While working at a Swiss patent office a century ago, the physicist Albert Einstein proposed, in his theory of relativity, that space and time were not separate domains, but deeply interrelated. He discovered that the gravitational force of physical objects actually curved space and bent time as well, and laid out this hypothesis in elegant formulae that contradicted the core of the Newtonian worldview, in which space and time were conceived of as absolute dimensions, with no connection to each other. In place of Newton’s “absolute space” and “absolute time,” Einstein defined a four-dimensional space-time continuum,in which no perspective is privileged. According to the physicist Mendel Sachs, “Relativity theory implies that the space and time coordinates are only the elements of a language that is used by an observer to describe his
environment.” The shock of this discovery was quickly compounded by other shocks.
The roots of physics can be found in the thought of the ancient Greeks, who made inquiries into “physis,” the essential nature of things. As modern physicists developed the analytical and experimental tools to probe deeper into the fundamental building blocks of matter, they were surprised— at times, appalled—by what they found. They found that matter was largely composed of empty space. If you were to blow up an atom to the size of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the neutron at its center would be the size of a grain of salt. The electrons whizzing around that neutron cannot be considered objects in the traditional sense of the term. They do not exist the way matter exists, but only evince “tendencies to exist.”
At this quantum level, physicists discovered that their attempts to measure the phenomena they were studying affected that phenomena, which led them to realize that consciousness had to be integrated into their understanding of matter. The perceiving subject could no longer be separated from the objects under investigation. The physicist Werner Heisenberg codified this understanding in his Uncertainty Principle: With quantum objects such as photons and electrons, it was impossible to determine both their position and their momentum. If the scientist chose to observe momentum, the quantum object appeared as a wave. If the scientist chose to determine position, the quantum object appeared as a particle. But in ac
tual fact, it was neither, or both at the same time—or it could be considered a transcendent “wavicle,” only existing in the Platonic realm of ideas. “The path of the electron comes into existence only when we observe it,” wrote Heisenberg. According to the physicist Niels Bohr, “Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems.”
Physicists discovered that the quantum world seemed to disregard the rules of classical physics in a number of startling ways: As probability waves spreading through space, photons and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place at the same time, only manifesting or collapsing to a particle when an observation is made. The physicists were also confronted with “quantum jumps”: electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another, without passing through the space in between. Experiments also
established quantum nonlocality or Action at a Distance: Once-correlated quantum objects remain linked even when separated by vast distances. If the probabilistic wave of one object is collapsed to make a particular observation, the other object is affected as well. The change happens immediately, with no time lag for a message to be transmitted through space, indicating that the objects are connected through a transcendent domain.Bohr once declared: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” In the world of “quantum strangeness” revealed by quantum mechanics, time, space, and consciousness are intimately interrelated and inseparable, and there exists a
higher dimension, outside our perceptions of space-time, in which everything is interconnected.
According to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as an observer: “‘Participant’ is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the ‘observer’ of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says it.” That consciousness is embedded in the processes it perceives, continually changing them while it is changed by them, was an insight conveyed to me, and many others, during psychedelic trips.
Wheeler was responsible for one of the most mind-bending explorations of this new realm: the “delayed choice” experiment. Wheeler utilized mirrors to split a beam of light into two paths that crossed each other, and created an apparatus that could register the photons as particles that take a single pathway, or as probabilistic waves that travel both routes at the same time. Once the light beam had passed the point where it split into two, experimenters made the decision whether or not to measure the wave aspect.
This choice seemed to have a retroactive effect on the nature of the beam, which still revealed itself either as wave or particle, depending on the scientist’s choice. The experiment demonstrated that quantum phenomena exist only in potentia, until a decision is made, by conscious choice, as to how they are to be perceived—even if this choice is made retroactively. Although this immediate and nonlocal effect happens beyond the speed of light, Heisenberg realized it does not violate the laws of causality because no signal can be transmitted in such a way. “May the universe in some sense be ‘brought into being’ by the participation of those who participate?”
Wheeler wondered.
The existence of a four-dimensional space-time continuum means that what we perceive as the linear direction of time is only an illusion created by our particular perspective. As the physicist Arthur Eddington put it, back in the 1920s, “Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.” Elaborating on this concept, Louis de Broglie wrote:
In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc. . . . Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.
Such a perspective is identical to the mystical or shamanic understanding of reality. It matches the Hopi perspective on time, in which “All time is present now,” and events unfold according to a preset pattern. The model of space-time presented by relativistic physics is a “timeless space of a higher dimension,” wrote Fritjof Capra, who found this idea echoed by many mystical traditions. “All events in it are interconnected, but the connections in it are not causal.” Instead of causal connections, the model of events in quantum mechanics is probabilistic and discontinuous, defined by the perceptions of a conscious observer.
Only a few Western philosophers had made the daring leap to such a perspective, rejecting materialist dualism and linear causality for a world created by our participation in it, among them Nietzsche:
In the “in-itself” there is nothing of “causal connections,” of “necessity,” or of “psychological non-freedom”; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or “law.” It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed “in itself,” we act once more as we have always acted—mythologically.
As Wheeler put it bluntly: “There is no space-time, there is no time, there is no before, there is no after. The question what happens ‘next’ is without meaning.” As if anticipating Wheeler, Nietzsche also wrote: “Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.”
After my father’s death, I inherited his life’s work as well as his library. Among the books on his dusty, homemade shelves were many on art history, philosophy, and physics—these last including a number of once-popular titles comparing the findings of quantum mechanics with the basic concepts of ancient spiritual traditions. These included the 1974 bestseller The Tao of Physics by the physicist Fritjof Capra, and Mysticism and the New Physics (1983) by Michael Talbot. Despite its concern with “the essential nature of things,” the subject of physics had always seemed abstruse to me, and I had never pursued this area of inquiry. The modern fragmentation of knowledge into many disciplines, each with its own specialist discourse, gives us the belief, or illusion, that we cannot attain an integrated understanding of our reality. As the poet Wallace Stevens put it, “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.” I assumed that the concepts of physics, based on complex equations and experiments with super-accelerators, could not be reduced into ordinary language, made sensible to a generalist such as myself, without deforming them. I knew, however, that these concepts had exerted a powerful effect on my father’s vision, taking permanent hold of his imagination. His early works depicted simple rectangles on a flat picture plane, calling to mind the early nonobjective explorations made by Russian Suprematist painters such as Kasimir Malevich. In his later work he was obsessed with volume and mass, painting gigantic menhir-like shapes of shimmering color that curved and fused with the fields around them. He was seeking to capture the space-bending effects of gravity, the interpenetration of diaphanous forms suggesting energy in constant transformation.
In The Tao of Physics, which developed out of the author’s initial insights during explorations of psychedelic “power plants,” Capra explores various concepts in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism and correlates them
with the worldview implied by the discoveries of quantum physics. He finds that these ancient traditions reflect the quantum understanding of interrelated and inseparable phenomena, of the centrality of consciousness to the world, and the unity of all appearances in a domain that transcends space-time. Although Hinduism describes a pantheon of gods, all of these gods are ultimately expressions of a single principle, Brahman, the unitary consciousness that pervades everything, “the one without a second.” In Hinduism, the world of appearance in which we live is “lila,” the divine play of the gods. “Brahman is the great magician who transforms himself into the world and he performs this feat with his ‘magic creative power,’” Capra writes. This “magic creative power” was given the name “maya” in The Rig Veda, one of the most ancient Hindu scriptures. “The word ‘maya’—one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy—has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the ‘might’ or ‘power’ of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play.”
The space-time reality we perceive from our limited perspective is lila, manifested through maya, the magical power of the gods. The transcendent consciousness, beyond all conceptualization, outside of space-time, the source of space and time, is Brahman. In the 1920s, Arthur Eddington was one of the first physicists to propose that Relativity Theory suggested “the stuff of the world is mind stuff,” and that this “mind stuff is not spread out in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived
from it.”
Enlightenment or awakening, in the Eastern traditions, is the individual’s experience of reconnecting with this ultimate ground of being, the “suchness” (Thathagatta) that supersedes all dualisms. As the Buddhist sage Ashvaghosha put it two thousand years ago: “Suchness is neither that which is existence, nor that which is nonexistence, nor that which is at once existence and nonexistence, nor that which is not at once existence and nonexistence.” Capra points out that such paradoxical descriptions sound identical to the physicist’s attempts to grasp the slippery essence of quantum objects, which are neither wave nor particle, do not exist yet do not not exist.
Capra found it interesting to follow the “spiral path” of Western science’s 2,500-year evolution, from the mystical philosophies of ancient Greece, to a materialistic dualism and mechanistic worldview that was in sharp contrast to Eastern thought, and now returning to the integrated perspective of the ancients: “This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.” The left-brain rationality of modern science, based on objective experiment, had confirmed the right-brain intuitions of mysticism, based on subjective experience.
Materialist critics of Capra’s perspective argue that quantum effects are limited to the submicroscopic quantum level, and that “macro objects,” the stuff we see in our world, continue to obey the rules of Newtonian physics. This, however, is not really the case. The laws of quantum physics, its quirks and quarks and discontinuous breaks, also govern the macro level. Macro objects obey the wave equation for matter, discovered by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, their size reducing the probabilistic spread of quantum
effects to an unnoticeable amount. The Newtonian equations still maintain their effect on the macro level, as a “special case” of the new relativistic physics, but they are fuzzy approximations. The world we live in is fundamentally a quantum one.
In our daily lives, do we experience quantum effects such as nonlocality, action at a distance, and so on? Is that what the statistical evidence for psychic phenomena—such as telepathy, remote viewing, and precognition—indicates? Is it possible that synchronicity is also one of these effects, revealing a deep-buried interrelationship between time, space, and consciousness? Is consciousness itself a quantum phenomenon?
In Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (1987), the physicist F. David Peat makes this argument. “Synchronicities are the jokers in nature’s pack of cards for they refuse to play by the rules and offer a hint that, in our quest for certainty about the universe, we have ignored some vital clues,” he writes. A one-time collaborator of the physicist David Bohm, who developed the “holographic universe” theory, Peat finds, in his study of synchronicities, a link between physics and psychology. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, in his 1951 essay on the subject, defined synchronicity as an “acausal ordering principle.” He noted that these episodes multiplied in his own life, and the lives of his patients, during periods of intense psychic transformation. In Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalls numerous such episodes—such as awakening from a startling dream in which a bullet passed through his head, to learn the next day that one of his patients had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head during the night. Elaborating on the concept, he wrote:
Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in time, or that space is relative to the psyche.
Studying these events, Jung found it probable that mind and matter were, ultimately, “two different aspects of one and the same thing.” For Peat, synchronicities give us glimpses into the deeper patterns of nature, indicating an organizing intelligence underlying the seeming chaos of daily events. They are a part of an order of psychic reality that we recognize, intuitively, when they occur to us, as profound glimpses or sudden revelations of the nature of mind: “Synchronicities, epiphanies, peak, and mystical experiences are all cases in which creativity breaks through the barriers of the self and allows awareness to flood through the whole domain of consciousness. It is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.”
Peat wondered if these episodes, instead of occasional reaches into a different order of cognition, could become a continuous flow of synchronic phenomena, experienced collectively. If that was the case, synchronicities would suggest “an intimation of the total transformation that is possible for both the individual and society.” In such a shift—which Peat equated with the “ending of time” described by various spiritual traditions—different “time orders” would be experienced simultaneously; spontaneity, synchronicity, and creativity would become the rule, rather than the rare exception. The old model of linear and mechanistic causality should give way to one more accurately based on “transformations and unfoldings.” In Mysticism and the New Physics, Talbot similarly concluded: “We may suspect a slow and continual change of axis from causality to synchronicity.” He quoted the Rig Veda: “Without effort, one world moves into another.”
My personal exploration of psychedelics and shamanism had attuned my sensitivity to such episodes—and this seemed to lead to an exponential increase in their frequency. I found this, at first, to be bizarre and destabilizing. From my previous mechanistic or materialist worldview, in which all events were accidents of physical processes colliding over time, I found myself catapulted into a realm of occult correspondences where signs seemed to multiply endlessly, suggesting the possibility of a schizophrenic break, in which the mind collapses from an overload of signifiers and uncanny signals—from an oversaturation of meaning.
According to Peat: “It is as if the formation of patterns within the unconscious mind is accompanied by
physical patterns in the outer world. In particular, as psychic patterns are on the point of reaching consciousness, then synchronicities reach their peak; moreover, they generally disappear as the individual becomes consciously aware of a new alignment of forces within his or her own personality.... It is as if the internal restructuring produces external resonance, or as if a burst of ‘mental energy’ is propagated outward onto the world.”
If consciousness somehow cocreates such events, it is only through the subjective perspective of an individual that the episodes can be observed and correlated. Like a quantum object that can be registered as either wave or particle, such temporally resonant phenomena exist only through our activity of conscious discrimination. It is our psyche that determines if an event reveals a deeper order of significance, or if it is ignored as part of the quotidian flux. I found that attuning myself to synchronicities, learning to separate signal from noise, required the development of a kind of intuitive skill, and revealed an aesthetic dimension. Meaningful synchronicities, ones that suggested some new pattern forming, seemed to occur just beyond the thought or idea I was currently holding, and were accompanied by a psychic sensation akin to a key turning in a lock. Some of these synchronicities involved conjunctions between personal episodes and world events that seemed to me both numinous and inexplicable.
environment.” The shock of this discovery was quickly compounded by other shocks.
The roots of physics can be found in the thought of the ancient Greeks, who made inquiries into “physis,” the essential nature of things. As modern physicists developed the analytical and experimental tools to probe deeper into the fundamental building blocks of matter, they were surprised— at times, appalled—by what they found. They found that matter was largely composed of empty space. If you were to blow up an atom to the size of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the neutron at its center would be the size of a grain of salt. The electrons whizzing around that neutron cannot be considered objects in the traditional sense of the term. They do not exist the way matter exists, but only evince “tendencies to exist.”
At this quantum level, physicists discovered that their attempts to measure the phenomena they were studying affected that phenomena, which led them to realize that consciousness had to be integrated into their understanding of matter. The perceiving subject could no longer be separated from the objects under investigation. The physicist Werner Heisenberg codified this understanding in his Uncertainty Principle: With quantum objects such as photons and electrons, it was impossible to determine both their position and their momentum. If the scientist chose to observe momentum, the quantum object appeared as a wave. If the scientist chose to determine position, the quantum object appeared as a particle. But in ac
tual fact, it was neither, or both at the same time—or it could be considered a transcendent “wavicle,” only existing in the Platonic realm of ideas. “The path of the electron comes into existence only when we observe it,” wrote Heisenberg. According to the physicist Niels Bohr, “Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems.”
Physicists discovered that the quantum world seemed to disregard the rules of classical physics in a number of startling ways: As probability waves spreading through space, photons and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place at the same time, only manifesting or collapsing to a particle when an observation is made. The physicists were also confronted with “quantum jumps”: electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another, without passing through the space in between. Experiments also
established quantum nonlocality or Action at a Distance: Once-correlated quantum objects remain linked even when separated by vast distances. If the probabilistic wave of one object is collapsed to make a particular observation, the other object is affected as well. The change happens immediately, with no time lag for a message to be transmitted through space, indicating that the objects are connected through a transcendent domain.Bohr once declared: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” In the world of “quantum strangeness” revealed by quantum mechanics, time, space, and consciousness are intimately interrelated and inseparable, and there exists a
higher dimension, outside our perceptions of space-time, in which everything is interconnected.
According to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as an observer: “‘Participant’ is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the ‘observer’ of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says it.” That consciousness is embedded in the processes it perceives, continually changing them while it is changed by them, was an insight conveyed to me, and many others, during psychedelic trips.
Wheeler was responsible for one of the most mind-bending explorations of this new realm: the “delayed choice” experiment. Wheeler utilized mirrors to split a beam of light into two paths that crossed each other, and created an apparatus that could register the photons as particles that take a single pathway, or as probabilistic waves that travel both routes at the same time. Once the light beam had passed the point where it split into two, experimenters made the decision whether or not to measure the wave aspect.
This choice seemed to have a retroactive effect on the nature of the beam, which still revealed itself either as wave or particle, depending on the scientist’s choice. The experiment demonstrated that quantum phenomena exist only in potentia, until a decision is made, by conscious choice, as to how they are to be perceived—even if this choice is made retroactively. Although this immediate and nonlocal effect happens beyond the speed of light, Heisenberg realized it does not violate the laws of causality because no signal can be transmitted in such a way. “May the universe in some sense be ‘brought into being’ by the participation of those who participate?”
Wheeler wondered.
The existence of a four-dimensional space-time continuum means that what we perceive as the linear direction of time is only an illusion created by our particular perspective. As the physicist Arthur Eddington put it, back in the 1920s, “Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.” Elaborating on this concept, Louis de Broglie wrote:
In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc. . . . Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.
Such a perspective is identical to the mystical or shamanic understanding of reality. It matches the Hopi perspective on time, in which “All time is present now,” and events unfold according to a preset pattern. The model of space-time presented by relativistic physics is a “timeless space of a higher dimension,” wrote Fritjof Capra, who found this idea echoed by many mystical traditions. “All events in it are interconnected, but the connections in it are not causal.” Instead of causal connections, the model of events in quantum mechanics is probabilistic and discontinuous, defined by the perceptions of a conscious observer.
Only a few Western philosophers had made the daring leap to such a perspective, rejecting materialist dualism and linear causality for a world created by our participation in it, among them Nietzsche:
In the “in-itself” there is nothing of “causal connections,” of “necessity,” or of “psychological non-freedom”; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or “law.” It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed “in itself,” we act once more as we have always acted—mythologically.
As Wheeler put it bluntly: “There is no space-time, there is no time, there is no before, there is no after. The question what happens ‘next’ is without meaning.” As if anticipating Wheeler, Nietzsche also wrote: “Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.”
After my father’s death, I inherited his life’s work as well as his library. Among the books on his dusty, homemade shelves were many on art history, philosophy, and physics—these last including a number of once-popular titles comparing the findings of quantum mechanics with the basic concepts of ancient spiritual traditions. These included the 1974 bestseller The Tao of Physics by the physicist Fritjof Capra, and Mysticism and the New Physics (1983) by Michael Talbot. Despite its concern with “the essential nature of things,” the subject of physics had always seemed abstruse to me, and I had never pursued this area of inquiry. The modern fragmentation of knowledge into many disciplines, each with its own specialist discourse, gives us the belief, or illusion, that we cannot attain an integrated understanding of our reality. As the poet Wallace Stevens put it, “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.” I assumed that the concepts of physics, based on complex equations and experiments with super-accelerators, could not be reduced into ordinary language, made sensible to a generalist such as myself, without deforming them. I knew, however, that these concepts had exerted a powerful effect on my father’s vision, taking permanent hold of his imagination. His early works depicted simple rectangles on a flat picture plane, calling to mind the early nonobjective explorations made by Russian Suprematist painters such as Kasimir Malevich. In his later work he was obsessed with volume and mass, painting gigantic menhir-like shapes of shimmering color that curved and fused with the fields around them. He was seeking to capture the space-bending effects of gravity, the interpenetration of diaphanous forms suggesting energy in constant transformation.
In The Tao of Physics, which developed out of the author’s initial insights during explorations of psychedelic “power plants,” Capra explores various concepts in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism and correlates them
with the worldview implied by the discoveries of quantum physics. He finds that these ancient traditions reflect the quantum understanding of interrelated and inseparable phenomena, of the centrality of consciousness to the world, and the unity of all appearances in a domain that transcends space-time. Although Hinduism describes a pantheon of gods, all of these gods are ultimately expressions of a single principle, Brahman, the unitary consciousness that pervades everything, “the one without a second.” In Hinduism, the world of appearance in which we live is “lila,” the divine play of the gods. “Brahman is the great magician who transforms himself into the world and he performs this feat with his ‘magic creative power,’” Capra writes. This “magic creative power” was given the name “maya” in The Rig Veda, one of the most ancient Hindu scriptures. “The word ‘maya’—one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy—has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the ‘might’ or ‘power’ of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play.”
The space-time reality we perceive from our limited perspective is lila, manifested through maya, the magical power of the gods. The transcendent consciousness, beyond all conceptualization, outside of space-time, the source of space and time, is Brahman. In the 1920s, Arthur Eddington was one of the first physicists to propose that Relativity Theory suggested “the stuff of the world is mind stuff,” and that this “mind stuff is not spread out in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived
from it.”
Enlightenment or awakening, in the Eastern traditions, is the individual’s experience of reconnecting with this ultimate ground of being, the “suchness” (Thathagatta) that supersedes all dualisms. As the Buddhist sage Ashvaghosha put it two thousand years ago: “Suchness is neither that which is existence, nor that which is nonexistence, nor that which is at once existence and nonexistence, nor that which is not at once existence and nonexistence.” Capra points out that such paradoxical descriptions sound identical to the physicist’s attempts to grasp the slippery essence of quantum objects, which are neither wave nor particle, do not exist yet do not not exist.
Capra found it interesting to follow the “spiral path” of Western science’s 2,500-year evolution, from the mystical philosophies of ancient Greece, to a materialistic dualism and mechanistic worldview that was in sharp contrast to Eastern thought, and now returning to the integrated perspective of the ancients: “This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.” The left-brain rationality of modern science, based on objective experiment, had confirmed the right-brain intuitions of mysticism, based on subjective experience.
Materialist critics of Capra’s perspective argue that quantum effects are limited to the submicroscopic quantum level, and that “macro objects,” the stuff we see in our world, continue to obey the rules of Newtonian physics. This, however, is not really the case. The laws of quantum physics, its quirks and quarks and discontinuous breaks, also govern the macro level. Macro objects obey the wave equation for matter, discovered by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, their size reducing the probabilistic spread of quantum
effects to an unnoticeable amount. The Newtonian equations still maintain their effect on the macro level, as a “special case” of the new relativistic physics, but they are fuzzy approximations. The world we live in is fundamentally a quantum one.
In our daily lives, do we experience quantum effects such as nonlocality, action at a distance, and so on? Is that what the statistical evidence for psychic phenomena—such as telepathy, remote viewing, and precognition—indicates? Is it possible that synchronicity is also one of these effects, revealing a deep-buried interrelationship between time, space, and consciousness? Is consciousness itself a quantum phenomenon?
In Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (1987), the physicist F. David Peat makes this argument. “Synchronicities are the jokers in nature’s pack of cards for they refuse to play by the rules and offer a hint that, in our quest for certainty about the universe, we have ignored some vital clues,” he writes. A one-time collaborator of the physicist David Bohm, who developed the “holographic universe” theory, Peat finds, in his study of synchronicities, a link between physics and psychology. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, in his 1951 essay on the subject, defined synchronicity as an “acausal ordering principle.” He noted that these episodes multiplied in his own life, and the lives of his patients, during periods of intense psychic transformation. In Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalls numerous such episodes—such as awakening from a startling dream in which a bullet passed through his head, to learn the next day that one of his patients had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head during the night. Elaborating on the concept, he wrote:
Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in time, or that space is relative to the psyche.
Studying these events, Jung found it probable that mind and matter were, ultimately, “two different aspects of one and the same thing.” For Peat, synchronicities give us glimpses into the deeper patterns of nature, indicating an organizing intelligence underlying the seeming chaos of daily events. They are a part of an order of psychic reality that we recognize, intuitively, when they occur to us, as profound glimpses or sudden revelations of the nature of mind: “Synchronicities, epiphanies, peak, and mystical experiences are all cases in which creativity breaks through the barriers of the self and allows awareness to flood through the whole domain of consciousness. It is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.”
Peat wondered if these episodes, instead of occasional reaches into a different order of cognition, could become a continuous flow of synchronic phenomena, experienced collectively. If that was the case, synchronicities would suggest “an intimation of the total transformation that is possible for both the individual and society.” In such a shift—which Peat equated with the “ending of time” described by various spiritual traditions—different “time orders” would be experienced simultaneously; spontaneity, synchronicity, and creativity would become the rule, rather than the rare exception. The old model of linear and mechanistic causality should give way to one more accurately based on “transformations and unfoldings.” In Mysticism and the New Physics, Talbot similarly concluded: “We may suspect a slow and continual change of axis from causality to synchronicity.” He quoted the Rig Veda: “Without effort, one world moves into another.”
My personal exploration of psychedelics and shamanism had attuned my sensitivity to such episodes—and this seemed to lead to an exponential increase in their frequency. I found this, at first, to be bizarre and destabilizing. From my previous mechanistic or materialist worldview, in which all events were accidents of physical processes colliding over time, I found myself catapulted into a realm of occult correspondences where signs seemed to multiply endlessly, suggesting the possibility of a schizophrenic break, in which the mind collapses from an overload of signifiers and uncanny signals—from an oversaturation of meaning.
According to Peat: “It is as if the formation of patterns within the unconscious mind is accompanied by
physical patterns in the outer world. In particular, as psychic patterns are on the point of reaching consciousness, then synchronicities reach their peak; moreover, they generally disappear as the individual becomes consciously aware of a new alignment of forces within his or her own personality.... It is as if the internal restructuring produces external resonance, or as if a burst of ‘mental energy’ is propagated outward onto the world.”
If consciousness somehow cocreates such events, it is only through the subjective perspective of an individual that the episodes can be observed and correlated. Like a quantum object that can be registered as either wave or particle, such temporally resonant phenomena exist only through our activity of conscious discrimination. It is our psyche that determines if an event reveals a deeper order of significance, or if it is ignored as part of the quotidian flux. I found that attuning myself to synchronicities, learning to separate signal from noise, required the development of a kind of intuitive skill, and revealed an aesthetic dimension. Meaningful synchronicities, ones that suggested some new pattern forming, seemed to occur just beyond the thought or idea I was currently holding, and were accompanied by a psychic sensation akin to a key turning in a lock. Some of these synchronicities involved conjunctions between personal episodes and world events that seemed to me both numinous and inexplicable.
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