If the title of this chapter is making you anxious, relax. The chapter is less on quantum physics and more on the gifts of quantum physics to new paradigm thinking in health and healing. From the preceding chapters it should be clear what three of these gifts are: downward causation, nonlocality, and discontinuity. There is another gift revealed by consideration of how quantum possibilities become actual events of our experience; it is called tangled hierarchy, a concept that I will leave a little mysterious until later.
Let's begin with a little history. What is a quantum? The word quantum etymologically comes from a Latin word meaning quantity, but the physicist Max Planck, who first introduced it in physics in a seminal work in 1900, had a slightly different meaning in mind. For Planck, and for quantum physics, the word quantum means a discrete quantity. For example, a quantum of light, called a photon, is a little discrete bundle of energy that cannot be broken down any further.
If the concept is still not clear, an example from everyday life may be of help. A cent or a penny is a discrete quantity of money; half a penny or half a cent does not exist.
Quantum objects are waves of possibility. When we are not looking, they spread as water waves do when you throw a pebble in a pond. But a quantum wave spreads, not in space-time, but in the realm of possibility, a realm that Heisenberg called potentia. When we look, make a measurement, the wave of possibility collapses, what was spread out before (in possibility) becomes localized in actuality as a space-time event, what was many-faceted in potentia takes on one manifest facet (see figure 7).
Fig. 7. Two phases of time development of a quantum object. A quantum object expands as a wave of possibility when nobody looks. This movement is continuous and is determined by quantum math. When we look, the possibility wave discontinuously collapses. This discontinuous movement is acausal and is not determinable by mathematics or algorithms.
Consider an example. Suppose we release an electron in a room. The electron's wave of possibility, if we are not looking at it, will spread in potentia. What this means is that the electron has the possibility of being all over the room in just a few moments. Each possibility, each possible position of the electron, comes with a probability forming a distribution (see figure 8). When we look, the wave collapses, the electron manifests in one of its possible places to be; an electron detector (for example, a Geiger counter) placed there ticks.
Fig. 8. A quantum probability distribution.
In the realm of possibility, the electron is not separate from us, from consciousness. It is a possibility of consciousness itself, a material possibility. When consciousness collapses the possibility wave by choosing one of the electron's possible facets, that facet becomes actuality. Simultaneously, the possibility wave of the electron detector also collapses, producing a tick; and the possibility wave of the observer's brain collapses, also registering the tick.
How the electron's wave, the detector's wave, or the brain's wave spreads in possibility, what facets these waves assume, is determined by upward causation, by the dynamics of elementary particle interactions. This part is calculable by quantum mathematics, at least in principle. The events of collapse of the waves of possibility are the results of conscious choice, downward causation. For this no mathematics exists, no algorithms. This choice of downward causation is free, unpredictable.
Consider next the concept of discontinuity. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr gave us a picture of discontinuous movement that makes the concept crystal clear. Everybody knows that electrons go around the atomic nucleus in orbits, much like the planets going around the sun. That is continuous movement. But when an electron jumps from one atomic orbit to another, said Niels Bohr, the jump is discontinuous; the electron never goes through the intervening space. It disappears from one orbit and reappears in the other. Following Niels Bohr, we call this discontinuous movement a quantum leap (see figure 9).
Fig. 9. A quantum leap as envisioned by Niels Bohr. According to Bohr, when electrons jump from one atomic orbit to another, they never go through the intervening space.
The mathematician John von Neumann (1955) further clarified the role of continuous and discontinuous motion in quantum physics. Quantum objects are described as superpositions of possible facets, or possibility waves. The possibility waves, von Neumann noted, develop in time in two clearly delineated ways. Between observations or measurements, their motion is continuous; they spread as waves in the domain of possibility, continuously, in causally traceable bits. But when we observe them in the process of quantum measurement, the possibility waves collapse discontinuously, from spread-out wave to localized particle, from a multifaceted object to one facet, all in one spontaneous, acausal step.
Quantum nonlocality was introduced by none other than Albert Einstein, who in 1935 along with two collaborators, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published a paper trying to discredit quantum physics. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (1935) pointed out that a mere interaction binds two quantum objects into a nonlocal whole. The quantum collapse of the possibility wave of one part of such a system must instantly collapse the possibility wave of the rest. This is instantaneous action-at-a-distance. But nothing is allowed to occur instantly according to the theory of relativity. According to that theory, all signals that communicate action from one body to another must travel within the speed limit of the speed of light (300,000 km per second). But the three missed the message of quantum physics altogether.
Quantum collapse can be nonlocal and yet not violate the theory of relativity because it takes place outside of space-time. We must not picture quantum collapse like the collapse of a collapsible umbrella. The possibility waves of the two correlated parts of a system reside in the realm of potentia, outside space and time, where they are connected; on collapse the actual correlated events are discontinuously manifest in space-time. The quantum nonlocal connection that puzzled Einstein and colleagues lies outside of space and time; this quantum connection leads to a signal-less communication, and thus no violation of the theory of relativity is involved.
So how does all this relate to how we look at ourselves, especially in relation to our health and healing? Let's first consider downward causation.
When quantum physicists and quantum aficionados first had an inkling of the potency of downward causation back in the 1970s, many were elated. Soon the physicist Fred Alan Wolf coined the phrase, “we choose our own reality,” and it became a New Age mantra. Many people started putting downward causation into practice, trying to manifest a Cadillac or some such thing via its help. And when that didn't work so well, they turned to manifesting parking spaces for their cars, Cadillac or not. But that did not work so well either.
Obviously, there are subtleties of downward causation that the 1970s' enthusiasts were missing. What are these subtleties?
One subtlety you already know: Who are we in relation to the world? Are we to apply downward causation to a world that is separate from us so that we don't have to be responsible for our action, or is the world us, and we have to accept responsibility along with our freedom of choice? In order to make sense of downward causation as a potent force in quantum physics, only the latter philosophy is acceptable—consciousness is the ground of all being. “We must supplement the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast by the Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast,” said the philosopher Victor Frankl. So be it, says quantum physics.
So this much is clear. We cannot frivolously choose health over disease; we have to do it responsibly, such as following up our choice with suitable lifestyle changes. But can we even do it with what we ordinarily call choice, by wishing it? If we cannot manifest the car of our choice via wishful thinking, what guarantee do we have that wishing for health will manifest health, even if we are ready to promise responsible follow-up actions?
The question of who we really are is a subtle question, the mystics among us declare. We have to do much spiritual work, called yoga in Sanskrit (a word that means union or integration), to find out, they say. Fortunately, quantum physics—more precisely, considerations of quantum measurement—is giving definitive answers as to the nature of us, our consciousness. When you understand and integrate the lessons of quantum measurement theory in your life, you will be practicing yoga of a sort, no doubt. I call it quantum yoga—a scientific path to discover who we are.
In brief, considerations of quantum measurement tell us the following about the nature of our consciousness:
The first two you already know and perhaps have already incorporated in your being. You can see the importance of the third one immediately: We don't choose from our ordinary ego. So wishful positive thinking about our health will not necessarily give us health.
But how do we manifest our potential for downward causation then? The following pages of quantum measurement theory will give you strong hints. To make the discussion more interesting I will even throw in some related explanations of health and healing data. Are you ready for a little quantum yoga?
Consider a paradox first raised by the Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner against the idea that quantum collapse consists of consciousness choosing actuality from quantum possibilities. That collapse is due to a conscious choice by an observer raises the specter of pandemonium in a case where there are two observers and two contradictory choices. To be concrete, consider the following scenario. Suppose you and your friend drive to a traffic light from two perpendicular directions. Let's say that the traffic light is a quantum traffic light with two possibilities: red and green. Now being busy Americans, you will both want to choose green, of course. If both of you get your choices, there is pandemonium. To avoid it, only one of you must be granted the power to choose. But on what criterion? Who gets to choose?
Wigner was puzzled because, to him, the only legitimate answer seemed to be a philosophy called solipsism—only you are real, and the rest of us, your friend included, are figments of your imagination. Then you are the chooser and there is no paradox.
Many people actually feel about the world in a solipsistic way. A Hollywood woman meets a long-lost friend, becomes excited, and invites her to “have a cup of coffee and catch up.” But in her excitement, she just talks and talks and then suddenly becomes aware. “Oh, look at me, only talking about myself. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?”
And yet we can appreciate Wigner's uneasiness because everyone feels solipsistic about everybody else. Fortunately, there is another solution that Wigner missed, which was independently discovered by three researchers (Bass 1971; Goswami 1989, 1993; Blood 1993, 2001): If it is always one consciousness choosing from behind our apparent individuality, the paradox disappears also. A unitive consciousness can choose objectively. So in a large number of such situations you and your friend each will get his or her wish half of the time; probabilistic anticipation holds. And yet this resolution leaves room for making a creative exception (as when there is a medical emergency) in any one particular case of looking.
So consciousness is one and universal, or as Erwin Schrödinger, one of the co-discoverers of quantum mathematics, put it, consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural. There are no two “consciousnesses”; our individuality is an illusory epiphenomenon of experience (discussed later).
So can we choose health over disease? Can we heal ourselves from a disease using the power of downward causation? Yes, we can, provided we develop the ability of transcending the ego and rising to unitive consciousness.
The late editor of the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins (1989), healed himself of a serious disease through laughter generated by funny movies and comic books. Although there is rumor that Cousins secretly used homeopathic medicine but was reluctant to admit it publicly, I have no doubt that his laughter therapy also substantially contributed to the healing. Laughter is when you are not taking yourself seriously. As the philosopher Gregory Bateson used to say, laughter is a half-step toward transcending the ego (more on transcending the ego later).
The physicist Alain Aspect and his collaborators (1982) verified quantum nonlocality in a laboratory experiment in which two correlated photons emitted simultaneously by an atom and moving away from each other were collapsed always in the same (polarization) state of actuality, although there were no signals between them. Yes, correlated quantum objects can influence one another at a distance without exchanging signals, by virtue of their quantum nonlocal connection.
Of course, experiments of this kind—and Aspect's is no exception—usually involve many decaying atoms and many pairs of correlated photons. Aspect's experiment reveals quantum nonlocality, but only after we compare and notice the correspondence of the (polarization) states of one photon at one detector at one place with that of the corresponding correlated photon at another detector at another place. But there is no correlation in the data collected in any one detector. These are entirely random. This is to be expected. Quantum objects are calculated as waves of possibility, and quantum mathematics enables us to calculate the probability associated with each possibility. In this way, quantum physics is probabilistic, and for a large number of events, randomness prevails. That is, the free choice that exists for individual events is always exerted so as to preserve the randomness in a large number of events.
Thus the quantum nonlocality that is revealed in Aspect's experiment is more like an event of what Carl Jung called synchronicity—meaningful coincidences attributable to a common cause. Two events take place at two different places. But you wouldn't see synchronicity—that there is meaningful coincidence—until you compare the two events.
Synchronicities are not uncommon in the healing literature. A doctor is enthusiastic about a new drug, a sample of which he received from a drug company. He administers the drug to his patient. The result is so impressive that he feels compelled to compare the effect of the drug with that of a placebo (sugar pill). But now the patient does not do so well. So when the doctor writes to the manufacturer for more samples of the drug, the manufacturer apologizes for sending him a placebo in the first instance by some mistake. The healing that took place is a clear case of placebo healing, but what prompted the manufacturer to make a mistake like that? Synchronicity or an Aspect kind of quantum nonlocality is a nice explanation.
In the previous chapter, I spoke of Randolph Byrd's data of distant healing, data pertaining to prayer group praying for double-blind patients at a distance and enhancing their healing rate as compared to control patients who were not prayed for. Can quantum nonlocality—Aspect style—be an explanation of this kind of data?
The answer is no. As I said earlier, since Aspect's data in any one place are random, and a meaningful message must involve a correlation between two subsequent events at the same place, there is no message in the data at any one detector location. Thus no transfer of message is possible through this kind of quantum nonlocal correlation between quantum objects.
In 1993, when my first book on quantum consciousness (Goswami 1993) was in press, I got a call from a University of Mexico neurophysiologist by the name of Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum. Jacobo was doing an Aspect-type experiment to demonstrate nonlocal communication between human brains, but an aspect of the data was puzzling him, he said. At his invitation, I immediately went to Mexico to check his experimental setup. The experiment seemed quite legitimate. Here is what he was doing.
In the experiment of Grinberg-Zylberbaum and colleagues (1994), two subjects meditate for 20 minutes with the intention of direct (nonlocal) communication. After the 20 minutes, they continue the meditative intention but from two separate Faraday cages (electromagnetically impervious chambers), where each one is wired to an individual EEG machine. Then only one subject is shown a series of light flashes producing electrical activity in his brain, which is deciphered from its recording in his EEG as an evoked potential. Amazingly, his partner's EEG readings, when deciphered, show that the evoked potential, evoked by the light flashes, has been transferred to her brain as well, without any local connection. This experiment was subsequently replicated by the neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick in London.
The puzzling aspect of the experiment is that by looking at the transferred potential of one subject, you can conclude that light flashes have been administered to the correlated subject, even without checking his brain wave data. This is message transfer. What is happening?
The answer lies in the involvement of consciousness. In the case of correlated brains as in the experiment described, or in the case of correlated minds as in mental telepathy or distant healing, conscious intention is involved in establishing and maintaining correlation between subjects, the person praying and the person prayed for in distant healing. Ordinarily, as in the Aspect experiment, collapse breaks the correlation between correlated objects. Also the disparate events in any one place correspond to disparate objects. But in the Grinberg-Zylberbaum experiment (or in distant healing), consciousness maintains the correlation between the correlated brains (or minds), and the data in any one place always correspond to the same object—the brain (or mind) of the subject present there. So message transfer is allowed.
Don't think of quantum nonlocality as an esoteric concept. Let's elaborate the nonlocality of being alive—it is subtle. As modern human beings, we live more in our heads than in the body, but even so most of us would agree that there is a feel to being alive. The experience of this feel is unitary, not fragmented. We don't feel being alive in our big toe and our ears separately. There is an undeniable unity of experience here that gives you a direct sense of quantum nonlocality.
A related phenomenon is a big puzzle in neurophysiology: the binding problem. Now that we can take pictures of the brain while we mentate (Posner and Raichle 1994), there is no doubt that activity in several spatially separated brain areas accompanies our mental experiences. Neither is there any doubt that we have a unity of experience. So the neurophysiologist worries, How do the disparate processes in different brain areas bind together to give us the unitary experience? It is a clear case of quantum nonlocality.
One of the surprising things in the event of quantum collapse is that when you look, not only does an object appear in consciousness but also a subject appears looking at the object. Quantum collapse produces the awareness of a subject-object split—the experience of a subject looking at an object. This can be understood by examining the role of the brain in making a conscious observation. No experimenter, no human observer, has ever performed a quantum measurement, a quantum collapse, without a brain! According to quantum rules, before measurement, before collapse, not only the object/stimulus but also the observer's brain itself, the brain that is taking in the stimulus, must be represented by a wave of possibilities. There is circularity here: Without the brain, there is no collapse and no awareness, no subject and no agent of downward causation; but without collapse, there is no actualized brain. The resolution of the circularity is dependent co-arising.
In the event of a quantum measurement, the collapsing subject and collapsed objects, including the brain, arise simultaneously, codependently. The experiencing subject and the experienced objects cocreate one another. The subject sees the object as separate from it—this is called self-reference. But it is only appearance; the truth is that consciousness creates both subject and object. Both the brain and the object are collapsed in the same event, but we never experience the brain as an object. Instead, consciousness identifies with the brain that is then experienced as the subject of the experience.
The dynamics of dependent co-arising can be understood using the idea of a tangled hierarchy (Hofstadter 1980). You know simple hierarchy; it occurs when one level of a hierarchy causally controls the other(s), but not the other way around. Go back and look at figure 1, which depicts a simple hierarchy. To understand a tangled hierarchy, examine the liar's paradox: I am a liar. It is a tangled hierarchy because the predicate qualifies the subject, but the subject qualifies the predicate also. If I am a liar, I am telling the truth, then I am lying, and so on, ad infinitum. The tangle can be seen (and also resolved) only by “jumping out of the system.” We cannot see it if we identify with the system. Instead, we get stuck and think of ourselves as separate from the rest of the world.
So quantum measurement involving the brain is tangled hierarchy. The reward is that we gain the capacity for self-reference, the ability to see ourselves as a “self” experiencing the world as separate from us. The downside is that we don't realize that our separateness is illusory, arising from a tangled hierarchy in quantum measurement, quantum collapse.
You may have seen the Escher picture of “Drawing Hands.” In that picture, the left hand draws the right hand, and the right hand draws the left, producing a tangled hierarchy. Again, if you identify with the picture, you can get caught in the infinite oscillation of the tangled hierarchy. But is the right hand really drawing the left? Is the left hand really drawing the right? No, from behind the scene, Escher is drawing them both.
So is the subject collapsing the object? Is (are) the object(s) creating the subject? Neither. From behind the scene, consciousness, through the illusion of a tangled hierarchy in quantum measurement, is becoming both, the subject and the object(s).
Tangled hierarchy and self-reference are important for us to understand. A lot of mental stress develops in our lives because we grow up in a dysfunctional family. A family is dysfunctional when it fails to act as a unit, when it lacks a “self” identity. Such a family self-identity arises only when there is tangled hierarchy in the relationships between the family members. The same thing is true for couples, and more to the point of the present discussion, true for the doctor-patient relationship.
I submit that tangled hierarchy, no doubt because of its conceptual difficulty, remains one of most unappreciated principles of nature, but if you are interested in healing, you must heed tangled hierarchy. Just notice one of the undeniable sources of popularity of alternative medicine over conventional medicine. A conventional medicine doctor treats you in a simple hierarchical manner. He or she dictates, you listen. But most alternative healers practice tangled hierarchy in their relationship to their patients! They dictate and also listen. You and your healer then become a self-referential unit. Such a self-referential unit has value. It enables you (together) occasionally to take creative quantum leaps of healing (more on this in chapter 16).
The idea that our subject-object split awareness arises from a quantum collapse enables us to understand the enigmatic concept of the unconscious that Freud introduced. We have seen above that awareness arises with quantum collapse. The unconscious is operational when awareness is not, when there is no quantum collapse. The unconscious is a misnomer in a worldview based on the primacy of consciousness, because consciousness is always present. What Freud meant was “unaware,” absence of awareness.
The concept of the unconscious is important for the subject of health and healing in connection with psychosomatic disease. We suppress the memories of certain traumatic experiences so deep that consciousness seldom collapses them, delegating them to what is called unconscious processing. The memories of these experiences are processed by producing somatic effects of disease, but we are not aware of them, because we never collapse these memories in our conscious thoughts (more on this in chapter 15).
Somebody is uneasy about feelings and suppresses them, relegating them to the unconscious, creating blocks in the flow of vital energy. These blocks eventually lead to malfunctioning organs when we have a conscious experience of disease. But we are not aware of the energy blocks that are responsible for the disease (more on this later).
Creativity is an undeniable component of biological beings. We can see the similarity of the two modes of movement of the quantum object—continuity and discontinuity—in two important components of the creative process. It is well known that the creative process consists of four distinct stages (Wallas 1926): preparation, unconscious processing, insight, and manifestation. The first one and the last one are obvious—preparation is reading up and getting acquainted with what is already known, and manifestation is capitalizing on the new idea, obtained as insight, by developing a product; these stages are both done more or less in a continuous fashion. But the middle two processes are more mysterious. They are the analogs of the two stages of quantum dynamics.
As discussed previously, unconscious processing refers to processing during which we are conscious but not aware; we process the possibilities but remain inseparate with them. In creativity, unconscious processing is believed to account for the proliferation of ambiguity of thought. It is the analog of the spreading of the quantum possibility wave between measurements (see figure 7). Creative insight, on the other hand, is found to be sudden and discontinuous. It is the analog of the quantum leap, a discontinuous leap of thought without going through the intermediate steps. Unconscious processing produces a multitude of possibilities; insight is the collapse of one of these possibilities (the new one of value) to actuality.
Thus, once we permit quantum thinking in our science of us, we make room for both continuous and discontinuous processes; we make room for creativity.
Quantum healing, a concept introduced by the physician Deepak Chopra (see chapter 5), is the result of a creative quantum leap. This will be further discussed later in this chapter and in chapter 16.
What is the nature of the subject/self of self-reference that arises from tangled-hierarchical quantum measurements? Consciousness identifies with the brain that becomes the subject of the resultant subject-object split. This identity I will call the quantum self. In this identity, the self is universal (that is, it has no personality), and the choice from possibility to actuality is free and potentially creative.
Much confusion arises in relating to this picture because this is not the self we regularly experience in waking awareness. How do we get from the universal, unitive, quantum self-identity to the local and personal ego-identity? The answer, in a nutshell, is conditioning.
Experiences brought about by quantum measurements in the brain produce memory; a repeated stimulus is usually experienced, reflected in the mirror of past memory, through secondary-awareness processes (in contrast, the first collapse event in response to a stimulus is called a primary-awareness event).
This reflection in the mirror of memory (see figure 10) reinforces the probabilities of the subsequent collapse in favor of the conditioned response (Mitchell and Goswami 1992). I will call this quantum memory as opposed to ordinary content memory, which requires a macro-body. Over time, all our responses to learned stimuli comprise a habit pattern. The quantum self-identity which is natural for a young child gradually gives way to an identity with a particular history and habit patterns, an identity that we call the ego (Goswami 1993).
Fig. 10. Processing via reflection in the mirror of memory produces the conditioned ego.
A quick aside: Since our mind is correlated with the brain, as we develop a brain-individuality via quantum memory, we also develop quantum memory and habit patterns of the mind, an individual mind. The same thing can be said of our physical body–vital body duo; experiences produce an individual vital body with individual vital propensities.
These mental and vital propensities are what Easterners call karma, and that plays a crucial role in the scientific theory of reincarnation (Goswami 2001). When an individual's physical body dies, what survive are the vital and mental bodies with their vital and mental karma. This karma is recycled to the next incarnation.
There is evidence in favor of such a scenario of our self—physical, vital, and mental. This theory leads to the following model for ego development. As we grow up, we are creative in our quantum self-identity, continually discovering new contexts of living, of being human. As we discover a new context, we also explore the secondary contexts available to us by combining new ones with old learned contexts—we adapt and assimilate; this is a stage of homeostatic adaptation. This model of alternative creative spurts and homeostatic adaptation for ego development is substantially the same as that arrived at by the psychologist Jean Piaget (1977) as a result of his long series of experiments with children (see Goswami 1999, for further details).
That there is a time lag of half a second (Libet et al. 1979) between the objective time of the arrival of a stimulus to the brain and the (subjective) time of our usual waking awareness of it gives further credence to the scenario. And although the quantum self-experience of primary awareness is usually relegated to what psychologists call the preconscious, we do penetrate the preconscious when we are creative.
Creativity researchers call this entering the preconscious the flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). When we are spontaneous and alive in physical activity such as a dance (Leonard 1990), when we feel one with the universe in a sudden moment of spiritual surge, when we are in meditative awareness, we are in flow. The experiencer tends to merge with the experience. Harvard neurophysiologist Dan Brown (1977) established that meditation reduces the reaction time of secondary processing.
There are reports of such flow experiences from cancer patients undergoing spontaneous remission. The physician Richard Moss (1981) tells us an anecdote that illustrates this idea. Moss runs workshops featuring a lot of bodywork and in his early days, in the 1980s, his workshops were famous for healing. So a terminal cancer patient, a woman whose cancer had spread all over her body, came to one of Moss's workshops. Although she must have come for healing, initially she was quite unwilling to participate in the rigor of the practices of the workshop.
Moss kept prodding her, sometimes to a degree that could be called insulting. After this went on for a while, in one session of active dancing, the cancer patient was so angry at Moss's prodding that she overcame her diseased body's lethargy and danced. And she really danced! Next morning she felt much better and tests showed that her cancer was gone.
I submit that while dancing with abandon, this patient forgot herself, she transcended the ego, went into her preconscious, and entered the state of flow. The dancer became the dance. She became available for the creativity of the quantum self. Eventually she took the quantum leap! And her cancer found the overnight cure of quantum healing.
This whole book is about the gifts of quantum physics to medicine. Here I will count the many ways quantum gifts are bestowed on health and healing:
