Nearly two decades ago in a small theater in Yelm, Washington a little film called What The Bleep Do We Know?!? screened to its first audiences and the term “I Create My Reality” was thrust into the collective consciousness.

Since then countless films and books have extolled the wonders of quantum physics and how understanding the nature of reality could change your life, often in just 3 easy steps. I too thought it was easy, heck I made a movie about it! And for a while it was easy, until I realized that I had only scratched the surface of what “it” all means.

For sure, at a party I could rattle off the wonders of quantum this and quantum that, I could throw around words like entanglement and heady concepts like The Copenhagen Theory, I could wow you with the double slit like nobody’s business. But the truth was, it was really all just smoke and mirrors.

What did understanding quantum physics have to do with my happiness?

What did understanding the workings of the brain mean to my life, in reality, at least this reality, the one where I have kids and bills to pay? I mean it’s fun to dream about other dimensions and my life as electron popping in and out, but in the end I felt as though it was becoming mental masturbation an easy way to escape from the fact that even though I knew I wasn’t really touching that chair, that it is possible I wasn’t even real.

What I was truly seeking was not the facts about how that chair manifested itself into my reality, but how I could be happy whether I had that chair or not.

Happiness has nothing to do with quarks and the discovery of the Higgs Boson was not going to bring me ever-lasting peace and joy. That I was going to have to find all on my own.

I began to explore the sacred cows, not only in my life, my beliefs about who I was and what I wanted, but also the sacred cows of spirituality, new thought and yes, quantum physics and how I could take all this knowledge and use it to create the happiness I sought, because after all, that is what we are all after. It is why we ask “why?”. It is why we explore the deepest depths of the quantum foam and so far quantum physics hasn’t found the happiness particle, because it doesn’t exist within the particles out there, it exists within the immeasurable particles within me.

For the Silo, Betsy Chasse.