Science is a funny thing. We think that we know something until we realize that, well, maybe, we don't really know that something, or at least maybe we don't fully understand that something as much as we thought we did.
It's just the nature of the beast; scientists develop a theory that they think explains something, and it may very well explain everything that's known up until that point. But then an unusual blip occurs—an outlier—that can't be explained by the existing theory. So then what do you have? Answer: a worthless theory. Because if a theory or a “law” of science can't explain every instance of a phenomenon that it attempts to explain, then it's not really worth the paper that it's written on.
Take the law of gravity. We are told that objects with a large mass generate a gravitational field that pulls objects downwards. If, however, we were to encounter a gravitational anomaly—say, for example, we were to discover an apple that “fell” upwards out of a tree rather than downwards—what then? We might be forced to conclude that perhaps we don't understand this thing we call gravity as well as we think we do because the law of gravity doesn't explain all of the available data. In other words, we would be forced to reevaluate the worldview that embraces gravity as a law, and be forced to seek an alternate, more comprehensive explanation for why that one apple falls upwards.
Make no mistake, science is full of examples of apples falling upwards. New theories are constantly replacing older, more obsolete theories as blips and outliers shatter old paradigms and necessitate new perspectives. For example, in physics, classical mechanics (such as Newton's ideas about gravity) were replaced (or supplemented) by theories of relativity (Einstein's little E=MC2 formula), which then were made somewhat obsolete by quantum mechanics. This evolution of theories has not only been true in physics, but also in other fields, such as astronomy, the biological sciences, and mathematics.
And what about our ideas about what it means to be human? How have they evolved? Well, from a Western perspective, we've gone from Adam and Eve creationism to enlightenment-period notions of a “ghost in the machine” (Descartes' view of a physical body with an animating life force) to present-day materialist ideas of biological reductionism (chemicals wrapped in skin). But are there any outliers—are there any apples falling upwards—to refute biological reductionism?
Luckily, yes. Earlier in this book, I had discussed the William James notion of white crows and the truly exceptional abilities of a handful of very gifted people that seem to push the boundary of human potential. There are other anomalies that are difficult, if not impossible, to explain via the mainstream scientific theories and paradigms. What are some of these head scratchers?
And there are many more examples of apples falling upwards—in physics and in consciousness research (as we'll further discuss)—but why are they important? In our earlier discussion of white crows, I mentioned that the notion of white crows requires us to reconceptualize how we view our human capacities. These paradigm-busters open up the door to the possibility of our possibilities. I made the point that to reflexively slam shut the door on even allowing that such unusual abilities might be possible precludes us from being able to push the boundary of our own potential. Similarly, these apples falling upwards, these outliers and anomalies from the natural world and the physical sciences, also force us to reevaluate our existing paradigms.
Any book that attempts to honor Pythagoras and other Greek mystics by helping people to experience deeper levels of reality— and thus pulling the existential rug out from under people—has to provide alternative paradigms to replace the old, shattered ones. It is thus essential to provide the theoretical framework that can allow for the possibility of such mind-expanding capabilities. In order to help engender an open mind-set towards such paradigm-busting possibilities, I'd like to briefly describe some more of the discoveries of the new science, as well as some of the various “new-paradigm” theories that might be able to theoretically explain how some of these anomalies might be possible.
What are some of the scientific developments of the new science of the last century that may have relevance in a discussion about the metaphysical, unseen reality that Pythagoras and Plato believed existed in a causal informational realm (what Plato called the Ideal Realm)? Interestingly, yet on somewhat of a sidenote, even main-stream physicists now commonly refer to matter as “information,” since they believe that “information is more fundamental than matter” (Radin 2006). And where does this new science begin?
Most of the advances I am referring to first began developing during the dawn of the last century, when advancements in the realm of the subatomic rocked the very foundation of what has been called classical mechanics or Newtonian physics. These experiments undermined the notion that all of reality is built of blocks that are themselves indivisible. What scientists discovered was that the subatomic particles that emerged when atoms and atomic nuclei were fissioned did not behave like conventional solids. Instead, they displayed an odd, paradoxically dual nature, alternately exhibiting wavelike or particlelike properties that were inexplicably determined by the mode of observation.
Danish physicist Niels Bohr, acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, pointed out that if subatomic particles only come into existence in the presence of an observer, then it would be meaningless to speak of particles' properties as existing before they are observed. This conclusion troubled one of the other founders of quantum theory, Albert Einstein. As troubling as these implications were on a subatomic level, Einstein refused to believe that they could have any implication on a larger, macro level; for example, he just thought it ludicrous to imply that, say, a cat did not exist until someone actually looked at it.
In 1935, Einstein and two associates, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published a now-famous paper that discussed what has come to be known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox. Their paper was entitled “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” and was written as a refutation of what Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance.”
Yet later, precise research would indeed validate Bohr's original insights. The cat didn't disappear if it wasn't observed, but Bohr's ideas did seem to very accurately predict and describe phenomena in the infinitesimal and unseen-to-the-naked-eye sub-atomic realm.
Further phenomena, dubbed by physicist Erwin Schrodinger as entanglement, were also discovered. Entanglement was the ability of certain separated particles to instantaneously influence one another in what has been called a nonlocal effect. This influence indicates a seeming state of connectedness between particles, even when those particles have been separated across space and time.
In the 1960s, Irish physicist John Bell became the first researcher to construct a theoretical laboratory experiment to confirm the entanglement phenomenon. When, in the 1980s, Bell's theory was experimentally confirmed, the phenomenon became known as Bell's Theorem of Nonlocality. In these later and very precise experiments, two “sister” electrons were separated across a certain distance and were no longer in physical contact with one another. When the rotational spin of one electron was artificially manipulated to change direction (for example, from clockwise to counterclockwise), the rotational spin of the sister electron across the room would also instantaneously change rotation. This result was not only remarkable but, according to Newtonian physics, should have been impossible. There was no physical or observable means by which the one electron was communicating or sending information to the other electron indicating a shift in rotation.
Yet shift they did.
These nonlocality results have since been repeated hundreds of times in very precise experiments that have only further affirmed Bell's original theory. These results are so indisputable in the scientific community, that quantum nonlocality and entanglement are today accepted doctrines of mainstream science.
While these phenomena may be undisputed in the micro subatomic realm, many physicists have continued to debate whether or not entanglement and nonlocality effects exist at the macro level. But recent research findings may be forcing scientists to reconsider their stance on this. In a review of developments on entanglement research, as quoted by science writer Michael Brooks in Dean Radin's Entangled Minds (2006), “Physicists now believe that entanglement between particles exists everywhere, all the time, and have recently found shocking evidence that it affects the wider, ‘macroscopic’ world that we inhabit.” Many paranormal researchers point towards quantum discoveries as possible explanatory frameworks for anomalous experiences, such as various psychic phenomena, also known as psi phenomena.
Then there are the holographic theories. Physicist David Bohm, based on his earlier observation and research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (a.k.a., Berkeley Lab), noticed certain collective and seemingly interconnected properties of plasma gas that led him to seek a more satisfying explanation than Bohr's interpretation. He believed that there was a deeper reality beyond the absence of observers. He proposed a new field theory called the quantum potential and theorized that it pervaded all space. Years later, after observing the properties of ink in glycerin, Bohm hypothesized a radical new theory to explain what he felt was a better model for reality's implicate (unseen) and explicate (seen) order: the universe as a hologram.
In a hologram, what is visually seen is a sort of three-dimensional interference-pattern projection that has a causal higher light or laser source. Thus, a laser creates a three-dimensional hologram from the information contained on a two-dimensional surface. In addition, all the information for the hologram is contained in that other implicate causal plane, which then informs and becomes explicate in the form of the three-dimensional hologram (Talbot 1991).
One of the most interesting properties of a hologram that can lend a theoretical framework for certain phenomena such as archetypal experiences, encounters with the collective unconscious, and other unusual phenomena that have emerged from consciousness studies is the “whole in every part” aspect of a hologram. What this aspect means is that within every subset of the explicate, or seen, part of the hologram, lays the implicate, or unseen, information— the DNA, if you will—of the entire hologram. This model gives new meaning to the old line from the William Blake poem “to see a world in a grain of sand.”
Separately and independently from Bohm, neurophysiologist Karl Pribram also developed a holographic model to explain certain properties of memories. Pribram's model indicates that perhaps memories were not localized within any particular specific brain site, but seemingly distributed throughout the brain as a whole. Pribram concluded that aspects of “mind” lent themselves to explanation via a holographic brain model, which he went on to propose in the 1970s after various experiments (such as Pietsch's salamander experiment) seemed to support his theory.
Pribram wondered if, in fact, what the mystics had been saying for centuries might be true—that reality might indeed be an illusion, and that what was really out there was just a vast, “resonating symphony of wave forms.” Otherwise known as a frequency domain, that waveform symphony was transformed into the material world as we know it only after it entered our senses.
As one can readily see, there are obvious parallels between a holographic model of the universe and Plato's notions of causal Ideal Realms or Pythagoras's informational realm. And there was yet more evidence from the world of theoretical astrophysics suggesting that the universe might indeed be a hologram; it came from the “information paradox” of black holes that Stephen Hawking pointed to over three decades ago.
This paradox begins with two facts: (1) the immense gravity of black holes sucks in all surrounding information (in the forms of matter and energy) and (2) black holes have been mathematically shown to eventually collapse in on themselves and disappear. The question is, what happens to all that sucked-in information when the black holes collapse? If it too were to disappear, that disappearance would contradict some of the most fundamental laws of physics.
For over thirty years, Hawking stuck to his belief that black holes did indeed destroy information. This was in spite of the fact that something that has been dubbed “Hawking radiation” emanates out of the black hole. Hawking argued that this radiation was random and could not contain the information that had originally fallen into the hole.
But in 1997, Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, developed a type of string theory in a universe with five large dimensions of space and a contorted space-time geometry. In his theory, which also included gravity, everything happening on the boundary (the event horizon) of the black hole is equivalent to everything happening inside the black hole; that is, ordinary particles interacting on the surface of the black hole correspond exactly to strings interacting on the interior of the black hole—sort of like a hologram. According to his theory, a black hole, like everything else in the universe, has an alter ego living on the boundary of the universe. Shockingly (at least for Hawking) Maldacena's theory suggested that “our universe might be something of a grand illusion—an enormous cosmic hologram” (Minkel, “The Hollow Universe,” New Scientist 2002, 22). This suggestion, again, corresponds to Plato's causal Ideal Realm or Pythagoras's informational realm.
Maldacena's calculations were so impeccable, his theory so elegant, that in 2004, at a conference in Dublin, Hawking conceded he had been wrong about information loss in a black hole.
According to Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind, credited as one of the inventors of string theory, Maldacena's theory was “so mathematically precise that for most practical purposes all theoretical physicists came to the conclusion that the holographic principle and the conservation of information would have to be true” (Gefter, “The Elephant and the Event Horizon,” New Scientist 2006).
In addition to physics research, consciousness research has also yielded discoveries that have defied explanation by the standard scientific models. Thought and consciousness (and not just atomic particles) have demonstrated nonlocal properties of entanglement.
Further, rigorous and repeatable experiments have explored a phenomenon known as direct mental interactions with living systems (DMILS). These experiments have yielded statistically significant data regarding people's abilities to influence the following systems via their thoughts and/or intentions (Braud 2003):
In addition, a controlled double-blind experiment has shown that intercessory prayer (healing prayer at a distance) yields positive recovery outcomes for coronary patients (Byrd 1998). There is also mounting evidence for other types of nonlocal human entanglement in the form of remote viewing (as was discussed in chapter 3), as well as less exotic forms of telepathy (Radin 2006; Targ 2004).
Besides holographic theories, another conceptualization that borrows from ancient wisdom is also gaining much traction within the scientific community. Systems theorist and visionary author Ervin Laszlo has proposed an Akashic Field theory that borrows from the Hindu concept of the Akashic Record. Akashic is a Sanskrit word that literally means “sky” or “aether,” but is used to describe the belief in a cosmic record of all that has ever occurred; this concept has also variously been called the collective consciousness or cosmic mind. In Laszlo's version, the Akashic is a subquantum field containing the holographic record of every-thing that happens—or has happened—in the universe. Laszlo illustrates his theory with a sea analogy. Anything that moves through the sea leaves a vibration in the water in the form of a wake. The Akashic Field is like the sea, and any object or happening leaves a similar vibration in it; that vibration is the record of that particular object or event.
Taken in its totality, Laszlo's A-Field (as it is also known) represents the embodiment of the philosophy known as Monistic Idealism, which is the school of philosophy that believes that everything is consciousness and that what we perceive as matter is, instead, just various ripples in the A-field vibrating in such a way that they take on the appearance of shape and form.
According to MIT physicist Milo Wolf, Laszlo's A-field is the cosmic vacuum or the “wave medium” in which all the material universe—particles, stars, people, planets—are not material. Instead, as Laszlo says, “[A]ll of these matter-like things are complex waves in the quantum vacuum.” It should then be theoretically possible to entrain one's frequency to resonate with the larger A-Field. Or, as Apollo 14 Captain Edgar Mitchell describes it, “[I]n higher states of awareness, every cell of the body coherently resonates with the holographically embedded information in the quantum zero-point energy field.” (Mitchell had a mystical experience on the moon and went on to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, or IONS.)
Recall our earlier discussion from chapter 2 regarding water meditation and entrainment; it would seem that if a person can reach a higher level of awareness through a variety of different practices (including Greek contemplative meditation), access to these higher informational realms becomes possible. And when these higher realms are accessed, the white-crow abilities demonstrated by people such as the calendrical savants or Pat Price (the remote viewer) become less unexplainable and paranormal and, instead, become both comprehensible and quite possible.
But Laszlo makes an important observation about accessing such “quantum-brain” abilities. In analyzing savants, he explains that they—due to their autism—preferentially use the right hemisphere of the brain; in other words, they experience things in visual terms. Laszlo suggests that perhaps the brain has two modes: One is the classic slow and linear problem-solving mode (the left-hemisphere-based thinking brain). The other is what he calls the quantum-processing mode; this mode is extremely rapid, capable of handling exponentially more information than the classical mode. It is the right-hemisphered brain that Laszlo suggests is in contact with the holographic informational field and is thus able to receive those lightning bolts of transcendent inspiration.
What's the catch? It seems that the quantum-processing mode only kicks in when the classical-processing mode is deactivated. That would explain why the altered states produced by various types of meditation are so effective; in the altered states, the left-hemisphere, classical-processing brain is turned off. The same thing happens with my exercise-before-contemplation technique; the physical exhaustion shuts down the thinking brain.
It also explains the mechanism by which people in sensory-deprivation tanks often have mystical experiences. In this modern form of Greek incubation, once the sensory input data ceases to stimulate the classical-processing mode of the brain, that mode is deactivated, and the quantum-processing mode is activated—and thus able to tap into the holographic archetypal realm.
In his groundbreaking book The Biology of Transcendence (2002), Joseph Chilton Pearce discusses a concept known as “unconflicted behavior” (a concept we had briefly discussed earlier). Unconflicted behavior is a mental state of being that is unburdened by doubt or overthinking. It is, in essence, a very unforced and uncomplicated way of thinking; in fact, this way of thinking is rather simple and childlike (and is symptomatic of most savants). Is this unconflicted behavior the same as the nonright hemisphere approach that Laszlo describes, or is it a different dynamic altogether?
Pearce describes how during such unconflicted states, one is able to think and do things on an almost superhuman level. The unconflicted person seems to be in direct contact with a transcendent source. The difficulty for most people, Pearce noted, was in maintaining that pure, unconflicted state. Yet savants, by virtue of cognitive limitation coupled with an enhanced ability to focus, can blissfully maintain this seemingly effortless and unconflicted mental state; thus, they seem almost uniquely able to maintain an “open channel.”
Pearce goes on to cite the legendary 1962 book by Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences, published by Indiana University Press. In it, she describes her research of “Eureka!” breakthrough types of experiences in the fields of science, philosophy, art, and religion. She was able to identify six common themes that were uniformly present for such seemingly transcendent phenomena to occur. Briefly stated, all of those who experienced such moments had:
Again, a similar precondition in Laski's study seemed to be the unconflicted mental state that seekers had assumed out of sheer mental exhaustion and frustration after quitting their trek—a level of fatigue and exhaustion that, interestingly, is similar to the physical exhaustion induced by my exercise-then-contemplate method. According to Laski's research, only when the seekers were exhausted and had quit searching for an answer did the seemingly transcendent information appear, as Pearce describes it, like a fully formed lightning bolt in the seekers' conscious awareness.
And it seems that, as with lightning, the necessary ground charge needs to be created in the recipient. In Laski's subjects, this ground charge would seem to be the fervent effort put forth by the seekers, even though the solution eluded them in the actively thinking, left-hemisphere-dominant state. They seem to have effectively created the necessary receptive charge, but only after they had stopped seeking. It would seem that while they were still actively seeking, their “thinking,” left-hemisphere brain was still activated and acting as a barrier to Laszlo's quantum-processing brain. Once that side of the brain was shut down out of frustration, the information-accessing, quantum-processing right hemisphere could turn on. That quitting seemed to be the final piece necessary to create the unconflicted, right-hemisphere mental state that would allow the lightning to strike. We might speculate that by attaining an unconflicted mind-set, by meditative practice or contemplation (and/or physical exhaustion!), one can create the ground charge needed for transcendent lightning to strike from that beyond realm we've been calling Pythagoras's Informational Realm or Plato's Ideal Realm.
Perhaps that's how Pythagoras was able to hear the universe vibrating or was able to remember his past lives. Perhaps that's how mystics can intuit cosmological insights and how psychics and clairvoyants can see things. Perhaps they're all able to achieve a form of unconflicted transcendence, or a right-hemisphere, quantum-processing mode.
And if the white crows can do it, then so can you!