The Physics of Consciousness

“At the heart of everything is a question, not an answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled face looking back at us.” John Archibald Wheeler

Hello again. John Wheeler, leading theoretical physicist of the 20th century, collaborated with Einstein on the vision of a unified field theory, worked on the principles of nuclear fission with Niels Bohr, on the Manhattan Project, hoping to end WWII. Wheeler was first to coin the term “black hole”. He spent his later years teaching at Princeton University and some of his most notable graduate students are also among some of my physics heroes, Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett the third, who proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics - of which I am a huge fan!

So why am I rattling on about this guy? Because he was one of the most influential role models to a reasonable translation of own mysterious life. My all-time favorite Wheeler quote: “I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination.”

I wanted to begin here with an explanation of how and why I decided to create this channel. This is because many of the topics mentioned in the intro to the video are situations I have in some way either encountered myself or have personal experience with.

One of the first and most memorable things I learned as a child was from my grandmother, my first metaphysical mentor. She had been watching me playing with my sisters. When I yelled out to my sister that what she had just done was stupid. My grandmother stopped the game and told me that “words and thoughts are things”. She went on to describe that using thought or imagination is what creates the world and told me to be careful what I thought or said, because it could happen. She explained that thinking words is the same as saying them out loud, so if I didn’t want to hurt my sister, I should not say such things.

From childhood and all throughout my life, I’ve had an inner perception or innate knowledge that has guided me though life, sometimes as a simple gut feeling other times as a visual manifestation of light-configurations or other sensory perceptions. As strange as it may seem, from my first moments of awareness I have had memories of coming from another realm, another plane of existence. From that early age, I knew that Earth was not my home and I was a visitor from another world. From the time I learned to speak I shared this knowledge with my mother and siblings. To my little open mind, the fact that I came from another world did not seem scary or odd to me, just a reality. I felt safe with my new family. At age three I asked my mother about my adoption - as I figured if I came from another reality and my sisters didn’t, I must have been adopted. Well, my mother quickly assured me that she remembered giving birth to me as a baby, yet what I clearly remembered was coming into the body of a child much later, while retaining all the memories of the child’s life before my arrival. And as I’ve mentioned this didn’t seem unusual in any way to me. The only discomfort was that I was the only one who seemed to have these memories and this sort of experience. Luckily, my family was very understanding and allowed me to be who I was, no matter how unconventional that all sounded to them. As I said, when I was very young I saw this all as a normal part of my life and who I was as a person. For example, from my first memories, I was aware of a constant loving presence in telepathic communication with me, guiding me and comforting me. When I was faced with a difficult choice, I could sense the guidance, sometimes even as a voice in my head, assuring me I could do it and it would be okay. And those few times I didn’t listen I always found myself regretting it.

Yet, as I grew and matured, I became increasingly aware that not everyone was seeing or sensing what I was and this became confusing, as I learned to hold certain things within my own experience. And because I was curious about so many of these rather unconventional occurrences, it became really important to learn as much as I could about these phenomena. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew these things were not fantasy, but very real and I began to read everything I could on the subjects of psychic phenomena, consciousness, extraterrestrials, and the magical worlds of the unseen. I took a course in quantum mechanics from Stanford University and was excited to discover that most everything I had experienced had a place, sometimes obvious, other times deeply hidden, within this fascinating quantum world of probability and wave function collapse, where every decision creates an alternate universe and most thrilling, the awareness that it is our consciousness that creates the universe, rather than the universe creating our consciousness. With these exciting realizations my entire world took on a new thrill, a new enthusiasm.

I learned how to lucid dream and to see with my eyes closed, to astral travel and how to influence matter, make things happen. Interestingly, over time I found that most of these things I was able to accomplish, would only manifest if I was in a place of high vibration and through a loving heart. I’ve since learned that this is because love is who we truly are. This innate sensation, this emotion, is at the very core of our being, our essence as a soul, as a consciousness. So, although you could say I ended up living a fairly conventional life, my thoughts, my instinct always returned to those exciting topics others never wanted to discuss or had even determined to be delusion or fantasy. And, these unique abilities may not be seriously considered in most scientific circles yet, but fortunately are beginning to show up even within academia as university courses and research studies.

We are now at a time when even the more traditional aspects of contemporary science are opening doors to potential and possibilities either hidden or ignored only 50 or 75 years ago, with the birth of quantum mechanics. And with the widening of these formerly imposed obstructions comes a time of assessment, reevaluating some of those principles and concepts hastily written into textbooks as truth, rather than the hypothesis and conjecture they truly were, lifting barriers and generating a new science. Unfortunately, it’s a very slow awakening, but happening nevertheless. I’m glad I lived to see this time when the most prestigious institutions are now hard at work researching many of those formerly forbidden phenomena, such as superposition or entanglement or the mysteries of non-locality, are now studied as the way our reality works, although sometimes still not easily discovered in every educational program, or even in mainstream conversation.

So where do we go from here? I believe the definition of corrupt…or maybe I should say irresponsible, is a closed mind - one who believes that reality consists only of what is in front of him. Many years ago people believed the earth was a disk, or that the sun went around the earth, or that we only use 10% of our brain, or that Twinkies last forever, HA! So would it be such a leap to find that matter is not solid or that consciousness is fundamental to all of existence, or even that extraterrestrials really do exist? As physicist David Bohm was known for saying, “The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.” So, why stay stuck in an old paradigm when there are so many exciting discoveries at hand right now within reach of any inquisitive intelligence.

On the other hand, skepticism can be healthy, but only when one’s mind is open to change. A closed mind is dangerous, because it slams closed the door to any further learning. One who’s mind is closed usually tends to be run by ego and all too often anyone who doesn’t agree with them is wrong and must be reined in, controlled, before their crazy ideology infects other people and we’ve all seen how well that has worked out so far. We’ve been taught to be afraid of anything new or alternative to the conventional model and are therefore easily controlled by one in authority. Yet, there is a potential positive here, in that I have noticed that one who has previously had the strongest intolerance against …let’s say the transcendental for example, when through some significant emotional event, like perhaps a near death experience or an out-of-body state, now becomes the staunchest of supporters to that which they formerly scorned, or even despised. A great example is Dr Eben Alexander’s total transformation after an incredible near-death experience, while deep in a 7 day coma, with essentially no brain activity. Before his NDE he didn’t believe in an afterlife, but after emerging from his otherworldly experience, he understood that our consciousness goes far beyond the limitations of the body and is truly who we are.

And what causes one to have a mind closed to new knowledge and where do these prejudices come from? They usually begin in childhood, from parents and teachers or classmates and friends, or even those in the media or on news reports. I’ve learned that one of the greatest things we can do for our own personal growth or soul-advancement, is to look back on our lives and discover which of our beliefs actually belongs to us, and which were learned from someone else. Also, which beliefs are for our greater good and which are harmful to our development and peace of mind? Where did we learn that limited thought and from whom? We may be very surprised how many judgments we picked up from other’s remarks, perhaps our parents, or maybe someone we were trying to impress and wanted them to like us and so we took-on their stuff as our own, or maybe someone we admired at the time, but once we began to open our own minds realized just how limited, and maybe even harmful, that belief was.

Back in the 80s I had a group of friends that would get together once a week and discuss fascinating subjects like, if the universe came from nothing, what did nothing come from? Or, because linear time only exists in a realm of duality, does it cease to exist the faster the frequency? Or, if the higher densities exist in a timeless state of eternity, then there is no before and no after and that empty void of nothing still exists, which means that there really was no beginning and will be no ending, only a state of perpetual existence or isness, therefore either the Big Bang never happened, or is still happening!

Another of my favorite topics of discussion with this group of friends was, is this universe real or just a dream or a hologram, which means it could be just an illusionary realm for our consciousness to play in, like a game, maybe just for fun, or maybe to learn and grow. And if we indeed are the consciousness, the body must just be a physical vehicle that allows us to participate in the game and if this is so, is the reality around us even real? And here’s the idea of the holographic or simulated reality. So what are we, a thought, an idea?

You know, we are constantly influenced by others and the way I see it, one of the most meaningful things we can do to improve who we are as a person, a soul, is to learn to discern what is really us - what do I believe? What do I know to be true? What feels right within me as a part of myself? What do I want to put out into the world, as me? No one else can do this for us and we may just find that the more we discover our true self, the more and deeper knowledge that is available to us. This is why the work being done in these previously taboo subjects is so significant and so pivotal to human development and to mankind’s ongoing role in the universe.

Thank you.