Beyond Just Stuff: Maps, Mystery & Nature's Flow - by Mackenzie Hawkins

COURSE

Beyond Just Stuff: Maps, Mystery & Nature's Flow

With Mackenzie Hawkins

What is it about quantum that lets us feel like physics permits us to view stuff as not just plain old mechanical stuff? One of the limitations that comes up in a body-centered practice is that we can have associations with the body as, you know, "it's just the body" — and that blocks our fuller experience. These six sessions explore that question from the inside out — using "maps," yes, including understanding of physics, and also learning to see through them, fall through them, and arrive at something that doesn't need a story to justify it. Each with an hour-long guided body-centered exploration at its core. To open to that richness, that lies "on the other side" of thinking, "oh, I know my physical body—it's just stuff." Recorded during Live Insight Timer sessions and made into this course because participants asked for one to revisit the explorations again. Whether for a first time or the second, enjoy the discoveries.

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Meet your Teacher

Mackenzie Hawkins
Princeton, NJ, USA

A fellow explorer, Mackenzie Hawkins is an independent scholar in philosophy of science, contemplative practitioner, and co-author of several books with physicist and Tai Chi Master Dr. Wonchull Park. Drawing from his nowflow philosophy, these series-based explorations use philosophy and physics as ways of understanding and perceiving what's here already. Not ways to follow, but ways that might help you find your own — for anyone looking to explore beyond the pressures we put on ourselves.

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6 Days

5 students

No ratings

99 min / day

Awakening

English

Lesson 1

What's Beneath The "Cartoon" Of Expectations?

What if the body you think you know is just a cartoon? This session uses two approaches — an artist's trick for seeing without labels, and a thought experiment from physicist Richard Feynman — to open to the unknown that's just beneath what we think we know. Not the unknown beyond, but the unknown right here: the richness underneath one layer of habitual mapping. Maps all the way down. And there's always more we can open to.

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Lesson 2

What If "Science Says" We're Mostly Space?

The nucleus of an atom is like a marble, and the atom is the size of a stadium. Which means we're mostly space — and in a way, we're levitating. This session uses Rutherford's gold foil experiment to ask: what is it that's actually shifting when we try on a new story about what we're made of? Is it the physics picture? Or is it a letting go of what we usually tell ourselves? Something you can know more directly — and what is that, for you?

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Lesson 3

What Happens With "Permission" To Not-Know?

A beam of electrons through two slits creates not the pattern you'd expect from billiard balls — but the interference pattern of a wave. And yet each electron arrives as a single ping. Is it a particle or is it a wave? There's just something else going on. The double slit experiment gives us what might be called a transparent map — one that points beyond itself and can't say what's underneath. Move those fingers, those toes. Moving mystery.

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Lesson 4

Can A Thud into "Mundane Physics" Be Grace-ful?

With a glorious thud, we leave spooky quantum behind and go into the most well-established, ho-hum, long-standing physics — probably my favorite session of the series. What if good old action-reaction isn't a killjoy but a pointer? What action-reaction points to is that it's actually one event. Simultaneous. Body and earth, not separate. Nothing separates. Nothing alone. It's not up to us. It's the mystery itself unfolding. Good news is there’s no thud in reality.

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Lesson 5

What if Observer And Observed Are Inseparable?

This is where some people really, really go to town — quantum mechanics, consciousness, someone claiming there'd be no moon without an observer. But what if taking a measurement just means having an interaction? Shot through this world is all of this relational, mutually interacting effects that breaks down that sense of separation between observer and observed. Master Park calls this a kind of subject comfort — no longer treating the body like the object of our attention. Each little part and particle gets to be its own subject. A kind of alchemy begins to take place.

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Lesson 6

What If The Mystery Is Already Untouched?

We've moved from playfully imaginative to genuinely strange to gloriously mundane — and arrived here: what if whatever we know, whatever we could know, can never threaten the utter fullness of the mystery that we're being? The mystery, it turns out, was never in danger. It's always untouched. No stamp of approval needed.

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