I want to acknowledge the passage of time since my last posting. Words and ideas were quite literally beyond my ability to express. Some, I’ve known, would insist it comes from my reluctance to share. If I had a nickel, as the expression goes, for every time that this was pointed out to me. It is true that sharing my observations has not always been a pleasant experience for me or those with whom I’ve shared.

I once was given an owl talon by a Cherokee shaman and teacher. This talon was to be held by me to remind me that in making a counterpoint to someone’s view, it was not necessary to rip their chest open to make my point. I acquired the skill to refrain from that behavior, though I relish the fact that I can.

This time was due more to the fact much of my learning and work in the area of consciousness is beyond words. It lies in the coming together of the intellect, heart and gut. The as above so below. What Jung called “coincidence”, many call abnormal even bizarre, I came to call normal for the territory and even came to expect.

A couple out of many. On a trip to Chaco Canyon to conduct some measurements to confirm the possible astronomical observatory theory of the canyon, I met an elderly gentleman who introduced himself as a Zuni shaman on a trip to the canyon for ceremony and a raven had told him I was going to be there and would give him a ride. How are you going to pass on that? I walked away from that trip with my measurements as well as a lineage of stories that dated the site to Stonehenge as well as experiencing my first peyote ceremony.

After Vietnam I wanted to learn the skill of meditation and wanted to go where no one had any answers only questions. Where else but Japan and a Zen monastery? Not just anyone, but one that in it’s history had never allowed an occidental student. I waited outside the gate for four days, each day a smallish man would open the door and smile at me, nothing more. On the fourth day I was surprised when he introduced himself as a Roshi and that I would be allowed to enter. In very broken English that he had been waiting for me for some time. With somewhat of an attitude, I asked if he had been waiting on me, how come it took him four days to ask me in? He replied that it was necessary to understand that I had also been waiting for him. I studied and practiced there for 3 1/2 years.

How do I express to someone who has never had the experience, that for four years my dreamtime was shared with a wolf and three Grandmothers who were my teachers?

Reincarnation as a concept came into my awareness at probably the age of eight. It made sense to me intellectually and for years I expressed a belief in. I was twenty-one and visiting the Alaskan wilderness for the first time when on the first night I heard the call of wild wolves. I had such a visceral reaction accompanied by a memory of how much I had missed that sound, that in my mind and heart the validity of reincarnation was answered and was now mine.

Now there is a gap between knowledge and making it your own, it’s like the gap between talking the talk and walking the walk. You train for a task for a period of time, you are confident that you can, but there is a difference when you have.

At this point in my writing I find that I can not understand or know how I ever intended to affect someone else’s thinking. I know that I was swept up in the idea that a change in thinking is desperately needed on the planet. I’ve found in my studies that we as a species do not need to learn new tricks but instead we need to remember. It’s interesting, I found the most agreement between my science background and those paradigms that have been labeled pagan. It is certainly true that the paradigms that speak of living within harmony with the planet, should speak to us with a loud voice.

There is a strong correlation between our separation from the planet and the rise of the personality centered cults. There is also the systematic reduction of role of the female aspect. If there are two better examples of factors to begin the explanation of how and why we find ourselves as a species on the precipice, I can’t think of any.

Another interesting tidbit I gleaned from all my searching was that the people’s we have long considered primitive, really did not have it very bad at all. We’re all familiar with the European dark ages, but in the Islamic world, people had pocket calculators. In Meso-American, civilizations have come and gone in which their cities supported a population of 100,000. They had made measurements of the Milky Way Galaxy that it took the Hubbell to calculate even as accurately.

It is becoming more clear, that the history of the modern world needs to be rewritten. Our species might be traveling to the stars right now if two events, that one could attribute to religion, the burning of the library at Alexandria and the burning of the Mayan codices. One could make an argument that we, as a species, are really just catching up with where we’ve been; even lament the idea of where we might be now.

One of my most critical insights of this whole investigation, is the understanding that, as in history, the winner gets to tell the story. You have to really dig and search the voice of those other than those with the biggest stick. Example for my Christian friends; it is the accepted story that Christ arose from the grave in a physical body. This was a matter of great disagreement among the early sects of Christianity with the other side asserting that Christ appeared as a manifestation of spirit. It was not until 500 years later that the official account of the story was decided.

I thought I might conclude this posting with another little insight that might surprise you. Jesus was a Buddhist.

I had little or no interest at the time about any of the particulars of these cultural paradigms. My interest was finding a connection between the two cultures that would serve as a macro demonstration of the quantum world.

The ninety degree opposition fit nicely into the mathematical model that comes from the examination of an exhibited phenomena in the quantum model, something called simultaneous occurrence. This is another of those hard to get your head around concepts. A particle can appear simultaneously in two places. Sounds straight forward enough but it doesn’t travel between locations, it is not two particles appearing at the same time, it is the same particle occurring at the same time in two different locations. You might want to contemplate this.

With this model in hand and my conjecture about the usage of symbols, I began to look at the Tibetan and Hopi cultures.
Now this was 1963, these cultures did not have the iconic mass appeal that they do now. It had only been four years since His Holiness the Dalai Lama was forced to flee Tibet. It would be another 15 years before His Holiness even visited the U.S. and not one Hollywood star wore robes or spoke of tantra.

The interesting thing was that the 13th Dalai Lama had written of and prophecized about the terrible fate that awaited the Tibetans. A fate resulting from their isolation and an insight to the “middle road”. The insight was that the teachings and knowledge of the Tibetans was needed by the world. This spreading of the Tibetan culture around the world by the Chinese oppression was simply a 2x4 to the forehead of the Tibetans (my metaphor).

The Hopi had a similar long history of self imposed isolation of their knowledge and teachings. This self preservation and isolation was a very understandable response to the screw job at the hands of the government of the U.S. One thing that struck me was the fact that the Hopi and Navajo of the four corners area were the only Native Americans that were not removed from their ancestral homes. That fact confused me, then I visited the area of the Hopi Mesas. (Another metaphor coming) have you ever visited a maternity ward and seen the child that “only a mother could love”?

Now, I have never been to Tibet. When it would have been possible for me, it was a decision of conscience not to go to Tibet as long as the Dalai Lama could not. The Hopi mesas, while being at first impression that ugly child, I visited twice at this time. It is with no reservation that I state that the Hopi mesas are the most magical place that I have ever visited. The light has a different quality and if you listen the wind speaks.

The fact that the wind spoke to me was good, because no one else would. Sure the gift shops attendants were eager, but any inquiries that went beyond the price, and I was told that only the Elders could speak of such things and they weren’t talking to me. I wasn’t Hopi and fourteen years old at the time. So my first ventures into the Tibetan and Hopi spiritual paradigms were through translated writings.

I found upon study that the ancient religion of the Tibetans was called Ba, and it was full of deities and demons that reflected their world back to them. (these are still an integral part of the Tibetan paradigm) The Hopi’s have as intricate a system of Kachinas. It amazed me that excluding names due to language that the two systems are basically mirror images of each other, down to the fact that the positive and negative aspects of each were represented by the same kachina or deity. Both systems recognized that both aspects were present and needed for their existence.

This was the macro demonstration of quantum. I wrote papers and sent my findings both to the Council of Elders of the Hopi and representatives of the Tibetan government in exile. They both said that my findings were “extremely interesting” and would take them under advisement and I didn’t hear from either again for fifteen years.

In 1979, I believe it was, I was living in Japan and received correspondence from both the Tibetans and the Hopi. They stated pretty much the same, that their scholars had looked at my findings and had found deeper connections that were beyond my knowledge. The connection was firmly established when His Holiness came to America for the first time and requested a visit with the Hopi. He showed up wearing the red hat of the kalachakra. It was the fulfillment of Hopi prophecy that a visitor of great importance would show up one day wearing a red hat, a marker in the countdown for the end of the fourth age of man.

This validation was a turning point for me. I was now considered eligible for oral transmission of knowledge in both paradigms. My physics professors thought this avenue of investigation was “clever”, but a career killer. So I killed it.

I decided that the clues to my understanding was not going to be found by more intellectual inquiry, but rather the expanding of my consciousness. I took my science training into an examination and hopefully an expansion of my personal consciousness. Hindu, Tibetan, Zen, Taoism, Kaballa, Sufi, Hopi, Cherokee, Chippewa, and Mayan/Toltec are all paradigms that I have had this oral transmission of teachings.

From this point forward in this discussion the facts become a bit more subjective, but are my personal truths found on this journey. I know that personal truth is just that, personal, but I feel compelled to go forward anyway.

These are the basic axioms of the quantum world, not the strangest perhaps nor the latest, but certainly some of the more thought provoking. These thoughts lead the world of physics to develop two different paths in the thinking.

One being the primary particle people, those who asserted that we could understand it all, if we could just find the primary building block of matter. We could theorize through mathematical models that in order that what we understood to be true, to work, there had to be more. We needed higher amounts of energy to reveal the “ holy grail” at this time, the quark. That required a cyclotron and lots of money.

There is a dirty little secret about science and scientists that they don’t like to talk about. Deep Throat could have been talking about big science when he said, “follow the money”. There is no conspiracy to unravel, but the facts are that researchers go to where the money is. How many of the physicists on the Manhattan Project were opposed to what they were doing, but could not resist unlimited funds to determine if it can be done?

The step child for many years was a group who asserted that the secrets weren’t held in the matter itself but in the idea that matter and consciousness were not a duality but one in the same. This thinking proposed that, yes, there would be the quark, but only after huge amounts of energy, both mental and physical were exerted in order that the new particle revealed itself. That perhaps this enormous focus of consciousness was actually creating a self predicting model. That there would be another “primary object” as long as we continued to seek one and were willing to expend energy to look for them.

Well as it turned out, the quark was found, if the trail of an object which wasn’t there, now its coming into existence and disappearing at the same time on a piece of film. First came Fermier, then CERN and now they are constructing a bigger more powerful instrument at CERN. They found the quark, but every discovery sent the theorists back to a position of predicting another, in order that what we learned continued to make the models work. They have predicted and found so many new particles that you might say that the quark is old hat, like that pair of bell bottom pants and your platform shoes.

Interesting things began to happen in astro physics; dark matter, dark energy and black holes. The work in these areas began to reveal a correlation to the quantum world. These two had always been regarded as working with no real connection, Newton appeared to explain the macro, while it took quantum to explain the very small. This duality of physical laws drove most physicists crazy. There has to be a way to bring these two realities together, a theory of everything. STRING THEORY

Now, I would never attempt to explain the workings of string, read a book. I would like to point out one “fact” of string, in fact it possibly is the only “fact”. String Theory is entirely a construct of the mind. It exists only using the symbols of mathematics. When humans first painted on walls of caves and cliffs they used symbols to communicate their understanding of the world around them. We really haven’t progressed that far.

I needed a personal experience, to substantiate my intuitions about this. I began to look for the most elegant usage's of symbols in cultures around the world. I use the word elegant because it is the word most commonly used by physicists when talking about string. The mathematical models of string are really elegant in their explanation of everything. I found my cultural use of symbols in the Hopi and Tibetan cultures. These cultures have evolved symbols and their usage into a language expressing an understanding of what exists beyond our very limited perception of reality. This understanding runs so deep in these cultures that it permeates not just a few but the entire population.

Thus, really began my quest to integrate this new esoteric view of the world with the esoteric knowledge of cultures that had viewed matter and consciousness as a singular.

Just a short thought for contemplation: if you could bisect the earth, you would find the traditional home of the Hopis and the land of Tibet are exactly opposite each other. Another dry high plateau, the Hopi word for day, nyma, is the Tibetan word for night. The word for moon in Tibetan, dawa, is the Hopi word for sun.

For the purpose to start to assemble a argument. there are more aspects of the quantum world that I need to present for your consideration.

The first is perhaps the most mind bending of the implications to come from research into the nature of matter. A physicists named John Wheeler conducted a experiment that solidifies the role of “participant” as the incontrovertible new concept of quantum mechanics. This new concept states that consciousness is embedded in the process it perceives, continually changing them while it is changed by them.

Wheeler set up an apparatus which split light and then could measure the photons as particles as they take a single pathway. or as probabilistic waves that travels both routes at the same time. After the beam was split the experimenters chose which property to measure. This choice seemed to have a retroactive effect on the beam , as it still demonstrated both wave and particle, depending on the scientist’s choice. It demonstrated that the quantum phenomena exists only in potentia, until a decision is made by conscious choice as how they are to be perceived---even if the choice is made retroactively. Although this immediate and non local effect happens beyond the speed of light and because it was thought that no signal could be transmitted in that way, Wheeler was left to wonder, “ May the universe in some sense be brought into being by the participation of those who participate?”

The existence of a four-dimensional space-time continuum means that what we perceive as the linear direction of time is only an illusion created by our particular perspective. As the physicists Arthur Eddington put it, “events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them”. Wheeler put it bluntly, “there is no space-time, there is no time, there is no before, there is no after. The question what happens next is without meaning.” Nietzche wrote, “every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment”.

Looking at all of this, and more, I began to realize the nature of matter that interested me occurred outside of my perceptions. I began to realize that I would have to combine my understanding of the science with the mystical or shamanic understandings of reality. The perspective of space-time of modern physics matches the Hopi perspective which states that all time is present now, and events unfold according to a preset pattern. The modern model put forward by physics is of a, “timeless space of a higher dimension”, this idea is echoed in many mystical traditions. Eddington was one of the first physicist to propose that relativity theory suggested,”the stuff og the world is mind stuff” and that this “mind stuff is not spread out in space-time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived from it”.

The final push for this combining came for me with the reading of a 2000 year old quote from a Buddhist sage Ashvaghosha: “Suchness is neither that which is existence, nor that which is nonexistence, not that which is at once existence and nonexistence, nor that which is not at once existence and nonexistence”. Now “suchness” (Thathagatta) refers to the eastern tradition of enlightenment, the individual experience of reconnecting with the ultimate ground of being that supersedes all dualisms.

Besides the fact that this quote sounded identical to the paradoxical expressions of physicists attempt to grasp the existence of quantum objects, which are neither wave nor particle, do not exist yet do not not exist. He was expressing these concepts 2000 years ago, this was a sign on where to look and a kick in the butt. I was at least 2000 years behind in my thinking.

When Einstein proposed, in his theory of relativity, that space and time were not separate domains but deeply interrelated, the world shifted. He discovered that the gravitational pull of physical objects actually curved space and bent time as well. Laying out his hypothesis in an elegant mathematical formulae that contradicted the core of Newtonian thinking of the world that held that space and time were absolute dimensions with no connection to each other. In the place of these absolutes, Einstein proposed a four dimensional space-time continuum in which no perspective is privileged. The physicist Sachs stated, “Relativity theory implies that the space and time coordinates are only the elements of a language that is used by an observer to describe his environment “ The shock of this upon the scientific community was quickly compounded by other shocks.

The roots of physics can be found in the thought of the ancient Greeks who made inquiries into “physis” the essential nature of things. When modern physicists developed the analytical and experimental tools to probe into the fundamental building blocks of matter, they were surprised even appalled - by what they found. They found that matter was largely composed of empty space. If you were to blow an atom up to the size of St. Peters Cathedral in Rome, the neutron at its center would be the size of a grain of salt. the electrons whizzing around the neutron cannot be considered objects in the traditional sense of the term They do not exist the way matter exists, but only evince “tendencies to exist”.

At this quantum level, physicists discovered that their attempts to measure the phenomena affected the phenomena, which led them to realize that consciousness had to be integrated into their understanding of matter. The perceiving subject could no longer be separated from the object under investigation, this concept was codified by the physicist Heisenberg in his Uncertainty Principle. With quantum objects, such as photons and electrons, it is impossible to determine both their position and their momentum. If one chooses to measure the momentum the object will appear as a wave. If it is the determination of position to be measured the object appears as a particle. But in actual fact, it was neither, or both at the same time. Heisenberg wrote, “that the path of the electron comes into existence when we observe it”. Neils Bohr wrote, “isolated material objects are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems”.

Physicists found that in the quantum world disregarded the classic physics in startling ways: as probability waves spreading through space, photon and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place at the same time only manifesting as a particle when observations are made.
They were also confronted by “quantum jumps”, electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another without passing through the space in between. They also discovered quantum non locality or Action at a Distance: once correlated quantum objects remain linked even when separated by great distances. If the probability wave of one object is collapsed to make a particular observation, the other object is affected as well. The change happens immediately, with no time lag for the message to be transmitted through space, indicating that the objects are connected through a transcendent domain.

Now, one needs to stop here and contemplate this, for this indicates that time, space and consciousness are intimately interrelated and inseparable, and there exists a higher dimension, outside our perceptions of space-time, in which everything is interconnected. Bohr once declared: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”

I think this is a good spot to stop for now. People of our culture need some time to integrate this, I know this blew me away. So I’ll stop here before I introduce some of the really strange implications that physics indicates for our existence.