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Following these experiences with my mother, Norbu, and Uri, it was clear to me that not only individual belief but also human intention plays a large, though quiet role in shaping our lives. Obviously my mother in- tended to be healed, but not by what she feared were tainted forces. Uri struggled to bring back my camera but couldn’t quite pull it off. Norbu intended to heal others, and, unfortunately, deformed my ring in demon- strating his range of capabilities.
Regardless of how one twists and turns deterministic theories of na- ture, such theories cannot accommodate these events, as both volition and intentionality are denied in the old scientific framework. My experiences with children performing psychokinesis didn’t help validate the supernatural theologies either, unless God was asleep at the switch and allowing Lucifer to run the show. That meant the answers lay in natural realms, likely within quantum mechanics and some new theory of mind.
The story of quantum mechanics in the last 100 years is of particular importance to notions about consciousness. On the surface it may seem strange that the nature of subatomic particles and light could be entangled with functions of mind. But when we eventually understand the full story of consciousness, it will have to be compatible with our knowledge of how the physical universe is structured. And quantum mechanics is a key map to a strange and invisible world that underpins everything we know. Re- search carried out in the last few years (and discussed in subsequent chap- ters) strongly suggests that the consciousness experienced by all living systems is inextricably tied to a mysterious property of the quantum world called nonlocality.
Quantum mechanics and general relativity have produced the best understanding we have to date of atomic-scale and cosmic-scale processes of the universe, respectively, yet there are particular conflicts between
them, as they are each incomplete models. From the time of Descartes’ dualism, through the later philosophy of materialism, consciousness wasn’t a subject of interest in mainstream science; real interest wasn’t generated until the final decade of the 20th century. However, when the theory of quantum mechanics was solidly framed in 1927, it was becoming obvious that consciousness could no longer be ignored, as it seemed to possess some of the fundamental pieces to the puzzle that physicists and cosmolo- gists themselves were trying to fit together. The struggle of individual sci- entists adapting their views from that of Newtonian reality to that of quantum reality was not unlike the difficulty each of us encounters in adapting our worldview to the rapid changes of the last 100 years or so. The drama always begins when we realize that something about our world is different than we previously thought, and cannot be explained with existing knowledge.
Scientists of the 19th century believed (but were absolutely convinced they knew) that the tangible substances of nature, such as rocks and trees, possessed fundamental physical characteristics measurable and completely described in terms of length, mass, chemical content, and the like. Mea- sures related to the appearance of things. Energy was not a fundamental property, but one mathematically derived by describing natural bodies in motion. The story of quantum mechanics (and to a lesser extent, relativ- ity) is the story of discovering that matter in motion does not only possess energy, but rather that matter is energy-solidified energy. In a sense, mat- ter is the death of free energy, being one of the ways it transforms into physical reality (just as matter can be transformed back into energy). When this idea was brought into the picture, our earlier understanding and thought structures about matter were turned upside down. Atomic matter is not like tiny ping-pong balls, but is rather a continuous flux of energy combin- ing and splitting. It only appears on our scale as solid matter.
Recognizing that energy is more fundamental than its appearance as just an attribute of matter has been an agonizing process that is only now finding its way into public awareness. The appearance of things always seems more “real” than the invisible world from which they emerge. Be- fore we are finished with discovery altogether, we will find that “know- ing” is also not secondary, but results from a fundamental property of nature. First, however, it is important to understand what “knowing” is.
Since the time of Newton, scientists and mathematicians have not looked seriously at “mind,” relegating it to the realm of theology. They came to believe nature was embedded with mathematics and the laws of physics— absolute rules of order waiting to be discovered. Mind came to be consid- ered a secondary phenomenon that evolved and eventually allowed humans to discover the absolutes. In due course, the complexities of the brain could be understood, and that would solve the riddle of mind. The mystic, on the
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other hand, has always believed that consciousness is fundamental, and that internal visions, voices, and insights are absolutes to be taken literally— messages from The Great Beyond. Their meanings were obvious. As a re- sult of this historical, though artificial division of viewpoints, beliefs about the nature of the universe have become more entangled, complex, and torturous to reconcile, though each has certain evidence to support the viewpoint. Paradoxes abound, with the entire edifice of our knowledge resting upon two fractured, incomplete, competitive, and teetering foun- dations—physical measurement and mystical insight—largely because there has not been an acceptable model for mind and consciousness.
Today mathematical models of reality require a multidimensional uni- verse and an ineffable quantum reality in order to make a strong, but less than complete picture. Interpretations of quantum mathematics by the most eminent of scientists require a phalanx of observers to “collapse the wave function” of the universe to its existing state. Mystical models re- quire a spirit world, a hierarchy of angels, deities, and demigods ascending to heaven, and a progression of levels descending to hell such as that repre- sented in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Both scientific and religious models seem a bit strained, having to make outrageous claims to account for the myster- ies of our world. As I pondered this, it reminded me of what would have happened had the makers of our Apollo spacecraft not consulted each other during design. Nothing would have fit when they finally assembled the various components. Science and religion have a similar problem with re- gard to the interface between them.
But there are alternative models of reality, and it wasn’t long after my return from the moon that I began to actively assemble my own. I saw that if we allow certain mind attributes to be fundamental to the processes of the universe, with mathematics as creation of mind—a language—and if the mystic allows that visions, voices, and insight are simply information the mind needs to interpret, then the artificial, but historical division between mind and matter suddenly collapses, and the most perplexing paradox in both camps evaporates; the dualism is resolved. The universe begins to look again like the universe we inhabit. The problem is one of giving inter- pretation, meaning, to information. It is the story of quantum mechanics that serves to illuminate these issues.
Centuries ago, long before the days we now associate with the genesis of quantum physics, a great debate was taking shape. In the time of Galileo, astronomers who had fashioned glass lenses from sand and peered at the world around them saw how the instruments were capable of shaping light and magnifying objects. The question that troubled these first astronomers and early thinkers was that light seemed most easily described mathematically
as a wave. However, since the later Greek thinkers, it was believed to be corpuscular or particle-like, and from Galileo to Newton onward for three centuries, the argument persisted. One side or the other would prevail, but only for a time, as new discoveries were made, lending credence to the opposing camp. Then by 1880, James Clerk Maxwell and his electromag- netic theory seemed to definitively settle the issue. His theory claimed that light was most certainly wavelike. Of course, this too passed.
With the discovery of the photo-electric effect by Philipp von Lenard in 1902, and the solution to quantized heat radiation by Max Planck, the pendulous answer again began to swing toward Newton and those who believed light was a particle. It was Einstein, still an unknown in 1905, who put the wave and particle ideas together, with the mathematics to show that light came in little packets of energy, subsequently called pho- tons, each carrying a quantum of energy proportional to the frequency of the light. Light, and all radiation, clearly had both wave and particle char- acteristics. Einstein had cobbled together concepts previously considered separate.
A few years later, Louis de Broglie asserted that not only light, but all matter possessed both wave and particle properties at the subatomic level. That is to say, he brought into question the fundamental way matter was believed to exist. Atoms were not like little ping-pong balls after all. This brought us to the strange new world of quantum physics, an eerie world so baffling and mysterious that both Einstein and Planck had difficulty ac- cepting it until the very end of their lives.
The dual nature of matter as both particle and wave is the foundation of quantum physics; we now call it the wave/particle duality.1 Since the
days of Newton, waves and particles have been given precisely definable and measurable attributes, though the definiteness of the attributes of each are quite different. Particles may be said to have a definite position, mass, velocity, and spin. Their momentum and energy are attributes that can be computed. However, waves have no mass, no definite position, nor spin. Waves can also overlap constructively or destructively (in other words, coexist at the same location)—matter cannot. But waves do have polariza- tion, energy proportional to frequency, and a constant velocity (the speed of light in free space). These different attributes and their measures were and are a source of consternation to many physicists. How can such differ- ent concepts be brought together?
Einstein resolved one critical issue even before the ascension of quan- tum theory by postulating that the energy equivalent of matter at rest was the product of its mass and the velocity of light squared, expressed in his famous equation, E=MC2. This equation helped relate the energy of waves
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the square of the speed of light. More conundrums arose, however, when physicists looked closely at how to manage the differences in the other measurable attributes. These problems resulted in several fundamental principles and two major paradoxes that still create confusion nearly a century later.
Two of the principles are those of complementarity and uncertainty. The complementarity principle states that particle and wave characteristics are not mutually exclusive, but complementary to each other, in that both are required to measure basic nature. Complementarity specifies which attributes of matter may be measured together, and which may not. It would be like describing apples and pitchforks with the same limited set of adjectives.
Let’s assume, for example, that apples are primarily measured by their nutritional content, and pitchforks by the amount of hay they can lift. We know that apples and pitchforks both have measurable size and weight. Pitchforks have some of the elements that make up nutrition, but not many. An apple might lift a few straws of hay, but not many. Therefore, when we discuss apples, hay-lifting capacity is not fundamental, and when discuss- ing pitchforks, nutrition is not fundamental. If, instead of particles and waves, scientists suddenly discovered that beneath the level of our visibil- ity all nature seemed to be made up of tiny apples and pitchforks, we would have a problem. Our instruments are calibrated to measure weight, size, nutritional content, and hay-carrying capacity. The instruments do not measure apples or pitchforks directly, but only some of their measur- able attributes.
However, the picture we carry in our minds would most likely consist of tiny versions of the apples and pitchforks we observe in daily life. If, in an experiment, we detect a little nutritional value, is the instrument de- tecting the apple part of nature or a little residual pitchfork? Or does it matter at all except in terms of our visual image of how we think things really are? In this way nutritional content and hay-lifting capacity must be considered complementary attributes, so long as we are tied to the notion that apples and pitchforks are what we’re looking for.
The apple and pitchfork example was not chosen haphazardly. Though particles and waves seem to be a more rational basis for describing the fundamentals of nature, all such descriptions from the macroscale world of everyday existence are just keys we have chosen in order to represent our map of reality. The underlying basis of our existence certainly isn’t little apples and pitchforks, but little particles and waves may not be the best description either.
This idea of the complementary appearance of things finds its roots in the process of knowing, not in the process of what it is that exists. In order
to know about something, we must first label what it is we observe, and then assign qualitative attributes such as size, weight, color, beauty, what have you, and finally ways to describe how much of the attribute is present. In science, “how much” is defined by numerical measure. In ordinary lan- guage we use adverbs. We can unequivocally state that mathematics is a linguistic creation of mind, not an intrinsic characteristic of nature, be- cause it depends upon how we assign labels to nature, and then quantify those labels. Waves, particles, apples, and pitchforks are the blue and red lines on the map, not the roads and highways themselves. And this distinc- tion is fundamental in resolving questions of mind/matter interaction. The map is not the territory.
The concept of waves and particles, and their associated measures, is the best metaphor from the macro-world that we currently have for basic physical reality, because energy, which is common to both, is not some- thing we can readily picture.2 Early in the 20th century scientists under-
stood even less about how the brain/mind assimilates information than we do today; that is to say, how it is we know what we know. The Cartesian conclusion that the role of mind in physical measurement was unimpor- tant, dominated science until late in the 20th century. But the framers of quantum theory recognized that the observer’s mind was somehow impor- tant in the observation, and that there were hidden mental traps lurking in the invisible quantum world. They consistently warned us not to create and rely upon visual images of the underlying quantum reality, but rather to place faith only in the measurements derived from experiment. This became known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. As many scientists of the period were dogmatic materialists, they were skepti- cal because quantum theory seemed to enter the forbidden mystical do- main of theology—which indeed it was. They preferred a physics that was mechanistic. But how else can questions about consciousness be addressed, and the Cartesian dualism resolved, except by addressing the issue of mind? While the Copenhagen interpretation helped avoid one mental trap, it set up another involving the meaning of measurements, which still creates controversy.
The uncertainty principle specifies that complementary variables may not be measured with equal precision simultaneously. It also defines the limit of precision (thus the limit of our knowing) in the measurement. The newcomer to physics often chafes at the idea that there is a limit to the precision of a measurement. He or she wants to believe that with better instruments or technique the desired precision can be obtained. But this is just the natural conclusion of the erroneous belief that waves and particles represent distinctly different entities, when in fact they do not. Better instruments will never change that.
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Problems also arise when we consider what is required to measure at this tiny scale. We must keep in mind that it takes at least a single photon of light to illuminate and thereby measure a particle. And to know in science is to measure. The energy imparted to the particle through the act of observing changes the attributes of the particle and makes its future state uncertain, a fact that must be considered in the measurement pro- cess. Historically, some have reasoned that the attempt to know is not only the cause of the uncertainty, but that it is, therefore, the process of know- ing that influences the quantum processes of nature. But neither idea is correct. It is with this interpretation, however, that the Cartesian edifice of separateness of mind and matter begins to crumble.
The fuzzy line between existence and knowing was destined to become even more confused by this interpretation, and led to more paradoxes. Some modern textbooks still produce contradictory viewpoints that reflect the desperation of those attempting to interpret quantum theory. It took 70 years of experimental evidence and an understanding of how the mind manages information to bring some clarity to the issue. The account I am presenting here relies only upon analysis of mind processes, consciousness, and information. Yet it is corroborated by the experimental evidence from physics. It has occurred to me that the principles of complementarity and uncertainty apply equally well and in the same manner to the two means by which each of us observes: the sensory, or outer experience; and the inner, subjective experience. These two modes of observation are comple- mentary in that both are required to complete our picture of reality. Yet they have different characteristics, and are not equally valid for all obser- vations. The outer experience reaches its zenith in the scientific method, and is characterized by specificity, precision, and detail, and most often uses the language of mathematics—it is understood intellectually. The highest expression of the subjective experience is in the ineffable mystical insight. It is characterized by holistic patterns, and lack of precision, but deep feelings of certainty. By necessity, it must be expressed through metaphor, analogy, archetypal imagery, and the arts—its effect is emotional. The notion