Sun, Atmosphere, and Breathing
Even after all this time, the Sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me.” Look at what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.” -Hafiz
Calling the Sun a "big ball of glowing gas" is tantamount to calling a tree a "tall column of wood", or a bacterium a "little ball of goo", or a whale a "big bag of water". It is so inaccurate to the revolving, roiling, sliding, pulsating, breathing actual Sun as to be laughable, if it weren't for the fact that most of us, when we think of the Sun at all in our distracted, busy days, think just that. It’s exactly how the Sun is described on NASA’s teaching website.
I'm currently teaching a small group of 8th graders Physics in a Waldorf school. Being Waldorf kids, they are open and receptive in all kinds of ways to activities and artistic practice that most kids usually just aren't at that age. Yet even they, when I asked them about whether there is evidence for a living Earth (never mind the Sun), nearly all have responses ranging from 'I don't know what to think," to "I don't think Earth is alive; I just think we are alive on Earth."
We're studying air and water dynamics, and so studying pressure phenomena closely. We've seen through experimentation that our world is a pressurized world and that we have so many organs in our own body that were made to operate through pressure dynamics (heart and circulation, lungs and breathing, vocal cords, ears, not to mention bladder! There is an indisputably striking and observable connection between the waves at any shore, rolling in, and the feeling of our own pulse in our carotid artery.
Physics is so wrapped up with materialism, it's extremely difficult to separate the two, and I'm willing to bet most of my fellow physics teachers are teaching physics stripped of any notion that, while water and air are not strictly speaking alive, all life that we know of shows startling characteristics that can be easily traced to the behavior of air and water. The only place where you can't see this behavior in air or water is when you take them out of their environment into the lab and confine them in a chamber or flask. And even then, if you disturb them at all they will immediately manifest pressure oscillations. Just pour water out of a narrow necked bottle. Glug, glug.
This leads to the core of the materialistic assumption (myth), that life arises upon completely dead matter. Matter is supposed to be the bedrock of existence upon which reality is built. It is this myth that has gotten us this far into the industrial-mechanomessianic age we live in today. If matter is reality, then matter (and our command and control of matter) is what will save us. Quantum physics punches a huge hole in this myth, but the myth persists because we as a society don't have a better one.
And yet studying pressure leads to some interesting other candidates for the bedrock of existence. In the last couple days of the Physics course, I plan to, in addition to studying some electricity and magnetism, and then electromagnetism, try to push this question further. In a Wired article that I pulled up when searching for “Sun breathing”, I found this from 2008: “‘From the Earth's perspective, we're in the sun's outer atmosphere,’ said Jeffrey Thayer, an aerospace engineer at UC-Boulder.” Whoa.
We’ve already clearly established in our class studies that we humans are born and like to live at the bottom of one ocean (an ocean of air that is, depending on how you measure and depending on the day, 50-400 miles high), and near the surface of another ocean (the ocean of water). The entire way up and down and through these oceans is infused with pressure phenomena. From weather of all kinds, to all the music and sounds of the world, to the fact that every living thing gets its start in a pressurized watery environment (and the two things a mammal baby does upon being born is breathe [cry] and suckle), the entire world is swinging and swaying, gurgling and blowing. Pressure is not a static quality in nature but always in motion, the “great communicator,” as Blaise Pascal would have said. It connects all life, and even all non-life, in the known universe, together. (You could argue with me that gravity connects us all together, and gravity leads to pressure. OK, but see below since gravity is, of course an abstraction derived from the matter mythos)
As a playful alternative to materialism, to make a point, I propose a new world myth of the ground of existence: pressurism. Pressure is the core phenomenon, and matter and its behavior can be completely explained by and through pressure. In this world mythos, in the beginning of the universe was: infinite pressure (this accords quite well with the Big Bang theory and even that theory doesn’t posit the existence of matter at the beginning). This infinite pressure, at a moment in time, gave birth to time and space by waving out across the universe. From that first moment on, pressure would be varied, higher in some places and lower in others, giving rise to matter which was the visible evidence of pressure at work giving shape to both time and space through variegation and movement. The beginning of the universe, therefore, was fundamentally a wave, and waves and waves upon waves made the very pond of our universe, and it has been rolling, roiling, swaying and breathing ever since.
It’s a chicken and egg question: which came first, the breathing, or the organism that breathes? The evidence I can see points to the former. The Wired article indicates clearly that Earth’s atmosphere is breathing, that it is doing so in response to the Sun’s rhythms, and that our Earth should be regarded as living within the Sun’s atmosphere. So the Sun is breathing the Earth, and the Earth is breathing us. Extend this idea outward to what is breathing the Sun, to the other planets, the galaxies and the clusters of galaxies and the vacuum of space now seems to be much more populated with beings that pulsate in all kinds of ways, communicating with each other.
Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing;
all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,
and it never winds down.
Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on.
Everything is swinging; heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the Secret One slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.
-Kabir
This way of thinking makes it startlingly obvious why meditation usually involves a focus on one's breathing as a place to enter into a deeper mental practice. We’ve learned in class that when you exhale, you are pushing the air out of your lungs by contracting your diaphragm and creating a higher pressure environment in your lungs. Yet when you inhale, it is literally the entire pressurized atmosphere of Earth, breathing into you, as you expand your diaphragm and create a low-pressure invitation for that inrushing air.
I’m not proposing “pressurism” as a true alternative to materialism (it wouldn’t be a true alternative, but just a cloaked reboot of materialism, as quantum physics is as its usually presented and understood in a popular sense). But I am proposing that we take seriously, when teaching Physics, when thinking about our benevolent breathing Sun being, when interacting with our own bodies and the plant and animal life of this world, and the Earth; that we adopt an approach to Physics that does not make the error of assuming the deadness of Earth, or of the Sun. Maybe the problem is we don't have words that can exist between the duals of either "alive" or "dead". Ultimately, you must choose how to interact with the world around you, as dead matter, or as living or quasi-living movements and communications and relationships that you can find in your own body as well as you can in the outer physical world. I understand quite well that water, air, a “big ball of gas”, etc are not strictly speaking, alive. Yet if even our own thinking moves wave-like through our investigation of the pulsating world, we’d better take seriously that we ourselves are water and air and pressure beings, and so are the Moon, Sun, and in some mysterious, fundamental and observable way, all of them are breathing.
When one studies electromagnetism, of course, one is dealing with a phenomenon that is entirely non-material, and therefore does not involve tangible pressure. Yet the pulsating and breathing is still there. See this video of some beautiful imaging of the Sun’s cycling and breathing magnetic field. Watch it for awhile and see if you can any longer believe that the Sun doesn’t breathe, or that we ourselves aren't breathing with it.