The Great Thauton

There was a visiting priest at mass yesterday who said a few interesting things during his sermon. For starters, he began by chatting physics. Along the lines of how the universe doesn't measure up, when you add all the observable mass and energy. He said that twenty-five percent of the descrepancy is thought to be in the form of Dark Matter, and five percent in Dark Energy.

This got me thinking. One noted Catholic writer and apologist in the blogosphere, very influential to my own development, equates Dark Matter to God's grace. I like that, and it seems quite possible to me that he's got something there. But this is not what immediately came to mind while I sat in the pews.

Thinking ... thoughts ... mind ...

Dark Matter and Dark Energy is Thought.

I mean, one of the greatest philosophic riddle is: just what the heck is a thought? An electrical impulse in the brain? Surely it must be more. If not, we'd have had AI for years now. I'm leaning toward the view that thoughts are a form of energy, just not any form we're accustomed to. Perhaps even calling it "energy" is misleading. A new word should be coined to acknowledge this thought-energy-not-energy.

I propose the word "thauton."

(T-wave is too bland; thoton could be confused with photon. So, for the sake of this stream-of-consciousness blog post, let's keep the phonetic connection and call thought-energy-not-energy thautons. A thauton is the simplest unit of a thought. Whether that unit is a particle or a wave, similar to the perennial quantum mechanical question, is a subject for some deeper meditation.)

So after Father segued back to the parables of Jesus, I was still thinking these thautonic thoughts. The problem, I believe, is equating the aggregate output of thautons from mankind to the amount of Dark Matter and Energy in the universe. Of course, I know the amounts (actual, expected, or theoretical) of neither. But intuitively I think on the great big scales of the universe, mankind's thauton output is microscopic compared to all that Darkness out there.

As the gifts were being brought up to the altar, my thautons flowed along this path: how 'bout if you tallied all the thoughts of all the human beings that have ever existed, going back to the dawn of man, hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago? How does that balance the scales?

Not much better. Because, if you think about it, thautons might travel at the speed of light. (Why not?). The thauton of that man-ape a million years ago pondering how to use that antelope bone as a club is now a million light years out in the Great Beyond. There's a million-light-year shell of thought around the earth. The universe, though, is something like 93 billion light years in diameter. That's a lot of Dark Matter / Energy out there. Our shell is like one-ninety-three-thousandth the size of the universe.

As the visiting priest is consecrating the bread and wine, I now realize that the thought of God, the Great Thauton, must factor into this equation. It's a single Thauton, capitalized, because Aquinas has proved to me that God is One, Single, Simple, and Pure Act. The Pure Act is the creation element of the Thauton. The Thauton, then, is another word for the Word, which is another word for Christ.

Blasphemy, according to the tenants of my religion? I don't know. Maybe. But this is all just musin'.

However, intuitively I now realize that introducing the Great Thauton, I've immediately flipped the scales of the universe way over in the other direction. In fact, the Great Thauton crushes the scale more efficiently than that giant black hole that lies in the center of each galaxy.

Hmmmm. Much more thautons need to be generated to solve this conundrum. Possibly more than my own broken-down and ramshackle thauton factory can produce ...