TWM Fred Alan Wolf , Ph.D. is a consulting physicist, writer, and lecturer. He travels throughout the United States and the world lecturing on the new physics and consciousness and is the author of The of The Eagle's Quest , Parallel Universes, Universes, and The Dreaming Universe. Universe . His latest book is The Spiritual Universe Wolf won the American Book Award for Taking the Quantum Leap. Leap . He lives in San Francisco.
His first book SPACETIME AND BEYOND dealt with questions of science and mysticism in a cartoon format, and was described as one of the most important works ever published on cosmic unity, scientific theory, and the nature of consciousness. His second book, TAKING THE QUANTUM LEAP was the recipient of the American Book Award for Science softcovers in 1982 and one reviewer said, "The prose is every bit as exhilarating as Gamow's and exhibits the same passion to explain--humorously." His third book, STAR WAVE: MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS, was critically acclaimed on the front page of the New York Times book Review as "a brilliant original leap into the future." His fourth book, THE BODY QUANTUM was described as "introducing a new model into medicine that may allow us to reenvision the body." His fifth book, PARALLEL UNIVERSES: THE SEARCH FOR OTHER WORLDS, has been described by Publisher's Weekly as "A wild intellectual ride . . . An enthralling read." The San Francisco ChronicleExaminer said that it had "Amazing speculations on time travel, the nature of reality and existence, and the role of consciousness." New Age Journal described it as "An outrageous ride along the frontiers of science." His sixth book, THE EAGLE'S QUEST: A PHYSICIST'S SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN THE HEART OF THE SHAMANIC WORLD describes in a visionary autobiography style, the author's interactions with shamans the world over and brings to bear the author's insights into the overlap of the modern physicist's view of reality with the shaman's. The author had actually participated with several new world shamans in sometimes painful and illuminating ceremonies with them. His seventh book, THE DREAMING UNIVERSE published in May 1994 has been described as "The most important book on the nature and significance of dreams since Freud's THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS. It describes a new vision of self in the universe arising from matter dreaming.
FRED ALAN WOLF Physics and Consciousness
An abridged transcript from the THINKING ALLOWED Television Series
With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "Quantum Physics and Consciousness," and my guest, guest, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, is certainly an authority in this area. He's the author of several books, including Taking the Quantum Leap, which is a winner of the National Book Award; Star Wave, a book describing Fred's own theories about quantum physics and consciousness; and also The Body Quantum. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here, Fred. Let's talk about consciousness for a moment, because before we can talk about quantum physics and consciousness consciousness we need to start with a definition. What is consciousness to you, as a quantum physicist? WOLF: Well, first let's talk about it in general -- not just as quantum physics, but what does it mean to be conscious? There are a thousand people writing books about consciousness, and not one of them really knows exactly what consciousness consciousness is. To tell you the t ruth, I don't know what it is either. So even though I've written several books about it and have been studying it for many, many years, to tell you exactly what consciousness is, is something that's beyond my grasp. MISHLOVE: It's Goedel's theorem. A system can never understand understand or explain itself in any case. WOLF: It's kind of like a mathematical theorem, or if you like, it's so much a part of ourselves that we can't recognize it. However, we shouldn't be so discouraged by such a remark as this, because in reality we don't know what anything is. If we ask, "What is this? What is that?" all you really do is try to describe how it behaves, or what it does, or what it looks like, or what it smells like, or what your sensation of it is. You really don't know what something intrinsically is. So it's really a philosophical question as to what consciousness could be , because that's the ultimate mystery. What I'm trying to describe, and what I've learned to describe, is what consciousness does.
MISHLOVE: All right. What does consciousness do, Fred? WOLF: What does consciousness do? MISHLOVE: It sounds like you were describing it in a way, when you said we t ry to discriminate, we try to understand what things are. That is what consciousness is about. WOLF: The best way I can describe it is to speak of it in terms of some kind of huge metaphor, like an ocean of consciousness; or that consciousness is everything, it fills the universe. What it does I think is very interesting. Before quantum physics, people knew that human beings were conscious. We knew that animals were conscious. Some of the ancient traditions, particularly some of the Hindu traditions, or the Vedic traditions of ancient Indian religion, speak in terms of everything being conscious. Rocks are conscious; your thumbnail is conscious; the television cameras that are recording this show are conscious. So they speak about consciousness pervading everything. But with the twentieth century and with quantum physics, we began to see what might be called a new role for consciousness -- something that we know happens, but remained inexplicable until we began to realize that what we were talking about was the action of consciousness. So what I've been doing in my work is talking about something I call fundamental acts of consciousness. I call them FACS -- please forgive the pun. W hat is a fundamental act of consciousness? It's an action in which something is perceived. Now, in ordinary physics, or in ordinary physiology, or in most of the classical realms of science, perception is something, which is taken to be outside the realm of physicality. In other words, if you perceive something, you know that you see something. Light will strike your retina; you'll get an idea, or something will pop off in your brain, or something of that sort. But we never got the notion that somehow the act of seeing something was affecting what you were seeing or what you were looking at. But in quantum physics we've learned that when you're looking at very small objects, subatomic particles for example, the very action of looking at them disturbs them to such an extent that we never really get a complete picture as to what they actually are. Now, this has led me to think that consciousness may be at the core of this problem as to how perception can affect and change reality, and that maybe what we're doing when we're thinking or feeling or sensing or even listening to a conversation is using this action of consciousness, this fundamental act, which sort of what I call pops the qwiff -- that suddenly alters the physical reality of, say, the human body. MISHLOVE: In other words, in subatomic physics, if I want to look at a particle, I literally have to touch it. I have to bounce a photon or something off of it in order to do that. What you're suggesting is that consciousness acts in this way; it touches the things that it perceives. WOLF: That's right. MISHLOVE: It almost becomes one with them, merges with them a little bit, in the process of perceiving. WOLF: Right. The way I kind of look at it is that consciousness is a huge oceanic wave that washes through everything, and it has ripples and vibrations in it.When there are acts of consciousness, the wave turns into bubbles at that moment, it just turns into froth... MISHLOVE: And this is your whole point, that we're composed of this stuff. We're composed of this frothy little ocean. If we could see ourselves under an electronic microscope, it's about all we'd look like, I suppose.... WOLF: What I'm getting at, is that possibly we can't really address the question of what consciousness is, if we purely look at it in its objective, causal framework. MISHLOVE: You're a physicist, and a theoretical quantum physicist. And when we get to that level of quantum physics, it seems as though the mechanical notions of the universe break down completely. Everything's fuzzy, it's frothy, it's foamy, it's probability waves. Doesn't that sort of seem to be like consciousness? WOLF: Well, let me quote from Newton about this, even though we're talking quantum physics. Literally, I feel like a child at a seashore, when it comes to seeing where quantum physics is pointing. I feel like we're on the verge of a gigantic discovery -- maybe the nature of God, maybe the nature of the human spirit. Something of that sort is going to emerge from this, because our normal notions -- in fact the notions upon which we think science makes any sense at all, the notions of space and time and matter -- they just are breaking down, they're just falling apart, like tissue paper before our eyes. Wet tissue paper; it isn't even good tissue paper. It doesn't hold anything up anymore. So we're beginning to see that -- for example, in classical physics the idea that the past influences the presence is pretty normal. Everybody says, "Oh, of course." MISHLOVE: One-way causality. WOLF: One-way causality. Everybody says, "Oh yeah, naturally." I mean, that's what Newton said, that's what they all say. OK, but there's another notion. What about the future influencing the present? Is such an idea just an idea that comes about through parapsychology, or through mystical insight? Quantum physics says no, it says that definitely there is a real mathematical basis for saying actions in the future can have an effect on the probability patterns that exist in the
present. In other words, what takes places now, what choices are being made right now, may not be as free to you as you think they are. To you it may seem uncertain -- well, I'll do this or I'll do that. But if you realized that what you did in the future is having an effect now, then it wouldn't be as obvious. So it's hard to talk about it because the future's yet to come, right?... MISHLOVE: Isn't that interesting? WOLF: We need to recreate the past. I mentioned this in an article I wrote about time, saying that the past is not fixed, that there's no absolute past. I'm sure there are events that we would all agree on. For example, we could agree on the Nazi Holocaust. OK, fine, but can we agree on what was going on in the German mind during the Nazi Holocaust? Can we agree on what was going on in our minds when we were ten years old? I mean, can we really come to grips and say, "OK, when I was ten years old I was really this bubbling kid, or I was just --" MISHLOVE: But now there's a difference between interpreting the past and creating it, and I think as a physicist you're talking about creation here, aren't you? WOLF: I'm talking about that interpretation is equivalent to creation -- that there really is no fixed, solid past, and that when you go back and look at the past, what you're doing is making an interpretation which will best rationalize the present position you're now holding. WOLF: Yes. You can't really do that. So what you can do, is you can create that past so that it serves your purposes now. In other words, that past is not fixed. It's not an absolute past. In physics we have the principle called the principle of uncertainty, or the principle of indeterminism. And that principle says that you can't specify the movement of an object through space and its position in space simultaneously. You can't say both... because according to quantum physics you can't say where every little particle is, at exactly the same time. MISHLOVE: And that's all we have in the now. WOLF: And that's all we have in the now, is that constant creation of whatever happened in the past . You know, George Orwell realized this was true when he wrote 1984. He was trying to wake us up to the fact that yes, we are controlling the past.... MISHLOVE: Well, are you suggesting at a deeper level that reality changes , or are we just looking at the changes of the mind? WOLF: Yes. I'm saying that the reality changes. I'm saying that what was real in that past has actually been created by the minds of today, and what's being written down is modifying and changing that. It is 1984. It's very subtle, ... MISHLOVE: Would you say that they'd realize that we are each other? WOLF: Ultimately that is the great vision -- to recognize that everything is one. There's just one basic being, one basic consciousness, of which we're all parts in some mysterious way -- but not in the simplified way of "You go your way, I go my way, and I don't care what you do, you don't care what I do, as long as we go our separate ways, everything's hunkydory." It doesn't work that way. If we go our separate ways on a round planet, we're bound to clash as we come around the other side, right? No matter what direction you go off in, you're going to come back together. MISHLOVE: I think you're talking about something more than a round planet. You're talking about quantum interconnectedness here. WOLF: I'm talking about global consciousness. I'm talking about the fact that what one being does in some way affects everybody on the whole planet. It's not just separate beings all going their own ways. We are interconnected in ways that are very subtle and not easy to appreciate. MISHLOVE: That's your basic sense of consciousness. WOLF: That's my basic sense of it, yes. And it goes beyond that, by the way. It goes off into space too. I mean, everything is basically consciousness. MISHLOVE: I gather from what you're saying that you would therefore see your world view as very compatible with what parapsychologists are researching. WOLF: I have no problem with what parapsychologists are researching at all, because what is parapsychology? Parapsychology is the workings of science in areas which are very difficult to test. It's called fringe areas. I work in fringe areas myself, so I understand the nature of the problem. It's difficult to test it, and it's difficult to objectify it because we're
working on things which break the paradigms of normal mechanistic thinking . So we have to go beyond those paradigms if we're going to have any success at all. So I'm very much a supporter of anything which gives people a new vision of how the universe works....
The Spiritual Universe How Quantum Physics Proves the Existence of the Soul An Interview with author Fred Alan Wolf By Julie Knowles In The Spiritual Universe, Fred Alan Wolf explores the existence of the soul from the standpoint of a scientist. He reveals why he believes the mind/body question so central to spiritual philosophy is illuminated by the discoveries of modern theoretical physics. In this interview Fred addresses his theories in particular, but also the eternal mysteries of humankind: matter, soul, spirit, self, and consciousness. JK: What led you in this direction - away from the traditional methodology of your scientific training and towards a more integrative exploration of the universe? FAW: This book is not as much of a divergence from the path I have been following as it would be for a physicist who hadn't been researching areas of my interest. My path has been moving steadily away from what might be described as traditional physics, although even that field is changing as to what is considered to be traditional and non-traditional. The whole spectrum of what it is to be a human being interests me and my training in physics has led me to alternative ways of looking at these concepts. My particular interest has been the subject of consciousness: What is consciousness? Is it something physical? Is it a field? Does it have any aspects to it that are related to the physical? Does it involve only human brains and human minds? If it does involve the mind, what is a mind? Are these things that can be talked about from the point of view of science- physics in particular - or are these concepts which have to remain nebulous and illdefined for all eternity? The questions that I'm asking and attempting to make models for are really the same questions the ancient philosophers (the Greeks for example) attempted to answer. Their models, like mine, were based on their understanding of the way the world, the universe, and the laws of science worked. In a modern sense, I'm a throwback because the aim of modern science has been to divide, separate, and look at things in greater detail with a well-designed microscope that, despite its depth of detail, leaves out a lot of things in its probing. In the attempts to define things so microscopically, I think we've "thrown out the baby with the bath water." We've dismissed things, or narrowed our focus to such a degree, that we've reached a point where we aren't seeing what we were originally looking for. So, in some ways we need to step back to a more classical approach and I think that's what I've attempted in my book the Spiritual Universe. I'm looking at some of the deeper philosophical questions such as, "What is the soul?" JK: Who has significantly influenced your work? Who are the people who have really affected you? FAW: There have been a number of people who have been teachers for me, not necessarily because I followed along in their direction, but because they inspired me to move in my own direction. In the scientific field there were basically two physicists who were inspiring to me. David Bohm was a physicist I knew reasonably well and who was a great inspiration because I was able to spend time and interact with him. He would talk to me about his ideas and theories and those discussions rubbed off on me. The other was Richard Feynman who taught a course of lectures at the company where I worked. Just being able to be in his class, I saw an original mind at work. He was very intuitive, he was funny, brash, and not at all what I expected a physicist to be - this man was alive. Whenever I heard a lecture of his it always inspired something new in my thinking. People I never have known, but whose work I have read, also influenced me. Albert Einstein, for example, certainly influenced me primarily because of his humility, his humanitarianism, and his outstanding and major break with traditional science when he did his original work. He opened up a vision of physics outside the ordinary world and yet there was a "shining-ness" to his truth in the theory of relativity; his discussion of the behavior of light was very exciting. Later on, there were the writings of Erwin Schroedinger who was the father-figure for quantum mechanics and who is still an inspiration to me, as well as Werner Heisenberg. Spiritually, I have been influenced to a large extent by Buddhist thinking and those who expound the Buddhist way. I find them quite delightful and it is interesting that a lot of physicists seem to follow Buddhist principles, which is perhaps, not so surprising after all. I have also been influenced by Jung and Freud. Although they went in very different directions, I found something original in their thinking that was exciting to me. JK: The Buddha, of course, did not believe in the existence of the soul. FAW: Yes, that's right. The Buddha had a remarkable ability to see what there is to see and to deal with what's it there. That made his approach to the spiritual or to the human problem of existence very refreshing. This is very similar to what a scientist does. We try to drop all assumptions about the way things should be, and deal with things the way they are. Although that's not always possible to do, it nevertheless is the basis of Buddhist thought.
JK: What are your definitions of soul, spirit, matter, self, and consciousness - the primary concepts discussed in this book? And, can you explain the relationships between them? FAW: To begin with, I want to emphasize that as the ancient philosophers did, I use metaphors as models that are based on my understanding of how the physical world works. Using metaphors allows me to explain things that are unfamiliar, in terms that are familiar, at least to me. -For example, almost all of these concepts- soul, matter, self, spirit, and consciousness can be defined by conceiving of two basic objects. One is a vibrating string as you might see on a violin, and the other is a mirror which reflects back images of the "real" world. In my models, both are placed in the context of quantum theories. -Spirit would be akin to the vibrations of the string, and to make it more applicable, we imagine the string to be infinitely long and shimmering or vibrating, due to the random input of heat, air, or just the vacuum of space itself, randomly fluctuating. This vibrating is the movement of the spirit. -This constant movement, energy, or life, is the modus operandi of the string, or spirit. In modern science this notion of a vibrating string is located in the vacuum of empty space. Physicists understand that we can model the vacuum as if it were filled with these vibrating strings and thus the vacuum itself becomes vibratory and is a natural place to look for spirit. -The soul is the reflected vibrations of the vacuum within the domain of time. Time (and the soul) extends from the beginning and ending points of time, known respectively as the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. The soul reflects from these vibrations just as an image is reflected from a mirror, and the soul embodiment in the material substrata is what I call "self," or the "selfprocess." The soul has to relate to itself continually in the body and therefore its basic concerns are with the survival of the body, or our material nature. The soul isn't necessarily embodied to begin with, but the self is. -What is consciousness? Consciousness occurs when there is a reflection. What is being reflected depends on the form of the consciousness. If we're talking about primal reflections from the beginning and ending of time, then the reflection produces a conscious soul. When reflections are from points in space, then those become essentially unconscious pieces of matter. -The self , because it is a reflection of something that is conscious (the soul) in matter which is unconscious, has both elements. So, the self is both conscious and unconscious. This then, offers a model for what we mean by consciousness and unconsciousness in that there is a consciousness reflecting off an unconscious material. -What makes the description of these things difficult is that they are alive and processing - they are not static objects. The self is not static. It is ever-changing and reflects something deeper that is the soul. The self is always embodied or contained. It is always a reflection of the soul that is in the body itself. So, the challenge we face is to define the processes, rather than the entities themselves. JK: Can you explain the theory that you just referred to, that the universe as we know it, exists in a vacuum? FAW: It's truly remarkable. There was a great philosopher and scientist whose name was Arthur Eddington and he gave us a model to understand this concept. As Arthur pointed out: here I am, sitting at a table, writing this paper. However, when I describe this "real" table in the language of science as I understand it, it is a ghost; in fact it is made of atoms that are themselves mostly empty space. -If you look at an object the size of the nucleus of an atom and compare it to the whole of an atom, one finds it to be one part in a hundred million billion or something ridiculously small like that. So the universe which is made up of atoms is mostly a vacuum: it's mostly empty. There's hardly anything here in terms of what we call the material world! -When you understand this concept, it radically alters your perspective of the universe and in fact, the vacuum or empty space that never goes away, becomes just about the only thing that is tangible and real when you take the Eddington point of view. JK: You also talk about the soul wanting to manifest itself in matter, which creates an ongoing tension that the self perceives as desire. FAW: Yes. The process is like this: There is undifferentiated spirit which is both conscious and unconscious. In order to become conscious it has to reflect, and that creates time. Further reflections in space form matter, so now we have space, time, and matter. Once that happens, there seems to be a desire to come out of time into space... that would be manifestation. So, coming out of pure action into something inert, there is something that stops the action: a resistance. There seems to be a need to create the resistance to oneself, which is desire. -The Qabalists speak about this frequently-that resistance is necessary for life. The resistance is necessary for spirit to know itself, so to speak. It's like the myth of Narcissus, or the myths of the dog with the bone in its mouth looking down into the river and seeing a bigger bone. Somehow, once there is a means by which a reflection can occur, there is a desire that arises. Maybe that's the fundamental spark of desire. -It could be a desire that we all have for each other, or to be in love, or the basic sexual desire that's the fundamental energy. Basically, each of us desires, because we want to express love with ourselves. We don't desire the other, what we really desire is a true connection to ourselves and we believe we see that in the other. I think that's what falling in love means. It's a falling out of the vacuum into the material. JK: Rumi described his desire as "rising in love."
FAW: Now that's different. Rising in love would be compassion. The desire to rise in love is very different that the desire to fall in love because there is an association with falling in love of satisfying the sense of the body; whereas, rising in love is almost a renunciation of that need to satisfy the senses. JK: If humans are consciously developing self-reflective awareness and the responsibility that inevitably goes with that, how do you see our role in the evolution of consciousness and human development? FAW: It seems evident to me, and maybe it will become more evident to others, that consciousness and matter are not in such separate camps as a lot of people used to think. It was popularly thought that mind deals with mind things thoughts, feelings and so forth - and that body deals with physiological things, and that there is virtually no communication between the two. -Now, particularly after some of the research I did for The Spiritual Universe, it seems to me that knowledge can be envisioned as embodied. Not in the metaphorical sense, but literally embodied in the material sense . Knowledge can alter and change the biology and physical structure of the thing that has that knowledge. How that knowledge is expressed can really change the body. In other words, there is the possibility that we can alter and change ourselves by how and what we learn, how and what we inform ourselves with, and what we do with that information. -If you ask me how do I do that - can I make myself float off the ground, or turn a cloud into rain - that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is how thinking can affect the nervous system of the body and the brain. -For me, taking some of the responsibility for that means being as open and as truthful about what I know as possible. I think that if people were more open and truthful, and if others did not react through violence to what another person expresses, we could learn a lot more from each other. We could become more human than we have been up to this point. -So, responsibility seems to me that those of us who have this expanded awareness just have to continue developing, writing, speaking, and being with people - recognizing that your presence, your words, and your attitudes do more than just express yourself or your mind, but affect mind overall. I think that's enough. Julie Knowles is a masters degree candidate at John F. Kennedy University's Consciousness Studies program, with a concentration in Dream Studies, and a certificate candidate in Conflict Resolution. email:
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