Quantum Miracles

One way of looking at Quantum Mechanics is that there is a little slop in the gears of life. When ball A hits ball B it veers off at a precise angle, all mathematically calculable, but not quite. Quantum freedom allows the ball to veer off at any angle it feels like, so long as it is sufficiently close to the precise angle. What I am talking about is something deeper than the slop you would expect because the ball isn’t quite round, the table not quite flat etc. At a fundamental level, atomic particles have choice, within limits, to do what they damn well please. It is called Heisenberg uncertainty. Please excuse the simplistic anthropomorphising; I am trying to reach a non-technical audience too.

Wheeler’s Many Worlds Hypothesis is the mathematically simplest way of resolving Bell’s Theorem. Bell’s Theorem is a mathematical proof derived from physics demonstrating that whenever two particles interact, they are thereafter connected in a mysterious faster-than-light way that doesn’t diminish with time or distance and can’t be shielded. Also known as the mechanism of non-locality. There are other explanations besides the Many-Worlds Hypothesis, but, historically, the mathematically simplest explanations tend to win out in the long run.

The Many Worlds Hypothesis states that the universe continuously branches into multiple parallel worlds — creating all possibilities allowed by quantum randomness / uncertainty / indefiniteness (which is a far cry from all possibilities conceivable!). You might imagine the tree of life with incredibly luxuriant lush branching. Because all possibilities, even the almost impossible ones, manifest, the many worlds hypothesis explains why we live in such an improbable universe. We humans just don’t exist in most of the probable universes — just in the improbable ones we inhabit.

The most recent work in Quantum Mechanics says that, in some way, various unlikely possibilities cancel each other out, so that in practice, in general, we manifest an orderly predicable universe.

If you want something little meatier try The Everett Many World Hypothesis FAQ. Many Worlds is not some flake theory. Even Stephen Hawking thinks it is likely true.

Strawberries and Tigers

A monk was chased by a pair of tigers. The monk found himself cornered at the edge of a cliff. He let himself down on a vine over the cliff. The tigers were pawing at the ground digging at the roots of the vine. Two mice started gnawing at the vine. It would be only minutes before he plunged to his death. Just then, the monk noticed a perfect, ripe stawberry growing out of the cliff and enjoyed the best tasting strawberry of his life.

Wild Metaphysical Speculation

Now comes the speculative part. If there are all these parallel worlds branching like mad, how come you only see one of them at a time and what determines which one you see? All the branches are in some sense pre-existing. Reality is a giant park you can explore by following its many meandering paths. How do you choose which path to follow in your exploration?

Here is how you steer your way around the tree of the many world possibilities.

Focus on what you like; you will tend to drift into worlds with more of that. Or in Ken Keyes’ terms, enjoy the strawberries. Think of it you are letting the universe/your subconscious know what you want by where you focus your attention. (Since men have mostly ridiculed this hypothesis, let’s go for a trivial experiment that may appeal to women who may be more open-minded and better-motivated to try it.) For example, let us say you wanted your body and face to look more youthful. People typically try two things that don’t work:
1. Berate themselves for how ugly they are. They focus on their flaws. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. They give up and fail to take any practical actions that would help their appearance. Their consciousness is filled with thoughts of ugliness, so even if they were cute as Alicia Keys (or Brad Pitt), they still could not enjoy it. As new agers say, what you resist persists. You steer toward unpleasantness because you are so intently focusing on what you don’t like. It works the same way as being distracted by a gruesome automobile accident while driving.
2. Lie to themselves, affirming for example,Everyone thinks I am cuter than Alicia Keys (or Brad Pitt). Underneath they know this is a lie, so they are effectively affirming and concentrating on the opposite.
What should you do instead? Focus on the parts of your face or body that are improved from yesterday or last month. Perhaps your eye bags are not quite as puffy. Perhaps your cheeks are not quite so plump. Look at the crow’s feet at the corner of your eyes and notice how shallow they are. No matter how deep they are, they are still shallow compared with the Grand Canyon. Notice how the grooves are so tiny you could not even measure their depth with a ruler. You might not even be able to feel them with your finger. Focus on their shallowness. Quantum changes still obey the normal laws of physics. You still have to take concrete actions as well, such as get better exercise, diet, rest and reduce your stress. This focus-on-what-you-like approach will better motivate you. Focusing on what you like means you get maximal return for your efforts. You will also be more acutely aware of your successes which will further motivate you to clean up your life.
The power of the futile gesture. Take action to improve what you do not like, but do not waste your energy excessively complaining. Do not focus too hard on the problem or you will drift into a universe where it is even worse. For example, if you want the forests saved, start a project to save one small forest, and you will drift into a universe where everyone is busy saving the forests. Since you don’t really have to change the world, you can attempt seemingly impossible tasks realizing that all you are really doing is voting on what part of the tree you would like to visit next. In my life, Gay Lib happened after I wrote A Guide For The Naive Homosexual. Live Aid happened after I gave my house to the African famine victims. Disarmament started after I composed the nuclear defense chain letter. Debt forgiveness of 3rd world countries happened after I helped get a small R.E.S.U.L.T.S. lobby together to write some letters on the topic to politicians. The Makah whale hunt was banned after my not-widely-publicised suicide protest (I stopped taking the AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) medications that were keeping me alive.) Gandhi picked up a handful of salt and it lead to the independence of India. This is akin to Stephen Gaskin’s Attention is Energy. In one sense, the world did not change; we just moved into a more compatible part of the tree.
Reprogram addictions to preferences, perhaps using the Living Love techniques. I am using the term addiction in the Ken Keyes sense as anything you tell yourself you have to have before you will let yourself be happy. Addictions are like burrs that hang out and hook you, preventing you from flowing smoothly to more beautiful parts of the tree. Sometimes addictions let go with a bang, then when the pent up energy is released, you can be catapulted quickly into other quite different places. At first this can be quite frightening even when the new place is quite pleasant. When I reprogrammed my addiction to live with my ex at the 1977-06 Joy of Living workshop in Berkeley, I got so high I was convinced someone had secretly been giving me drugs.
When you find yourself in a part of the tree you don’t like, do not panic. You do not have to change the entire universe, just focus on rules 1, 2 and 3 and the whole world will miraculously appear to change — but all that really happened is that you steered your way into a more harmonious part of the tree. Telling yourself your current universe is weird will just drift you into even weirder realms.
Movement over the possibility tree is governed by quantum mechanics. Only cumulative tiny shifts (allowed by quantum indefiniteness) are allowed and you always have to start from where you are and move smoothly and logically to the desired place. Do not attempt to break physical laws. The way to move is by slow steady pressure using rules 1, 2 and 3. When you get good at it, or when you are in high excitement, slow steady pressure can give the appearance of almost instantaneous change, a quantum miracle. Large seemingly impossible shifts are made by a consistently directed accumulation of microscopic changes over an extended time period, each allowed in the realm of quantum uncertainty.

If you get stuck in a particularly unpleasant part of the tree and feel incapable of following rules 1, 2 and 3, do not panic. Just wait — This too will pass. Your subconscious mind will eventually apply them for you. Outside help will also eventually arrive to get you unstuck. You can also try to move in the opposite direction, to sort of rock yourself free. You can also console yourself with the thought that you just explored a wrong turn and that possibly other copies of you are happily enjoying the fruits of the other branches. I explained this hypothesis at the end of Debby Hamm’s More Joy workshop. Participant Gerry was obsessing that his cat might be dead when he arrived home. I told Gerry that if when he went home and found his cat dead, that the many worlds hypothesis suggests another copy of Gerry went home and found his cat alive, as long as there were some lawful chain of events allowed by random indefiniteness that would lead to his cat living on. Gerry’s cat, like Schrödinger’s Cat was in some universal sense both alive and dead.

recommend book⇒In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality

John Gribbin

978-0-553-34253-6

paperback

birth

1946 age:71

978-0-553-34103-4

hardcover

publisher

Bantam

978-0-307-79044-6

eBook

published

1984-08-01

B004JN1CIS

kindle

covers this is a more technical way.

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One of the strange predictions of this theory is that you may be immortal. Your friends may die, but generally you won’t. You will tend to steer yourself into parts of the tree where you stay alive. So long as Heisenberg uncertainty allows sufficient slop in the inevitability of death, you can continue to squeak through. You may choose to die eventually. See my Reality Is A Hallucination essay, particularly the suicide. Immortality is one way of interpreting that experience. From the point of view of most of your friends, you would die, however. This may be a great comfort to those who have lost loved ones. Loved ones who have passed on are alive in some parts of the tree, but dead in yours. They did not die, you just drifted off to a different part of the reality tree than they did.
I wonder if these other copies of me living in other parts of the tree are also conscious, or if consciousness decides only to inhabit the more pleasant variants. Does my personal consciousness in some sense inhabit them all? If you get off in a part of the tree where people seem to act like wooden robots, chances are this is not a pleasant realm since there is little other consciousness visiting there.
One of the other corolloraries of this theory is you are partly responsible when other people do bad things. You chose a part of the tree where they behaved that way. Perhaps there are some other parts you could have chosen where they were better behaved. Your beliefs and expectations influence what you focus on and hence what you choose. Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand (if you will but think well of everyone). Sai Baba warned You can’t reform the world, but you can choose to steer toward the part of the probability tree where the world is already reformed, and you can try to get some friends to steer along with you.
Gambling I have done it very rarely. When I did, it was embarrassing. People assumed I cheated when I played bingo because I won, game after game. My Dad suggested doing your lifetime gambling in one throw of the dice. This gives you the best odds. I did this with a slot machine. I put in a nickel and got back $0.15. I am one of the few people on the planet who’s lifetime gambling paid off 300%. It is not as easy as you might think to use the many worlds hypothesis to gamble to make money. You have to deal with other people’s consciousness, their beliefs and your beliefs. Tolly Burkan is much more comfortable with this than I am. I believe gambling is more immoral than we realise.

Consensus. When people get together, they unconsciously form an agreement on what can happen. So for example, some flakes may get together and lift solid oak tables with their fingertips pressed to the top of the table. However, if a skeptic joins them, they will find they can no longer do this without cheating in some way. Jesus’s great skill was as quantum salesman, convincing people that miracles could happen. At some point the quantum physicists will give us the green light to create Quantum miracles and lo, we will all discover the ability to perform them. To what extent Quantum miracles are a shared hallucination and to what extent they represent objective reality I do not know. I suspect that at some point we may discover that what we call objective reality and what we call a shared hallucination are the same thing. Another way to look at this is that people’s consciousnesses are like flocks of birds or swarms of bees or schools of fish, that tend to travel in tribes through the probability tree. Another way to look at it is that people are not really individual consciousnesses, but like clouds that interpenetrate, like wave superimposition. They act in concert to steer along the branches of the tree. Quantum salesmen attempt to influence the direction of the tribe. Things get interesting when tribes collide. Each tribe can do things the other believes to be impossible. Lawrence Le Shan discusses this in his book Alternate Realities: The Search for the Full Human Being.

recommend book⇒Alternate Realities: The Search for the Full Human Being

Lawrence Leshan

978-0-345-34924-8

paperback

birth

1920 age:97

978-0-87131-217-4

hardcover

publisher

Ballantine

published

1987-11-12

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Gregg Braden’s quantum prayer sounds very much like steering. He explains why conventional forms of prayer may be counter productive because they make you focus so strongly and affirm what you don’t like.

Einstein wrote extensively on the connections between science and religion. Most other scientists believe this confluence of religion and science is too flaky for objective research.

Apologies And Other Explanations

The practical advice may still be useful even if my model of the universe to explain it is all wet. Nothing at all may be happening to the physical universe — just the way we look at it and model it internally.

On the other hand the Volvo effect may be all there is to it. When you buy a new Volvo suddenly you start noticing hundreds of other Volvos on the road. Subjectively it may seem there are suddenly more Volvos in the universe. Similarly, people fool themselves thinking that prayer or steering works simply because they become more aware of when the universe does go the way they want.

Perhaps all I am giving you is a Dumbo magic flying feather, just something that gives you a little faith to use the talents you had all along.

The effects I discovered may be totally mental — they modify the mental map you create of the universe, how you process and display information to yourself, but have no direct effect on the outside world. See the essay Experience Is A Hallucination.

Perhaps the whole thing can be explained by selective attention and selective memory. You remember that which fits with your current model and conveniently forget anything that does not.

As an experiment, make a list of all the unexplained little mysteries in your personal life. As you write it, likely even more memories will come back. The list of things most of us sweep under the carpet as not worthy of investigation is surprisingly long. This is your personal equivalent to the insignificant black body problem that Newtonian physicists tried to sweep under the rug. When they finally tackled it, they discovered relativity and quantum mechanics.

Yet another take is that I have given you a recipe for inducing psychosis, entering a dream world and leaving reality behind.

I don’t know the answer yet. All I know is that following those bizarre instructions generates the perception of improbable events. Why, I leave up to people smarter than I.

What is Cosmic Consciousness?

Holy people from all cultures report an experience where there are no boundaries, where we are all one. A tiny glimpse of this consciousness is considered the pearl of great price worth any effort to achieve it. Even though the majority of mankind has spent a few seconds in this consciousness, only a handful of saints manage to hang out in it for any extended period of time.

This experience has happened to me on a number of occasions. It is the purest delight and has had profound after effects. If we are all one, amassing wealth makes no sense; poverty makes no sense; war makes absolutely no sense. Taking advantage of others is not wicked, just silly, like cutting off your left arm in a vain attempt to improve the strength of your right arm.

I think this way of looking at the world can become much more common if we take cosmic consciousness off its pedestal and have a look at what it is scientifically. It turns out all you are doing is temporarily shutting down the part of your brain that constantly computes where you are, what is you and what is not you.

Most modern people imagine their consciousness resides right behind the eyes. This may sound very strange to you, but medieval people experienced their consciousness as residing near the heart. If you walk through a forest with your eyes closed in bare feet, you will discover that the subjective place where your consciousness lives will tend to drift down to your feet.

Using a computer analogy, consciousness is like the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screen that shows a few interesting details of what the program (subconscious mind) is doing. Exactly what is shown on the screen is rather arbitrary and need have only a tenuous relationship to immense complexity going on in the CPU (Central Processing Unit) (brain).

There is a huge wealth of information — gleaned from many senses percolating in your mind. This information goes to update an unconscious internal model of reality. The model is formed primarily of relationships and analogies. The conscious mind taps information from key points in this model. There is no direct link between sensory neurons and consciousness. Thus there is little problem in having information gleaned primarily via hearing be displayed to the conscious mind as a visual image or even an odour. Information gleaned primarily from past experiences will look to the conscious mind almost indistinguishable to current sensory information. All the information goes into the big model where we tend to lose track of its original source.

People fortunate enough to have experienced perfect hallucinations — in every respect totally indistinguishable from reality realise how hallucinatory normal reality actually is. You cannot experience reality directly — only your own internal model. I strongly suspect that people’s subjective experience of what the universe is like are so different that if you were, through some electronic miracle, to become conscious of another person’s internal model, you would not recognize the subjective experience of it as reality at all. However, once you got to understand it, you would see that it was reasonably homeomorphic to your own.

A very simple example may suffice. Presume that since birth your conscious mind reversed the subjective experiences of red and green from the way most people experience them. There is no experiment you could perform to detect that this was indeed the case. In fact you could even reverse up and down subjectively and still function perfectly and never know it.

What is in this internal model? There is your body (which most of the time can send you sensory data) and other stuff (which you can hear, see and taste, but not feel). All this stuff is in your model; all of it is in your head. If your leg goes to sleep and stops sending you tactile information, you still tend intellectually to regard it as part of yourself even though it feels like part of the other stuff.

Is the saliva in your mouth you or not you? Is your stomach contents you or not you? Is your hair you or not you?

My point is that what you consider part of you and not part of you is in a way somewhat arbitrary since in actuality all of the mental model (the only thing you can be directly conscious of) is inside you.

With a computer drafting program, you can ask the computer to examine its internal model to draw how a building would look from any perspective. You can do exactly the same thing with your consciousness. You can use your internal model to look at the world from any point of view within it.

Since it’s all in there, you can see why looking at the world from any viewpoint should not be too difficult. It is not too hard to imagine how the room would appear looking down from the ceiling. You can even do this modeling so strongly that your consciousness is dominated by it. Normally, of course, you are performing exactly the same sorts of computations to model how the world would look from just behind your eyes and allowing this hallucination to dominate your consciousness. If you do not find it too frightening, you can ask your conscious mind to look at the model from the ceiling. If you succeed in doing just that, you might be tempted to call it an out of body experience, but nothing nearly so fancy need occur.

In addition, you can diffuse your consciousness over a wider and wider part of the model. Cosmic consciousness is just a very diffuse consciousness where you are experiencing the world from many points of view in your internal model simultaneously. Your consciousness taps the internal model from points representing places both within your body and without.

Playing with your consciousness is one of the most fun things you can do, but I warn you, if you go at it too vigorously you can scare yourself silly. Most people live out their whole lives hiding their consciousness just behind their eyes — just out of habit. There is a huge world in there. We each have a model of the entire universe in our skulls and most are too timid to get out and look it over.

Most people continously berate themselves with a vicious inner dialog: You pig, you lazy slob! They would never dream of treating another person so rudely and tactlessly. From the point of view of cosmic consciousness, there is no difference between you and others, therefore, bullying yourself is just as reprehensible as bullying another. Further, your subconscious takes this abuse as commands on how to behave. Give a dog a bad name… Be as polite, encouraging, tactful and gentle with yourself as you would with anyone else.

Karma

Traditionally, karma is thought of in terms of reward and punishment for good and bad behaviour, but what is actually happening is you are punished for your sins in the same sense you are punished when you hit your thumb with a hammer. Your lack of skill causes you to do a stupid painful thing.

From the point of view of cosmic consciousness, when you are nasty to anyone, you are being nasty to yourself, so, of course, it hurts! It is not wicked, just stupid, like poking an ice pick up your nostril.

You don’t necessarily feel the pain immediately. There are hysteresis effects. It will just make us both dizzy if I try to explain all the ramifications of this, but they are fairly obvious if you think it through using that simple CC model.

When you mess around with Quantum miracles, you are playing with higher stakes. With Quantum miracles, karmic effects are magnified and react faster.

I hope it is now clear to you why Quantum miracles are for ethical use only. This is a safety tip, not a moral chastisement.

How

Disclaimer

The Ken Keyes Living Love Methods and the Science of Happiness are a spiritual path for atheists and scientists. They are the are based on common sense requiring absolutely no faith. They won’t rip you off or have you selling flowers on the street. They will, however, teach you how to be happier.

What I described are my own weird beliefs — nothing whatever to do with what Ken teaches.

I go through phases of my life where these quantum effects seem totally neglible and other times where it seems every casual thought manifests in reality reminiscent of the sorceror’s apprentice or King Midas. If I want them to work faster, I focus on how fast they are. If I want them to work slower (the more usual case), I notice how slow they are compared with how fast they could be. When this stuff starts percolating it is downright scary. Don’t push it too hard.

There is a ton more to tell you. Much of it is scattered all over this website, some of it as parable and metaphor. Warning! Quantum miracles are for ethical use only!

Links

Conclusion

As the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead said Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.

This is all so outrageously flaky, you would be insane to take my word for it. Perform your own experiments and come to your own conclusions.

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Quantum Miracles

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Quantum Physics