Quantum Jumping from the Periphery of our Minds

Is there a connection between how and what we pay attention to–and quantum jumping?  And if so, how does it work?

While preparing to be  interviewed by Brian MacFarland this month, I was pleased that he was particularly intrigued by something He’d heard me say, regarding the way that Mandela Effects and reality shifts tend to occur “in the peripheries of our minds.” Brian asked me to please elaborate on what I meant by that. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to grasp this concept is through some thing known as the shyness effect.  In the simplest terms, we typically only see mind matter interaction outside of our direct line of sight.  Most Reality Shifts, Quantum Jumps, and Mandela effect are witnessed after the edges of our attentional focus, out on the periphery.

The Shyness Effect

Over the last 25 years that I’ve dedicated my professional life to tracking the reality shift phenomenon, one of the most striking aspects to me has been the way that there’s something akin to a “shyness effect” going on.  In 1975, physicist John G. Taylor first began using this term to describe the interesting phenomenon by which demonstrations of mind-matter interaction are often more readily made unobtrusively, rather than under close scrutiny or observation.  This “shyness effect” has provided skeptics with ammunition by which to ascribe the possibility of ‘cheating’ or practicing sleight-of-hand to spoon-bending mentalists such as Uri Geller.

While I can see why people might feel skeptical regarding Uri Geller’s spoon bending occurring just out of visual line of sight, I have witnessed my daughter ‘melt’ / bend a fork at a spoon-bending party in our home.  And I’ve held a perfectly normal quarter in my hand and felt it melt like soft, malleable putty into a curved shape while I was relaxed and attempting to get it to stay firm and solid as I inserted it into a coin slot at our local underground public transportation station.  I can personally testify to neither of those two cases being examples of sleight-of-hand, since there was no possibility of any illusionist practices in either of those instances.

And my first encounter with the shyness effect occurred when I was a young girl of about five years of age, looking out our living room window into the backyard, watching the rain.  I noticed that the rain seemed to directly respond to my thoughts, such that when I thought, “Stop rain,” the rain would immediately stop.  And when I thought, “Start rain,” the rain would start again.  I did this back and forth several times, until I was certain that I was as one with the rain, and with great excitement, I ran to find my mom, to tell her what I’d observed.  I noticed when I found her in her bedroom that she seemed interested at first to hear what I had to say, that is, until she heard me say, “Look, Mom!  The rain stops when I think Stop rain, and starts when I say Start rain!”  She crossed her arms (not the best sign), and try as I might, I could not get this demonstration to work.

When I first met Uri Geller in San Francisco in 1999, I was intrigued to witness something similar to him in one of his psi demonstrations.  He’d asked a volunteer to “think of a color,” and at some point told us he was picking up interference–that clearly, not everyone was sending a clear image for him.  One man standing in the back of the room admitted that yes, he had been telepathically sending a color of his own.

Your Mind is as good, if not better than, Quantum Computers

I mentioned in my book Quantum Jumps that we are starting to observe scientific evidence of macroscopic quantum phenomenon occurring in nature.  It has long been assumed by many scientists that we would not be able to witness any type of quantum phenomenon within the warm, wet, noisy environment of natural biological systems. It came as quite a surprise then,to observe that photosynthesis in plants appears to definitely be happening thanks to quantum entanglement.  it also seems likely that we will soon be able to witness other types of condom phenomena being employed in our own senses such as smell, thanks to quantum tunneling occurring and natural systems that include our noses.  another example of natural systems employing quantum processes includes birds navigational systems, and we can expect to see many more examples in the years to come.

It is clearly not necessary for birds, plants, and our noses to be consciously operating quantum computers in order to benefit from microscopic quantum phenomena.  and it is not necessary for many of us to employ quantum phenomena in our daily lives, when we feel that we are receiving direct intuitive insights from those who are not indirect contact with us at that time. We can certainly envision that thanks to quantum entanglement with others with whom we feel heartfelt connection and coherence, we have some kind of a quantum mechanism by which experiences like telepathy can be enjoyed.

We are also finding that our minds operate very much in a quantum manner, as described in the wonderful book, Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision. I interviewed Jerome Busemeyer in my Living the Quantum Dream podcast, talking about the amazing and wonderful quantum properties our minds demonstrate.

Walking between Worlds with the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE)

Most of us are familiar with those situations where it seems that the more we stare at a given situation, waiting for a momentous phase change to occur, the less likely it seems we’ll see much of anything interesting transpire. You might have heard your someone say, “A watched pot never boils,” suggesting you find something more productive to do than stand and stare, waiting for water to get hot enough to come to a boil.  Amazingly, the “watched pot” phenomenon is backed up by some pretty interesting scientific studies in quantum physics.  With respect to quantum systems, the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) provides a mechanism by which a quantum system consisting of entangled particles can be locked in place, simply by consistently and persistently observing it in whichever state is most desired.

While Alan Turing has been acknowledged as having first mentioned the basic principle behind the Quantum Zeno Effect in the form of a paradox in 1954, physicists Baidyanaith Misra and George Sudarshan were the first to write a paper in 1977, hypothesizing that if a quantum system is measured often enough, it’s state will be unable to progress, and this hypothesis was tested and proven to be true in a 1989 experiment involving laser-cooled ions trapped in electric and magnetic fields. Subsequent tests further confirmed that the Quantum Zeno Effect works, and in 2013, researchers moved a step closer to building quantum computers by demonstrating that objects as large as diamonds can exhibit the Quantum Zeno Effect.

We might envision the possibilities of being able to freeze-frame a given situation–such as a life-threatening experience–in order that we can best address whatever needs to be handled. Some people, including me, have had such moments where we could have sworn that time slowed to a stop–and the Quantum Zeno Effect can go a long way toward explaining what’s going on when that happens.  We also have opportunities to select realities that we most enjoy, on occasions when we witness some kind of flip-flop, back-and-forth between to possible alternative realities.  Thanks to the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE), we can persistently  make observations of what we must wish to experience, thereby locking a particular entangled quantum system in place.  In practical, down to earth terms, this simply means that when we are riding a bicycle or a motorcycle, we can either fix our eyes on the horizon toward our desired destination, or we can stare at the pothole coming up ahead of us in the middle of the road. We know from learning from experienced instructors to avoid staring at the pothole, unless we truly desire to hit that pothole.  in similar fashion, we know that if we continue gazing at our desired destination, we can best avoid potholes and ensure a safe passage.

Quantum Jumping in the Periphery

Putting all of this together, we can practice making desired Quantum Jumps in our lives by staying focused on desired outcomes when we are focusing our attention, and also by providing relaxed states of mind that wave-like and open to all possibilities, in order to provide an optimal environment for Quantum Jumps to adjacent realities.  For a tip on keeping things at the periphery of your mind, it might help to practice remembering things.

Have you ever tried to remember something, like somebody’s name, so hard that you couldn’t recall it at all?  Most of us have learned that if we want to remember something, it helps to stop trying so hard, and relax.  When we relax and let go of trying so hard, those parts of our mind that are entangled with what we are seeking have a chance to make the connections we seek, and provide us with the answer we were looking for.  This provides us with a sense of how we can move back and forth between ‘locking in’ a particular focus of attention and reality, and entering into a relaxed daydream ‘wavelike’ state of providing opportunity for a quantum jump to occur.

You can watch the companion video to this blog post on YouTube here:

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REFERENCES:

Busemeyer, Jerome R., and Peter D. Bruza. Quantum models of cognition and decision. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Reich, Eugenie Samuel, “Quantum Paradox Seen in Diamond,” Nature, 20 August 2013

Patil, Yogesh Sharad, Srivatsan Chakram, and Mukund Vengalattore. “Quantum Control by Imaging: The Zeno effect in an ultracold lattice gas.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2678 (2014).

Larson, Cynthia Sue. Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World. RealityShifters, 2011.

Larson, Cynthia Sue. Quantum Jumps:  An Extraordinary Science of Happiness and Prosperity. RealityShifters, 2013.

Taylor, John Gerald. Superminds. Viking Adult, 1975.

Wang, Zheng, et al. “The potential of using quantum theory to build models of cognition.” Topics in Cognitive Science 5.4 (2013): 672-688.

You can watch the companion video to this blog here:

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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 first 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

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Envisioning a Positive Future for Humanity

This is the perfect time to envision an alternative to Transhumanism, reclaiming humanity’s wisdom.

I noted with great interest that Dr. Robert W Malone, M.D. is asking a brilliant question that affects us all in his Substack column, Who is Robert Malone: Is the dark WEF globalist transhuman future dystopia inevitable?

I smiled when reading Dr. Malone’s article, for three reasons:

Firstly, I share Dr. Malone’s concern with regard to a possible nightmarish future for humanity, which he summarizes as:

As we begin to emerge from the tunnel of the COVIDcrisis and all of the biowarfare, information warfare, WHO, WEF and US Department of Homeland Security mismanagement which has caused so much damage, we are being presented with a “Great Reset” vision of a fourth industrial revolution, transhumanism, and a new class structure of Physicals, Virtuals, Machines and “Davos Man” Overlords which is being globally pitched by the World Economic Forum and its acolytes as the inevitable outcome.

Secondly, the author Malone heavily cites in this article, Christopher Michael Langan, is a colleague of mine, who has graced events that I have helped to organize for Foundations of Mind, including the 2017 conference where Langan presented the paper mentioned by Dr. Malone, Metareligion in the Human Singularity. In this paper, Langan emphasizes:

… man requires a valid interpretation of the human individual in society, and of the individual and society in reality at large. This interpretation must take the form of an unbroken correspondence spanning the extended relationship between man, as an inhabitant of reality, and reality in its most basic and universal form; man must see himself as an integral part of reality, and reality as an extension of his own being within a single unified ontology or metaphysics. In short, man and reality must share a common metaphysical identity.

And thirdly, because the call to action of finding some kind of common metaphysical identity for man and reality proposed by Christopher Michael Langan is one that I’ve taken to heart and begun working on.

In October 2020, I began writing articles, and giving presentations and interviews about a possible positive vision for humanity that I referred to as Revhumanism. I discussed Revhumanism on Gaia TV, on an episode of Open Minds with Regina Meredith, presenting it as an essential alternative to Transhumanism that is of critical importance to humanity at this time.

What is Revhumanism?

Humanity now faces a choice between Transhumanism, which was named by Julian Huxley in 1927 as part of a belief that, “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself,” and something that is much more life-positive. While Transhumanism is pushed by Big Tech and the World Economic Forum—an alternative metaphysics currently seems much more nebulous and unclear, to the point that it’s something akin to “The Road not Taken”—the road referred to in Robert Frost’s poem by that same name as “grassy, and wanted wear.”

At this time when there is such clamor to upgrade to ever-newer gadgetry and technology, so much pressure to comply with new medical procedures and technology, and ever-increasing evidence that the rights of the many are being trampled by power wielded by a few—that “Road not Taken” can start to seem better and better.

Fortunately for mankind, some have kept the “Road not Taken” in their hearts. There are even some people who have walked this beautiful path consistently, despite tremendous pressure to be assimilated by more modern ways. Fortunately, there still exists a philosophy of harmoniously living and co-creating with a living, developing Cosmos, with reverence for the Earth, and other beings. Revhumanism involves relating with reverence, humility, and empathy with others, with the Earth, and with the Cosmos, inviting us to actuate high-level sovereign agency.

These principles can be considered to be central parts of a life-centered alternative to Transhumanism. When pondering what to call such a life-positive alternative, Revhumanism comes to mind. The Latin “rev” relates to ideas of reviving, regaining, recalling, and growing strong and young again. “Rev” also stands for reverence: a quality that inspires us to live up to our truly highest potential of seeing and respecting the inspiration, light, and consciousness that all of creation shares. Revhumanism invites humans to return to honoring the Earth as the source of life and sustenance. Sovereignty is a key concept in Revhumanism, with awareness of incarnational spirituality, which recognizes our sense of living our life with purpose and for some reason. We are not mere automatons whose existence can be summarized as somehow only consisting of information, or bits and bytes of computer memory on a chip. We have an awareness of having meaning and purpose in our life.

Common Metaphysical Identity

In 1992, the Fetzer Institute sponsored one of the highest-level intellectual conferences ever held between the first nations people of the American continent, including Leroy Little Bear, together with quantum physicists, including Dr. David Bohm, and field-experienced linguists, with a goal of translating concepts between indigenous and western scientific worldviews, and finding unifying areas of agreement. Linguist and professor Dan Moonhawk Alford documented points of agreement from between physicists and Native Americans, in his “Report on the Fetzer Institute-sponsored Dialogues between Western and Indigenous Scientists” published in 1993. These points of agreement included:

• Everything that exists vibrates
• Everything is in flux
• The Part Enfolds the Whole (not just whole is more than sum of its parts)
• There is an implicate order to the universe
• The ecosphere is basically friendly
• Nature can be taught new tricks
• Quantum potential and Spirit mean something similar
• The principle of complementarity supercedes dualities

One of the most important discoveries of this intersection of linguistics, Native America, quantum physics and consciousness was the realization that there can exist the kind of common metaphysical identity shared by man and reality called for by Christopher Michael Langan. Dan Moonhawk Alford pointed out the realization that Benjamin Lee Whorf made of the way human thinking can be influenced by language, which can be witnessed when considering verb-dominated languages, such as most Native American languages. As Moonhawk writes:

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.’

Leroy Little Bear further clarifies:

Aboriginal peoples are forever explaining themselves to non-Aboriginal people: telling their stories, explaining their beliefs and ceremonies, and introducing ideas that have never crossed the non-Aboriginal mind. Western knowledge operates from a linear, singular view; it views the world from order beneath chaos; it is very noun oriented; knowledge is about oneself in relation to everything else in a relativistic sense. Aboriginal knowledge has a very different “coming to know.” It is holistic and cyclical; it views the world from chaos underneath order; its languages are process and action oriented. Knowledge is about participation in and with the natural world.

Revhumanism acknowledges that humanity is part of a living, growing Cosmos, with everyone intrinsically having a transcendant divine nature. Revhumanism invites us to live true to our highest potential of embodying more wisdom than cleverness; more hope than cynicism; more humility than hubris; more empathy than apathy; and more reverence than insolence. Revhumanism represents a radical invitation for each of us to be the highest level embodiment of consciousness we wish to see in the world. When we see everyone and everything from the perspective of reverence, doors to adjacent possible realities open where there were no doors before.

We now have a wonderful opportunity to ask, “How good can it get when we see ourselves as an integral part of reality, and reality as an extension of our own being?”

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REFERENCES:

Alford, Dan Moonhawk. “A report on the Fetzer Institute-sponsored dialogues between Western and Indigenous scientists.” In A Presentation for the Annual Spring Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness. 1993.

Larson, Cynthia Sue.  “Comes True Being Hoped For.”
PARABOLA: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Vol. 25, No. 1. (Spring 2000): 84-87
http://www.parabola.org

Little Bear, Leroy. “Naturalizing indigenous knowledge.” Synthesis Paper (2009).

Bear, Leroy Little. “Traditional knowledge and humanities: A perspective by a Blackfoot.” Journal of Chinese philosophy 39, no. 4 (2012): 518-527.

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 first 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

How to Break Cell Phone Addiction

Cynthia Sue Larson and Justin Riddle

Have you noticed signs of cell phone addiction in yourself or others?

Maybe you’ve tried to get someone’s attention, and found they were so deeply ensconced in their cellphone that they were completely oblivious to you and pretty much everyone and everything around them.Or perhaps you’ve noticed you’re spending just a bit too much time on your phone when you dozed off with cellphone in hand, texted someone standing next to you, or grabbed your phone before doing anything else when you woke up. Cell phones can do a marvelous job of helping us stay connected with friends, family, and colleagues, but they can also be a bit addictive.

Good news! You can break the addiction to constantly check your cell phone by utilizing the concept of the Quantum Zeno mechanism for mental control over bodily action. Dr. Henry Stapp describes a little bit about how this works in a paper he presented at the 2014 Foundations of Mind conference, Mind, Brain and Neuroscience, about a way of better understanding the role of free will. Dr. Henry Stapp, a colleague of Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg, emphasizes the significance of our choices in influencing the realities we experience:

The central problem in quantum mechanics is that the basic dynamical equation, the Schroedinger equation, generates not the evolving physical reality itself but only a smear of potentialities for the future. But then how does what actually occurs get picked out. It is not picked out by nature acting alone. According to quantum mechanics, some subject/observer/agent must pose a question: “Is my immediately to appear experience Experience X?” Yes or No? Nature immediately answers, and in the “Yes” case delivers Experience X. In either case it changes the entire physical world by eliminating all features that are incompatible with the answer it has just chosen.

What this Means for You

When you recognize how you are engaging in a constant dialogue with the world through your questions and your focus of conscious awareness, you can see useful ways you can influence habitual behaviors. One of the benefits of dialogue is that it’s not a one-way conversation. This means there’s absolutely no reason that you need be a victim of old patterns or habits–you really do have free will. Your free will comes into play when you observe your surroundings and decide to do something; and your decision makes an imprint on your brain in such a way that makes it easier for you to follow that mental pathway again.

Breaking Cellphone Addiction in 3 Easy Steps

You can break a habit of checking for cellphone text messages every few minutes by first getting an idea of the underlying emotional reasons for checking your phone so often. Many people check for text messages because they want to stay in touch with people, so in addition to replacing the action of reaching for your cellphone with a different action, you an also do something to stay connected besides activating your phone.

Instead of reaching for your phone every few minutes, you can:

(1) Pat your leg,

(2) Look around, and

(3) Engage with your surroundings.

Justin Riddle, Dr. Henry Stapp and I discuss the Quantum Zeno mechanism for mental control over bodily action in this short video on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/siJRYT1rbEU

Foundations of Mind

If you enjoy learning about new ideas in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, quantum physics, philosophy, and consciousness, I’d love to see you at this year’s Foundations of Mind: A Dialogue of World Views conference. This year’s speakers include Fritjof Capra, Stuart Kauffman, Jacob Needleman, and many more in Berkeley, California August 13-15.

To learn more about Foundations of Mind, please visit:
http://www.FoundationsOfMind.org

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Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps. Cynthia has a degree in Physics from UC Berkeley, and discusses consciousness and quantum physics on numerous shows including the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, the BBC and One World with Deepak Chopra. You can subscribe to Cynthia’s free monthly ezine at: http://www.RealityShifters.com

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Cynthia Sue Larson Interviews Stanley Krippner

Dr. Stanley Krippner with Cynthia Sue Larson

I recently had the pleasure to chat with Dr. Stanley Krippner about quantum logic, consciousness, and dreams. Dr. Krippner is a professor of psychology at Saybrook University, and author, editor, and co-author of numerous books including:  “The Voice of Rolling Thunder,” “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” and many others.

I first met Stanley Krippner about ten years ago at the International Conference on the Study of Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing, where we’ve both given presentations. I’ve long been deeply impressed with the insights Stanley shares, such as I reported in the September 2005 issue of RealityShifters, in which I mentioned some fascinating aspects of his work:

 Stanley Krippner presented a thought-provoking paper at this year’s shamanism conference that summarized research findings between the differences in the dreams of schizophrenics and non-schizophrenics. Imagery in schizophrenic dreams is quite different than imagery in shamanic dreams and visions; schizophrenic dreams are more apathetic, banal, and low-energy with few clear settings or distinct outcomes. I am intrigued to note that one of the biggest differences between shamanic and schizophrenic dreams appears to be that of lucidity… that what the shaman knows for sure is something the schizophrenic has not noticed. The shaman maintains a constant sense of awareness and focus that brings greater meaning to peoples’ lives.
http://www.realityshifters.com/pages/archives/sep05.html
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CYNTHIA: Thanks so much for meeting to talk with me today! I’d love to know your thoughts about the connection between quantum physics, consciousness, and dreams.

STANLEY: Montague Ullman was doing just what you’re telling me—applying quantum physics to dreaming. Especially to psychic dreaming. And he was working on that before he died. I’ve not seen the manuscript of his incomplete book, but you can get some information from an interview he did with Mark Schroll.

CYNTHIA:  Wonderful!

STANLEY: Now in the sense that I see it, it’s especially true of precognitive dreams—dreams about the future, because there will be several possible futures that the dreamer could dream about. And the psychic dreamer knows which one to dream about, so this is where the observational effect comes in. And this is why some people are able to do this and some people aren’t. Some people have the talent to unconsciously select the possible future that indeed comes true. And I wrote an article about the probable future years ago, before I knew anything about quantum physics. But in that article, I pointed out how so many dreams about the future are pliable. In other words, once the dreamer knows about what might takes place, the dreamer can make a change to prevent something disastrous from happening.

CYNTHIA: So you’re saying this happens frequently.

STANLEY: This happens frequently, yes. There’s been a study on this, years ago, by Louisa Rhine. If I remember the statistics, whenever there was a portending disaster, the dreamer was able to prevent the disaster in about three out of four occasions, which was a lot. And there was another evidence indicating that the disaster might happen, to know that this was something that was not just being made up.

CYNTHIA: Right. That would be the challenging thing, to know if it didn’t happen, would it have happened, of course.

STANLEY: One case I do remember was a woman who had a dream about a light fixture falling on her baby’s crib, killing the baby at exactly two o’clock in the morning. So she woke up and took the baby into the bed with her and husband. He was very dismissive, saying, “Oh, it’s just a dream. You were worried—you’re concerned.” But later that night, at two o’clock in the morning, this light fixture did fall into the baby’s crib.

CYNTHIA: Wow. And that’s something they would hear, and it would wake them up if they were asleep.

STANLEY: Yes, if they were telling the truth about this account, there you have an example of where the likely future had changed by human volition. 

CYNTHIA: Right.

STANLEY: Now, your feeling that dreams show us the real nature of reality is something that’s shared by many indigenous groups around the world.

CYNTHIA: Yes. What I’m suspecting is that’s the best way to look at the quantum paradigm that we’re trying to understand. I think that one of the best ways to look at it is as if everything really is a dream, basically. As you know, we can’t even agree on what consciousness is to begin with. But I’m expecting that we’re making progress.

STANLEY: Consciousness is anything you define it as. I tell people instead of waiting, just take any definition that you like, and use that, and run with it! So I don’t think the issue is that we don’t know what consciousness is. The issue is we don’t have a consensus on what consciousness is. Far from it.

CYNTHIA: We recognize it when we see it, but we don’t know how to explain it or describe it fully, so that everyone agrees.

STANLEY: That’s the so-called “hard problem,” which many people don’t think exists.

CYNTHIA: How about yourself?

STANLEY: Oh, yes! I’m working with a team of people who are interested in doing a documentary on the hard problem. Are you familiar with the new movie, The Imitation Game?

CYNTHIA: Yes.

STANLEY: Did you know that the protagonist had written about telepathy?

CYNTHIA: No. Wow! In real life?

STANLEY: In real life. It was Henry Stapp who picked up on that essay, and carried it a step further, in a classic article which came out in about 1972. So you might ask Henry for the article that builds on Turing’s notion of telepathy. It came out in a journal called Mind, as I recall. I have a copy of it. And it’s I think still very timely. Henry was so far ahead of his time.

CYNTHIA: Wow! So Henry Stapp wrote an article and published it…

STANLEY: Yes, based on Turing’s original article. Turing was saying, well, if telepathy exists, then it would proceed this way and that way. And so then what Henry did was to take that and show, yes, this is how it would proceed. And he was able to fill in the gap that Turing had no way of knowing about.

CYNTHIA: That’s quite useful! I appreciate the way that Henry Stapp looks at the Von Neumann cut, focusing attention on finding the place where consciousness occurs. I think of it as levels of consciousness, actually. So I agree with that. But at the same time, I’m also quite interested in the multiverse concepts and ideas, because they match the feeling of how it feels when you jump into another world.

STANLEY: They do, yes.

CYNTHIA: And you can jump in, and jump out. You can see things go back and forth, which is quite interesting to me. That’s why I want to talk to people who have experienced them, rather than people who say that you can’t do it. I’d rather trade notes with other people who’ve been there, on the SS Quantum Beagle, as we observe things from the deck, and share our notes. And then when it comes to levels of consciousness, I find that’s where some of the most interesting phenomena occurs, when you meditate a lot. I do martial arts, and I meditate a lot.

STANLEY: Keep doing both!

CYNTHIA: I think it helps. When you do martial arts, you’re honing your entire system and your ability to focus attention. I can move my consciousness and sort of expand it out. Like when I first met Eva Herr at the Portland airport and without any tips from her walked away from her to pick up her unmarked suitcase that she had not told me anything about, I was what you might call entangled with or coherent with the entire system of me and Eva Herr—and it felt very much like a dream. What it felt like to me was, “Now it’s time to go–wave at Eva. Now go this way. Now walk that way. Pick up that bag that is just now dropping onto the baggage claim carousel at the same moment you arrive. Now look at Eva and gesture to this bag to make sure it is hers.” It was her bag, and her jaw just about hit the floor, as she’d been on her cell phone that whole time, and had not given me any information about her luggage, nor was it tagged. It just felt like I was ‘in the zone’–like what athletes experience. So it wasn’t so much precognition so much as, “Here we go! This is what we’re doing.” I think a lot of people do this, and they don’t know that they’re doing it. It goes unrecognized quite a lot. And when we expand our consciousness, then you can have an effect on things like the weather, I believe. On a lot of things. A lot more than people recognize, even.

STANLEY: Two years ago I came out with the book about Rolling Thunder, the native American medicine man. I did it with his grandson, who’s also interested in quantum physics, and there are several documented instances where Rolling Thunder seemed to have an effect on the weather.

CYNTHIA: Yes, exactly! That sounds like a great book! I’ve also experienced other changes. Just on the flight to New York, we hit turbulence. The plane was just “bah-duh-duh-duh-duh” So I spread my consciousness to the plane, and the weather, and everything became all smooth. Smooth! Then my friend next to me started talking to me, and I turned and I looked at her, and it went back to “bah-duh-duh-duh-duh,” so I said, “Excuse me—I need to meditate.”

STANLEY: Really! I’m going to have to try that when I’m on a turbulent flight.

CYNTHIA: I think we often think we are the bodies that we’re in; we’re not the bodies that we’re in.

STANLEY: This is another native American concept—the concept of the “long body.” The body does not end with our skin—it extends into time, into space, and into other people.

CYNTHIA: Yes!

STANLEY: William Roll wrote a whole series of articles about the long body.

CYNTHIA: That’s what I would call levels of consciousness; you can expand it, you can bring it in, you can direct it.

STANLEY: Now getting back to dreams, have you read Fred Alan Wolf’s book about dreams?

CYNTHIA: Yes, it’s quite excellent.

STANLEY: Yes, I like his book about “The Dreaming Universe,” very much.

CYNTHIA: It’s one of my favorites!

STANLEY: I have an article coming out in a European newsletter, “Transpersonal Transformative Experiences,” and I have a whole series of examples past and present TTEs.

CYNTHIA: That sounds excellent.

STANLEY: There are two types of Transpersonal Transformative Experiences. One is the spiritual, and one is the secular. In both of them, they’re transpersonal, because the person goes beyond their usual self identity. And in spiritual experiences, it’s (vertical). They go up to the upper world, and go down to the lower world, and they encounter entities or beings or energies or forces that are not part of their customary world or identity. Whereas in the secular experience, that’s horizontal. People go to Nature. They become involved with other people in a group movement. And again, they transcend their ordinary identity in sort of a group consciousness or a version of their consciousness with Nature, and that’s all observable entities and observable objects, which is why it’s horizontal. But either one can transform a person.

CYNTHIA: Yes, they can.

STANLEY: I’m going to do another version of that on the east coast. I just signed the agreement today, for the Academy of Spirituality and Consciousness Research. You should look at their website—very interesting group. And that’s happening right after the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

CYNTHIA: I’d love to ask you one last question: What would be the one thing that you would like people to be aware of with regard to everything that you’ve done, and all of your work?

STANLEY: Interconnectedness. If people see how we’re all interconnected and connected with Nature, we wouldn’t have an environmental crisis, we wouldn’t have two dozen wars all over the world. We’d honor the rest of Nature and the rest of humanity, because we’d know that those are parts of ourselves. So that’s an easy question.

CYNTHIA: Getting to the place of how we can do that is the hard problem.

STANLEY: What you’re doing, with books like yours, helps raise peoples’ consciousness. And you don’t have to have everybody agreeing with this. A small group of people who want to make change is enough to get the ball rolling.

CYNTHIA: That’s right.

STANLEY: Have you heard of Stephen Schwartz?

CYNTHIA:  Stephen Schwartz—that sounds very familiar.

STANLEY: He has written several books. He has a new book coming out, “Eight Rules for Changing the World.” He gives many examples of how small groups of people in very peaceful ways can make major changes in the world, or parts of it, simply by following these eight rules.

CYNTHIA: Nice!

STANLEY: His book isn’t out yet, but it will be available on amazon.com.

CYNTHIA: OK. Thank you so very much!

 ___________________________

Dr. Stanley Krippner 
http://stanleykrippner.weebly.com/

___________________________

Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps. Cynthia has a degree in Physics from UC Berkeley, and discusses consciousness and quantum physics on numerous shows including the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, and BBC. You can subscribe to Cynthia’s free monthly ezine at: http://www.RealityShifters.com

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Cynthia Sue Larson Interviews Stuart Hameroff

Cynthia Sue Larson with Dr. Stuart Hameroff

I talked with Stuart Hameroff this month about his ideas about quantum physics and consciousness. Dr Hameroff is a clinical anesthesiologist and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, and lead organizer of the Toward a Science of Consciousness conferences that began in Tucson, Arizona in 1994.

Stuart Hameroff’s research involves a theory of consciousness developed over the past 20 years with British physicist Sir Roger Penrose. Their Orchestrated Objective Reduction (‘Orch OR’) theory suggests that consciousness arises from quantum vibrations in protein polymers called microtubules inside the brain’s neurons.  For a review, along with critical commentaries and replies, see: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188

Hameroff and Penrose suggest these vibrations compute, collapse, interfere and resonate, regulating neuronal processes and connecting to the fundamental level of the universe, providing moments of conscious experience and choice.

________________________

CYNTHIA: Some scientists point out that the brain is basically dissipative, essentially, that it’s not isolated. Would you agree with that?

STUART: I think that the brain is a little bit more clever, that there are alternating phases of isolated/quantum and dissipative/classical processing. Quantum and classical, quantum and classical, quantum and classical. The classical is dissipative and interacts with the environment, bringing information in and letting information out, exerting causal efficacy in the world. But classical phases alternate with quantum phases at EEG frequencies, for example, at 40 Hz. Or maybe even faster, at megahertz. So for 40 Hz, that would imply every twenty-five milliseconds there is a cycle of quantum processing followed by collapse, a classical result that interacts with the outside world. In this classical phase information comes in and that’s when it’s dissipative, and then the cycle repeats. So you have a quantum phase that’s isolated, then an open phase that’s dissipative and brings information in, and then another quantum phase, so on in alternating phases. I think consciousness consists of sequences of these alternating phases, the end of each quantum phase a discrete event. Consciousness is a sequence of discrete events, not a continuum. A movie appears continuous to us, but it’s actually a sequence of frames; I think consciousness is like that, and these frames alternate, quantum and classical.

CYNTHIA: I love your theory, which is about the best one I’ve seen for bringing that together. When we look in the brain, would you say we see evidence of this quantum logic happening? You might say that we do?

STUART: As far as quantum logic, specifically, I think that you see that in dreams. I think dreams are quantum information without collapse—you stay in the quantum phase, without the dissipative phase. If there’s a loud noise, you wake up, so you’re shielded, isolated. Except for sleepwalkers, or something like that.

CYNTHIA: And lucid dreaming is interesting.

STUART: Lucid dreaming, exactly.

CYNTHIA: In that case, maybe, would there be alternation?

STUART: Lucid dreaming, I have to think about that. Probably there’s some collapse, but maybe infrequent, or not total, or something like that. I’m not sure. That’s certainly an exception to the rule. Sleepwalking and lucid dreaming are special cases.  Matte Blanco described the logic of dreams which is very similar to quantum logic.

CYNTHIA: You can find the extremes there, but they come together.

STUART: Well the big issue in quantum logic is noncommutativity. In regular logic, A times B equals B times A, but in quantum logic, A times B is not equal to B times A. Paradox reigns. Opposites co-exist.

CYNTHIA: Right!

STUART: Irreversible steps are one of the keys.

CYNTHIA: In addition to the irreversible steps, some people have noticed that quantum logic is a little bit like four-fold logic—so-called “Asian logic”—because it does have True, False, True-and-False, and Not-True-Not-False.

STUART: Yeah, superposition, quantum superposition. Or as Stuart Kaufman talks about, Aristotle’s ‘excluded middle’ actually occurs in quantum logic.

CYNTHIA: Would you say that quantum logic feels like an equal partner to classical logic, or do you feel it’s more of the primarily logic that is constantly there? This gets to what you were noticing about the brain.

STUART: I think the logic of the quantum world underlies the classical world—but then when collapse occurs—you get the classical world. I believe in collapse, but quantum field theorists don’t necessarily agree with collapse. And then you have Henry Stapp’s view, that collapse is caused by the Cosmic Mind. I don’t think that solves the problem. That puts consciousness out there, kind of outside of science, so it’s really a spiritual, religious type of approach. But I think you can get spirituality out of collapse, with non-locality and Platonic values, which is what Penrose brought in.

CYNTHIA: I love the way you bring up protoconsciousness, the Planck scale, and the way consciousness might exist in that sort of decoherent state, but at the same time, you do look to consciousness to bring about collapse.

STUART: Roger Penrose essentially replaced decoherence with self collapse, what he called ‘objective reduction’. Decoherence is kind of an ill-defined thing anyway. Nobody can really say exactly what it is. Plus it doesn’t really get rid of the quantum superposition—just buries it in noise. So Roger came up with the idea that there is this objective threshold for reduction, related to the uncertainty principle, so every superposition will reach this threshold, and have a self collapse. Now normally, that occurs in a very charged, polar environment, like in this table, or in the air, or liquids. So the charge will entangle with another charge, the simple equation is: E = h/t, where E is the amount of superposition, h is Planck’s constant, and t is the time at which self collapse occurs by OR. So the larger the E, the faster the t. Roger then also said that when OR happens, there is a moment of subjective experience.

CYNTHIA: OK.

STUART: Now normally, if that happens in a polar environment, then it’s random, and it’s going to happen very quickly, but randomly, so the moment of conscious experience won’t have any cognition. That’s what we call protoconscious moments, random, non-cognitive and inconsequential—but still experience. There’s consciousness everywhere, but it doesn’t hang together and do anything meaningful.

CYNTHIA: That could explain, perhaps, why plants can photosynthesize using that quantum random walk, because on some level, they’ve got protoconsciousness.

STUART: Yeah, photosynthesis is a really interesting thing. I was talking about this yesterday with these guys down at Stanford. Does that collapse? That’s a good question. The problem is that, by e=h/t, if it’s just electrons, electrons have very little mass, so e is going to be very, very small. So it will take a lot of electrons to reach collapse.

CYNTHIA: Right.

STUART: Everything has proto-conscious moments. But in the brain, and specifically due to structures called microtubules inside neurons, the random entanglements are avoided during quantum isolation phases, and the quantum states are organized, or ‘orchestrated’ by memory, sensory inputs and resonances, and cognitive ‘orchestrated’ OR conscious moments occur. But plants have photosynthesis which uses electron quantum coherence but probably don’t have orchestrated OR and meaningful consciousness. The problem is that by E=h/t, electrons comprising E have very little mass, so E is going to be very, very small, and t very, very long. So plants might have meaningful conscious moments but very rarely.

CYNTHIA: Right.

STUART: But the quantum movements of electron excitations in plant proteins which enables highly efficient conversion to food is similar to what happens in microtubule proteins. You have these aromatic rings, kind of like benzene and phenyl rings, which have excitons and dipole states. These are the same molecules that are in psychedelics, dopamine and psychoactive drugs and neurotransmitters. And that type of environment is non-polar, so there’s no charge. There are induced dipoles, but no net charge. So the quantum states there don’t automatically and quickly entangle with the environment and collapse. They can persist and couple with other quantum states to interact cognitively and process information. Or in the case of photosynthesis, transfer energy.

CYNTHIA: This coupling with other quantum states is really interesting, and brings me to the core of something I’ve been looking at, which is levels of consciousness. When we ask this big question, “Who are we?” and “Who is the observer?” we tend to have a human bias, of course, because this is how we see the world. But obviously, people who meditate are able to focus very closely in on one particular system within themselves, such as their breathing, their heart rate, these kind of things. So it’s something that we have the ability—at least yogi masters do—through meditation and awareness of themselves—to change that kind of level of consciousness. This to me is the key.

STUART: Yes, levels of consciousness. If you go back to E=h/t, these protoconscious events are happening in the table, in the air, in the coffee cup all the time. It’s basically the same as decoherence, except there is this little snippet of protoconscious experience that’s happening everywhere. So that seems bizarre and crazy, but on the other hand you have people—panpsychists—now saying that everything’s conscious, without any clue as to what actually that might mean. But then, if you get into a non-polar environment, you avoid the random entanglements, and have cognition and meaningful consciousness. In other words, the quantum states are orchestrated. It’s like the difference between the sounds and tones of an orchestra warming up, and the orchestra playing a symphony.

CYNTHIA: Exactly.

STUART: So the orchestra warming up with the various isolated tones and notes is like protoconscious moments here and there. And then they start playing Beethoven, because it’s all orchestrated, and that’s music. It’s a very good analogy, the musical analogy, except with music you need a listener, whereas here, the vibrations are self-aware. So when you start to orchestrate the objective reduction events, you get cognition and consciousness. And then it’s a matter of the intensity of the levels. So for example, assuming it’s orchestrated, and you have meaningful consciousness, then as “E” becomes larger, “t” becomes shorter, and you get more intense conscious experience, like music changing to a higher octave. As E is larger, you use more of the brain. Did you see that movie, “Lucy”?

CYNTHIA: Yes!

STUART: It’s about how we use some percentage of the brain, and Lucy was using more and more percentage of her brain. And how they were saying she was doing it wasn’t right.

CYNTHIA: It was fanciful.

STUART: Nobody really knows. Based on available technology they tell us we only use a small fraction of our brain. Well, bullshit! How do you know how much of our brain we use? We may use a lot of it for stuff that’s not conscious, or that is conscious and cant be measured, like quantum effects in microtubules. But just for consciousness, I think if you’re meditating or if you’re in an altered state or something like that, that means you’re using more and more of your brain that is involved. Therefore, “E” becomes greater and “t” is faster, so you get faster, more frequent, conscious events. You go to a deeper level which is a higher plane. It’s been shown that meditators have  higher frequency gamma synchrony, for example, but it could go even faster, like to megahertz, for example. So we could be having ten million of these events per second. But then you’d say, “Wait a second. For EEG, our cognition is much, much slower.” What Roger and I proposed in our last paper is that these faster events interfere and give beats, just like in music, when you have beat frequencies. And the beat frequencies are what we see—the EEG. The beat frequency that we see is cognitive windows in the range of milliseconds. But they are actually deriving from faster vibrations, like in megahertz, which is where the microtubules are vibrating. So there’s a spectrum of terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz, and then hertz. And the EEG is basically hertz. So what we see as EEG I think of as beat frequencies of faster vibrations at a deeper level. EEG is the slower, large scale tip of an iceberg of deeper, faster vibrations. So if you’re meditating, or you go in an altered state, you’re going into that faster, more intense domain. So it will include more conscious moments per second, and they are more intense. So that’s what I think an altered state is, a deeper level, higher frequency level of consciousness—it’s the frequency at which you’re having orchestrated conscious events, more deeply into spacetime geometry. Very intense experiences may be entirely in spacetime geometry, and could exist independent of the brain, at least temporarily, remaining entangled. So this could explain out-of-body experiences. As the Beatles said – ‘The deeper you go, the higher you fly….”

 ___________________________

Dr. Stuart Hameroff 

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org

 

Center for Consciousness Studies

http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu

 

Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory

by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188/

 

___________________________

 

Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps. Cynthia has a degree in Physics from UC Berkeley, and discusses consciousness and quantum physics on numerous shows including the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, and BBC. You can subscribe to Cynthia’s free monthly ezine at: http://www.RealityShifters.com

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Cynthia Sue Larson Interviews Yasunori Nomura

Yasunori Nomura with Cynthia Sue Larson

I’ve been following Professor Yasunori Nomura‘s work this past year with tremendous interest, since he was one of the first theoretical physicists to publish a paper on the topic of the many worlds of quantum mechanics being one and the same as the eternally inflating multiverse. This perspective is one I consider to be extremely promising, both for its elegance and also for its ability to explain much that other theories cannot so easily address.

I was thrilled when attending a screening of the recent documentary film, “Particle Fever,” about the hunt for the Higgs boson to see Yasunori’s name up on the podium. I’d received an invitation to attend this UC Berkeley event through the Physics Department where I’d studied and received my degree many years ago. Dr. Yasunori Nomura was one of the panelists who talked about what we’re learning from the hunt for the Higgs boson after the show, along with Lawrence Hall, Marjorie Shapiro, Walter Murch, Mark Levinson, Petr Horava, Beate Heinemann, and Surjeet Rajendran. Dr. Nomura is a Professor at UC Berkeley at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, where his work is primarily focused on particle physics and cosmology.

Panelists at “Particle Fever” screening at UC Berkeley, September 12, 2014

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CYNTHIA: Thank you so very much for taking time from your busy schedule to answer a few questions! I also want to thank you for writing such a clear and persuasive paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics, “Physical Theories, Eternal Inflation, and Quantum Universe.” You’ve also developed a new theoretical framework to describe dynamics of quantum gravity in low energy regimes, preserving locality. What’s so wonderfully exciting about bringing these ideas together is that you are presenting us with a view of general relativistic global spacetime being an emerging classical concept that arises from a special relativistic, quantum mechanical description of quantum gravity. When these concepts are applied to the idea of the multiverse, we then have a multiverse with no beginning and no end, but rather time that emerges locally in branches. Is this a fairly good summary of your most current perspective? And in what new directions is your work going next?

YASUNORI: Yes, that is a good summary of my perspective. Our world is quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics governs how nature works at the deepest level, not just in small subatomic scales but also at the largest scale of the eternally inflating multiverse. At the same time, quantum mechanics is a “weird theory” which predicts many counter-intuitive phenomena, and from which the “normal world” we perceive emerges only in a certain limit. This includes concepts such as space and time. Furthermore, quantum mechanics is an intrinsically probabilistic theory—every prediction you make is probabilistic. My current effort focuses on developing a deeper understanding of these issues. What is the detailed microscopic mechanism underlying the emergence of spacetime? What does the probability really mean? How does understanding of these issues help revealing the so-far elusive quantum theory of gravity?

CYNTHIA: I love the way you describe our world as being quantum mechanical at the deepest level! This conceptualization has not been popularly embraced, perhaps due to the counter-intuitive “weirdness” of quantum mechanics. You make excellent points about quantum mechanics being intrinsically probabilistic, and I appreciate your emphasis on the importance of better understanding what probability really means. In the introduction of your 2011 paper, “Quantum Mechanics, Spacetime Locality, and Gravity,” you point out that, “Quantum mechanics introduced the concept of probability to physics at the fundamental level. This has led to the issue of the quantum-to-classical transition, in particular the measurement problem.”  What is needed for us to better understand probability in a quantum world?

YASUNORI: What the probability in quantum mechanics really means is a deep question, with which people have been struggling for a century. At the most naive level, it means that when we prepare an ensemble of a large number of systems all of which are in an identical state, then the records of performing physical measurements on these systems are distributed according to what quantum mechanics predicts. Does this mean that we simply do not know enough details of the systems, and if we do, then we can predict the outcome of measuring each member of the ensemble with certainty? People certainly wondered this possibility in early days in developing quantum mechanics, but we are now almost certain that this is not the case. In quantum mechanical world, the outcome of a measurement is intrinsically probabilistic—the probabilistic nature is not a manifestation of our incomplete knowledge of the system. A question then arises when we ask what happens if we make a “single” measurement on “a” system in our universe. According to quantum mechanics, the result is “probabilistic,” but what does that really mean? Where is the ensemble? Are there many universes which are “distributed” according to the prediction of quantum mechanics? This is where the necessity of considering many universes—or multiverse—comes in. We need to consider cosmology in a deepest sense to really address this problem.

CYNTHIA: This suggests there is a deeper interconnectedness that goes beyond any “single” measurement on “a” system that is occurring everywhere–and not just in the realm of quantum particles, because we cannot assume that any given experiment is closed off from its surrounding environment. We definitely require an understanding of probabilities beyond mere statistical frequencies, since we can’t run experiments on multiple versions of the universe! What are your thoughts about the value of the Bayesian interpretation of probability for quantum cosmology–the idea that before we start measuring probabilities, we must set initial assumptions about the probabilities?

YASUNORI: Yes, the issue is certainly relevant beyond the realm of quantum particles at small scales. Quantum effects are there even at large distances—they are simply hard to recognize for an observer like us living in “a branch” of a complete quantum state. We still do not know exactly what form the physical law that allows us to address this issue will take, but I can certainly imagine that some sort of Bayesian ways of thinking may play an important, and perhaps even crucial, role in formulating such a law. In fact, there are already several hints to move forward, based on consistency of quantum cosmology. (Another obvious clue is that the new rule must reduce to the standard Born rule in situations in which an ensemble is explicitly available to an observer.) Perhaps, explorations of this issue may lead to a new theory beyond quantum mechanics, not just reinterpretation (or reformulation) of the standard quantum mechanics.

CYNTHIA: Quantum cosmology is an especially exciting field right now, as it is becoming clear that multiverse theories can be modeled using computer simulations that can be compared to cosmic background radiation. When you envision a new theory beyond our current conceptualization of quantum mechanics, what ideas do you find most interesting now?

YASUNORI: Yes, quantum cosmology is an especially exciting field right now because of observational and theoretical evidence pointing to the multiverse, gathered in the last decade or two. We are, however, not at a stage in which we can simulate the multiverse as we do for cosmic background radiation. The problems we are struggling are still conceptual: what is the probability in the cosmological context, etc. I am, however, optimistic about near future progress. One idea which I think promising, and which I have been pursuing, is that “time” we perceive emerges only locally in relevant branches (e.g. in our own universe) in the static multiverse state. This would solve many conceptual issues such as what is the beginning or end of the multiverse.

CYNTHIA: Considering time to be more of a variable than a constant in the multiverse is fascinating and mind-bending. We now have measurements from our most accurate strontium atomic clocks showing that time elapses more slowly at lower altitudes, influenced by gravity, so a clock positioned just a few centimeters higher will read a different time. NIST’s chief timekeeper, Tom O’Brian, recently stated in an NPR interview that, “My own personal opinion is that time is a human construct.” Could you describe a little bit more about how might we envision time as being something we perceive locally in relevant branches of the multiverse–is there some way to visualize such a thing?

YASUNORI: What we call time is nothing more than (a very special form of) correlations between physical objects. Consider throwing a baseball. It is usually stated that the baseball then moves (relative to the earth) as “time passes.” What is really happening, however, is that the relative location between the baseball and the earth is correlated with configurations of other physical systems, e.g. the location of the hands of a clock, relative configurations of the Sun, Earth, and Moon (although their changes are minuscule in the timescale of the motion of the baseball), configurations of synapses in your brain, etc. To describe all these correlations, one may introduce some parameter “t” and write the configurations of the systems as functions of this “spurious” parameter t as we describe a curve in a two-dimensional plane using a parametric representation: (x(t), y(t)). This parameter t is precisely what we call time—it does not really “exist” as a physical object!

A real question then is why there exists such a special form of correlations between configurations of various physical systems, more specifically correlations that are described in a simple manner using a single spurious parameter t. This is what really must be explained, which my static quantum multiverse proposal is trying to address. Note that these special corrections (i.e. time) need not exist in all the branches of the multiverse state. We only know experimentally that they exist in the branches corresponding to our universe.

CYNTHIA: You point out that our conceptualization of infinitely large space that we associate with eternal inflation is really just an illusion, and a more accurate way to describe everything is that we exist within an intrinsically probabilistic multiverse. The vastness of eternally inflating space can thus be found in probability–in which an initial state evolves into a superposition of states, with branches occurring whenever bubble universes burst forth. In your “Static Quantum Multiverse” 2012 paper, you explain how the multiverse need not evolve in order to be consistent with an arrow of time–which presents a completely different picture of cosmology than the currently popular sense of infinitely large space. Within this static quantum multiverse, can you envision there being a place for subjective observation with its associated sense of past, present and future—so important to people, as Bernard d’Espagnat’s observes, “Time is at the heart of all that is important to human beings.” For example, when imagining ourselves throwing a baseball, is there anything we can identify as being ‘now’–the present moment?

YASUNORI: You correctly summarize that the vastness of eternally inflating space can be found in probability space. In a sense, the “Static Quantum Multiverse” proposal simply says that the vastness of time should also be found in the probability space. In this picture, the (static) multiverse state contains many “observers,” e.g. myself, at “different times,” each of whom has his/her own sense of past, present and future. In your example, each of these “observers” (which we usually describe as a single observer in different moments) has his/her own sense of now, with the baseball located in the place determined mostly by the Newtonian mechanics. I can’t affirm that the absence of the absolute notion of ‘now’ is not a problem, but I think it is not.

CYNTHIA: I appreciate how your static quantum multiverse model’s inclusion of probability space and time provides such an elegant view of the cosmos while allowing for free will and unique individual experience. Thank you for sharing some of your fascinating ideas and observations about quantum cosmology, time and space! In addition to reading your many publications–which number 111 to date, according to ResearchGate–how best can people follow your work and what you are doing?

YASUNORI: It is my pleasure. ResearchGate is one option. Another possibility is to use an author search in INSPIRE, the High Energy Physics information system built by CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC: http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&ln=en&p=author%3AY.Nomura.1&of=hb&action_search=Search&sf=earliestdate&so=d&rm=&rg=250&sc=0/ I will also be updating my homepage: http://physics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/yasunori-nomura/

 ___________________________

Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps, Reality Shifts, Aura Advantage, High Energy Money, and Karen Kimball and the Dream Weaver’s Web, and the Aura Healing Meditations CD. Cynthia has a degree in Physics from UC Berkeley, and she discusses consciousness and quantum physics on numerous shows including the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, and BBC. You can subscribe to Cynthia’s free monthly ezine at: http://www.RealityShifters.com

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Big Bang Waves Suggest We Live in a Multiverse

If you’ve heard news reports of big discoveries related to the Big Bang and don’t know what to make of it, or why it should matter, you may be amazed to find that scientists have made one of the biggest discoveries about the beginning and nature of our universe–confirming that our universe began from something very, very small, and there was rapid inflation that left its mark in the form of gravitational waves.

Recent findings by physicists working with data from observations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation at the time of the Big Bang suggest that our universe experienced a time of extraordinarily rapid expansion called inflation… which in turn provides support for the idea that new “pocket universes” can be formed.

The basic idea of inflation is that spacetime is physically infinite… a fabric stretched out farther than we can fully imagine. Even more amazingly, the notion of “eternal inflation” predicts there will be an infinite number of Big Bang universes separate and distinct from ours, bursting forth endlessly from an underlying matrix. While most other Big Bang universes are likely to be quite different from ours, parallel universes are now viewed to be more than just a theory, and in fact predictions of particular theories.

This new research is generating tremendous excitement based on data collected by the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica, where scientists have been searching for evidence of a particular type of polarization existing in the cosmic radiation found everywhere in our universe after the Big Bang. BICEP stands for “Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization,” and the BICEP2 telescope is the second version of this research device. Scientists working with BICEP and BICEP2 have found primordial b-mode gravitational waves, indicating that light was polarized by existence of uniformly distributed influence of gravity on light from a time period of 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

What makes the discovery of these gravitational waves so remarkable is the phenomenal power and frequency of these waves at the time they were formed–on the order of about 10 to the sixteenth gigaelectronvolts, or 10 trillion times the peak energies found at the world’s largest operating particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)… energies so high, in fact, that physicists expect that three of the four fundamental forces in physics (the weak, the strong, and the electromagnetic forces) would operate as one. This is the first observation of quantum gravity at work, providing real evidence of a quantum connection to gravity.

While the BICEP2 results were confirmed by corroborating reports from an earlier version of BICEP utilizing different equipment, physicists are expressing cautious enthusiasm until such time as the Planck telescope provides confirmation that these gravity waves can be found in Planck’s view of the CMB, too.

And where does all this lead? The next steps for physicists looking back as far as possible to the very beginnings of this universe are to integrate new data with existing and emerging theories. Multiverse theories are gaining tremendous ground, now that inflation appears to have moved from theory to fact.

I am tremendously excited about these findings because I have been following a great deal of multidisciplinary studies, all suggesting we live in a holographic multiverse, as discussed in the book, Quantum Jumps, in which quantum effects influence much more than just the microscopic realm.

You can view the video summary of this at:

http://youtu.be/TdzLf0DpRUY

Get a Quantum Jump to Make This an Amazing Year

This can be an amazing year for you, regardless of whether or not you made (or broke) any new year’s resolutions. At this time when the placebo effect has mysteriously doubled in efficacy over the past thirty years as people benefit from sugar pills and “sham” surgery so much that Harvard University has created an institute to study the placebo effect… it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is a powerful mind-matter connection.

The mind-matter connection became crystal clear to me in the early 1980s when I came to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in the Physics program. At that time, I was one of the very few caucasians in the Physics program, and one of just a handful of women. When I sat down in one of my first lecture halls, surrounded by hundreds of mostly male Asian students, I experienced a very primal sense of fear–a feeling of “you don’t belong here.”

Fortunately, this was a familiar feeling that I’d learned to deal with before, as just two years earlier I’d been the only girl in my high school physics class. One would think such things don’t really matter, except every time a female high school student walked past the windows in our high school physics class, the teacher stopped talking mid-sentence, silence descended upon the class, and all eyes watched the young lady stroll the length of the classroom as she walked past outside.

I’d learned while taking advanced math classes and physics classes in high school to pretend that “lots of young girls just like you do great in math and science,” and this was the same cheery inner pep talk I gave myself that first year as a Physics major at UC Berkeley.

It turns out such an attitude of “faking it ‘til you make it” is enormously useful for all of us as we get older, as scientific studies show that those of us who harbor negative prejudices about old age are statistically more likely to end up the way we presume older people to be. When a group of people were asked to  describe qualities typically found in the elderly, those who expected people to deteriorate over time were found by researchers in this longitudinal study to suffer just such a fate, whereas those who viewed the elderly in more favorable light were statistically more likely to be found prospering and thriving many years later.

If you’re wondering what can possibly account for people being healed by fake surgeries and sugar pills, and aging according to largely subconsciously held prejudices about old people… you’re not alone.

Fortunately for all of us, we’re now living through one of the most exciting times in the history of the world when our entire way of thinking about ourselves in relation to the world is being transformed. We’re now at the dawn of the Quantum Age, which was officially ushered in back in September 2013 when Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center purchased the first quantum computer, the D-Wave Two, for $17 million. Thanks to a modicum of transparency with the US government financing of part of this project, we can now track some of the progress in quantum programing at the QUantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QUAIL) at NASA.

So what’s the big deal about this being the dawn of the Quantum Age, and how does that relate to this being such a great year for you?

I was inspired to write my newest book, Quantum Jumps: An Extraordinary Science of Happiness and Prosperity, after seeing a convergence in results from a number of scientific studies showing that quantum phenomena such as superposition of states, entanglement, and teleportation are happening on the macroscopic, human scale. The significance of such phenomena was not lost on me, since for the past fifteen years I’ve been conducting surveys and sharing first-hand reports of a wide variety of seemingly inexplicable experiences through the RealityShifters.com web site. What’s truly exciting now is that thanks to findings from a variety of scientific studies, it’s clear that:

1. We most likely live in a holographic multiverse of interconnected parallel possible worlds, and
2. Quantum effects are now being regularly observed on the macroscopic scale (so for example, we can witness quantum entanglement in diamonds that we can hold in our hands).

When we consider some of the quantum phenomena we’re now witnessing in the natural world in birds navigational abilities, in the way plants photosynthesize, and even in the way our very own noses work, we begin to see how we are receiving extraordinary insights into how we benefit from quantum entanglement, quantum coherence, and quantum superposition of states in our everyday lives. Nature shows us that quantum processing is built into plants and animals in such a way that provides something akin to intuitive reasoning that is an integral part of optimizing efficiency in a number of ways. Plants are able to instantly determine the most efficient way to transform a photon to stored energy, by doing something akin to simultaneously comparing all possible pathways, and choosing the best.

For us humans, this kind of natural efficiency is a bit like telling ourselves when taking a test, “You know the answer to this,” and then doing significantly better as a result. In fact, scientists have proven that this type of placebo treatment does indeed improve peoples’ test scores.

Put another way, we can consider the ways that quantum effects can improve our daily lives as doing something American psychologist William James once stated as, “If you want a quality, act as if you already have it.”

So one of the best ways to make this year one of your best years yet is simply to tell yourself that is exactly what is happening now. See what happens when you think or say aloud:

This is one of the best years of my life. 

And just for good measure, feel free to add my favorite open-ended question:

How good can it get?!

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A YouTube video summary of this blog post can be viewed here:

A Unified Universe of Entangled Diamonds and Altruistic Rats

Cynthia Sue Larson

“I believe we will continue to find increasingly strong reasons to believe that some of the strange effects observable in the microscopic world exist not only in the exotic realms, but also in more intimate domain of human experience.  I also believe that the implications of all this for understanding psi are sufficiently remote from engrained ways of thinking that the first reaction will be confidence that it’s wrong.  The second will be horror that it might be right. The third will be boredom because it’s obvious.” — Dean Radin

We are fortunate to be alive in this amazing time in history, when scientific discoveries in one field often have parallel findings in another field… such as the fascinating timing of a diamond entanglement study at the same point in time when neurobiologists are citing the significance of empathy and altruism in animals, such as jailbreak rats that spring their pals and share sweets.

At first glance, entangled diamonds and altruistic rats don’t seem to have much in common, yet once we’ve taken a closer look, we can begin to notice how in a universe where everything exists as vibration, some vibrations occur harmonically across space and time in ways that resonance is achieved and information is exchanged.

On the physics front, recent groundbreaking experiments at the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford in England have successfully demonstrated that two physically separated diamonds vibrated together when only one of them was zapped with an ultrashort laser. This kind of entanglement has been previously witnessed only at the quantum level… which is in a microscopically small realm beyond reach of our ordinary range of sensory perception. What’s so exciting about these experiments is how they move the wild and woolly world of quantum mechanics into our everyday world of objects we can touch, taste, smell, hear and feel.

Quantum entanglement is one of those strange behaviors that physicist Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” and like quantum teleportation and quantum tunneling, quantum entanglement is something seldom acknowledged on the macroscopic scale. Scientific successes in observing quantum weirdness with things larger than quantum particles initiates a paradigm shift to better assumptions about our world, such as: the energy of things matters as much as the material; non-local effects can be profound; observers influence experimental results; and some outcomes are best described in terms of probabilities.

Diamonds were selected for this entanglement study for their crystalline nature… yet we see evidence of the biological equivalent of entanglement in neurons. Over the past decade, some neurological researchers have suggested a theory that the presence of mirror neurons might help explain empathy because mirror neurons enable a person to know how someone feels by watching them, allowing that person to literally feel what they are feeling. Psychologists often conduct psychology experiments with rats, which have a special place in my heart, as my daughters had pet rats when they were young and we learned first-hand what wonderful pets they make.

Rats are highly intelligent social creatures that can form strong bonds with rats and people, as my daughters and I learned one day when our lost pet rat came bounding home after four days out in the world on her own. While I was amazed that our pet rat survived four days in the great big world on her own, my daughter explained that she’d never lost confidence in her rat returning, because, “I told her to come back home, and she did.”

The exciting news from recent studies with rats comes from University of Chicago neuroscientists Peggy Mason, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, and Jean Decety who conducted an experiment with rats in which rats had an opportunity to free a rat trapped in a plexiglass cage, and a majority of the rats learned how to open the cage and free the other rat. Rats did not free similarly caged toy rats, and when given a dilemma between opening a locked cage containing special chocolate treats and freeing a trapped rat, rats typically chose to free the trapped rat and share the chocolate treats.

The implications of these entangled diamonds and altruistic rat studies are truly profound, as it’s clear that we are now entering a time when we can feel awe and wonder at witnessing “some of the strange effects observable in the microscopic world” that Dr. Dean Radin presciently predicted we’d encounter… which invites all of us to re-envision a more unified universe in which we may be more and better connected to one another than we’ve ever previously conceived possible.

Please watch and share my YouTube video summary of A Unified Universe of Entangled Diamonds and Altruistic Rats.

On a personal level, one of the things I love most about the experimental results with entangled diamonds and altruistic rats is how they drive home the point that no matter how alone or trapped we may feel, chances are there’s someone out there who empathizes with what we’re going through, and truly cares. On a global level, one of the things I love most about being on this threshold of a whole new way of envisioning a more unified world is that humanity is being given a huge opportunity to expand our awareness of who we are and what we are capable of being and doing. And all of this helps expand what we imagine possible when we contemplate my favorite meditative question, “How good can it get?!”

Love always,
Cynthia Sue Larson
email Cynthia at cynthia@realityshifters.com

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