Algorithm: a rule-bound procedure to get from step A to step B.
Archetype: a Platonic idea that is the precursor of a material, vital, or mental manifestation; also the Jungian symbol of the instincts and primordial psychic processes of the collective unconscious.
Aspect, Alain: the experimental physicist at the University of Paris-Sud acclaimed for the 1982 experiment named after him that established quantum nonlocality. This experiment is a prime example of experimental metaphysics.
Atman: the Sanskrit word meaning “higher cosmic self beyond ego,” the quantum creative self of primary experience.
Aurobindo: visionary philosopher-sage who gave us the idea of the supermind. See supermind.
Awareness: subject-object split consciousness.
Bardo: Tibetan word meaning “passageway” or “transition.”
Behaviorism: the primary paradigm of psychology in this century, it holds that the explanation of human behavior is to be found in the history of stimulus-response-reinforcement patterns of a person.
Bhakti yoga: the yoga of love or devotion.
Bliss body: consciousness as the ground of being, the source of all bliss.
Bodhisattva: realized people (in Buddhism) who, instead of opting for merging into the clear light of consciousness, instead stand in the doorway helping people until everyone arrives.
Bohr, Niels: a Danish physicist, discoverer of the Bohr atom and of the complementarity principle. During his lifetime, he was the most influential spokesperson for the message of quantum mechanics.
Brahman: Sanskrit word signifying consciousness as the ground of all being; godhead or Tao.
Causal body: consciousness as the ground of being; bliss body.
Causal determinism: see Determinism.
Causality: the principle that a cause precedes every effect.
Cerebral cortex: the outermost and most recently evolved segment of the mammalian brain; also called the neocortex.
Chakras: the location of those places of the physical body where the vital body is collapsed along with the correlated physical cellular conglomerate or organ that represents a vital body function. Also, centers of feeling.
Chaos theory: a theory of certain deterministic classical systems (called chaotic systems) whose motion is so sensitive to initial conditions as not to be susceptible to long-term predictability. To materialists, this determined but not predictable character of chaotic systems make them an apt metaphor for subjective phenomena.
Character: the tendencies, patterns, and learned repertoire of contexts that define an individual.
Chi: the Chinese word for the modes of motion of the vital body.
Circularity: see self-reference.
Classical mechanics: the system of physics based on Isaac Newton's laws of motion; today it remains only approximately valid for most macroobjects as a special case of quantum mechanics.
Classical physics: see classical mechanics.
Collective unconscious: unitive unconscious—that aspect of our consciousness that transcends space, time, and culture, but of which we are not aware. A concept first introduced by Jung.
Complementarity: the characteristic of quantum objects possessing opposite aspects, such as waveness and particleness, only one of which we can see with a given experimental arrangement. The complementary aspects of a quantum object refer to transcendent waves and immanent particles.
Consciousness: the ground of being (original, self-contained, and constitutive of all things) that manifests as the subject that chooses, and experiences what it chooses, as it self-referentially collapses the quantum wave function in the brain or in a living cell or other cellular conglomerates.
Context: the interpretive field consciousness uses to guide the flow of meaning into the world; the causal underpinning behind content.
Correspondence principle: the idea, discovered by Bohr, that under certain limiting conditions (which are satisfied by most macrobodies under ordinary circumstances) quantum mathematics predicts the same motion as Newtonian classical mathematics. A similar correspondence principle is found to hold for idealist science; under conditions of complete conditioning idealist science corresponds to materialist science.
Creativity: the discovery of something new of value in a new context or with new meaning.
Darwin, Charles: the discoverer of the theory of evolution that bears his name.
Decay: the process in which an atomic nucleus emits harmful radiations and transforms to a different state.
Determinism: the philosophy according to which the world is causal and completely determined by Newton's laws of motion and the initial conditions—the initial positions and velocities of the objects of the space-time universe.
Deva: a Sanskrit word meaning “angel.”
dharma: the ethical and creative path of discovery of every individual, an individual's creative destiny of life, so to speak.
Dharma: consciousness, the whole, the ground of being. Spelled with a lower case “d,” it means duty and creative destiny. Also, in Hinduism, the god of justice.
Dharmakaya: in Buddhism, the body of consciousness, the ground of being.
Death: the withdrawal of conscious supervention—in the form of the collapse of the possibility waves—and conscious identity from the living.
Death yoga: practices designed for conscious death.
Double-slit experiment: the classic experiment for determining characteristics of waves; a beam of light or electrons, for example, is split by passing it through two slits in a screen to make an interference pattern on a photographic plate or a fluorescent screen.
Dualism: the idea that mind and brain belong to two separate realms of reality.
Ego: the identity with the content of an individual's story line in addition to the character.
Einstein, Albert: perhaps the most famous physicist that ever lived, he is the discoverer of the relativity theories. He was a major contributor to quantum theory, including the basic ideas of wave-particle duality and probability.
Epiphenomenon: a secondary phenomenon with no causal efficacy; something that exists contingent on the prior existence of something else.
Free will: freedom of choice undetermined by any necessary cause.
Freud, Sigmund: the founder of psychoanalysis; according to some, of modern psychology.
Gene: components of the DNA molecule that are believed to be the elements that transfer hereditary traits in reproduction; genes are also believed to be selected for or against in biological evolution; according to some biologists, the genes are the fundamental elements of biological being.
God: the creative principle behind the totality of all manifestation.
Gross body: the physical body that manifests in our awareness as external.
Gunas: qualities of consciousness in ancient Indian psychology that correspond to psychological drives in more modern terminology. There are three gunas: sattwa (illumination), rajas (libido), and tamas (conditioned ignorance).
Hayflick effect: the effect discovered by Leonard Hayflick that human cells can reproduce only about fifty times.
Heaven: archetypal realm; also archetypal realm of godly traits.
Heisenberg, Werner: a German physicist and codiscoverer of quantum mechanics. His discovery of quantum mechanics is widely regarded as one of the most creative events in the history of physics.
Hell: archetypal realm of consciousness corresponding to the violent emotions.
Idealism: the philosophy that holds that the fundamental elements of reality must include the mind as well as matter. In this book, we have used idealism as synonymous with monistic idealism. See monistic idealism.
Idealist science: science based on the primacy of consciousness; see also science within consciousness.
Immanent reality: a monistic idealist's designation of the immanent space-time-matter-motion ordinary world of our experience to distinguish it from a transcendent world of ideas and archetypes; however, note that both transcendent and immanent worlds exist in consciousness, the first as possibility forms (ideas), the second as the result of a conscious observation.
Immanent space-time: see immanent reality.
Individual self: the ego-content and character together define the individual self.
Intellect: the supramental body of consciousness that provides the contexts for mental, vital, and mental movement. In ordinary usage today, intellect more refers to the mental ideas of the contexts of the intellect body; see also theme body, supramental.
Interference: the interaction of two waves incident in the same region of space that produces a net disturbance equal to the algebraic sum of the individual disturbances of the respective waves.
Interference pattern: the pattern of reinforcement of a wave disturbance in some places and cancellation in others that is produced by the superposition of two (or more) waves.
Jiva: the Sanskrit word for the quantum monad.
Jivanmukta: an individual who has arrived at liberation from the birth-death-rebirth cycle.
Jnana yoga: the yoga based on using the intellect to transcend the intellect.
Jung, Carl G: the psychologist who founded a major force of modern psychology that carries his name; he is famous for his concept of the collective unconscious and for his visionary insight that physics and psychology one day should come together.
Karma: past-life propensities, learnings, and good and bad conditioning that are carried from one incarnation to the next.
Karma yoga: the yoga of action, a yoga in which one acts but surrenders personal interest in the fruit of the action.
Ki: the Japanese word for the modes of movement of the vital body.
Koan: a paradoxical statement or question used in the Zen Buddhist tradition to enable the mind to make a discontinuous (quantum) leap in understanding.
Kundalini: coiled-up vital energy whose rising along a nadi that parallels the spine opens the chakras. See also chakras.
Law of conservation of energy: the idea, which has been vindicated in every scientific experiment so far, that the energy of the material universe remains a constant.
Law-like behavior: behavior governed solely by causal laws such as the laws of physics.
Liberation: liberation from birth-death-rebirth cycle.
Life: the ability of subject-object cognition that arises from the self-referential quantum measurement in the living cell and its conglomerates.
Locality: the idea that all interactions or communications among objects occur via fields or signals that propagate through space-time obeying the speed-of-light limit.
Macrobodies: large-scale objects such as a baseball or a table.
Manas: Sanskrit word meaning “mind.”
Maslow, Abraham: the founder of transpersonal psychology, which is based on a monistic idealist framework.
Material realism: a philosophy holding that there is only one material reality, that all things are made of matter (and its correlates, energy, and fields), and that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter.
Materialist: in this book, we have used the word materialist to mean material realist, one who holds matter to be the ground of all being.
Matter waves: material objects such as electrons and atoms (and even macrobodies) have wavelike properties, according to quantum mechanics. Waves of material objects are called matter waves.
Maya: the apparent separateness of I and the world; also translated as illusion. According to the present theory, maya arises from tangled hierarchy of quantum measurement.
Medium: a person able to communicate with the dead.
Mental body: the body of mind stuff that belongs to a separate world. Mind gives meaning to brain stuff.
Meridian: Chinese concept for the pathway of the flow of chi, vital energy
Mind: see mental body.
Moksha: Sanskrit word meaning liberation from birth-death-reincarnation cycle.
Monism: the philosophy that mind and brain belong to the same reality.
Monad: the entity that survives physical death.
Monistic idealism: the philosophy that defines consciousness as the primary reality, as the ground of all being. The objects of a consensus empirical reality are all epiphenomena of consciousness that arise from the modifications of consciousness. There is no self-nature in either the subject or the object of a conscious experience apart from consciousness.
Morphogenesis: the making of biological form.
Morphogenetic fields: the information fields that, according to Rupert Sheldrake, contain the morphogenetic plan of biological beings.
Mystical experience: an experience of consciousness in its primacy beyond ego.
NDE: abbreviation for near-death experience; see near-death experience.
Nadi: Sanskrit word meaning channels for the flow of prana, vital energy.
Near-death experience: the experiences that subjects revived from heart failure and other near-death situations report.
Neocortex: see cerebral cortex.
Neumann, John von: a mathematician who was the first to postulate that consciousness collapses the quantum wave function; he also did fundamental work in game theory and the theory of modern computers.
Newton, Isaac: the founder of classical mechanics.
Nirvana: Sanskrit word literally meaning the extinction of the flame (of desire). It is conceptual equivalent in Buddhism of the Hindu idea of Moksha.
Nonlocal correlation: a phase relationship that persists even at a distance between two quantum objects which have interacted for a period and then stopped interacting. In the model of this book, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlation corresponds to a potential nonlocal influence between the objects.
Nonlocality: an instantaneous influence or communication without any exchange of signals through space-time; an unbroken wholeness or nonseparability that transcends space-time; see also transcendence.
Nirmanakaya: the manifest body of consciousness, a Buddhist term.
Nucleus: the heavy core of the atom around which electrons revolve.
Ontology: the study of the essence of being or fundamental reality; metaphysics.
Out-of-the-body experience (OBE): experience of people that they are out of their body in which state they report seeing things beyond their local vision, such as surgery being performed on their own bodies.
Paradigm shift: a fundamental change in the supertheory or umbrella world view that governs scientific work at a given time.
Phase relationship: a relationship between the phases (conditions) of motion of objects, especially waves.
Plato: one of the original monistic idealists in the West.
Possibility wave: a multifaceted quantum state with phase relations among its different facets (or possibilities). For example, an electron going through a double slit becomes a wave of two possible states, one state corresponding to its passing through slit 1 and another state corresponding to its passing through slit 2.
Potentia: the transcendent domain of the possibility waves of quantum physics.
Prana: Sanskrit word that means “vital energy” (and also means breath and life).
Program-like behavior: behavior not only governed by cause but also by purpose, as in computer programs.
Psychokinesis: psychic ability to move things.
Psychophysical parallelism: the idea that mind and body belong to two separate, noninteracting realities in which things happen in parallel. In other words, to every state of the brain, there is a corresponding mental state.
Punctuated equilibrium: a theory of evolution that says that there are punctuation marks—periods and commas, periods of rapid evolution—within the otherwise continuous text of Darwinian evolution.
Quantum: a discrete bundle of energy; the lowest denomination of energy or other physical quantities that can be exchanged.
Quantum leap: a discontinuous transition of an electron from one atomic orbit to another without going through the intervening space between orbits.
Quantum measurement theory: the theory of how a multifaceted quantum possibility wave reduces or collapses to a single facet upon measurement. According to this author, measurement is accomplished only with conscious observation by an observer with awareness.
Quantum mechanics: a physical theory based on the idea of the quantum (a discrete amount) and quantum jumps (a discontinuous transition), first discovered in connection with atomic objects.
Quantum memory: memory based on the modification of the probability calculus of nonlinear quantum equations that govern the quantum dynamics of the brain, mind, and the vital body. As a result of this memory, the probability of recall of learned responses is enhanced.
Quantum monad: a monad that transmigrates lived propensities and learned contexts from one incarnation to another via quantum memory of its mental and vital body.
Quantum self: the primary subject modality of the self beyond ego where resides real freedom, creativity, and nonlocality of the human experience.
Radioactivity: the property of certain chemical elements to spontaneously emit harmful radiation while their atomic nuclei undergo decay. Radioactive decay is governed by quantum probability rules.
Rajas: the Sanskrit word for the tendency towards activeness, akin to libido—a psychological drive of Freudian vintage.
Realism: the philosophy that propounds the existence of an empirical reality independent of observers or subjects. See also material realism.
Reality: all that is the case, including both local and nonlocal, immanent and transcendent; in contrast, the universe of space-time refers to the local immanent aspect of reality.
Reductionism: the philosophy that all phenomena can be reduced to matter at some microlevel.
Reincarnation: the idea that there is survival after death and rebirth; that there is a continuity of some essence of us that transmigrates from one birth to the next.
Relativity: the theory of special relativity discovered by Einstein in 1905 that changed our concept of time from the Newtonian absolute time to a time existing and changing in relation to motion.
Resurrection: the rising from the dead; a Christian term.
Rupa: a Sanskrit word meaning “form.”
Samadhi: the experience of the quantum self that transcends the egoic identity. In this experience, the observer and the observed tend to merge.
Sambhogakaya: the archetypal body of consciousness, a Buddhist term.
Sambhogakaya body: a karmically fulfilled discarnate quantum monad that has transcended rebirth in the manifest world.
Satori: the Zen term for samadhi—the experience of the quantum self.
Sattwa: the Sanskrit word for creativity, one of the psychological drives according to Hindu psychology.
Schrödinger, Erwin: an Austrian physicist, co-discoverer with Heisenberg of quantum mechanics, he was opposed to the probability interpretation for quite some time. Later in life, he embraced some elements of the philosophy of monistic idealism.
Science within consciousness: a science based on the idea that consciousness is the ground of all being. See also idealist science.
Self: the subject of consciousness. See also individual self and quantum self.
Self-reference: the logical loop of referring to itself; also see circularity.
Semantics: the study of meaning.
Sheldrake, Rupert: the biologist who gave one of the first idealist theories of science, the theory of biological morphogenesis.
Solipsism: the philosophy that only one's own self can be proved to exist.
Soul: the entity that survives the death of the physical body; the quantum monad.
Speed of light: the speed at which light travels, 300,000 km/s; it is also the highest speed in space-time that nature permits.
State of consciousness: conditions within consciousness of varying degrees of awareness; examples are waking state, deep sleep, dream sleep, hypnosis, meditative states, and so forth.
Stevenson, Ian: the most celebrated researcher of reincarnational anecdotes of children.
Subtle body: the mental, vital, theme body conglomerate that is normally experienced only internally, as private.
Supermind: activities when one has “control” over the causal body of being, including the laws of physics.
Supramental: the body of consciousness beyond the mind that governs the movement of mental, vital, and physical bodies. See also theme body, intellect.
Synchronicity: acausal but meaningful coincidences, a term employed by Jung.
Tamas: a Sanskrit term meaning the tendency toward conditioned action in Hindu psychology.
Tangled hierarchy: a loop between levels of categories; a hierarchy that cannot be causally traced without encountering a discontinuity. An example is the liar's paradox “I am a liar.”
Theme body: the supramental body of themes or contexts for the movement of mental, vital, and physical bodies. See also supramental, intellect.
Theosophy: the doctrines of a modern movement that started in 1875 in the U.S. by Helena Blavatsky based on Eastern mystical ideas about evolution and reincarnation.
Transcendental domain: pertaining to a realm of reality that is paradoxically both in and outside of physical space-time. According to this book, the transcendent realm is to be interpreted as being nonlocal—it can influence events in space-time by making possible connections without exchange of signals through space-time. See also nonlocality and potentia.
Transcendental experience: a direct experience of consciousness beyond ego.
Transpersonal psychology: the school of psychology based on the idea that our consciousness extends beyond the conditioned individual ego to include a unitive and transcendent aspect.
Uncertainty principle: the principle that such complementary quantities as momentum and position of a quantum object cannot be measured simultaneously with complete accuracy.
Unconscious: in this book, the reality of which there is consciousness, but no subject-object split awareness; see also collective unconscious.
Unconscious perception: perception without awareness of it; in this book, perception for which there is no collapse of the quantum brain state.
Unconscious processing: processing by consciousness without the presence of awareness (that is, without the collapse of possibility waves).
Vedanta: the end or final message of the Hindu Vedas, which appeared in the Upanishads, that propounds the philosophy of monistic idealism.
Vital body: the body of life-processes made of life-substance (prana or chi or ki) as opposed to physical and mental processes; this is a body separate from and independent of the physical and the mental body. It is the carrier of morphogenetic fields.
Vital energy: the modes of movement of the vital body; also called prana, chi, or ki.
Wave function: a mathematical function that represents the wave amplitude of quantum possibility waves; it is obtained as a solution of the Schrödinger equation.
Wilber, Ken: transpersonal philosopher whose voluminous work has been instrumental in bringing Eastern wisdom to the Western psyche.