Eight Key Ideas in Quantum Physics and Indigenous Philosophy

What can we learn about reality when comparing notes between quantum physicists and indigenous language and philosophy?

Some deep insights regarding wisdom with respect to the nature of reality comes from Indigenous elders, who emphasize that everything that can be created already exists–and this existence is an intrinsic, core quality of Nature.  Some of these ideas are beautifully described in the book, Original Thinking, by Glenn Aparicio Parry, which I experienced firsthand when attending some dialogues described in this book with scientists, indigenous elders, and linguists.  Physicist David Bohm and Harvard-educated Blackfood elder Leroy Little Bear attended the first such dialogue, hosted by the Fetzer Institute in Michigan in 1992.  Also in attendance was linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford, who helped illuminate shared areas of agreement between quantum physics and indigenous wisdom. David Bohm, once an associate of Einstein, had been the key instigator behind this first meeting–and this had been a dream of his for decades, ever since reading what Benjamin Lee Whorf comments about Native American languages being verb-dominated.  Linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford describes what this verb-centric quality suggests:

Whereas every sentence in English must properly have a subject, a noun or noun phrase, and a verb, many if not most Native American languages can have sentences with no nouns at all. ‘Rehpi,’ a full
sentence in Hopi referring to a celestial event, means ‘flashed,’ where we have to say ‘the lightning flashed.’ But this goes much further: sa’ke’j says that when he’s speaking mi’kmaq back on the reserve, he can go all day long without ever uttering a single noun.  This statement is mind-boggling to most English speakers.  So much of our facts and knowledge are wrapped up in nouns, so what would all that knowledge look like in a language that doesn’t value nouns in the same way? This includes all concepts, all the way to ‘god’.

Dan Moonhawk Alford documented eight key areas of agreement between the quantum physicists and the Native Americans.  These include:

1. Everything that exists vibrates
This point of agreement is important because it moves beyond our usual ‘thingy’ or particle notion of existence based on raw sensory impressions, which is favored in the indo-european language family, and allows a justification on the part of Native Americans for the existence of spirits.
2. Everything is in flux
(Sa’ke’j:) The only constant is change–constant change, transformations; everything naturally friendly, trying to reach a more stable state instead of bullying each other around. That kind of process the English language doesn’t allow you to talk about too much, but most Native American languages are based on capturing the motions of nature, the rhythms, the vibrations, the relationships, that you can form with all these elements, just like a periodic table in a different way: relationships rather than a game of billiards,
where you only count the ones that go in–all of their motion doesn’t count.
3. The Part Enfolds the Whole:
… not just whole is more than the sum of its parts.  (Sa’ke’j:) When we wear leathers and beads and eagle thongs and things like that, it’s not seen as totally ludicrous, as decoration – it’s seen as containing something you want to have a relationship with.
4. There is an implicate order to the universe
(Sa’ke’j:) This implicate order holds everything together whether we want it to or not, and exists independently of our beliefs, our perceptions, or our linguistic categories. It exists totally independently of the methods or rules that people use to arrive at what it is, and David Bohm’s captured that with the great phrase the implicate order, versus the explicate order of things that they can explain quite concretely, such as a rock falling out of a window. This also agrees with the lakhota phrase ‘skan skan,’ which points to the motion behind the motion.
5. This ecosphere is basically friendly
Sa’ke’j maintains that the planet, and especially the Americas as well as the physical universe, are basically gentle and friendly: You don’t have an electron jumping and bullying into other(s) unless it knows it’s missing a stable state and knows it can reach that stable state and increase its own stability.
6. Nature can be taught new tricks
(Sa’ke’j:) We also agreed that that world out there that exists–that reality, not imaginality–can be taught new tricks with the cyclotron; and what was raised in the meeting was, are these new tricks beneficial, or will they create a hostile universe on their own, independent of scientists, once they teach electrons how to jump and how to amass the energy to jump, and it becomes a bullying, hostile biological world. Reminds me of Alan Watts talking about how the universe has had to learn how to get ever smaller and ever larger as we probe it with microscopes and telescopes, receding ever further in the distance as self observes itself.
7. Quantum Potential and Spirit
After listening to the physicists and American Indians talk for a few days, it struck me that the way physicists use the term potential, or quantum potential, is nearly identical to the way Native Americans use the term spirit. They all agreed there was something similar going on.
8. The principle of complementarity
Physicists for all this century have realized that our usual notion of bipolar or black & white opposites was insufficient when working with nature. The first clue came when they asked incoming light, ‘Are you particle?’ and it answered Yes; ‘Are you wave?’ and it answered Yes. This is equivalent to asking whether something is a noun or a verb and getting a yes answer to both–which is exactly how Native American language nouns are made up: as verbs with suffixes that make them temporarily into nouns for discussion sake. this yes-yes complementarity is foreign to Indo-European languages, but quite
common in other language families (such as the Chinese notion of Yin-Yang), and represents a higher level of formal operations, in Piaget’s terms, referred to by some as post-formal operations–that which lies beyond normal Western Indo-European development.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

REFERENCES:

Alford, Dan Moonhawk. “Dialogues Between Western and Indigenous Scientists.” Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness. (1993).

Parry, Glenn Aparicio. Original thinking: A radical revisioning of time, humanity, and nature. North Atlantic Books, 2015.

You can watch the companion video to this blog here:

___________________________

Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps.  Cynthia has a degree in physics from UC Berkeley, an MBA degree, a Doctor of Divinity, and a second degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won. Cynthia is the founder of RealityShifters, and is president of the International Mandela Effect Conference. Cynthia hosts “Living the Quantum Dream” on the DreamVisions7 radio network, and has been featured in numerous shows including Gaia, the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, One World with Deepak Chopra, and BBC. Cynthia reminds us to ask in every situation, “How good can it get?” Subscribe to her free monthly ezine at:

http://www.RealityShifters.com

RealityShifters

A Gift for All of Us, a Falcon in the Garden

A Magical Moment

An extraordinary thing happened the other day that was such a good sign and omen, that I know you’ll just love it. 

When I looked out the front window, I saw a giant falcon fly into our Gravenstein apple tree, and perch on the lowest branch, only a few feet off the ground.  This bird looked like a peregrine falcon to me, with distinctive striped/dappled patterns on its golden chest and on both sides, giant yellow-orange talons (that seemed as big as its head) and a beautiful, curved beak.  It was watching activity at our neighbor’s house across the street, where tree trimmers had been clearing branches away from overhead electrical lines.  There was a pile of branches in front of our neighbor’s driveway–and a mother and her young son had stopped to look at all the branches.  The falcon watched all this with great interest, settling into our apple tree where it remained for about 10 minutes or so. 

The falcon’s head swiveled around to see me watching it–even though I was inside the house, about ten feet away from the window.  I was amazed to see how alert and aware this bird was, and how keen its vision must be.  After the falcon had rested in our apple tree for about ten minutes, it flew directly toward me (!!!) and then just up above me, to the right, to sit atop the roof over our front porch!  It saw me watching it from a respectful distance inside the house.  I could tell it was watching my every move, since any time I made even the slightest movement, the falcon swiveled its head to stare at me intently.  The falcon also kept a close eye on our front yard, no doubt aware that we have a gopher who burrows there regularly. 

After many minutes of sitting on the porch roof, the falcon flew off toward our backyard.  I went to look out the kitchen window, and a few minutes later, the falcon flew right toward me a second time, (!!!) so I got a perfect view of its beautiful golden breast and outstretched wings–and then it flew up over the roof of our house.  I returned to the living room, to see if I could spot it in the front yard, but saw no sign of it.  I then returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, when I saw the falcon fly directly toward me a third time (!!!)–looking at me as it approached the house, and then landed atop our front porch roof once more. 

This falcon was so gorgeous in full flight, and so regal when keeping watch on the yard, but the it’s most remarkable quality was how much love I could palpably feel from being in the presence of this beautiful bird.  I was especially overwhelmed with how much love it had shown me by flying directly toward me, while looking me in the eye, THREE times that afternoon.  I see a lot of birds in our garden, including crows, bluejays, house finches, and hummingbirds–and in the entire 30 plus years I’ve lived here, yesterday was the first time a bird ever flew directly toward me while looking right at me the whole time.  Only one other bird has flown up to a window and peered in at me on the other side, and that was a hummingbird several years ago, who seemed to be saying “Thank you!” to me, for having refilled the nectar in the hummingbird feeder.  This summer I’ve also had a few hummingbirds hover close to me, and sometimes fly into a spray of water when I’m watering the yard.  All of those moments are memorable, indeed, but this felt truly exceptional.

This bird looked like a young peregrine falcon.  Peregrine falcons have been my favorite bird ever since I was a little girl, and saw one in a children’s book.  I’d been watching three baby peregrine falcons that hatched this Spring up at the top of UC Berkeley’s campanile tower, where a Cal falcons camera monitor showed livestream video from their nesting box from the time their mother sat on the eggs, to the time the young peregrine’s flight feathers came in, and up until their very first practice flights.

Blessing, Message, and Gift

To see something extraordinary three times is a blessing, and a message, and a gift.  There was so much love in this bird’s visit that I spent quite a bit of time just soaking it in.  This falcon had a truly majestic presence, and in addition to that, it seemed especially attuned with me–the way it flew directly toward me while clearly seeing me (inside my house) three times in a row.

What I’d been doing in the days before the peregrine’s visit was honoring the memory of my dear beloved deceased friend and mentor, the American linguist, Dan “Moonhawk” Alford.  Moonhawk often described himself as hanging out

“at the lonely intersection of language, physics, Native America and consciousness,”

and the few precious hours I spent hanging out with him at my first Language of Spirit conference in New Mexico was life-changing for me.  Moonhawk has a way of illuminating important ideas, such as how language shapes consciousness, and he has a genius for inspiring people to think differently.  Moonhawk pointed out how it might be, for example, that in Nature, “A does not always equal A,” because

“you can never step into the same river twice.”

Such a seemingly simple point gets to the heart of how our western science and logic was constructed with a mechanistic bias, while the natural world is ever-changing, generous, alive and profound. 

Another mind-expanding point that Moonhawk made is that our English language is noun-based, which affects our view of the cosmos.  Moonhawk pointed out that he’s spent time with Native Americans who could talk for hours, or even for an entire day, without once uttering a single noun.  Such a thing is mind-blowing to most westerners, whose thoughts shape the way they think to an extraordinary degree.  Even the idea of God is a verb to Native Americans, and this mental conceptualization of reality is so different from typical western reductionist viewpoints, yet such a perfect match for quantum physicists, such as David Bohm, who’d met with Moonhawk and Leroy Little Bear at a special dialogue hosted by the Fetzer Institute in Michigan in 1992. 

I’d been reading Moonhawk’s articles on his website, after having watched a DVD documentary film honoring him and physicist David Bohm and Blackfoot indian Leroy Little Bear, called “The Language of Spirituality” this weekend.  I’d been talking with Moonhawk in my heart for the past several days–hearing his jokes, witticisms, and responses in my heart–so it feels right that Moonhawk’s spirit is so with me.  And indeed the peregrine falcon’s visit was a blessing, a message, and a gift. 

As always, I encourage us all to keep asking my favorite question, “How good can it get?” 

I invite you to watch the companion video to this blog post at:

___________________________

Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps.  Cynthia has a degree in physics from UC Berkeley, an MBA degree, a Doctor of Divinity, and a second degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won. Cynthia is the founder of RealityShifters, and is president of the International Mandela Effect Conference. Cynthia hosts “Living the Quantum Dream” on the DreamVisions7 radio network, and has been featured in numerous shows including Gaia, the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, One World with Deepak Chopra, and BBC. Cynthia reminds us to ask in every situation, “How good can it get?” Subscribe to her free monthly ezine at:

http://www.RealityShifters.com

RealityShifters®