The following is excerpted from How Quantum Activism Can Save Civilization, available from Hampton Roads Publications.
Quantum physics was discovered through the study of the
motion of elementary particles at the atomic and subatomic level. Many people
still cannot get over the prejudice that quantum thinking must be engaged only
when we deal with the submicroscopic world of matter. The same people also
think that the world is fundamentally made of matter and the real world is
objective, local, rational, and deterministic. These people cannot rise beyond
the concept of IQ brain-based mental intelligence in their belief system,
although many of them take regular forays into the supramental when they
creatively discover the solutions to their scientific problems. Their
relationship with the world outside their profession may be seriously
handicapped because of their faulty belief system. They more often than not
live a loveless life (that is, they live in their head, not their heart), they
cannot discriminate between good and evil consequences of either their professional
or their social work (they are not bothered by developing the atomic bomb or
such things), and happiness and emotional equanimity elude them, but they don't
know why.
The problem with a worldview that is strictly objective,
deterministic, and materialist (scientific materialism-oriented) is that it
gives us a highly skewed view of us and our consciousness, emotions, meanings,
conscience, and values. In materialism, everything is made of matter; thus
consciousness and all subjective phenomena related to it, such as conscience,
are relegated to mere epiphenomena of matter (as a gold ornament is an
epiphenomenon of gold) without causal efficacy. If consciousness has no causal
efficacy, how can we transform? How can we apply the dictates of our conscience?
How can we love?
But science is changing, and people who are following this
change are realizing that they have to take a transformative path in order to
develop a 21st-century science and a code of living that can deal with
transformation. Such people are consciously using supramental intelligence
(limited though it may be). It is as a result of their work that a scientific
treatment of transformation removing all confusion on the subject can today be
given.
Once we understand the quantum principles, it greatly
facilitates our attempts to develop supramental intelligence. The truth is,
everybody has access to the supramental world; many of us just don't explore it
for one reason or another. The materialist people do not use it optimally
because of faulty ideology in which they have vested interest. What is your
reason?
It doesn't matter. with help from quantum principles, as
explained later, I am convinced that your reasons for avoiding the supramental
will dissipate and you will be able to move onto the transformative path
(unending as it may seem), leaving behind the information superhighway to
nowhere. The world and its 21st-century problems need you and your capacity for
processing supramental intelligence.
You probably like to dance occasionally. Dancing has a
unique spontaneity that sometimes surprises the dancer; it seems to happen by
itself, effortlessly. When even a limited amount of supramental intelligence
manifests in us, it is like dancing in the world much of the time. Resonating
with Lewis Carroll, "will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join
the dance?"
The Quantum Tools
toward Supramental Intelligence and Transformation
Why is transformation a relatively rare commodity? The
psychologist Abraham Maslow, who did a definitive study of (partially)
transformed people (Maslow's term for these people was people of positive
mental health), estimated that maybe 5 percent of all people belong to this
category. What is the explanation of this rarity?
Let's put it in a different way, in keeping with the mystic
philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. He used to chide people, and I paraphrase: why
can't you change? Why can't you embrace nonviolence? Great teachers have given
you the message of nonviolence for millennia, and good recipes, too. You all
have tried to follow them. But why do you fail? Why does a vast majority of
people fail? Because you try to be nonviolent in a continuous way. You think,
today I will be a little less violent, and tomorrow even less. It doesn't work
like that!
So how does transformation work, if not through continuous
effort, if not by applying rational intelligence? Can any movement, any change
be discontinuous?
There are two reasons that people tend to be skeptical about
discontinuous change. One is that as adults they seldom experience a
discontinuous movement of consciousness. Generally, our experiences are
continuous. We look outside, close our eyes, or go to sleep; when we open our
eyes or wake up from sleep, the same outside world is there. Continuity seems
to prevail. If we look inside, we find thoughts and feelings that seem to make
up a continuous stream of consciousness. The second reason for skepticism is
the brainwashing that goes on today under the guise of scientific education in
favor of rationality, in favor of a continuous algorithmic answer to every
problem.
From its very inception, quantum physics has told us of the
validity of the concept of discontinuous movement. Consider once again Niels
Bohr's picture of the discontinuous movement of the electron in the atom. In
the atom, the electrons go around the nucleus, the core of the atom, in orbits;
this part of the electron's movement is continuous, one little bit at a time.
But when the electron jumps from one orbit to another, something it does
whenever there is emission of light from the atom, the electron never goes
through the intervening space. One moment it is here; and then it is there,
instantly. This quantum leap, Bohr style, remains a good model of discontinuous
movement in nature.
Can we describe the movement of quantum leap via continuous
algorithms, via mathematics, via causal logic, via mechanical modeling? No. So
where does the doctrine of continuity (which underlies determinism — if motion
can be determined even in principle, continuity must prevail so we can
calculate, at least in principle) stand now? The doctrine of continuity has to
be given up!
The materialist can still hope that maybe quantum physics is
not the final theory of physics, or maybe quantum physics can be reformulated
in such a way that continuity prevails. But the success of quantum physics
seems to indicate the futility of this kind of hope.
Alternatively, the materialist can hope that, although
discontinuity undeniably prevails in the submicroscopic world, maybe it does
not make it to the macroworld of our experience. Maybe when the movement of
jillions of submicroscopic objects is involved, all discontinuity gets wiped
out and continuity prevails once more. But this hope also does not hold up.
And as for your lack of personal experience of the
discontinuous movement of consciousness, relax. It is not as foreign to you as
you think. Have you seen the cartoon "The Physics Teacher," by Sidney Harris?
Einstein stands before a blackboard trying to discover his law E = mc2. He
writes E = ma2 and crosses it out. Next he tries E = mb2 and crosses it out.
The caption says, "The creative moment." So why do you laugh when you see the
cartoon? Because you know intuitively that creative discoveries do not involve
step-by-step continuity; instead, they are the products of discontinuous
insight.
The truth is, when you were a child, you used to take such
discontinuous quantum leaps of thought quite regularly. That's how we learn
things that require new contexts of thinking, such as a new mathematical
concept, reading meaning in a story, and abstract thinking for the first time.
And if childhood is too remote, think of those moments when
you intuit something. What happens? What is intuition? Why do you call certain
thoughts intuition? Because there is no rational continuous explanation for
such thoughts; there is no contextual precedent for such thoughts. An intuition
is your glimpse at a future quantum leap.
In this day and age you may also take a different track. You
may go see the movie The Secret and
get inspired by its message that you can manifest anything. When you fail a few
times, you may remember the lesson of quantum physics: the intention for
manifestation must resonate with nonlocal consciousness. Then is the time to do
the following exercise.
Of course, initially with this exercise, you will probably
try to manifest physical things: a helicopter would be nice! You want to fly.
If you keep at it, there may be a phase when you see a lot of flying dreams and
the experience is frustrating. In the dream you fly so well, but you wake to
find that you are grounded, you can't fly; your helicopter has not manifested.
Then one day, when you wake up, a different idea occurs to you. Suppose the
dream is trying to draw your attention to the fact that you can fly in your
dreams, although you can't in physical reality. In other words, you can be
creative in the subtle, and that is where you work on your powers of creativity
and manifestation.
Transformation involves the same kind of discontinuous
quantum leap in the movement of consciousness as acts of creativity in science,
math, art, and music. I call the latter acts outer creativity and the former
inner creativity.
So the first exploratory quantum tool for developing
supramental intelligence is discontinuous quantum leaps.
Quantum Nonlocality
Consider now another important principle of the
materialist's worldview: locality. Locality is the idea that all influences
that cause movement or change travel through space and time continuously, a
little bit at a time. So influences that are in the local vicinity have more
effect; the influences farther away are far less effective. An example derives
from how a wave affects an object. When the object is close, the power of the
wave reaching out to the object is strong. But at twice the distance, this
power attenuates to only one-fourth of the previous strength. Furthermore,
Einstein proved with his relativity theory (and experimenters have verified
Einstein's relativity many times over) that influences can propagate in space
and time only subject to a speed limit, the speed of light (300,000 km/sec).
This is also part of the locality principle.
But for quantum objects, the locality principle does not
hold. Ironically, Einstein, whose relativity theory was instrumental in
establishing the locality principle, was the first, along with his two
colleagues Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky, to see the viability of quantum
nonlocality (Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen 1935). If two quantum objects
interact, they become so correlated that their mutual influence persists
unabated even at a distance, even when they are not interacting via any local
force or exchanging any local signals. Later the physicists John Bell and David
Bohm developed ideas that made quantum nonlocality experimentally verifiable.
As discussed in chapter 4, experimental verification of the idea came via the
work of the physicist Alain Aspect and his collaborators. They watched two
photons emitted with quantum correlation from the same calcium atom continue
their correlated dance even after they were separated by distance, and without
any signals exchanged between them.
As mentioned before, quantum nonlocality has now been
directly verified even for human subjects (correlation between brains), leaving
no doubt that quantum physics does apply to us, to the macroworld, under
suitable subtle situations.
For millennia, nonlocal connections between humans have been
known to exist in such phenomena as mental telepathy. What is special about the
new experiments is that they are objective and the role of meditation and
intention is so clearly seen in them (Grinberg-zylberbaum et al. 1994).
Our consciousness ordinarily works with local stimuli,
either from the physical environment or from memory; this is the ego mode. In
nonlocal communication, we transcend the local ego mind and momentarily use
quantum consciousness. Like creatives who (somewhat unconsciously) use
momentary forays into quantum consciousness to process supramental intelligence
in their professional field, psychics are people who have the access (again
somewhat unconsciously) to quantum consciousness in the area of nonlocal
communication. This access to quantum consciousness can be used to process supramental
intelligence as well.
As I have stated before, quantum physics makes the idea of
nonlocal communication of information scientifically feasible. Here are a
couple of exercises for you to access quantum consciousness, God, through an
experience of quantum nonlocality. This should open your door further for
processing supramental intelligence.
One word of caution. Nonlocal communication is the easiest
entry point to nonlocal consciousness. It can be used for accessing God, but it
can and is often used in the pursuit of power. The sage Patanjali warned us all
about this danger, and a quantum activist is well advised not to fall prey to
this tendency.
Tangled Hierarchy
Self-referential collapse that gives us the subject-object
split in an experience is tangled hierarchical as opposed to simple
hierarchical. What does this mean? In a tangled hierarchy, the levels of the
hierarchy are codependent, each has causal efficacy over the other, and yet,
the causal efficacy is only an appearance, coming from an inviolate level. In
the case of the subject-object split, the causal efficacy is neither in the
subject nor in the object, but in the God consciousness beyond the
subject-object split. When we learn to love tangled hierarchically, we have an
opportunity to fall into the quantum self beyond the simple hierarchy of the
ego. This gives another path to supramental intelligence. The spiritual
tradition of Christianity mainly uses this tangled hierarchical path of love of
God. "I am as needed by God," the mystic Meister Eckhart used to say, "as God
is needed by me."
From Sex to Love: Sex
and the New Physics
The subtitle of this section, I hope, does not give you the
impression that I am talking about some exotic new quantum recipe for enhancing
sexual pleasure, that I am trying to found a kind of new age tantra, quantum
sex maybe? For ordinary people of the world who choose to remain householders,
the path of love is best reached through intimate relationships involving sex. What does the new physics have to say about sex? A lot, but it is subtle.
You already know that quantum physics, when properly
interpreted with the conceptual lens of primacy of consciousness, is all about
nonlocality, quantum leaps, and tangled hierarchy. Can sex lead to relationships
in which these quantum principles play a frequent role?
When we begin our sex lives, there is a definite tendency to
use sex to explore power. This is especially true of men. But mysteriously,
with some special partners, we hear a different drum, we feel a different vital
energy, and we are in love. How does one take a quantum leap from the tendency
to use sex to make power to a tendency to use sex always to make love, not
power?
How does one transform the usual romantic relationships of
linear causality to quantum relationships of circular causality, from simple
hierarchy to tangled hierarchy? Face it, for all the hoopla surrounding it,
romantic love is simple hierarchical: she (he) is mine. How do commitment and
marriage fit into this discussion?
And finally, to the main subject: How does one utilize
sexual relationships as springboards to practice unconditional love? How does
one make a quantum leap to a transformed being for whom sex becomes a choice
rather than a compulsion?
So these are the quantum questions of sex. The answers tell
us about the three stages of sexual maturity in relationship, the three stages
of sexual intelligence, if you will.
From Sex in the
Service of Power to Sex to Make Love
Because of our instinctual brain circuits, our sexuality is
aroused easily and often by a variety of stimuli. When we are teenagers and
these feelings are unfamiliar, we become confused about our sexuality. Most
societies have a taboo against educating the young about sexuality. In some
spiritual societies, the idea of celibacy is introduced for the young.
Unfortunately, this, too, is done without much guidance as to why or how. The
original idea could have been good: remain celibate until you discover romantic
love when you will no longer be confused about the real goal of your sexuality.
But without any avenue for such education, how is the confusion going to go
away?
If a teenager goes into sex without understanding the
meaning and purpose of sex (and I am not talking here about "the birds and the
bees" reproductive aspect of sex that is generally taught in schools as sex
education), he or she will blindly respond to the brain circuits and look upon
sexuality as a gratification, as a vehicle for a unique kind of intense
pleasure. Since the fulfillment of sexual pleasure with a partner raises vital
energy to the third chakra, associated with ego identity with the physical
body, a sense of personal power enters the equation. Hence it is common to
think of "sexual conquests" in connection with sex that is not associated with
romantic love.
In the western world, the pattern that has developed over
the last few decades, at least for men, is this early conditioning of sex for
power. women, thanks to some protective ("conservative") parents, are somewhat
exempt, although that is rapidly changing. what happens when we eventually
discover a partner with whom our heart chakra resonates? We enter the romantic
love relationship, but we tend not to give up the habit. So when the romance
runs out, which it does sooner or later, the sex-for-power tendency returns. We
then have a choice. We can look for another romantic partner, or go deep in the
existing relationship.
Hence the social custom of the man being the one to ask his
romantic partner to enter marriage. To enter marriage is to change the equation
of sex: I will commit to changing my pattern of using sex for power to using
sex always to make love. This means we always allow the energy to rise to the
heart after a sexual encounter; we allow ourselves to become vulnerable.
Marriage is a commitment to make love, not war (conquest).
Unfortunately, this vital body agreement has concurrently to
find agreements between the mental bodies of the partners as well. There the
ego conditionings are very deep and involve wide areas of overlap in which
competitiveness can emerge and bring down the energy from the heart chakra.
Competitiveness and other negative emotions will go away only when we begin to
glimpse intuitively that it is possible to surrender the negative emotions
within the positive energy of love.
Inviting God to
resolve your Conflicts: the Practice of unconditional Love
After it dawns on you that your intimate enemy can be your
intimate friend as well, a truly respectful relationship begins to evolve
between you and your partner. In this relationship, each of you are
individuals, each of you can recognize the "otherness" of the other (to use
sociologist Carol Gilligan's language). Now your relationship has taken a turn
toward transforming from simple hierarchy to a tangled hierarchy.
In Escher's picture Drawing Hands, the tangled hierarchy is created because the left
hand is drawing the right, and the right hand is drawing the left, but you can
see that this is an illusion. Behind the scene, Escher is drawing them both. When through your study of the quantum paradoxes, you have
truly taken the quantum leap of understanding that the reality of your manifest
consciousness, the subject-hood of the subject-object partnership arises from
the quantum choice and collapse from an undivided quantum consciousness, you
have also identified the source of your real freedom. It is in the state of unmanifest quantum consciousness. But how
do you shift your identity from the manifest to the unmanifest, even
temporarily?
Now your intimate enemy-friend can become a huge boon. I
spoke of creativity before. Creative insights are greatly helped if we can
somehow produce a proliferation of the quantum possibilities from which our
quantum consciousness chooses. Your partner is a boon in this regard because
she or he introduces a second slit of a double slit arrangement through which
the stimuli you process are sifted, allowing an enormous proliferation of
possibilities.
You and your partner represent different slits, different
points of view for sorting out stimuli, so conflicts are natural. Suppose you
don't try to resolve these conflicts, but learn to live with unresolved
conflicts, thus leaving it to your unmanifest quantum consciousness to process
the possibilities and choose the resolution.
This practice, holding unresolved conflicts indefinitely
until resolution comes from higher consciousness, is a difficult practice, but
its rewards are enormous. The conditions that we impose on our love now can
fall away, and love can blossom into unconditional, objective love. It is
objective love because the love of quantum consciousness is objective.
And then we have choice. Once we can love unconditionally,
sex is a choice. we do not need it to make love. we have a positive emotional
love circuit in our brain now. we can still include sex in our love
relationship if appropriate and if we so choose, of course, but sex is no
longer compulsory. We don't have to engage in it helplessly.
This is the legendary love of Krishna and his gopis, celebrated
in the Hindu Vaishnavite tradition. On special full moon nights, Krishna dances
with his 10,000 gopis, all at once. Or so the legend goes. Can Krishna
duplicate himself in 10,000 bodies? If you think of Krishna's love as love in
space and time, you will be puzzled by this legend. It must be a metaphor! It
is. The unconditional love of Krishna is always celebrated outside of space and
time, nonlocally.
From Spiritual
Materialism to total Surrender
Some words of caution once more before we go further. In our
materialist society, we have become corrupted by behavioral psychology and have
moved toward a reward-punishment motivation for our spiritual accomplishments.
Remember that this is spiritual materialism; it becomes a big barrier to your
personal spiritual fulfillment, especially if you want to arrive at a permanent
identity with God consciousness (called nirvikalpa or the "no boundaries"
stage) and live mostly in your quantum self in this
very human condition. Remember, gaining mastery in the form of the overmind is
only a stopgap goal; the ultimate objective is to arrive at a station of
consciousness wherein even ego-level memory-based responses conform to
supramental intelligence as far as possible.
So one never loses sight of the ultimate goal-to give up ego
supremacy in favor of the quantum self-God consciousness. The practice toward
that end is to undermine the accomplisher within us, not to take ourselves too
seriously. In other words, we dance, but always lightly, not caring what anyone
thinks of us, not even what I think of me.
Karma Yoga
Karma yoga is the yoga of applying yogic practice right in
the middle of real life. Karma means "action" and yoga means "union" or
"integration," so karma yoga means the union of ego and spirit through the path
of action. This is an important practice of service to others in many spiritual
traditions, especially Hinduism, Christianity, and Soto zen. In these
traditions, however, this service is often not a part of one's livelihood. For
a quantum activist, karma yoga as part of earning your living is encouraged.
If you are satisfied with your current livelihood, obviously
you can practice karma yoga while earning your living. But if you have a
mismatch, this is not practical. Part 3 takes you into real-life situations of
our society and points you toward finding a suitable livelihood in which you
can practice karma yoga for your quantum activism. As you read through it, look
for the particular context for activism that turns you on. For example, if you
are a healer at heart, clearly health and healing is your arena for quantum
activism. Doesn't this require years of training and huge amounts of cash? Not
necessarily. As the medical paradigm changes toward an integrative medicine,
there will be many new ways to receive a healing education and one of these is
bound to suit you.
Copyright@2011 by Amit Goswami, Ph.D. Reprinted with permission of Hampton Roads Publications. Available at any bookstore or through the publisher at orders@redwheelweiser.com or 1-800-423-7087.
