Quantum Revelation, Part Two

Can we change the plot?

Ayahuasca journey on a terraform’d Mars, courtesy of Midjourney

Yesterday, I started to explore Paul Levy’s very enjoyable Quantum Revelation.

I mentioned the thesis, developed in my past work, that humanity, in symbiosis with the Earth, may be undergoing a bio-cosmic evolutionary process. This process is, I suspect, as perfectly timed and orchestrated as other processes we find across nature. For example, the development of the fetus in the womb from conception to birth, or the caterpillar’s metamorphosis into the butterfly.

This thesis, perhaps, impinges upon our sense of individual free will. However, physics, as Sabine Hossfelder explores in Existential Physics, doesn’t leave much room for free will, generally. At least not as we typically conceive of it. “What you do today follows from the state of the universe yesterday, which follows from the state of the universe last Wednesday, and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang,” she writes.

Eastern mystical traditions and many religions tell us that individual free will is an illusion. Our belief in it actually holds us back from liberation. For example, the Ashtavakra Gita (the whole text is here; it is a must-read) states:

The thought: “I am the doer”

Is the bite of a poisonous snake. To know: “I do nothing”

Is the wisdom of faith.

Be happy.

In ancient Vedantic thought, the Self or Atman is absolutely free, and we are, ultimately, aspects of that Self:

As waves, foam and bubbles

are not different from water, 

so the universe emanating from Self 

is not different from Self.

As our little egoic selves, we are merely dreams that the Self is having. We recover freedom when we shift our locus of identification from our personal ego-ic self to the big Self, atman, which is pure awareness without any object. 

A central idea of Islam is submission or surrender to the will of God. In fact, for Islam, nothing truly exists outside of God’s will, which is Absolute. As Frithjof Schuon writes in Understanding Islam, Islam “teaches the reality of the Absolute and the dependence of all things on the Absolute. Islam is the religion of the Absolute as Christianity is the religion of love and of the miracle.” This may explain why, philosophically, Islam and postmodern secular civilization struggle to coexist. 

We tend to think of our human creations as something separate that stand outside of nature. I suggest this isn’t the case — that we continue the organic evolutionary process through our various creations and projections. Just as a flower automatically turns its pedals toward sunlight, or a slime mould oozes toward nearby sources of nutrition, humanity relentlessly works to extract energy and resources from its environment for our own, obvious purposes. Our technologies are prostheses through which we extend our various capacities, whether a car for transport, a microscope for sight, or a Chat GPT to extend our mental powers.

We might think of our globe-spanning post-industrial civilization as an extended body. This suggests that humanity-plus-Earth has, at least, an opportunity to evolve into a unified, harmonic planetary super-organism, if we can make the shift — we might consider it a “quantum leap” — from competition to cooperation as our basis for our activity. Such a drastic mutation in our consciousness and social practices could only be triggered during an existential emergency, such as the one we have unleashed via industrial pollution / global warming and nuclear warheads plus other WMDs.

As I wrote in How Soon Is Now, we might look at multinational corporations as the decentralized organs of our planetary super-organism. They build and operate the technological systems and infrastructures — the shipping lines, extraction industries, recycling plants, satellite systems, etcetera — spread across the Earth. Energy companies, for example, function like the body’s circulatory system, keeping the body moving. Media companies act like sensory organs: They register the raw data of what’s happening (wars, earthquakes, supply chain breakdowns) and convert it into memes, myths, narratives which guide the collective body’s decisions and movements. The money system functions like the super-organism’s nervous system, flickering instantaneously, directing energy and resources to billions of nodal points across the human/planetary symbiote.

Unfortunately, we drive this gigantic apparatus – both made by us yet separate from us and seemingly out of our control – with the wrong set of goals and principles. Under the fragmented individualist/materialist paradigm, people, companies, and nations strive for power, dominance, and control. Forms of control include control over physical regions of the Earth, over intellectual property rights, or over human consciousness using techniques of manipulation and indoctrination. We have lost contact with other ideals or potentials that could redirect our still-immature super-organism away from toying with oblivion (currently we’re playing Russian Roulette with biospheric self-extinction). 

According to the quantum awakening, such efforts at control are ultimately delusional and must produce negative results. This is obvious if we consider the Buddhist maxim, “As Viewed, So Appears,” which meshes perfectly with the quantum worldview. To some extent (perhaps a greater extent than we can yet quite fathom), how we perceive and approach the world creates a world that appears to us in that form — as “real.” 

As Werner Heisenberg put it: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” The worldview of technocratic rationalism and economic utility creates and gives illusory certainty to a particular world shaped by its ideology. Within that world, certain goals become attainable, while other possibilities are exiled, inconceivable. 

I think about this, often, as it relates to my (admittedly short) visits to different indigenous communities, working with ayahuasca and other visionary plants and learning their practices. For example, the Kogi and Aruak in Colombia possess a highly developed local knowledge system that includes magical and divinatory practices that produce successful results. As I have also discussed here a number of times, there is the “Rainbow Body” of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, where the physical body shrinks or dissolves entirely (leaving behind only hair and fingernails) after physical death. There are also many well-documented examples of monks whose bodies do not decompose for months after they die. They are known to be maintaining themselves in a subtle state of consciousness as they choose the manner of their rebirth. 

When I visited the Secoyas in Ecuador, they stated matter-of-factly that when their community drank ayahuasca together in the past, they would pray/sing new plants into existence: Occasionally, at the end of an all-night ceremony, the presiding shaman would look down at his hand and a new seed or stem would have manifested, which might help to treat a medical condition faced by a member of the community. Personally, I have experienced enough paranormal and psychic phenomena to be convinced that the boundaries of “reality” can be stretched like taffy. My intuition is that all of these possibilities remain completely available to us. What is conceivable and attainable is rooted in ideology and perspective or point of view, when combined with disciplined activity toward a goal.

Let me ask you a question, dear reader: