42: The Particle, the Passer-By, and the Mystery of Matter

What if one of the deepest lessons of existence is not how to possess this world—but how to pass through it?

I recently found myself studying something I had heard about many times but never truly stopped to contemplate: the Higgs boson.

Popular culture gave it the dramatic nickname “the God particle,” but the real science is more interesting than the nickname.

The Higgs boson is an excitation of an underlying Higgs field, a quantum field believed to extend throughout the universe. Through their interaction with this field, certain fundamental particles acquire mass.

The Higgs field does not explain all the mass around us. Much of the mass of protons and neutrons comes from the energy of the strong interaction between quarks and gluons. But the Higgs mechanism is nevertheless fundamental to the physical universe we inhabit.

As I began contemplating this, something caught my attention.

Not an equation.

Not a particle.

A saying.

And a number.

42.

“Become Passers-By”

Saying 42 of the Gospel of Thomas may be one of the shortest teachings attributed to Jesus:

That's essentially the entire saying.

Two thousand years of questions compressed into a few words.

What are we passing through?

And perhaps more importantly:

What have we mistakenly believed we were supposed to hold onto?

The obvious interpretation is non-attachment. Houses disappear. Bodies age. Empires collapse. Possessions change hands. Identities change. Even our strongest emotions eventually pass.

But what if the saying goes deeper?

What if Jesus is pointing toward the fundamental distinction between form and whatever lies beneath form?

That question unexpectedly brought me back to physics.

What Is Actually Solid?

We experience ourselves as solid creatures walking through a solid world.

Rock feels solid.

Wood feels solid.

Our bodies feel solid.

Yet when science investigates matter deeply enough, the intuitive picture begins to dissolve.

Atoms lead us toward electrons and nuclei.

Nuclei lead toward protons and neutrons.

Those lead toward quarks and gluons.

And modern particle physics ultimately describes nature in terms of quantum fields and their excitations and interactions.

The deeper we look into the “thing,” the stranger the thing becomes.

Then comes the Higgs field.

Certain elementary particles interact with this field in a way that gives them mass.

That made me contemplate a simple progression:

Field → Interaction → Mass → Form → Experience

And suddenly I found myself reading Thomas 42 differently:

Form → Experience → Awareness → Non-Attachment → Passage

Could these be viewed as opposite movements?

Not scientifically.

Symbolically.

One describes something about how the physical universe takes form.

The other may describe how consciousness should move through form.

Then I Remembered Another 42

There is another ancient 42 that has fascinated me for years.

Chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching begins with one of the most extraordinary descriptions of manifestation ever written:

The Tao gives birth to One.

One gives birth to Two.

Two gives birth to Three.

Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.

Read those words slowly.

Tao.

One.

Two.

Three.

Everything.

It is a movement from unity toward multiplicity.

Of course Laozi wasn't describing quantum field theory. To claim that would turn metaphor into false history.

But compare the shape of the ideas.

The Taoist movement is:

Source → differentiation → multiplicity

The physical story might be simplified symbolically as:

Fields → interactions → particles → atoms → structures → life

And Thomas 42 appears almost at the opposite end saying:

Now become a passer-by.

One 42 describes the emergence of the ten thousand things.

Another 42 tells us how to walk among them.

That stopped me.

Perhaps Matter Isn't the Prison

Many spiritual traditions contain a tension between spirit and matter.

And it is tempting to turn that tension into:

Spirit = good.

Matter = bad.

But I wonder if that misses something.

Perhaps matter isn't the problem.

Perhaps attachment to matter is the problem.

Thomas doesn't say:

Destroy the world.

He doesn't say:

Refuse the experience.

He says:

Become passers-by.

A passer-by still sees the landscape.

A passer-by encounters people.

A passer-by feels the rain.

A passer-by experiences the road.

The difference is that the passer-by doesn't confuse the roadside with the destination.

Maybe incarnation isn't something we need to despise.

Maybe we're supposed to experience it completely—

without forgetting that we're passing through.

The Field and the Wave

There is another aspect of the Higgs story that creates an intriguing metaphor.

The Higgs field and the Higgs boson aren't the same thing.

The field is fundamental.

The boson is an excitation of that field.

A crude but useful image is an ocean and a wave.

The wave appears.

It takes form.

It can be observed.

And then that particular wave disappears.

The ocean remains.

Physics does not tell us from this that human consciousness survives death, that reincarnation is real, or that consciousness is itself some universal field. Those are philosophical and spiritual propositions, not conclusions of the Higgs mechanism.

But the metaphor asks a beautiful question:

Have we mistaken the wave for the whole ocean?

Maybe Thomas 42 is whispering:

Don't become obsessed with preserving the wave.

Become a passer-by.

What About the Crystal?

This also changed the way I think about crystals.

A crystal is not magical because it somehow escapes matter.

A crystal is matter displaying remarkable organization.

Its constituents arrange into ordered structures.

That gives us another metaphor.

Perhaps spiritual transformation isn't about literally changing the human body from carbon into crystal.

There is no scientific evidence that humans are undergoing such a biological transformation.

But crystallization can be a powerful symbol for consciousness.

Chaos becomes order.

Noise becomes coherence.

Fragments become pattern.

Perhaps awakening isn't becoming a different substance.

Perhaps awakening is becoming more coherent within the substance we already inhabit.

And then Thomas provides another warning.

Don't become attached even to that.

Don't replace:

“I am my possessions”

with:

“I am spiritually advanced.”

That's simply another identity.

Another roadside stop.

Another form.

Pass by that too.

Maybe 42 Means Remember

For years I have associated the number 42 with Remembering.

Not because I believe I've discovered a mathematical law proving what 42 means.

It's a personal symbolic framework.

But Thomas 42 has made that framework increasingly interesting to me.

Maybe remembering means:

Remember that the map isn't the territory.

Remember that symbols point beyond themselves.

Remember that your possessions aren't you.

Remember that your suffering isn't you.

Remember that your success isn't you.

Remember that your religion isn't you.

Remember that your spiritual experiences aren't you.

Remember that even your theories aren't you.

Experience them.

Learn from them.

And then—

pass by.

This also provides an important safeguard when exploring numbers, synchronicities and ancient texts.

A number can be a signpost without being proof.

And perhaps one of the greatest spiritual mistakes is discovering a signpost and then building a house underneath it.

The sign says:

KEEP GOING.

Two 42s and a Modern Discovery

So I am left contemplating three very different ideas.

Tao 42:

The One unfolds into the many.

Modern physics and the Higgs field:

Reality beneath familiar matter involves fields, interactions and structures far stranger than our everyday experience suggests.

Thomas 42:

Become passers-by.

I am not claiming these three sources secretly describe the same phenomenon.

They don't.

The Higgs mechanism is experimentally testable physics.

The Tao Te Ching is philosophical and spiritual literature.

The Gospel of Thomas is an ancient collection of sayings.

But perhaps we lose something when we believe different ways of questioning reality can never be placed beside one another.

Science asks:

What is reality made of, and how does it behave?

Spirituality asks:

Who are we within it, and how should we live?

And philosophy stands between them asking:

What does any of this mean?

The Crossing Point

This brings me back to the symbol of the cross.

I increasingly see the cross not merely as an instrument of death but as an intersection.

One line can represent matter.

Another can represent spirit.

And where do they meet?

At the centre.

The heart.

Perhaps that centre represents neither rejection of matter nor worship of matter.

It represents awareness within matter.

You are here.

You have a body.

You experience hunger, pleasure, exhaustion, love, grief, family, birth and death.

The spiritual teaching isn't necessarily asking us to pretend those experiences aren't real.

Perhaps it is asking us to experience them without forgetting something deeper.

That gives me a new interpretation of the passer-by:

Be fully here without believing here is all there is.

42: Remember, Then Pass

And perhaps that is where my exploration of 42 ultimately leads.

Not:

42 is the answer.

But:

42 is the reminder.

The universe produces extraordinary forms.

Stars.

Planets.

Crystals.

Trees.

Animals.

Human beings.

And somehow, within this extraordinary unfolding, human beings became capable of turning around and asking:

What am I?

Maybe we spend the first part of life constructing the answer.

My name.

My body.

My property.

My career.

My beliefs.

My accomplishments.

My suffering.

My story.

And perhaps awakening begins when another question appears:

What remains when I stop clinging to all the answers?

The Tao tells us about the One becoming the many.

Physics reveals an astonishing world beneath what appears solid.

And Thomas leaves us with two haunting words:

Become passers-by.

Maybe the purpose isn't to escape the physical world.

Maybe it is to enter it fully.

Love it.

Learn from it.

Care for it.

Experience it.

But never possess it so tightly that we forget its impermanence.

Remember the Source.

Experience the form.

Find the centre.

Then pass.

Perhaps that is 42.

Not the destination.

The reminder to keep going.