Religious people — and by this I mean people who are deeply committed to a religion and aspire to live in accordance with its scriptures — usually fear science: they suspect that science contradicts some of their cherished beliefs, beliefs they are asked to accept on faith. And because many believe that the best defense is offense, the religious often attack science and scientists, and widen the gulf that separates these branches of contemporary culture. This is regrettable, for throughout history every enduring culture embraced the best of its dominant religion, together with the rational and empirical ideas that made up the science of its time. The current gulf is all the more regrettable as it’s based on a fundamental misconception.  Indeed, on two misconceptions: of the nature of religion, as well as of science.

The average religious person identifies the religion that he or she espouses with the doctrines of that religion. These are the sacred scriptures created by the founders and prophets of that religion. For the most part they are centuries old, and contain sayings, episodes, and injunctions that are said to come from a higher, superhuman authority.

If it is its doctrines that make up a religion, then there are reasons for the faithful to fear science, or at least a dominant (mis)conception of science (and the misguided souls who embrace that misconception). It’s always possible that science will fail to recognize that the sayings, episodes, and injunctions that make up the literal content of the doctrines come from an undisputable superhuman authority. Scientists are not disposed to accept claims on faith; they are trained to ask for proof — for empirical proof.  If it’s not available, then they might say that the sayings, episodes and injunctions are unproven, and could be mistaken. In that case the religious would have good reason to fear science (or at least those who believe that science would pass judgment on the literal meaning of religious scriptures); their deepest convictions would be in question.

But this fear is unfounded.  It’s based on a misconception of the true nature both of religion, and of science.

Religion doesn’t simply consist of the doctrines that make up its sacred scriptures. There is far more to religion than that. And it’s not the case that science would take religious doctrines at face value and pronounce their content either true or false. There is far more to science than that.

Both religion and science are sourced in human experience. True, they are sourced in a different kind of experience, and science can tell us that they are conveyed by a different hemisphere of the brain: religion is right-hemispheric, and science, left-hemispheric. Human experience encompasses both.

Religion is based on the right-hemispheric experience of its founders, saints, and prophets. These must have been deep and vivid experiences, for they had a remarkable power to affect the heart and the mind of those around them. The founders, and even more their disciples, sought to communicate the substance of these experiences. They did so in the language, and with the concepts of their time. Their followers made the mistake of taking the record of the experiences for the essence of the experiences. They mistook the letter of religion for its spirit.

True scientists would not confound the record of a religious experience with the meaning of that experience. They would not judge a religion by the literal veracity of the sayings, episodes, and injunctions contained in its doctrines; they would ask about their roots in lived experience. And they would seek to understand that experience.

Analyzing the nature and meaning of religious experience is not a threat to the religious. On the contrary, it can prove to be a support. Because when the deep religious experience is analyzed with the methods of a science, a remarkable finding comes to light. The religious experience has aspects and elements that make it consistent with the world scientists discover on the basis of empirical experience.

Strange? Perhaps, but it is so. Psychiatrists such as Stanislav Grof find that in meditative, prayerful, or otherwise altered states of mind and consciousness people have access to the kind of mystical or transcendent realities that make up the substance of all great religions. This doesn’t mean that science can “verify” the metaphysical reality of these visions and entities. To establish their reality is not simply to see whether they correspond to the entities and processes that make up the content of valid scientific theories. It calls for careful reasoning and a further development of our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive powers of the brain, and of the consciousness associated with it. This development is already under way — among other things, recent attempts to discover the quantum-receptivity of microtubules and other subneuronal arrays in the brain point to it. It appears that we can apprehend far more of the reality in which we are embedded than we had thought. In addition to its standard information-processing circuits, the brain has quantum-receptive capacities, picking up information that’s instantaneous, multidimensional, and “nonlocal.”

Work in this area is still in progress, but we can be reasonably certain already that there are aspects and planes of human experience that far transcend the limits of everyday experience. As Shakespeare remarked, there are more things in this world than you and I had ever conceived.

Entering on a plane that is deeper or higher than that of everyday experience is what the religious experience is all about.  And trying to understand how we can connect with that plane is one of the most exciting tasks facing science today.

The sincere religious has nothing to fear from the genuine scientist. On the contrary, the religious and the scientist have much to learn from each other. Together they will achieve a better understanding of the deep reality that surrounds us, and grounds our own existence. Isn’t it time to begin to explore that reality together — instead of fearing and fighting each other?

Where there is no vision, the people perish
Proverbs 29:18

One can’t solve a problem with the same level
of consciousness at which the problem arose
Albert Einstein

The final statements of the June 2010 Canada meetings of the G-8 and the G-20 make for impressive reading (G-8 Muskoka Declaration – Recovery and New Beginnings, 25-26 June, and The G-20 Toronto Summit Declaration, June 26-27). They contain a long list of marvelous commitments through which the leaders of the advanced world decide to join forces to ensure a better future for all.

All is well then?  Hardly. A closer look reveals major problems.

First of all, the flawless harmony communicated in the Declarations was not mirrored in the actual debates. There was little agreement on how to move forward, with the U.S. insisting on additional public spending to re-launch recovery, and the UK and the other European nations opting for budgetary cutbacks as the way to move forward. The proposals of the member states also had a tacit “beggar-thy-neighbor” dimension: if implemented they would serve the given nation’s economy, without much regard for the sacrifices incurred by the others.

But the real problem is not the attempt to hide or smooth over internal disagreements—that’s normal procedure for international bodies. The problem is that the objectives espoused by the G-8, and the larger G-20 that incorporates the G-8, are one-sided, as if only money matters and economic growth of the kind we have known in the past can solve all problems. This suggests a vision that’s terminally out of date.

In the G-20 vision the world is made up of nation-states and groups of nation-states, with national governments in charge of ensuring the national interest. Except for some frills and half-hearted regulations, the national interest is business-as-usual economic interest. The governments are to bring about “recovery,” “renewed stability” and “balanced growth” in their national economies, and international cooperation is intended to rebalance the economic and financial system that the crises of the recent past has unbalanced.

The G-8 and G-20 leaders do not seem to realize that recovering and re-establishing the economic-financial order of the past is to re-create a system that’s structurally unstable and no longer sustainable. They do not seem to entertain the possibility that what the world needs is not more of the same, but something radically different. A thorough transformation.

In a world where a third of the people live in abject poverty, as many if not more face critical water shortages, and where the atmosphere heats up, the climate changes, sea levels rise, and the processes enabling the regeneration of vital biological resources are seriously impaired, a classical economic focus is not just inadequate, it’s obsolete. We have seen what reliance on the open market produces: abject poverty for billions, and inequality of the kind where the wealth of a few hundred billionaires equals the income on which half the world’s population has to subsist. With this classical vision, the people, at least the poorer and less powerful elements of the people, will perish.

Obviously, putting more money into humanitarian projects, such as reducing infant and under-five morality, is good and necessary. But “recovery”—in the sense of recovering the kind of system and the kind of growth that characterized the last several decades—is not. As hardly any serious economist would contest any longer, this will only lead to more and bigger crises, and ultimately to breakdown.

Can we expect the recognition of the need for urgent and deep-seated transformation to dawn in the mind of the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation-states? Evidently not. A thorough transformation would—or is very likely to—place in question the legitimacy of the very order that brought them to power and maintains them in power.

Re-launching the kind of growth that the world experienced in the late 20^th century is not the way to go in the 21^st century. The dilemma is not whether to let states and peoples undergo imminent crises, or attempt to postpone the onset of these crises; here the choice is clear. The real dilemma is whether to lead the transformation to a more sustainable system, or to be overwhelmed by the collapse of the existing one. Leading the transformation offers an opportunity for sustained leadership to those who can still steer the present system, whereas a failure here would surely lead to their demise.

The crux of the matter is that initiating the processes that would lead us to the needed transformation calls for a kind of vision the G-20 doesn’t now possess. Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that produced the problem. A kind of vision that could solve today’s problems demands a new level of consciousness—a consciousness that inspires and motivates cooperation not only by national governments, and not only in the economic and financial domain, but also in the domains of ecology, technology, education, public information, cultural contact and communication. A consciousness that in today’s world the basic precondition of peace and sustainability, and even of enduring prosperity, is wide-ranging cooperation based on a solidarity that embraces transformation. A consciousness, in the last count, of the interdependence and oneness of all the people on this spaceship Earth, and the oneness of our shared destiny.

The “games” the G-20 should be playing are not inter-national games where either I win and you lose, or you win and I lose. They must be trans-national games where everyone wins. Because unless all the people win, all the people will lose. Sooner and more dramatically than the G-20 seems to believe.

Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem. His insight applies also to the domain of consciousness: we can’t solve the problems of our time with the same kind of consciousness that created them. We live in global times, yet most of us have a tribal kind of consciousness – it’s me or you, my group or yours, and whoever isn’t with us is against us. The continuation of tribal consciousness is nothing less than a recipe for disaster in a world of nuclear weapons, environmental devastation, increasing population and dwindling resources.

There can be no doubt: if we’re going to live sustainably and in peace with each other, we must all shift from a tribal to a planetary consciousness.

But just what is planetary consciousness? Here is how we defined it in the Manifesto on Planetary Consciousness that I drafted with the Dalai Lama and other luminaries of the Club of Budapest in 1996:

“Planetary consciousness is knowing as well as feeling the vital interdependence and essential oneness of humankind, and the conscious adoption of the ethic and the ethos that this entails.”

It was our conclusion at that time that the evolution of planetary consciousness was the foundational imperative for the survival of the human species. I remain more convinced than ever that this is the case.

But what do you think? Assuming you agree that we must evolve beyond tribalism if we are to survive, would you consider yourself to have planetary consciousness? Here are ten questions that I believe, if answered honestly, will tell you whether you do.

Do you –

1. Satisfy your basic needs without diminishing other people’s chances of satisfying theirs?

2. Pursue your own happiness with due regard for the similar pursuit of others?

3. Respect the right to economic development for all people, wherever they live and whatever their ethnic origin or belief system?

4. Live in a way that respects the integrity of nature around you?

5. Work with like-minded people to safeguard and restore your local environment?

6. Require your government to relate to other nations peacefully and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing the legitimate aspirations of all the members of the international community?

7. Buy from companies that accept responsibility for stakeholders at all levels of the supply chain?

8. Consume media that provides unbiased information relevant to you and your community?

9. Do something to help at least one other person escape the hopeless struggles and abject humiliations of extreme poverty?

10. Believe all young people are entitled to the education they need to be productive members of their community?

Answering these ten questions with an honest yes doesn’t call for money or power. It calls for dedication and solidarity, for the spirit that creates true community, both locally and globally.

The evolution of planetary consciousness is without question an imperative for human survival on our planet. In its absence it’s difficult to see how all seven billion of us will be able to live in peace—or even just survive. To paraphrase Gandhi, “Live consciously, so that all of us may live.”

When someone asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, he replied he thought it was a good idea. It is indeed a good idea because it’s not entirely a reality. Western civilization—more exactly, the Western mind that creates the civilization—has a serious disease. It’s a “dis-ease” that affects all of us of in the West. And now we can have a better idea of what’s behind it.

Take merely these characteristics of the Western mind:

• it sees things as separate, each thing on its own, connected merely by mechanistic relations of cause and effect;
• it’s competitive: each individual is on his or her own, making his or her way in an impersonal and indifferent world;
• it disconnects the mind from the body: the mind only “drives” or “manages” the body as it would a car or an organization;
• it best understands the things it has itself creates: artificial, synthetic things, that can be readily and unambiguously manipulated;
• it disconnects the human from the natural; nature itself becomes the “environment” that humans can manage and manipulate to serve their interests;
• it categorizes, schematizes people and things, viewing them as abstract entities rather than as existing, living realities;
• it deals with the representations of people and things rather than with our living experience people and things;
• and it views all things, nature included, as mechanistic kinds of systems, put together from their parts and capable of being manipulated by acting on their parts.

These traits add up to a dis-ease; to the long-discussed malaise of civilization—of Western civilization. Other civilizations have their own problems and failings, but the above traits are typically those of the Western mind: of the civilization created by the Western mind.

Are these traits purely accidental, just the way the typical Western mind happens to work?

A historical analysis can furnish an explanation why this particular mindset came to dominate the West. The main reason appears to be the separation of the world of values, feelings and spirit from the world of fact and reason at the dawn of the modern age. Following the famous trial of Giordano Bruno, the Church claimed for itself authority over the world of value, feeling and spirit, and allowed science and scientists to investigate the world of fact through reasoning based on observation and experiment.

The original covenant between science and church, concluded on the part of science by Galileo, was reinforced and made into an unquestioned precept by the radical separation of the two worlds by René Descartes. According to Cartesian philosophy there is a complete disjunction between the physical world “outside” the mind (the world of “extended substance” res extensa) from the thinking, feeling world “within” (the thinking substance, res cogitans). Science made great progress by dissecting the outside world into parts and manipulating the parts: this became the basis of modern technology. And the West fell in love with technology, more exactly, with the powers over people and nature conferred by technology. It relegated the felt “inside” world of value, feeling and spirit to religion and spirituality, to be celebrated on Sundays and holidays. It made the manipulation of the “outside” world its true concern: the woof and wharf of modern economics and politics, the way relations between people, and between people and nature are decided and conducted.

This historical backdrop might explain how it is that the West ended up with an impersonal, mechanical, atomized world as its “real” world. But it doesn’t say how the Western mind actually operates; why it sees the world as an impersonal, mechanical aggregate of atomistic parts. But cognitive neuroscience can tell us more.

Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga, and the other pioneers of split-brain research founded the discipline of cognitive neuroscience. They discovered that we have two brains and not just one. We have the right brain and the left brain, more exactly, the right and the left hemisphere of the neocortex. The two brains are different in their functioning, and even in their anatomy. The right hemisphere is wider, longer, larger and heavier than the left. It’s also different in its sensitivity to neurotransmitters and neurohormones, and has a different neuronal structure and organization. It’s differently “tuned“ to our experience.

It’s important to realize that the world is not given in experience in its pristine purity, “just the way it is.” Our input from the senses is organized, interpreted by our brain, with the result that the same sensory stimulus can give rise to very different experiences, very different interpretations. (Think of the famous drawing used by psychologists, where you can see either an elegant young woman, or an old hag.) Our two brains “see” the world each in its own way, and these ways are different. The reason that we have something like a single world-picture is because one of the two brains is dominant. In the West, the left brain is dominant. And here is the clue to the “dis-ease” of the Western mind.

In his seminal book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist asked, what would it look like if our left brain were the sole purveyor of reality? The whole world would be a heap of bits and pieces; its only meaning would come through its capacity to be used. Our attention would be narrowly focused on the individual bits and pieces, with increasing specialization bringing more and more familiarity with less and less. Information and information-gathering would be substituted for knowledge gained by actual experience. And the kind of knowledge we would gain would be rooted in representations of reality, by abstract cognitive schemes that would seem more “real” than the things we actually experience.

Does this world seem familiar? That shouldn’t surprise you: the left-hemisphere’s view of the world is by and large the Western mind’s view of the world. There are people and things in this world, but there is no “betweenness”—they are connected only by relations of cause and effect, by how one thing affects another, by what one person “does” to another. This world is centered on, and is best when it deals with, the things we ourselves have created. It’s a competitive world, where everyone is separate, and everyone is out for him- or herself. And it’s an impersonal and uncaring world, where to think that there is meaning feeling, and purpose is merely to project one’s own subjective feelings into an impersonal “objective” reality.

The world of the right brain would be a very different world. While having only the right brain available to us we couldn’t analyze things and express them in language, our experience would be filled with many positive things. We would be making connections between things, seeing the world around us as a whole in which people and things are organic parts. We would be attending directly to our experience, seeing people and things in their presented uniqueness. We would be living in our body, feeling ourselves one with it and the world that surrounds and embeds it. The sense of time, the “flow” of things, would be primary, and we would enjoy experiences where this flow is evident, such as narration, theatre, dance, and music. Because of the betweenness connecting us to the world, we would be more empathetic, tuned to compassion and fellow-feeling, and concern with all things in nature. And our empathies would get a powerful boost by our being aware of our intuitions, of our subtle communication with the world beyond the range of our bodily senses. This perception is within the compass of the nonlocal quantum-receptivity of the sub-neuronal networks of our brain, but is repressed by the narrow rationality of our left hemisphere.

This right-brain world would seem more familiar to traditional people than to most of us in Western civilization. But to many of us it might seem more like regress rather than progress, for it would mean giving up much of our technical prowess and manipulative skills. However, this would not be necessary: we could also combine the world of our right brain with the world of the left. We could hand the things and events presented to our world-tuned right brain to the left for analysis, formulation, and communication, and then allow our right brain to place it in context, so we could reach an integral assessment, and a balanced way of responding. We would see the forest, and still find our way among the trees.

The dis-ease of the Western mind is a product of historical circumstance. But it’s not fated; we could overcome our one-sided heritage of the past. The key to it is using our brain more fully. This would give us a consciousness where the broad, holistic world of the right brain is linked with the pragmatic, skillful world of the left. This “broadband” consciousness without loss of acuity is the hallmark of what I called Quantum Consciousness.  QC could be the next step in the evolution of the human mind, and it could be our salvation. Moving toward it by balancing your own approach to reality would be a good beginning toward curing the dis-ease of the Western mind.

Published at Huffington Post

The debate among conservative Christians, Muslims, and Jews (the “creationists”) and natural scientists and the science-minded public (the “evolutionists”) centers on biological evolution. But on a deeper look, it concerns the universe in which life has evolved—or in which it was created. And, as I will argue, on this level there is no contradiction between design and evolution: both are equally needed to explain the facts.

At first glance, the scientific community—and anyone who believes that science can tell us something about the nature of reality—is compelled to reject the hypothesis that all organisms are the way they are because they were designed to be that way. But the creationists question that the stupendously varied panoply of life arose from mutations in the genome occurring by chance with the resulting organisms fitting by chance into environments where they can reproduce better than their predecessors.  Such a chance-mutation and lucky-environmental-fit process is surely too “hit or miss” to have created the complex web of life in the biosphere. The theory that affirms it is bound to be false.

However, at the cutting edge of science the theory of evolution doesn’t rely on random serendipity.  That view marks the classical Darwinist position, still championed by a few (though always fewer) mainline biologists. Richard Dawkins, for example, insists that the living world is the result of processes of piecemeal trial and error, without deeper meaning and significance. Evolution happens, but there is no purpose and meaning to it.

Take cheetahs, said Dawkins. They give every indication of being superbly designed to kill antelopes. The teeth, claws, eyes, nose, leg muscles, backbone, and brain of a cheetah are all precisely what we should expect if God’s purpose in creating cheetahs was to maximize deaths among antelopes. At the same time, antelopes are fast, agile, and watchful, apparently designed so they can escape cheetahs. Yet neither the one nor the other feature implies creation by design: this is just the way nature is. Cheetahs have a “utility function” to kill antelopes, and antelopes have a utility function to escape cheetahs. Nature itself is indifferent to this game. This is a world of blind physical forces and genetic replication where some get hurt and others flourish. It has precisely the properties we would expect it to have if there were no design, no purpose, and no evil and no good in the world, only blind indifference.

If a Designer is responsible for the way the living world works, He/She would have to be at best indifferent to what comes about in that world, or at worst a sadist who enjoys blood sports. It’s more reasonable, according to Dawkins, to hold that the world just is, without reason and purpose. The way it is results from random processes played out within limits set by fundamental physical laws. The idea of design is superfluous. Classical Darwinists echo French mathematician Pierre Laplace, who is reputed to have said to Napoleon that God is a hypothesis for which there is no longer any need.

Confronted with the classical theory, creationists are justified in pointing out that it’s extremely improbable that all we see in the world of life, ourselves included, should be the result of chance processes governed by impersonal laws. The idea that everything evolved by blind chance out of common and simple origins is just theory, they say. The world is more than a random assembly of disjoined elements; it exhibits meaning and purpose. This implies design.

The creationist position would be the logical choice if—but only if—scientists would persist in claiming that the evolution of living species is a product of two-fold serendipity. But at the cutting edge, scientists no longer claim this. Post-Darwinian biologists recognize that the evolution of species is far more than the chance processes classical Darwinists say it is. It must be more, because the time that was available for evolution would not have been sufficient to generate the complex web of life on this planet merely by trial and error. Mathematical physicist Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probabilities and came to the conclusion that they are about the same as the probability that a hurricane blowing through a scrap-yard assembles a working airplane.

Leading-edge scientists realize that the evolution of organic species is an orderly, highly coordinated process, even if it’s not mechanistic and deterministic. The evolution of the living world is part of the great wave that created particles from the underlying virtual-energy and information field misleadingly called ”vacuum” (and is better called unified field, nuether, or Akashic field). The wave unfolded in the cosmos by structuring particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into macromolecules and cells, cells into organisms, and organisms and populations of organisms into local, regional, and continental ecologies.

The wave of evolution could only have unfolded in a universe where the fundamental laws and constants are finely tuned to permit the emergence of complexity. Ours is such a universe. Physicists know that even a minute difference in these laws and constants would have foreclosed the possibility of life forever.

Our universe is staggeringly fine-tuned to the creation of systems of higher and higher orders of complexity, differentiation, and integration. That such a universe would have come about by chance is astronomically improbable. According to quantum cosmology, some 10⁵⁰⁰ (1 followed by five hundred zeros) universes could exist physically, but only a handful could give rise to life. That our life-supporting universe would have come about by a random selection from this enormous set of possible universes is a zillion times more improbable than that living species would have come about by random mutations.  The great wave of evolution requires highly harmonized and coordinated processes in all its domains.

In the final count the evolution of life presupposes intelligent design. But the design it presupposes is not the design of the products of evolution; it’s the design of its preconditions. Given the right preconditions, nature comes up with the products on her own.

The debate between creationists and evolutionists would be better focused on the origins of the universe than on the origins of life. Could it be that our universe has been purposefully designed so it could give rise to the evolution of life? For creationists, this would be the logical assumption. Evolutionists could not object: evolution, being an irreversible process, must have had a beginning, and that beginning must be accounted for. And our fine-tuned universe is entirely unlikely to have come about by chance.

So the creationist/evolutionist controversy really is pointless. Design is a necessary assumption, because chance doesn’t explain the facts. But evolution is likewise a necessary assumption, for given the way this universe works, the evolution of complexity is a logical and by now well-documented consequence. Therefore the rational conclusion is not design or evolution. It’s design for evolution.

Then why the controversy?

Published at Huffington Post

The rise of quantum consciousness could be the biggest step our species has taken since it came down from the trees. It would bring us to a new stage of species maturity — and could also enable us to surmount the problems that threaten our life and our future.

But just what is quantum consciousness — QC? I have spoken about QC in my previous posts, but the question merits a further, deeper look.

First of all, what is consciousness? The commonsense assumption is that consciousness is a stream of experience produced by the brain. As long as the brain functions, there is consciousness; when the brain shuts down, consciousness vanishes. This, however, is not necessarily the case. It could be that our brain no more produces consciousness than the radio produces the symphony that comes through its speakers. The symphony, too, disappears when the radio is shut down, yet we know that it’s not produced by the radio. Both the radio and the brain pick up signals, transform them, and display the result in our stream of conscious experience.

According to received wisdom, the things and events that make up our experience of the world originate in the world. People and things around us reflect light and make sound; for the most part they can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. The corresponding signals reach our eye and ear in the form of waves in the electromagnetic field, in the air, and in the physical, chemical, and biological fields in and around our body. Our exteroceptive senses transform this information into nerve signals, and the signals are analyzed, sharpened, and interpreted by our brain. The result is the experience that appears in our consciousness.

This is the gist of the standard scientific explanation of our perception of the world, but it’s not complete. It’s incomplete not only because it fails to solve the age-old philosophers’ puzzle, how physical signals can transmute into intimately felt conscious experience (is this transmutation the work of the brain, or does the brain also transmit forms of consciousness from the external world?), but also because it doesn’t account for all the things that appear in our consciousness. Some of the things that appear in our consciousness convey information about the world even though we cannot see how they could be based on sense-perceivable events. Happily, unlike the philosophers’ “hard problem,” this is no longer an unsolved puzzle. We now realize that our brain is not limited to capturing sense-organ conveyed information, for it’s not just a classical biochemical system. It’s also a “macroscopic quantum system,” and such a system can “resonate” with the world. On the quantum level it can capture and process signals that far exceed the range of the signals available to the bodily senses.

The quantum-perception of the world is just as real as its sensory perception. Here, in brief, is why.

All things in space and time emit waves, and these waves interact with the waves produced by other things. They create wave interference patterns. Pressure waves in the air, and electric and magnetic waves in the EM field diminish with distance and the patterns they produce are limited to our immediate vicinity. Quantum waves, however (waves that propagate in the nearly infinite virtual-energy domain that fills cosmic space), move instantly over any distance. The kinds of interference patterns they create constitute quantum holograms, and quantum holograms are “entangled” with each other — they are instantly connected. As a result the information carried by one quantum hologram can be transferred to any other quantum hologram. Thus a system that can “read” the information in one hologram has access to the information carried by all. Our quantum-resonance-decoding brain could in principle capture information on anything and everything that creates quantum-interference waves in the universe.

Evidently, to capture this kind of information our brain must have the corresponding receptivity. Scientists are now beginning to understand how quantum-hologram receptivity might be built into the brain.

It appears that quantum-level signals are picked up by microstructures in our brain’s cytoskeleton (the cytoskeleton is a protein-based structure that maintains the integrity of living cells, including neurons). The neurons in the brain are organized into a network of microtubules of microscopic size but astronomical number. There are about 10**18 microtubules in the human brain, and “merely” 10**11 neurons (though this number is still larger than the number of stars in the galaxy). With filaments just 5 to 6 nanometers in diameter, our network of microtubules — the so-called “microtrabecular lattice” — is believed to capture, process, and convey information.

Physicist Roger Penrose and neurophysiologist Stuart Hameroff claim that consciousness emerges from these quantum-level elements of the brain’s cytoskeleton. The microtrabecular lattice could be responsible for the quantum-receptivity of our brain, picking up, transforming, and interpreting information based on phase-conjugate resonance.

If this is the case, there is not just one mode of perceiving the world available to us, but two. We have what neuroscientist Ede Frecska and anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna call the classical “perceptual-cognitive-symbolic” mode, based on information conveyed by our bodily senses, and we also have the “direct-intuitive-nonlocal” mode, enabled by the quantum receptivity of our brain’s microstructures.

In today’s world we tend to perceive the world in the classical mode, yet we could, and sometimes do, perceive aspects of it in the direct mode as well. However, our left-hemisphere dominated perceptual mode represses information that doesn’t accord with our established ways of thinking. Only in spiritual, religious, or mystical experience does such information penetrate to our everyday awareness — and then, just fleetingly.

Yet our brain could operate in a more balanced way: the cerebral functions underlying our everyday awareness could be more embracing than those in the classical perceptual mode. Operating in this way is possible, and has already been achieved by a few people. This was the finding of British psychophysiologist Maxwell Cade, who in the 1970s examined the EEG patterns of more than 3,000 individuals. He had found four typical patterns, made up of specific combinations of alpha, beta, and theta waves. (He did not consider dreamless deep sleep, where delta waves predominate.) Each combination turned out to be associated with a particular state of consciousness. The consciousness accompanying dreamful sleep, the state between waking and sleeping, and deep meditation each exhibits a typical combination of EEG waves. Dreamful sleep, the transitory state between waking and sleeping, and meditation all show pronounced alpha and theta waves. Our state of ordinary awareness is dominated by beta waves.

But Cade also found a “fifth state.” This is the remarkable state that comes to light in the EEG-portrait of accomplished healers. Cade called the consciousness associated with this state “awakened mind.” Here alpha and theta waves are strong, much as in the meditative state, but there are also beta waves. In some healers this state has become the norm, maintained not only during active healing, but also in everyday life.

Just as remarkably, in the fifth state the EEG waves are balanced across the left and the right hemispheres. This is important. The brain-state underlying ordinary consciousness is left-hemisphere dominated, and we know that the left hemisphere filters out experiences that do not mesh with our established beliefs and expectations. We also know that deep prayer and meditation activate the right hemisphere, and tend to synchronize the two hemispheres. A hemisphere-synchronized brain can operate in the direct quantum-resonance mode: as experiments I have witnessed myself demonstrate, expert meditators synchronize not only their own left and right hemispheres, but can also synchronize their left and right hemispheres with the synchronized hemispheres of others who meditate with them. And this synchronization occurs in the entire absence of sensory contact among the meditators. They can be in different rooms, different cities, even on different continents. (I reported on these experiments in my book, Science and the Akashic Field, and in other books.)

Unfortunately, a state of deep prayer and meditation is not functional in the everyday context: in most cases we need to sit with closed eyes, detached from the world around us.

A truly evolved consciousness would have the quantum-receptivity of deep prayer and meditation, but it would operate also in the everyday context. It would display a broad EEG wave-spectrum, embracing alpha and theta as well as beta waves. And it would show that the two brain hemispheres are highly coordinated, so that the information processed by the quantum-mode receiving right hemisphere is readily communicated to the sensory-information processing left. An evolved consciousness is wider and deeper than the everyday consciousness of people today, and more functional than the consciousness of those engaged in deep prayer and meditation.

In the past this kind of consciousness has been limited to exceptionally sensitive and creative people: to healers and poets, prophets and spiritual masters. In the future it could spread to a wider segment of the population. Humanity could be evolving its consciousness.

In closing, let us return to the example of the radio. Tuned to the right station, our radio can pick up and bring to us a great symphony. Imagine what our quantum brain could bring to us when, in the expanded and balanced mode, it would be tuned to the information encoded at the heart of the cosmos. This would be veritably a cosmic symphony. Of course, we could never capture all of it — only God could do that — but we could capture far more than we do today. This would make us more empathetic as individuals, and more cooperative as citizens in our interactive and interdependent global community. The rise of these attributes in a critical mass could be the key to our continued survival. QC may be not only the next step in our species evolution; it could also be our collective salvation.

Published at Huffington Post

In the first post of this series I promised to explore the wider implications of our having a quantum computer in our head. What does this revolutionary understanding of the capacities of the human brain mean for our life and our future?

Here I call “quantum consciousness” the consciousness we access when we use the potentials of our quantum-computer brain. Our brain is a macroscopic quantum system, yet we use it as if it were exclusively a classical biochemical system. With its quantum-system functions, our brain can receive information not only from our eyes and ears, but directly from the wider world with which we are “entangled”—nonlocally connected. Insightful people throughout history, whether shamans or scientists, poets or prophets, have extensively used this capacity, innate to all human beings. Today it is widely neglected. This impoverishes our world picture, and causes a nagging sense that we are separate from the world around us.

I believe that quantum consciousness could be the next stage in the evolution of our consciousness—and that this evolution could be our salvation. Let me explain.

The first thing I ask you to note is that human consciousness is not static, fixed once and for all. It’s the product of a long evolutionary development, and is capable of further development. In the thirty- or fifty-thousand-year history of the species we proudly call homo sapiens the human body didn’t change significantly, but human consciousness did. And it can change again.

In a variety of “alternative cultures” a new consciousness is already emerging. The members of these cultures—the green movement, the peace movement, the sustainable living movement, the movement of cultural creatives, and others—share similar social values and are open and interactive with the larger society; they don’t seek isolation or indulge in promiscuous sex. They aim to rethink accepted beliefs and values, and adopt a more responsible style of living. They shift from matter- and energy-wasteful ostentation toward voluntary simplicity and the search for sustainability and harmony with nature.

A new consciousness is now struggling to be born. Does this mean that the consciousness of humanity itself is evolving? Some famous thinkers have said so. The Indian sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of the emergence of superconsciousness in ever more people, and this, he said, is the harbinger of the next evolution of human consciousness. In a similar vein the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser spoke of the coming of four-dimensional integral consciousness, rising from the prior stages of archaic, magical, and mythical consciousness. The American mystic Richard Bucke called the new consciousness “cosmic,” and in the colorful spiral dynamics developed by Chris Cowan and Don Beck it’s the turquoise stage of collective individualism, cosmic spirituality, and Earth changes. For philosopher Ken Wilber these developments signify an evolutionary transition from the mental consciousness characteristic of both animals and humans, to subtle consciousness, which is archetypal, transindividual, and intuitive, to causal consciousness, and then ultimately to “consciousness as such.” Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof summed up the characteristics of the emerging consciousness as “transpersonal.”

There is remarkable agreement among these visionary concepts.  Superconsciousness, integral consciousness, cosmic consciousness, turquoise-stage consciousness, and consciousness as such are all forms of consciousness that transcend the divide between you and me, the individual and the world, the human being and nature. If these thinkers are right, this kind of consciousness will be the next stage in the evolution of the consciousness of our species.

Quantum consciousness—QC—could perhaps be the next stage in the evolution of the mind of humanity, but why would it be our salvation?

The answer is simple commonsense: because QC is a consciousness of directly intuited, felt connection to the world. It inspires empathy with people and with nature; it brings an experience of oneness and belonging. Quantum consciousness makes us realize that, being one with others and with nature, what we do to them we do to ourselves.

Not only will QC make us behave more responsibly toward other people and the planet, it will also encourage us to join together to cope with the problems we face.

Most of us cooperate with members of our own family and community. But cooperation has now become vitally necessary on the global level: it’s in all our best interest to cooperate with our fellows in the global community. Without such cooperation we’ll be hard put to overcome the global threats and problems that face us. Without cooperation we risk joining the countless species that became extinct because they couldn’t adjust to changed circumstances.

With dedicated and purposeful cooperation we can meet the challenges of human survival: we can have seven billion or more people living peacefully and sustainably on the planet. We have the technologies, the skills, and the necessary financial and human resources. Abject forms of poverty can be eliminated, energy- and resource-efficient technologies can be made widely available, water can be recycled and seawater desalinized, and sustainable forms of agriculture adopted. We can be more efficient and effective in harvesting the vast stream of energy that flows from the sun to our planet. And to finance these projects we would only need a small part of the enormous sums of money that we now commit to speculative, self-serving, or downright destructive ends.

Cooperation on the global level is a new requirement in the history of our civilization, and we are not prepared for it. Our institutions and organizations were designed to protect their own interests in competition with others; the need for them to join together in the shared interest has been limited to territorial aspirations and defense, and to economic gain in selected domains. The will to cooperate in globally cooperative projects that subordinate immediate self-interest to the vital interests of a wider community is still lacking in the political as well as in the economic domains.

When all is said and done, the fundamental need of our time, the precondition of creating a peaceful and sustainable world, is the spread of a new and more evolutionarily adaptive consciousness—the quantum consciousness of oneness and belonging.

Forms and intimations of the new consciousness are already emerging in the world, but they haven’t yet reached the mainstream. When QC becomes mainstream, humanity will have reached a higher stage of maturity. It will have become a species that has not only the technologies and the skills, but also the wisdom and the will, to survive in the world it has itself created.

Published at Huffington Post

When our brain, (“a quantum computer” as I said in my previous posts),  connects us to the world, that experience of connection is the same source where artists and even scientists find inspiration and creativity. The quantum connection of our brain can serve us as a subtle but trustworthy compass—one known to traditional peoples and cultures, but largely ignored in the modern world.

The experience of connection is also a source of spirituality. The great teachers entered a deeply altered state, had a spiritual experience, and when they returned to their waking state, endeavored to capture it in words. Their words became the scriptures venerated by their followers.

The spiritual/religious experience has been basically the same in all epochs and cultures. It has always been an experience of oneness and belonging. William James described it as the sense of entering into union with something deeper and larger than oneself. The experience of people in all epochs and walks of life confirms that James was right: we are like islands on the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

Although the basic substance of the spiritual experience has always been the same, teachers expressed it in different ways because they were only able to approximate their experience through the words and symbols of their time and place. In each time, and each place, these symbols and expressions were unique and different.

Over the centuries these differences intensified. Groups and communities of followers, intent on maintaining their identity and ensuring their coherence, froze the original pronouncements into sacred doctrines, and made the doctrines into holy dogmas, sometimes further honed to serve their followers’ social and political aims and ambitions.

In the final count the differences between the doctrines, religions, and the insights of spiritual traditions are not differences in the substance of the experience that inspired them. They are only the differences in the way that substance has been expressed and communicated.

But how does the spiritual experience itself come about? Today we have a better answer to this question than we ever had before. A spiritual/religious experience can happen any time and any place, but it usually occurs in an altered state of consciousness. In that state, as psychiatrist Stanislav Grof notes, we can apprehend anything that exists in the universe. We can even apprehend universal archetypes and mythical beings.

The altered states that give rise to the spiritual experience can be purposefully induced. As traditional cultures have known and practiced for millennia, the experience can be triggered by dancing, drumming, rhythmic breathing, and also by the use of psychedelic substances (although these can be dangerous to health). Prayer and meditation is the royal road, and their depth and efficacy can be enhanced when practiced on altered-state-conducive “sacred” sites.

Churches, temples, mosques and synagogues were built to facilitate the spiritual experience of the faithful. Traditional people have often gone further: they had sought spiritual transformation even through “temple sleep.” This meant spending a night in a venerated location, trying to incubate dreams for initiation, divination, or healing. Dynastic Egypt had special temples for suppliants who would fast and recite prayers immediately before going to sleep, and Jewish seers would spend the night in an agrave or sepulchral vault, hoping that the spirit of the deceased would appear in their dream and offer guidance. In Greece over 300 dream temples were dedicated to Aesculapius, the god of healing, and in China the temples where state officials sought guidance were active until the 16^th century.

The spiritual experience usually comes about in altered states, but what does the recurring substance of the experience signify? What is that “something deeper and larger than ourselves” to which the experience seems to connect us?

An answer to this question is given by every religion, and today it can also be given by science, if only hypothetically. Science suggests that the spiritual experience opens the brain with which our consciousness is associated to an extended range of information. This information is real, but it’s not always really received. Here by “information” I don’t mean the information we produce when we talk, write, or act. I mean the kind of information that scientists now discover underlies everything in the universe.

Information is entirely basic in the universe. In the latest conception the universe doesn’t consist of matter and space; it consists of energy and information. Energy exists in the form of wave-patterns and wave-propagations in the quantum vacuum that fills space; in its various forms, energy is the “hardware” of the universe. The “software” is information. The universe is not an assemblage of bits of inert matter moving passively in empty space: it’s a dynamic and coherent whole. The energy that constitutes its hardware is always and everywhere “in-formed.” It’s in-formed by what David Bohm called the implicate order, and physicists now regard as the quantum vacuum or zero-point field (also called physical spacetime, universal field, or nuether). This is the “in-formation” that structures the physical world, the information we grasp as the laws of nature. Without information the energy-waves and patterns of the universe would be as random and unstructured as the behavior of a computer without its software. But the universe is not random and unstructured; it’s precisely “in-formed.” Would it be any the less precisely informed, complex systems could not have emerged in it, and we would not be here to ask how this on first sight highly improbably development could have come about.

Science’s answer to the “what” question refers to an entangled, holographic, nonlocally connecting in-formation field in the cosmos. In my books, in greatest detail in Science and the Akashic Field, I discuss the evidence for this field, and note that the Hindu seers referred to it as Akasha, the fundamental element of the cosmos. In recognition of this feat of insight I am now calling the information field of the universe the Akashic Field.

But how does science’s answer to the question regarding the fundamental significance of the spiritual experience relate to the answer given by religion?

For the world’s religions the larger and deeper reality to which the spiritual experience connects us is a numinous, divine reality. It’s either a spirit or consciousness that infuses the natural world (the “immanentist” view), or a spirit and consciousness that’s above and beyond it (the “transcendentalist” claim). Traditional polytheistic religions were leaning to the former, while the Abrahamic monotheistic religions (with some exceptions) embraced the latter.

The difference between a divine intelligence immanent in the world and one that transcends it is not negligible; but it is still only a difference in interpretation. The “raw data” for both positions is the same: it’s the spiritual experience, a quantum communion with universal oneness. In the Western religious perspective this is communion with the spirit that infuses the cosmos, identified as God. Deepak Chopra writes, “spirituality is the experience of that domain of awareness where we experience our universality. This domain of awareness is a core consciousness that is beyond our mind, intellect, and ego. In religious traditions this core consciousness is referred to as the soul which is part of a collective soul or collective consciousness, which in turn is part of a more universal domain of consciousness referred to in religions as God.”

Our experience of the core consciousness of the world is ultimately an experience of the universal domain of consciousness Western religions call God. The experience itself, if not it’s interpretation, is the same in all religions, and in all religions it inspires a sense of oneness and belonging. Michael Beckwith affirms that “when you strip away the culture, history, and dogma of every religion, the teachers of those religions were teaching very similar principles and practices that led to a sense of oneness, that ended a sense of separation from the Whole.”

Science’s answer to the question as to what the spiritual experience connects us is immanentist. The information that underlies the universe, the Akashic Field, is part of the universe. This doesn’t mean that the immanentist position necessarily states the ultimate truth; it only means that science can only take an immanentist a position. Scientists are limited to speaking about the natural world; they must leave speculation about transcendent realities to poets, philosophers, and spiritual masters.

It’s time to conclude. If the substance of the spiritual experience is always and everywhere the same, differences in its expression and interpretation are secondary, and not a valid cause for conflict and intolerance. The world to which our quantum brain connects us is fundamentally one, whether its oneness is due to an information field within the natural world or the work of a divine transcendent intelligence. To enter into communion with this oneness has been the quest of all the great teachers and spiritual masters. And to understand the nature of this oneness has been, and is, the ultimate quest of all great scientists. Still today, physicists seek the one equation that would anchor their famous “Theory of Everything,” the theory that would account for all the laws of nature and explain everything that ever happened in our integrally whole universe. Of this equation Einstein said that knowing it would be reading the mind of God….

Published at Huffington Post

In my last post (“If Your Brain Is a Quantum Computer, Can It Connect You to the World?) I said that your brain—as all normal human brains—can connect to the Akashic information field of the cosmos because it is a quantum computer capable of operating and communicating in quantum resonance mode. Yet in today’s world most people fail to make use of this power. We keep peering at the world through five slits in the tower, when we could open our mind to the sky. Why is that—and what can we do about it?

The answer to the question of “why” is clear: it’s because we repress the feelings, insights and intuitions that come to us spontaneously. We don’t allow them to reach our consciousness. And if any of this seemingly inexplicable information gets through, we dismiss it as imagination. Children don’t repress it before they are told it’s mere fantasy, and they often come up with stories and ideas that are truly significant: Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia has verified thousands of children’s reports as bona fide memories stemming from what appears to be previous lives. Artists, spiritual teachers and innovative people remain open to spontaneous apprehensions all their lives, and these apprehensions prove to be a deep source of their insights and creativity.

It’s a pity if you fail (as most of us do) to open your mind to the sky. You lose out on a source of insight and intuition that could help you live better, in harmony with other people and nature. As it is, most of us tend to feel lonely and isolated, strangers in an indifferent and hostile world.

But your feeling of separateness is not irreparable: it can be overcome. You can enable your quantum-computer brain to connect you to the world. What you can do on this score is best understood in reference to the workings of the two hemispheres of your brain.

In us modern people the two brain hemispheres work almost independently; there is hardly any correlation between them. It’s as if we had two brains. We have a spontaneously apprehending broadband receiver that picks up a wide variety of signals but cannot order them and express them in ordinary language: this is our right hemisphere. And we have a highly focused, linearly ordering logic and language-based narrow-band receiver: our left hemisphere. If we only had the right hemisphere—or if we let it dominate our consciousness as traditional and indigenous folk do—we would live in a magical world, a world alive and full of meaning, but we would have difficulty expressing and communicating what we experience. With our left-hemisphere dominated brain we live in the everyday world of material things and forces and we can communicate articulately. But we seem to have little or no connection to anything outside our skin; our drives and our self-interests make up the warp and woof of our existence.

You can do better than this. You can open your consciousness to the sky by allowing the information that flows into your right hemisphere to inform your left hemisphere. To do this you must desist from dismissing your spontaneous insights, feelings and intuitions as fantasy; you must hold them and reflect on them as potentially deeply meaningful segments of your life’s experience.

But what if you don’t have spontaneous apprehensions? Or have them only rarely and fleetingly? Then you should seek to enhance the receptivity of your brain’s right hemisphere. Fortunately this can be done: the technique for doing so has been known for millennia, practiced by shamans, medicinemen and women, and spiritual teachers. In our time it’s also practiced by artists, writers, and even scientists, although most scientists don’t practice it consciously. Yet Einstein, who was a highly intuitive person, noted that, in science, imagination is more important than reasoning. And Thomas Edison declared, in a little-known but remarkable essay, “People say I have created things. I have never created anything. I get impressions from the Universe at large and work them out, but I am only a plate on a record or a receiving apparatus…” (Gary Indiana Gazette, 1911).

Put simply, the way to enhance your connectivity to the world is to cultivate altered states of consciousness. This means taking time to enter into communion with yourself: meditating, praying, daydreaming, or just relaxing, allowing your mind to empty and your thoughts and ideas to flow freely (Buddhists have been teaching this for centuries). When this happens your right hemisphere becomes dominant, and spending time in this state changes the way you feel, and the way you act; it changes the way you see yourself and the world. It shifts the pattern of dominance in your consciousness.

Your altered states of consciousness are not abstract and imaginary, for they are not only mental states but states of the brain with which your consciousness is associated. And your brain states are physical states, and their workings can be measured by physical instruments.

During our entire lifetime our brains emit electromagnetic oscillations that can be measured by a device called an EEG (electroencephalograph). In our ordinary waking state these waves are almost entirely in the high-frequency Beta domain. When we meditate, pray, or are in a deeply relaxed state, our brain emits mostly Alpha waves. Practiced meditators, natural healers, and persons of deep spirituality show brain activity also in the Theta region. And unusually gifted healers and great spiritual teachers remain conscious even in the low-frequency Delta region, although that region is normally active only in deep sleep. (Beta waves are in the 12 to 30 Hz [frequency] domain, Alpha waves are between 8 and 12 Hz, Theta waves between 4 to 7 Hz, and Delta waves are below 4 Hz.)

Repeated and controlled experiments show that as people enter progressively deeper altered states, their EEG waves shift to lower regions: first to Alpha, then also to Theta. While some Beta waves persist—indicating activity in the context of everyday life—the deeper regions now become active, and the whole spectrum of waves becomes harmonic. What’s more, the waves of the two hemispheres become synchronized. Practiced meditators, healers, and spiritual teachers can achieve a level of cross-hemispheric synchronization that reaches 98 percent; at that point their two hemispheres are in syntony, their brain working as an integral whole.

When you enter an altered state you open your consciousness to the sky—you connect to the Akashic information field of the cosmos. Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who for more than thirty years did thousands of experiments with altered states, was definite on this point: in an altered state people can apprehend anything that exists in space and time, no matter how big or small, and how near or far.

In my next post I‘ll explore whether by connecting to the cosmic information field you are in fact connecting to the intelligence that pervades the universe—to something that in the religious context we could consider the mind of God.

Published at Huffington Post

Could it be that the Internet mirrors something about how we really communicate (or could communicate) with each other and with the world? I’d like you to consider the possibility that nature embodies within herself a kind of Internet, and that through our brain we might be able to communicate with it. (I have discussed the scientific foundations of the concept of a cosmically extended natural Internet in my recent books, including Science and the Akashic Field, and The Akashic Experience.) Let me consider here the ramifications of this possibility for our life and our future.

To understand how our brain could communicate with a natural information field that embeds us and all things around us, let’s explore how our brain developed, and how it functions. How did it evolve its precise and stupendously complex architecture? And how did it grow into a quantum computer?

Amazingly, our brain had almost all of its 100 billion neurons in place the day we were born, and some 250,000 of those neurons were born every minute while we were in the womb. Moreover, the connections among the neurons are so dense that during the entire time we were in the womb 30,000 synapses were created every second to fill every square centimeter of the cortical surface. The entire evolving assembly was astonishingly precise: our brain has exactly the same structure as all human brains — even a small variation from the norm would have been lethal.

Biochemical processes alone could never have coordinated this exacting process with such speed and precision. It seems that the human brain develops through an instantaneous, nonlocal exchange of information via the process known in physics as entanglement. Our brain is an entangled “macroscopic quantum system,” and it functions as a “quantum computer.”

There is further evidence to support this conclusion. The human brain appears to have an enormous — and conventionally inexplicable — capacity for storing information. Famed mathematician John von Neumann calculated that during an average lifetime of seventy years we accumulate some 280 trillion bits of information. This volume of information doesn’t just disappear without a trace: evidence from psychotherapy and research on non-ordinary states of consciousness shows that all, or almost all, of the information is retrievable. This means that potentially everything we have ever experienced in our lifetime can be recalled. And if it can be recalled, then it must be stored somehow, somewhere. While this is obviously true, the storage repository is not necessarily within our brain.

Consider that 280 trillion is an inconceivably large number and it poses a serious puzzle. How can a network of neurons no larger than 1400 cubic centimeters store 280 trillion bits of information? There is no explanation for this in terms of standard biochemical and biophysical processes.

A nonstandard explanation of the puzzle is daring but logical. Not only are the neurons of our brain thoroughly entangled with each other–so that they can assemble and then process information with lightning speed–they are also entangled with the world beyond our brain. The logical conclusion is that the bulk of the information picked up and processed by the brain is not stored within the brain; it’s stored in the vast information field that embeds the brain. This cosmically extended natural Internet I have called Akashic Field, for it connects all things, and is the memory of all things, just like the legendary Akashic Chronicles. It’s into this Akashic information field that our brain stores all the things we experience, and, except for the items of our short-term memory (which are known to be stored within the brain), it’s from this field that it reads them out again.

This is a staggering possibility, and it has enormous practical implications.

What would it really mean to have a quantum-computer for a brain? Would we still be limited to the information conveyed by our bodily senses, peering at the world through our five slits in the tower? Or could we open the roof to the sky?

If our brain does use “phase-conjugate quantum resonance” to access information — the process by which microparticles once connected remain “nonlocally entangled” — then we should indeed be able to open the roof. Our brain would then be a broadband receiver that picks up information both from our senses, and from the world at large. And the latter kind of information is, by definition, extrasensory.

Yes, I know that ESP has been dismissed by mainstream science as superstition, but today, at its leading edge, science opens up the possibility that ESP is based on a real quantum-physical process of cerebral information transmission.

The implications embrace not only our view and experience of the world, but also our behavior and wellbeing in the world. Because if in the “phase-conjugate quantum resonance” mode our brain is sending information into, and receiving information from, the Akashic information field, it not only links all parts of our body and creates coordination and harmony among them, it also links our body and our brain with the rest of the world, thus creating coordination and harmony between us and the rest of the world.

But why doesn’t our brain create coordination and harmony between us and the world already today? I’ll review this vital question in my next post, and discuss what opening our brain to nature’s Internet might mean for our own health and wellbeing, as well as for the future we share with all humankind.

Published at Huffington Post