🍄 The Quantum Blueprint

The Quantum Mind weaves through the dense jungle of quantum physics, Zen, and subjective experience, and arrives at an unexpected destination. Did the ancients know more than we do today?

Sep 08, 2023

From the minds of Sputnik Futures. Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

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I had a dream…
I was working on this newsletter at the time but not with any indigenous angle, but I woke up from a dream to the word ‘Iroquois’—so googled it with quantum physics and the Real Peoples Media podcast came up 😊 —Ellen, an ALICE writer

“Quantum physics kind of explains what is in our language already,” Tehahenteh Miller, a Turtle Clan Kanien’kehà:ka Elder from Six Nations tells Real Peoples Media podcast. “That’s why we call it spiritual language – because it has vibration. And everything responds to vibration.”

Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. More than just a Plato platitude, “Human nature was originally One and we were a whole,” is a tale as old as time. From Native American creation stories and Hindu scriptures to historic Hermetic texts, Vedantic visions and spiritual ‘synchronicity’-speak, the idea of an omnipresent One Mind Universe is all embracing. Sure, evidencing what came before the Big Bang might make western scientists’ heads explode, but in certain cultures, the concept of connected consciousness is a calm certainty.

“The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new; for millennia it's been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies,” Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), states in Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. “What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct.”

An Eternal Ecosystem

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” ― Niels Bohr (Nobel-Prize winning physicist and a pioneer in quantum theory.)

Let’s quantum-leap back into ALICE’s previous peak into the quantum mind. We spoke of ‘quantum entanglement’—the theory that particles once combined can instantly influence each other, no matter the distance, forever. The one that Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." You can brush up on the basics of quantum physics in our newsletter here, but essentially it’s the study of atoms and subatomic particles at the deepest layer of reality we know, and how they interact.

“One of the most surprising discoveries of modern physics is that objects aren't as separate as they may seem,” writes Radin. “When you drill down into the core of even the most solid-looking material, separateness dissolves. All that remains, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, are relationships extending curiously throughout space and time.”

Remember how Nobel Prize-winning Erwin Schrödinger (the ‘father of quantum physics’) thought that “the total number of minds in the universe is one”? In 1925, he wrote that, “consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception.” He emphasized his point by comparing it to reflected light from prisms, and never changed his mind. Schrödinger was similarly convinced that metaphysics does not come after physics, but precedes it. He often referenced the ancient Indian philosophy that consciousness is only one, singular, identifiable with its universal source (Brahman). He would also end his conferences with what he called the “second Schrödinger equation”: “Atman = Brahman” (meaning, the individual soul is the same as the universal soul), the Indian doctrine of identity.

Soul Searchers

“Some 2,700 years ago in the ancient city of Sam’al, in what is now modern Turkey, an elderly servant of the king sits in a corner of his house and contemplates the nature of his soul,” writes Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, for Aeon. “His name is Katumuwa. He stares at a basalt stele made for him, featuring his own graven portrait together with an inscription in ancient Aramaic. It instructs his family, when he dies, to celebrate ‘a feast at this chamber: a bull for Hadad harpatalli and a ram for Nik-arawas of the hunters and a ram for Shamash, and a ram for Hadad of the vineyards, and a ram for Kubaba, and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.” Katumuwa believed that he had built a durable stone receptacle for his soul after death. This stele might be one of the earliest written records of dualism: the belief that our conscious mind is located in an immaterial soul or spirit, distinct from the matter of the body.

“The soul is neither born, nor does it ever die; nor having once existed, does it ever cease to be. The soul is without birth, eternal, immortal, and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” —Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2, Verse 20.

“This provides us with the reasoning that conscious of universe existed as spirit even before matter was created, say at the Big Bang,” writes Rudra Dubey, referencing ‘Bhagavad Gita’ in a MyInd essay titled: “Are Shiva and Shakti The God Equation That Relativists and Quantum Mechanists Seek?” “The primordial essence of the duality of universe involving energy and matter may need us to dive in the micro-structures such as in the nucleus of atoms. The subatomic particles acquiring mass in Boson field from Boson is akin to the same concept of unification of Shakti and Shiva, the basic Spirit-Substance duality,” writes Dubey. “Boson field provides boson to what it unites with, and as a result mass is created and that in turn creates gravitational attraction. This can conceptually be intertwined with string theory, and envisioned that all strings vibrate at subatomic level enabling four forces to work and allow the incompatible time space and quantum both to function without duality.”

So Below, As Above

The tide is turning.

“Scientists are now finding that there are ways in which the effects of microscopic entanglements ‘scale up’ into our macroscopic world,” he says. “Entangled connections between carefully prepared atomic-sized objects can persist over many miles. There are theoretical descriptions showing how tasks can be accomplished by entangled groups without the members of the group communicating with each other in any conventional way. Some scientists suggest that the remarkable degree of coherence displayed in living systems might depend in some fundamental way on quantum effects like entanglement. Others suggest that conscious awareness is caused or related in some important way to entangled particles in the brain. Some even propose that the entire universe is a single, self-entangled object.”

And: As Above, So Below

Again, that’s nothing new. Historians understand the Hermetic text of ‘as above, so below’ (approximately 200-500 BCE) to reference the sun’s effect on Earth’s seasons and the moon on the tides. However it’s also the Hermetic view that ‘all created things pre-exist in God and God is the nature of the cosmos, being both the substance from which is proceeds and the governing principle which orders it.’

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan also wrote in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, that “science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.”

A New Wave of Possibility?

“Quantum physics has known for a hundred years that observation is an energetic event; not inert, but participatory,” writes Ginny Whitelaw, CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership, in Forbes. “It is the very stimulus that brings out the particle nature of what otherwise also behaves like a wave. It is the precipitating event that ‘collapses’ a wave function of possibilities into a particular object. But this participatory role of consciousness has yet to collapse our collective belief in an objective reality.”

Out of Sight, Still In Mind

David Bohm is considered one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20^th century and strongly supported the idea of a single, over-arching mind that includes all individual minds. It’s not unlike how the Iroquoian understanding of life is based on the idea of a giant energy connected to everything in the universe.

ALICE listened to and loved this Real Peoples Media podcast interview with Tehahenteh Miller, a Turtle Clan Kanien’kehà:ka elder from Six Nations. “When Earth was being propagated the Original Instructions (Ogwehowehgeka) were given by an entity, a great, intelligent, natural energy,” he says. “This intelligent energy has a feeling that it wants to expand its knowledge and that coincides with the Big Bang theory. It sent all its parts out to gather information and bring it back.”

He compares the story of pregnant Sky Woman falling through a hole created by an uprooted tree, to science’s wormholes, the hypothetical structures – visualized as a tunnel - connecting disparate points in spacetime. “We have a sky being falling through space and all she can see is water, which again basically coincides with science saying that the world was covered with water in its initial stages of formation. Land rises up, which we call the Turtle. And actually it’s barren, because the back of the Turtle is barren. And so all of these things connect. And so a process using life that was already here, provides her with the Earth that then grows on its own. And that coincides with everything we know about natural energy as well.

Where does this energy come from? You can look at the smallest particle – well now they have identified smaller particles but look at the atom for instance. It’s got these electrons flying around there – well that’s not being powered by the mighty Duracell battery right? It’s alive, because it has those other electrons flying around it. And it reacts with other atoms that come together and form their individual parts. And so in its smallest form (as its used to be known) it’s still intelligent. In other words there’s an outer space and an inner space. And this gets kind of into the realm of what they call Quantum physics. Quantum physics kind of explains what is in our language already. That’s why we call it spiritual language—because it has vibration. And everything responds to vibration.”

ALICE has been on ‘the vibration of everything’ tip for awhile. It all started in 2001 with an event titled ManTransforms. At this event, we asked, “Where are we headed as a culture, and as a species?” Whether you call it curiosity or just plain naïveté, we rounded up a mix of theorists representing the furthest reaches of scientific thought. At ManTransforms, posthumans mingled with string theorists and ecologists shared the stage with astrologists. The godfather of virtual reality gave way to a cosmologist, and we all found the connection points.

Of all the great minds we have spoken with, one conversation with the philosopher Ervin László has stayed with us, like a song we can’t get out of our heads: “Now I think it’s time to come back to this concept of belonging to a larger community, the community of life on Earth—which is itself a part of the community of the solar system, part of the galaxy, part of the universe. So this is a cultural change, a change in consciousness.”

His wisdom is ever more relevant to the uncertainty of today, and the inevitable transition to come.

Whether you believe in the science or the spiritual explanation for this great shift, one thing is clear to us: We are on a new energetic path. Can you feel us?

What else we are wondering…

🔍 Have we lost our minds?
We mean, literally. Dictionaries dictate that the brain is composed of nerve cells and can be touched, where as the mind is considered to be mental, and can’t be touched. Scientists try to define the mind as the product of brain activity, but evidence is piling up to suggest it goes well beyond the brain. “Science has largely flattened the subjective experience of mind to the objective functioning of the brain. Mind equals brain equals machine,” was the way one of my graduate school professors put it,” writes Ginny Whitelaw in Forbes. She argues that this view guided neuroscience for years, including through the 1990’s, aka “the decade of the brain.” Even though there’s a lot more to mind than can be accounted for by brain— from the enteric nervous system to consciousness in every cell, to the energetic fields surrounding the body—Whitelaw explains that the brain bias of science reinforced the subjective experience of “I” as a ‘little voice in the head.’ “If you ask someone where their mind is, that’s likely where they’ll point.”

🔍 What Is Life Force?
What animates a non-living object to make it alive? Prana, chi, there are many terms for it across many ages. ALICE likes how Tehahenteh Miller tells it. “Creation story says the great intelligence feeds information to the twin boys (Sky Woman’s grandsons, who are spiritual beings) that they should mix the matter on Earth with the energy (the spiritual being.) Good twin picks up clay and fashions a doll that looks like a man. He puts his breath into it three times and the breath becomes the life. We liken it to the stars. Because it’s a little sparkle thing we can all relate to and we call it the inner flame. When people die, the body goes cold. The flame leaves. That energy goes and just leaves the clay. So that’s that cycle. Original instructions is that in this form where matter and energy come together, is a limited life span.”

🔍 Brain WiFi?
In this essay for Aeon, Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, asks: “Instead of a code encrypted in the wiring of our neurons, could consciousness reside in the brain’s electromagnetic field?”

🎧 In a podcast interview with ALICE, McFadden explains how our brain is like WiFi and our consciousness is a field.

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland Books
🎧 Alice in Futureland Podcasts
🎧 Consciousness and the Quantum Mind with Johnjoe McFadden
🎧 Consciousness & Healing with Shamini Jain
🎧 The Energy of Everything with Andrea Kartika Deierlein
🎧 Epigenetics and Consciousness with Mickra Hamilton

Thanks for tuning in.