All that is natural and supernatural is miraculous

Physician Deepak Chopra writes: “Ever since the Big Bang, the energy in the universe has been dissipating, like a hot stove cooling off. This dispersal of heat, known as entropy, is inexorable. Yet somehow islands of ‘negative entropy’ have evolved. One of them is life on earth. Instead of dissipating into the void of outer space, the sunlight that hits green plants begins the chain of life, holding on to energy and converting it into incredibly complex forms that hand the energy around, recycle it, and use it in creative ways. It is impossible for random events to explain how entropy could be defied for billions of years.

“DNA was born in a hostile environment filled with extreme heat and cold, toxic gases, and a firestorm of random chemical reactions. Unlike any chemical in the known universe, DNA resisted being degraded into smaller molecules; instead it built itself up into higher complexity and learned to replicate itself. No explanation for this unique activity has been offered.

“All the cells in our bodies, trillions of them, contain the same DNA, yet they spontaneously ‘know’ how to become liver cells, heart cells, and all other specialized cells. In the embryonic brain, stem cells travel along precise paths, stop when they reach their destinations, and become specific neurons for seeing, hearing, controlling hormones, and thinking. This spontaneous ability to ‘know’ how to suppress one part of the genetic code while enlivening others is inexplicable.

“DNA can tell time. From the moment an ovum gets fertilized, a single cell contains time-sensitive triggers for growing baby teeth, entering puberty, causing menopause, and eventually dying. How these sequences, which span seven decades or more, can be contained inside a chemical is beyond explanation.

“In an uncanny way, molecules ‘know’ what they are doing, whether in the ancestral chemical soup from which DNA emerged or in the chemistry of your brain cells as you read this sentence.

“One of the everyday mysteries that medicine can’t explain is controlled by the host. Every minute you and I inhale millions of microbes, viruses, allergens, and toxic substances. The vast majority reside in us harmlessly. Our bodies control them from harming us. But when AIDS destroys the immune system, the host loses control, and rampant disease breaks out in an autoimmune disorder like rheumatoid arthritis. The system for protecting the body turns upon it instead. Even an innocuous condition like hay fever indicates that control by the host has failed. In all these examples, the breakdown is a breakdown of intelligence. Thus mind is pervasive in every cell and swims invisibly through the bloodstream.

“The reason that mixing mind with matter disturbs mainstream doctors, who are trained to be scientific, isn’t a secret. Mind rules the subjective world, which science distrusts, while matter is the basis of ‘real’ knowledge. Heart patients feel all kinds of pain, pressure, and strangeness about their condition; an angiogram tells the doctor what’s really going on.

“Mind holds some kind of key to the ultimate nature of reality. Once you admit that this is true, the possibility of miraculous events increases, because the non-miraculous has shifted so much. Natural and supernatural are infused with the same properties of consciousness.

“Nothing is real for us outside our experience of it, and experience is a conscious creative act. Without me, an observer, there is no proof that the stars exist. This is why Heisenberg declared consciousness is something science cannot get behind, or go beyond. We only know that we are here observing the world. What happens when nobody observes it is a mystery.

“Are miracles all in your mind? Yes. Is the everyday world all in your mind? Yes again.

“Every experience we have, mental or physical, is a miracle, because we have no way of explaining experience scientifically. We assume that photons give us the experience of form and color, yet photons are formless and colorless. We assume that the vibration of air creates sound, but vibrations are silent outside the brain. We study the receptor sites on the tongue and inside the nose, which gives rise to taste and smell, yet what takes place at those sites is chemical reactions, not an experience.

“Materialism, in its conquest of the spiritual worldview, has burdened us with explanations requiring just as much faith as believing in miracles. Faith alone supports the notion that sodium and potassium ions passing through the outer membrane of neurons, in turn setting up electrochemical reactions that span millions of neural networks, create sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. These are assumptions with no explanation whatsoever. Chemicals are just names we have applied to a mystery. Brain scans are snapshots of activity, telling us nothing about actual experience, just as snapshots of piano keys tell us nothing about enjoying music.

“Only consciousness makes experience possible; therefore, as the source of consciousness, God exists outside the domain of data.

“The founder of quantum physics, Max Planck, had no doubt that mind would eventually become the elephant in the room, an issue too massive and obvious to ignore: ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’”

Deepak Chopra, The Future of God: A Practical Approach to Spirituality for Our Times (Harmony Books, 2014), 93-147.

Deepak Chopra: wisdom, faith, and truth

“Wisdom supports faith, because both are about invisible things. Both must be tested one person at a time to see if they are valid. As with God, wisdom is valid only if it’s practical from day to day. I’d venture that it is a mark of wisdom to believe in God. What makes it wise is simply that faith makes life better. 

“Wisdom is discovered inside a situation; it is elusive and changeable. You cannot confine it to rules and adages. Most of the time wisdom startles us because it is so contrary to reason and common sense. Self-awareness plunges us into the sad knowledge that we were born to suffer. But at the same time it offers a solution: the path of wisdom.

“To Buddha, God and the soul were question marks, because the seeker after God doesn’t even know who ‘I’ am. Nothing is closer to each of us than our sense of self, but if it remains a mystery, what good does it do us to pursue higher mysteries?

“Truth isn’t found in words but through insight and self-discovery. Truth isn’t taught or learned. It is wrapped inside consciousness itself. Your consciousness must deepen until what is false has been left behind. Then truth will exist by itself, strong and self-sufficient.

“The reason that the average person cannot live the pure teachings of Jesus or Buddha is that these teachings depend upon higher consciousness. Otherwise, turning the other cheek will get you beaten up twice as badly. Burning yourself up to protest the Vietnam War will be an act of futile pain. Even devoting yourself to sick, orphaned babies in Calcutta might bring painful disillusionment. Most of the time, in fact, the teaching of wisdom can’t be applied effectively to the surface of life. An inner revolution must occur along the way."

For Chopra, the Buddha’s “Eightfold Path represents a way to find out who you really are by inviting your awareness to reveal what this path really involves. The mystery of Buddha’s cure is this: What you seek you already are."

Chopra agrees with Einstein’s insight: “Whatever there is of God in the universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us.” In a sentence Einstein outlines the agenda of wisdom. Wisdom is the divine working itself out and expressing itself through us. “Wisdom reveals that suffering comes and goes while a deeper reality never changes. That reality is founded on truth and love.

“Faith makes life better because in the midst of pain and suffering, we need to trust that something else is more powerful. Your present self, in its unawakened state, isn’t your enemy or a cripple or a failure. It is Buddha waiting to realize itself. It’s the seed of wisdom needing to be nurtured.

“Faith sees the divine in every aspect of creation. All the world’s wisdom traditions declare that there is only one reality, which embraces any conceivable phenomenon.

“Establishing that miracles exist requires two steps. First, we have to take down the wall that separates the natural from the supernatural. Fortunately, that’s fairly easy to do since the wall was artificial to begin with. The basis of everything in the physical world is the quantum domain. If anything deserves to be called the zone of miracles, it is this level of nature. Here the laws that make miracles ‘impossible’ are fluid. The constraints of space and time as we know them do not exist."

The second step involves acknowledging that: “The vast physical mechanism we call the universe behaves more like a mind than like a machine. How did mind ever find a way to manifest as the physical world? That question brings us to the merging of the natural and the supernatural, because the very fact that anything exists is supernatural—literally beyond the rules of the natural world."

 

Deepak Chopra, The Future of God: A Practical Approach to Spirituality for Our Times (Harmony Books, 2014).

Deepak Chopra: faith, mind, and science

Deepak Chopra turns to the Vedic tradition for an understanding of faith. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says to Arjuna: “Everyone’s faith comes from the perceptions of the mind. O Arjuna, the ego-personality is the living embodiment of faith. Your faith is your identity.”

Chopra suggests: “Blind faith and blind unbelief have other attributes in common. They both refuse to be tested. They condemn the other side. They depend on strong emotional attachments. The main difference is that unbelief disguises its blindness behind a veil of reason.

“Faith is a stage on the way to true knowledge of God. By that standard, blind faith is questionable but not fatal—far from it. As a mystical act, blind faith can open up subtle aspects of the mind. It can lead to an expanded view of reality and allow a person to see himself or herself as multidimensional, existing on other planes beyond the physical.

“Any form of us-versus-them thinking strikes me as bad faith. Religions draw into tight camps where their God is the only true God, for tribal, political, and theological reasons. I find none of them justified.^"

Chopra agrees with the statement by physicist David Bohm: “In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.” Chopra adds, “Since the only universe we can know comes to us through our minds, it may be that our minds shape reality."

Nonetheless, he explains, “We need to be clear about a very basic point: The visible universe isn’t the same as reality. When solid objects are reduced to atoms and then to subatomic particles, they are not longer solid. They are clouds of potentiality. As physics defines it, potentiality is neither matter nor energy but completely intangible, no matter how solid a mountain may be or how powerful a lightning bolt. Particles in such a state aren’t even particles anymore. They do not have a specific location in space; instead, every particle emerges from quantum waves that can extend infinitely in all directions."

Furthermore, “Dark energy is enlarging the space between galaxies faster than the speed of light. So something beyond space and time serves as the major force for creation and destruction in the cosmos, and whatever it is, it will be as invisible as mind, God, the soul, and higher consciousness.

“A universe that is meaningless can’t be divine. Random activity undermines all sense of purpose. A mind that arose out of electrochemical activity can’t know revelation or epiphany. The choice, for once, does come down to either/or. To me, it is self-evident that spiritual experiences exist, that we act out of free will, and that our lives have meaning. One might claim, with deep conviction, that ‘natural religion’ grew out of human experience, age upon age.

“Science doesn’t describe reality, because no school of philosophy has ever proved that the physical universe is real. (Even Stephen Hawking, no believer in God, has attested to this.) We assume that physical things are real, on the evidence of the information that enters through the five senses. But that is the same as saying that we accept reality subjectively.

“The surprising result is that God is on a level playing field with stars, galaxies, mountains, trees, and the sky. None of them can be objectively validated. ‘This rock feels hard’ is no truer than ‘I feel God’s love.’ But it’s no less true, either, as feeling is one sure way to navigate through the world.

“We are all embedded in the worldview of materialism; therefore the assumption that spiritual experiences must be unreal has become an article of faith. To love God isn’t different from loving science, if that is what shapes your life at its very core. In bad faith, we insist our beliefs should define reality for everyone. In good faith, we make the most of what we love and desire no less for everyone."

Deepak Chopra, The Future of God (2014), 1-92.

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Self-organization, knowledge, life, and ethics

Physicist Fritjof Capra writes: “The central concept of the new theory is that of self-organization. A living system is defined as a self-organizing system, which means that its order is not imposed by the environment but is established by the system itself. In other words, self-organizing systems exhibit a certain degree of autonomy. This does not mean that living systems are isolated from their environment; on the contrary, they interact with it continually, but this interaction does not determine their organization.

“An important aspect of the theory is the fact that the description of the pattern of self-organization does not use any physical parameters, such as energy or entropy, nor does it use the concepts of space and time. It is an abstract mathematical description of a pattern of relationships. This pattern can be realized in space and time in different physical structures, which are then described in terms of the concepts of physics and chemistry. But such a description alone will fail to capture the biological phenomenon of self-organization. In other words, physics and chemistry are not enough to understand life; we also need to understand the pattern of self-organization, which is independent of physical and chemical parameters.

“The organizing activity of living, self-organizing systems, finally, is cognition, or mental activity. Mental process is defined as the organizing activity of life. This means that all interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive, or mental interactions. With this new concept of mind, life and cognition become inseparably connected. Mind, or more accurately, mental process is seen as being immanent in matter at all levels of life.

 “A further reason why I find the theory of self-organizing systems so important is that it seems to provide the ideal scientific framework for an ecologically oriented ethics. Such a system of ethics is urgently needed, since most of what scientists are doing today is not life-furthering and life-preserving but life-destroying. With physicists designing nuclear weapons that threaten to wipe out all life on the planet, with chemists contaminating our environment, with biologists releasing new and unknown types of microorganisms into the environment without really knowing what the consequences are, with psychologists and other scientists torturing animals in the name of scientific progress, with all these activities occurring, it seems that it is most urgent to introduce ethical standards into modern science.

“It is generally not recognized in our culture that values are not peripheral to science and technology but constitute their very basis and driving force. During the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, values were separated from facts, and since that time we have tended to believe that scientific facts are independent of what we do and, therefore, independent of our values. In reality, scientific facts emerge out of an entire constellation of human perceptions, values, and actions—in a word, out of a paradigm—from which they cannot be separated. Although much of the detailed research may not depend explicitly on the scientist’s value system, the larger paradigm within which this research is pursued will never be value-free. Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research not only intellectually but also morally.

“One of the most important insights of the new systems theory of life is that life and cognition are inseparable. The process of knowledge is also the process of self-organization, that is, the process of life. The conventional model of knowledge is one of a representation or an image of independently existing facts, which is the model derived from classical physics. From the new systems point of view, knowledge is part of the process of life, of a dialogue between object and subject.

“Knowledge and life then, are inseparable, and, therefore, facts are inseparable from values. Thus, the fundamental split that made it impossible to include ethical consideration in our scientific worldview has now been healed.”

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.

 

For a more recent and developed presentation of this argument for a new paradigm, see Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

The new systems paradigm is applied to jurisprudence in Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015).

Dynamic relationships create heaven and earth

Affirming heaven requires new ways of understanding science and reality. Fritjof Capra's explanation of systems theory is a bridge to a more holistic understanding. He writes: “In science, the language of systems theory, and especially the theory of living systems, seems to provide the most appropriate formulation of the new ecological paradigm. Since living systems cover such a wide range of phenomena—individual organisms, social systems, and ecosystems—the theory provides a common framework and language for biology, psychology, medicine, economics, ecology, and many other sciences, a framework in which the so urgently needed ecological perspective is explicitly manifest.

“The conceptual framework of contemporary physics, and especially those aspects (suggesting a new metaphysics is needed), may be seen as a special case of the systems approach, dealing with nonliving systems and exploring the interface between nonliving and living systems. It is important to recognize, I believe, that in the new paradigm physics is no longer the model and source of metaphors for the other sciences. Even though the paradigm shift in physics is still of special interest, since it was the first to occur in modern science, physics has now lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality.

“I would now like to specify what I mean by the systems approach. To do so, I shall identify five criteria of systems thinking that, I claim, hold for all the sciences—the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. I shall formulate each criterion in terms of the shift from the old to the new paradigm, and I will illustrate the five criteria with examples from contemporary physics. However, since the criteria hold for all the sciences, I could equally well illustrate them with examples from biology, psychology, or economics.

“1. Shift from the part to the whole. In the old paradigm, it is believed that in any complex system the dynamics of the whole can be understood from the properties of the parts. The parts themselves cannot be analyzed any further, except by reducing them to still smaller parts. Indeed, physics has been progressing in that way, and at each step there has been a level of fundamental constituents that could not be analyzed any further.

“In the new paradigm, the relationship between the parts and the whole is reversed. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. In fact, ultimately there are no parts at all. What we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships. The shift from the part to the whole was the central aspect of the conceptual revolution of quantum physics in the 1920s.

“2. Shift from structure to process. In the old paradigm, there are fundamental structures, and then there are forces and mechanisms through which these interact, thus giving rise to processes. In the new paradigm, every structure is seen as the manifestation of an underlying process. The entire web of relationships is intrinsically dynamic. The shift from structure to process is evident, for example, when we remember that mass in contemporary physics is no longer seen as measuring the fundamental substance but rather as a form of energy, that is, as measuring activity or processes.

“3. Shift from objective to ‘epistemic’ science. In the old paradigm, scientific descriptions are believed to be objective, that is, independent of the human observer and the process of knowing. In the new paradigm, it is believed that epistemology—the understanding of the process of knowledge—has to be included explicitly in the description of natural phenomena. This recognition entered into physics with Heisenberg and is closely related to the view of physical reality as a web of relationships. Whenever we isolate a pattern in this network and define it as a part, or an object, we do so by cutting through some of its connections to the rest of the network, and this may be done in different ways. As Heisenberg put it, ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’

“4. Shift from ‘building’ to ‘network’ as metaphor of knowledge. The metaphor of knowledge as a building has been used in Western science and philosophy for thousands of years. There are fundamental laws, fundamental principles, basic building blocks, and so on. The edifice of science must be built on firm foundations.

“In the new paradigm, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of a network. Since we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations. Things exist by virtue of their mutually consistent relationships, and all of physics has to follow uniquely from the requirement that its components be consistent with one another and with themselves.

“Since there are no foundations in the network, the phenomena described by physics are not any more fundamental than those described, for example, by biology or psychology. They belong to different systems levels, but none of those levels is any more fundamental than the others.

“5. Shift from truth to approximate descriptions. Scientists do not deal with truth in the sense of a precise correspondence between the description and the described phenomena. They deal with limited and approximate descriptions of reality. Heisenberg wrote in Physics and Philosophy, ‘The often discussed lesson that has been learned from modern physics (is) that every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.’

 

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.

A holistic or ecological worldview of reality

This is an excellent summary of a new scientific paradigm and a challenging new social worldview that is gaining acceptance in the twenty-first century. Even as there was nothing inevitable about the mechanistic paradigm of science, there is nothing inevitable about the survival and contribution to the evolution of human civilization of this new paradigm. It makes sense to me, however, and informs my writings about ethics and consciousness, as well as my self-understanding and interpretation of near-death experiences. So I am sharing it on this blog.

Physicist Fritjof Capra writes: “What we are seeing today is a shift of paradigms not only within science but also in the larger social arena. To analyze that cultural transformation, I have generalized Kuhn’s account of a scientific paradigm to that of a social paradigm, which I define as ‘a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices shared by a community, which form a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organizes itself.’

“The social paradigm now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in a society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth and—last but not least—the belief that a society, in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male, is one that follows from some basic law of nature. During recent decades all of these assumptions have been found severely limited and in need of radical revision.

“Indeed, such a revision is now taking place. The emerging new paradigm may be called a holistic, or an ecological, worldview, using the term ecological here in a much broader and deeper sense than it is commonly used. Ecological awareness, in that deep sense, recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the embeddedness of individuals and societies in the cyclical processes of nature.

“Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, which is the root meaning of the word religion (from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind strongly’), it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence. It is, therefore, not surprising that the emerging new vision of reality, based on deep ecological awareness, is consistent with the ‘perennial philosophy’ of spiritual traditions, for example, that of Eastern spiritual traditions, the spirituality of Christian mystics, or with the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American traditions.

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.

"Consciousness survives across lifetimes"

Scientist Jim B. Tucker writes: “How might the larger part of each of us—the Dreamer—be connected to the other dreamers? In looking at the way our world works so seamlessly—once I observe the outcome of an event, the result is set for any future observers—I think the unique consciousness in each of us must be part of a larger whole. Each of us is contributing to a tapestry of existence rather than creating our own individual work.

”The I in my nighttime dreams, my character in the dreams, is part of a bigger I, my larger mind out of which my dream world arises. All the people in the dream are arising from the same consciousness, in the case of my nighttime dreams, from mine. In the same way, all the individuals in the physical world may also arise from the same consciousness, from some larger conscious force.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that happens is planned or intended by this Mind. I don’t control or plan the events in my nighttime dreams, and I know my mind creates those. The physical world may work the same way. This conscious-created reality may include painful or negative events that happen randomly without any conscious intent or control. Even so, we may be able to reduce them by appealing to the benign aspect of this larger Mind.

“Since part of us seems able to transcend the various dream worlds as we move from one to another in different lifetimes, there must also be existence outside of these worlds and outside of space-time—an existence of pure Mind. Each of us may be like a single train of thought in one large Mind. We seem to be like a chain of islands as William James suggested, separate when seen above the water but connected at the ocean floor. More than just connected, islands turn out to be projections that are so many small parts of a single larger object, the planet. Likewise, each of our minds may turn out to be small streams of consciousness that are all part of a larger Mind, a ‘cosmic consciousness’ as James said.

“I know this is a long way from children’s past-life memories. But as each step has followed the other, this is where the journey has led. A little boy who repeatedly relives the exact details of the terrible death of a young World War II pilot challenges the mainstream understanding that consciousness is always created by—and confined to—a physical brain. Exploring quantum physics then produces a way to understand such events because it leads to a rational conclusion that the physical world grows out of consciousness, meaning that consciousness must not be limited by the physical. A child in Louisiana remembering events from the life of a pilot from Pennsylvania offers a glimpse that consciousness survives across lifetimes and that experiences separated by great distances and many years can nonetheless be connected and intertwined. 

“This connection, along with the seamless way in which observation from countless observers create our holistic world, indicates that a single individual consciousness is only a tiny piece in the act of creation, that all the pieces work in concert as part of a bigger whole, and just as our physical world grows out of consciousness, so the entirety of existence grows out of this bigger whole, this Ultimate Source. As mere streams of thoughts from one large Mind, we are not separate; we are all in this together. And just as our experiences in life can enrich our individual minds, if this awareness that we are all part of the Ultimate helps us be a little more patient, a little more accepting, a little more loving, if it helps us focus more on our shared experiences and less on our differences, then perhaps in some small way, we will be better able to enrich the Ultimate and, with it, all of existence.”

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 195-219.

Our consciousness makes possibilities real

“Despite appearances,” reincarnation researcher Jim B. Tucker argues, “the universe was not created in one fell swoop in the Big Bang. Instead, it continues to be created, one observation at a time. Events in the distant past such as the paths of photons billions of years ago—even events all the way back to the Big Bang—remain in suspended animation until they are observed, at which point one particular outcome occurs. This does not mean that we human observers had to come into existence. Different life forms might have evolved here or in other places in the universe. Observers had to develop somewhere, however, in order for the world to exist.

Wheeler’s theory of genesis through observer participants is known as “the strong anthropic principle. A universe that supports the development of observers is the only kind that ever could come into existence. It might seem that humans on this little planet, or observers anywhere in any galaxy, are far too small and unimportant to have any significant function in the universe, much less bring it into existence. Observation, however, couldn’t create a smaller universe, not because of size per se but because of the time required to produce life. As Wheeler pointed out, to produce heavy elements like carbon out of hydrogen, thermonuclear combustion is required, and it needs several billion years to cook inside a star. And for the universe to provide several billion years of time, general relativity says it must extend in space several billion light-years. Any observed universe would have to be as big as ours is, in order to have observers.

Stanford physicist Andrei Linde writes: ‘I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.’ And this leads him to assert: ‘I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness.’ “French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat argues: ‘The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.’

“Conscious observers eventually evolved in the universe . . . and then created that very same universe. How does that make sense? One answer is that individual observers are the result of evolution, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that consciousness itself is. For people like me who are open to the possibility that consciousness is more than just the result of physical chemistry and electrochemical potentials—that there might be more to existence than just the physical universe—the way out of the paradox is for consciousness to be primary. The physical world grows out of it.

“The findings of quantum physics have challenged the worldview of materialism from the outset; at the very least, they have undeniably shown that the world does not function at the smallest level in a way that common sense suggests it does. The findings point, not just for me but for a number of physicists as well, to the fundamental importance of consciousness. Something has to be outside the quantum system to register it, to observe it. My answer is that consciousness is outside the quantum system, interacting with the physical universe but also existing beyond it, as it registers and creates that universe. Consciousness does not exist because the physical world does; the physical world exists because consciousness does. As Max Plank said, we cannot get behind consciousness.

“The picture that emerges from quantum physics is a world in which events do not occur until conscious beings observe them. One way to comprehend this is to realize that it is quite similar to another world we know very well—the world of our dreams. When we are dreaming, people only come into existence there when we interact with them. There are differences, to be sure. All sorts of nonsensical things happen in the dream world. It is undeniable that the possibilities are more limited in the physical world. Events that begin through observation become fixed, unable to be altered by other observations. The overall process, however, is very similar. Possibilities exist, and one of them becomes a fact when it is observed.

“The analogy to dreams is so apt that the world can be thought of, not as the giant clockworks of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe, but as a dream that all its observers share. Its pieces only come into existence when one of its dreamers experiences them. When something is not being observed, it may as well not exist.

“We are the physical beings living in a physical world that mainstream science tells us we are. But we also have consciousness that is more than just a product of our brains. Though we have physical bodies with limited life spans, we also have a conscious piece that is part of something bigger. Consciousness is independent of the physical world and is even the creator of the physical world. And a portion of it is in each of us.”

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 165-193.

Our "knowing" is verified by quantum mechanics

Researcher Jim B. Tucker writes: “Work in quantum mechanics has revealed what is known as the measurement problem. This unassuming name describes a challenge that shakes our understanding of the world to its core. Quantum theory says that particles on the small quantum scale exist less as solid objects and more as probability waves. Only when an object is measured, it seems, does its probability wave collapse to produce one outcome.”

In what is called the double-slit experiment, “you have a light source, along with a photographic plate that records the light that’s emitted. Between them, you place a screen that blocks the light. If you cut a slit in the screen for the light to pass through, then a fuzzy image is created on the photographic plate that corresponds to the location of the slit.

“What happens if you cut a second slit in the screen? You might think you would get two fuzzy images, matching the two slits, but you don’t. Instead, the light appears to pass through the slits as waves, producing an interference pattern on the photographic plate, of alternating light and dark bands. Light sometimes acts as if it’s made up of particles, and other times it acts like waves. But here’s the thing about the double-slit experiment: when you turn down the light source so low that the light goes through the screen one photon at a time, guess what happens? Somehow, you still get the interference pattern. As theoretical physicist Paul Dirac said, ‘Each photon then interferes only with itself.’ It’s as if each photon hasn’t made up its mind about which slit to choose and goes through both of them simultaneously.

“In case you think these results are simply due to the strangeness of light, its particle-wave duality, you should know that the double-slit experiment has now been done with electrons as well. In fact, similar experiments have been done with neutrons, atoms, and even larger molecules. Not just light but actual matter also acts like waves, seeming to go in two places at once and interfering with itself. The famed physicist Richard Feynman said the double-slit experiment was ‘impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way’ and it ‘has in it the heart of quantum mechanics.’

“Most of us learned in science class that atoms, the building blocks of the universe, consist of electrons circling a nucleus like small billiard balls. Quantum physicists tell us instead that electrons are better seen as smears of probability, with their locations being potentials rather than definite places. As strange as it may seem, it is only when an electron is measured that its location goes from a smear to a specific spot.

“In the double-slit experiment, there is one thing that can force the photons to make up their minds and go through one slit or the other. If you set up sensors to observe them as they travel, each photon is seen going through just one of the slits. The interference pattern on the photographic plate disappears, and you get two fuzzy images corresponding to the two slits instead. The observation leads to one path, one definite outcome, rather than the two potential outcomes that existed before.

“Similarly, take a small particle that can travel down one of the two paths, with a fifty-fifty chance of going down each one. According to quantum theory, until someone looks to see which path it goes down, with a measuring device for instance, all that can be said about the particle is that it has the two probabilities. Common sense says it goes down a path but we just don’t know which one until someone checks. Common sense, however, can be misleading at the quantum level. Until the particle is observed, it does not actually go down either path. It simply exists as a fifty-fifty probability wave for going down each path.

“To say that light and matter only exist as probability waves until they are observed raises the question of what their existence in such a state would mean. As Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics, noted: ‘The atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real [as any phenomena in daily life]; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.’ With a measurement, one outcome snaps into place. ‘The transition from the possible to the actual takes place during the act of observation,’ to quote Heisenberg again. The measurement somehow causes one of the two possibilities—or in other situations one of many possibilities—to become the reality that is seen. Measuring something thus creates a reality that did not exist before.

“Imagine that you do an experiment in which a photon can take one of two paths, and a measuring device can be set up on one of the paths to determine if the photon goes down it. The device failing to detect it on that path would mean that the photon must have taken the other one.” Quantum physicists examining this situation “found that observing the absence of a photon on the first path collapses the wave function just as much as observing the presence of it would. Since nothing is actually measured and only an absence is observed, this indicates that the observation—not the measurement itself—is the critical process in wave function collapse.’”

Moreover, Tucker writes: “it’s not the observing per se that produces a result, it is the knowing produced by the observing that does. By seeing that a particle doesn’t go down one path, an observer can deduce that it must have gone down the other one. Since no other result is possible, the observer ‘knows’ which path the particle took, thereby collapsing the wave function and producing the result.” As John Hopkins physicist Richard Conn Henry wrote in the journal Nature, ‘The wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing.’ This led him to conclude, ‘The Universe is entirely mental.’

Another physicist, Helmut Schmidt, conducted experiments “to see if conscious effort could produce nonrandom results even if the effort occurred after the events had already been recorded. He got positive results in the five studies he did, with odds against chance of 8,000 to 1. He recorded random events such as red and green light flashes, and the series of flashes was then stored on a floppy disk. Days or months later, the sequence was shown on a computer while a test subject tried to mentally cause one of the colors to flash more. As long as no one inspected the recordings beforehand, the mental efforts of the test subjects could cause the results to be nonrandom, with more of one color appearing that would be expected by chance. The test subjects’ success means that the collapse of the wave function did not occur when the recording device initially measured the flashes of light; the collapse only happened when the recordings were later observed.

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

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