This article was written for publication by the Irish Association for Transpersonal Psychology.
Everything and Nothing.......Quantum Theory and Psychic Experience.
Five years ago I was one of the subjects studied by IATP member, Maureen O’Connor, for her M.Sc dissertation in Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness. I contacted her on impulse after seeing one of her posters which stated that she was seeking people who had both psychic and creative abilities and who would be willing to participate in investigating the interaction between the two. As ‘Gina’ I was one of six respondents whose views and experiences were included in Maureen’s ‘In the Living Spirit...an exploration of the dynamic between spirituality, psychic awareness and creativity.’
At the time I related to Maureen my experiences of being profoundly psychic since childhood and my view, acquired through a lot of life-learning, that there are two principle qualities, two very simple keys, to the creative living of a life of constant development and learning...the qualities of openness and integrity. Maureen quoted me then as saying,
‘If you make the decision to be open...when you have that openness, then I find the Universe becomes your teacher and, mysteriously, things are always put before you that are what you need to do next, or what you need to know.’
It had been my experience up to that point that my life had always been like a modular course in personal and intellectual development and that as fast as I completed one part of the course and was looking forward to a break the next challenge would inevitably appear on the horizon and this is no less true today. Over the years a singular theme emerged from this dialectic interaction with life. The willingness to be completely open to new experience and the ethos of engaging with this within one’s own code of personal integrity has always brought me to the same point of understanding – that of the profound interrelatedness of all things, a simultaneous awareness of both the enormous apparent complexity of existence coupled with a deep conviction of its actual and absolute simplicity. Year on year life keeps showing me, one small clue at a time, that complexity is really only a multiplicity of extreme simplicity. That the replicating patterns of our perceived reality, personal, social, emotional and physical are just a mushroom cloud emanating from a core of pure and simple potential. That the ultimate simplicity is Nothing and that the ultimate complexity is Everything and that Everything grows from the absolute potential contained in the Nothing.
Perhaps I’ve lost you, let me ground my explanation in a bit of the perceived reality of my own life. My own psychicness, in the form of clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsensience, is as normal to me as my ability to cook, raise kids, change plugs or put up shelves. It has been there all my life and I have never sought to understand how or why it works. I just know that it does, as do the many people who have either seen it in action or who have availed of its benefits over the years. My mainstream working life has always been in the twin arenas of social science and education and thus there has never been any particular imperative for me to seek a scientific rationale for my capacities.
When I was younger, and not very adept at controlling my psychic energy, the manifestations of its presence could be simultaneously very destructive and very impressive. I went through years of constantly disabling or destroying electrical appliances (both my own and other people’s), merely by touching them, of certain items of metal jewellery becoming like rubber on contact with my skin and of computers and cars and anything else remotely technological behaving erratically in my presence....my piece de resistance was the blowing of our mains fuse box whenever I became anxious or upset.
It never occurred to me to seek an answer to this phenomenon. I just knew it happened, wished that it didn’t and mostly tried to block it from my mind. Age, inner balance and the ability to channel my own energy have mostly cured these problems and inadvertent destruction is now a rare occurrence. The qualities of personal maturity that have facilitated the decline of physical phenomena have simultaneously brought with them a significant growth in my psychic capacities, particularly in the accuracy and detail of what I perceive. All in all, it’s a big package of unexplained phenomena which lie well outside the range of what most people would consider to be normal.
I was, however, quite happy in my relatively cosy and unexplained abnormality. I had my own very definite plans for my life, part of which included the setting up of a website as a platform for the extension of my freelance writing work. My plans did not include any scientific exploration of my psychic experiences but the Open Universality clearly had other ideas. My subsequent meeting with a web designer who had used quantum theory as an inspiration for a photo blog resulted in a couple of hours of discussion on the possibilities or otherwise of bridging the gap between the apparently diametrically opposed domains of the scientific and the psychic. I then went home and read his blog and suddenly I entirely understood my own psychic experience.
Put briefly, quantum physics is a branch of science that has developed during the last century based on the discovery made by Max Planck in 1900 that when objects either emit or absorb radiation they can do so only in certain specific amounts of energy called ‘quanta’. Although this sounds like a relatively simple concept in itself this discovery became the catalyst for the exploration of various forms of electromagnetic radiation, such as light, and of atomic and subatomic matter and energy. The concepts within this realm, for the rational mind at least, are anything but simple, as we shall see.
There is an oft-quoted saying in the field of quantum theory, made by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, that anyone who claims they understand quantum physics obviously doesn’t understand quantum physics. But the more I read the more I began to wonder whether trying to understand it is not the way to understand it. Nothing in the field of quantum physics can be understood by the exertion of a rational will to know, as we will see in a moment. It may be the case that the mysteries of quantum theory can only really be understood through the medium of being rather than knowing. Let me explain further by quoting you some pieces from Trevor Williams’ efastnet.blogspot.com ‘Collapsing the Wavefunction’. In it he talks of..........
‘...the mysterious and befuddling world of quantum physics...the assertion that at the base of all we see, hear and touch is a seething, microscopic world ....a world of things and non-things...where existence and non-existence occurs at the same time...a realm where all bets are on and off.’
He goes on to explain the mind-blowing nature of the quantum concept of the ‘wavicle’ or wave-particle duality of atomic and subatomic energy and matter.
‘A scientist was once awarded a Nobel prize for showing that light...was made up of little tiny particles – little lumps of stuff. A while later another scientist was awarded a Nobel prize for showing that it was made of vibrating waves of energy. Both were right, and the result was the wavicle – a wave-particle duality!’
Quantum theory is a product of the scientific paradigm, one of the founding principles of which is quantitative measurement. But to be able to measure something accurately you have to know what it is you are measuring in order to adopt an appropriate method of assessment. The wavicle then becomes the enfant terrible of the scientific method in that it refuses to play by the known rules, simultaneously containing the capacity to be both a particle (and therefore a ‘thing’) and a wave of energy (and therefore a ‘no-thing’).
The very act of measurement, that objective sine qua non of science, appears to determine the wavicle’s state at any given time. Measure it by use of a particle detector and it will cease to exhibit any wave-like properties and will, indeed, be a particle. Measure it as a wave and it will obligingly perform as such and thus, theoretically, cease to be a particle. Try and measure both at the same time and you’re in trouble.
So to cut a long story short and return to how this relates to a clairvoyant writer who wanted a website let us say that on a sunny winter’s afternoon when I went out to seek my website the Universality provided me instead with the sudden perception that the principle of Thing, or matter, and No-thing, or energy, pervaded all perceived reality and that in that moment my entire psychic existence made sense. I realized that I was, in effect, a walking wavicle.
Now we are all ‘walking wavicles’ in that these are the stuff of which everything is made and so we are all multiplicities of these most simple components of existence. But we are not all psychic. Psychic capacities and phenomena present a major difficulty for the mainstream scientific paradigm precisely because of their random occurrence and the inability of most psychics to produce ‘evidence’ at will. Although some institutions, such as John Moore’s University in Liverpool, at which Maureen studied for her M.Sc, are actively researching this field it remains the case that the psychic domain is still largely categorised by the scientific community as New Age mumbo-jumbo.
On a personal level it is an attitude that I find both arrogant and ignorant. As an individual I never sought to be psychic and never undertook any kind of conscious choice or action to achieve it. I just am and as such can produce a catalogue of ‘evidence’ going back over decades witnessed and supported by a multitude of other people, some known to me but many who were complete strangers. What I cannot do with certainty is to ‘perform’ at will and I know many other psychics who are the same. Because our capacities and their manifestations do not fit within existing parameters of replicability and predictability they are either derided or ignored. But we do exist and to ignore our abilities and the phenomena that manifest around us is an act of supreme epistemological folly. To presume that the extant scientific method is absolute and as such requires no adaptation is arrogant and to wilfully disregard that which does not fit within its parameters is voluntary ignorance.
If we return for a moment to quantum theory it also becomes evident that there is a considerable degree of hypocrisy inherent in the scientific mindset. The basic tenets of quantum theory are derived from the fact that the monolith of the established scientific method is wholly inadequate when applied to the study of atomic and subatomic matter and energy.
An array of eminent physicists have consistently found the behaviour of subatomic electrons to be fundamentally random, indeterminate and unpredictable. I quote here from the Open University’s publication, ‘The Quantum World’...
‘Quantum physics deals in probabilities...we have to come to terms with intrinsic ‘uncertainties’ or more accurately, ‘indeterminacies.’
Thus when a puzzling phenomenon occurs that the scientific community legitimates by inclusion in its own domain it becomes perfectly acceptable to acknowledge the elements of uncertainty, indeterminacy and probability. Indeed, in this case an entire and much lauded theory has been built upon them. But the concept of psychicness is excluded as a valid subject for scientific study precisely because these elements exist within its field. On a personal level I think there are significant social, cultural and gender connotations inherent in this hypocrisy as psychicness lies traditionally within the feminine domain and as such is anathema to the masculine world of science but that will have to be the subject of another article.
To return to the wavicle and its role in quantum theory, I believe it is not only a perfect metaphorical model for the understanding of the psychic experience but that it may also prove to be a valid explanatory model for what has previously been termed ‘psychic energy’.
To illustrate this I’ll return once more to Trevor Williams’ blog and link what he has to say to my own experience and then, from what is admittedly an entirely lay viewpoint, consider the relationship between the concept of the wavicle and the transmission of psychic information.
‘The wavicle is a hard thing to visualise – it’s a kind of fuzzy ball with no definite edge to it. ' efastnet.blogspot.com.
Not many things make me want to cry, but reading this did. When I read this I realized that this was me, this was what I have always been and and why I have never been able to feel I was the same as everyone else, something that for many years of my life I desperately wanted to be. From as early as I can remember I have always had a profound sense of being everything and nothing all at the same time and have always had a pervasive sense of ‘psychic’ boundarylessness, finding it very difficult to demarcate where my individual ‘energy’ ends and everything else begins. I have often felt profoundly grateful for having a body to live in so that I can at least see where the edges are. Logically, I can see that I must, like the wavicle, be made of matter and that I am therefore a thing, but like the wavicle, I have a strong tendency to drift off into waviness when not under the direct requirement to be matter-based; that requirement usually being the attention of other people or, in effect, their ‘ measurement’ or assessment of me. In fact, my default point of consciousness is, and always has been, located primarily in an existence within the energy state, the place of No-Thing rather than within the world of Thing, or matter ( and very nice it is too. )
Quantum physicists may have difficulty mentally reconciling the concept of matterenergy. It is one thing to theorise about it, another thing entirely to get your own head around it – try it and see. How can something be simultaneously both energy and matter, or sometimes one, or sometimes the other? How do you make a picture of this in your head? You can’t because in a rational, matter-based world all our mental structures have been programmed on binary either/or options. But I, and other psychics like me, have absolutely no problem with this concept because this is what we are. My entire mode of existence is to be both grounded in matter but yet simultaneously and very consciously part of the vast energy field of all existence, both this and that, Every-Thing and No-Thing, and it is this capacity that I believe to be the source of psychicness for reasons I will explain later.
The use of the term ‘ psychic energy’ within the alternative/psychic domain has been deemed to be either ‘pseudoscientific’ or simply misguided by the scientific community. This view is based on the incontrovertible fact that no additional form of scientifically definable energy has ever been discovered that could be identified as alternative or psychic. The presumption has always been made, in both domains, that the existence of such an energy would be the only possible explanation for psychic or healing phenomena.
But what if this view is entirely erroneous? What if everyone, both scientific and alternative, is looking in entirely the wrong place? What if it is not the case that there is some, as yet, undiscovered external energy at work out there in the world? Could it be possible that the answer lies in the vast, multiwavicle pool of natural and scientifically identifiable matterenergy that is continuously humming and buzzing away in everyone and everything? That perhaps this is the medium for the transmission of psychic information and the manifestation of psychic phenomena? That both we and everything around us constitute a vast energy Internet for which psychics just happen to be effective human interfaces ? It is no more bizarre a concept than radio, television or wireless telephone and internet transmission would once have been.
Pertinent questions for science would then become the ways in which lifedata becomes encoded for transmission, how it moves across the energy medium and what characteristics are inherent in psychics that make them effective ‘decoders’ .
To conclude, and to illustrate the distinct possibility of this, I will give a current example from my own experience.
I was recently introduced to M, the friend of a friend, who was having extreme personal difficulties. On a purely material level I was able to give her help and advice and within a few days we had managed to turn life around for her. No psychic mystery here but as a token of thanks she took off the pendant she always wore and gave it to me. After a day or so I started to ‘see’ pictures whenever I wore this pendant. I knew very little of this woman as I had only met her days previously but one of the things I did know was that she had recently lost her younger sister to cancer. One of the pictures that I kept seeing was of a slim, happy blonde girl who I had an overwhelming feeling was her sister. But I said nothing because M. is small, dark and completely unlike the girl I was seeing and so I was sure I had to be wrong about this and I didn’t want to upset her.
At Christmas I was invited to M’s new home, which she proudly showed me around. On the wall in her own room is a photograph of her dead sister, the blonde girl, the exact picture that I saw every time I wore the pendant. There are two immediately possible explanations for this. One is that this image is somehow ‘encoded’ in the matterenergy of M’s pendant and ‘decoded’ when I wear it.The other is that the pendant links me, USB style, to M and that I see something of what she sees. There may, of course, be other explanatory possibilities.
This incident is but one of a catalogue of many thousands that have occurred in my lifetime and is by no means the most bizarre. I have regularly seen what others see and have experienced information - transmitting links even to complete strangers.
Something is happening here, something science is currently excluding from its domain of legitimate research. Psychicness is no more or less befuddling than quantum physics and is just as much part of our natural world. I think the two may be inextricably linked and it may be no coincidence that the Greek letter psi symbolises both quantum wavefunction and the realm of the psychic. Indeed, a time may well come when current attitudes to psychic capacity will be seen as being as unenlightened as the once-held belief that the world was flat.
In fact, as a psychic, I predict it.
Gaia Charis, 01/09.