Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals About How We Should Live

278 Pages·2013·1.93 MB·English

by  Lothar Schafer

ALSO BY LOTHAR SCHÄFER
In Search of Divine Reality (1997)
Copyright © 2013 by Lothar Schäfer
Foreword copyright © 2013 by Deepak Chopra All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Deepak Chopra Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
DEEPAK CHOPRA BOOKS and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-30798596-5
Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket photography © Traumlichtfabrik/Getty Images
v3.1
To Gabriele,
friend of a lifetime,
and our loving children
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Deepak Chopra
Preface: The Physics of Enlightenment
Introduction
YOUR COSMIC POTENTIAL: BEING PART OF THE UNIVERSE
PART ONE: THE NATURE OF REALITY
Chapter 1
MATERIALISM IS WRONG: THE BASIS OF THE MATERIAL WORLD IS NONMATERIAL
Chapter 2
YOUR POTENTIAL IS REAL EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN’T SEE IT: HOW VIRTUAL STATES ACT ON
THE VISIBLE WORLD
Chapter 3
WE ARE ALL CONNECTED: REALITY AS INDIVISIBLE WHOLENESS
Chapter 4
CONSCIOUSNESS: A COSMIC PROPERTY
PART TWO: LIVING IN THIS REALITY
Chapter 5
DARWIN WAS WRONG: EVOLUTION NEEDS QUANTUM SELECTION AND COOPERATION
Chapter 6
WORLD ETHOS: LIVING IN HARMONY WITH THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE
Chapter 7
YOUR EVOLVING MIND: INTEGRATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS AND A LEAP INTO A NEW HUMAN SPECIES
Acknowledgments
Appendix for Chapter 1
ON SINGLE-PARTICLE INTERFERENCE AND THE CONCEPT OF POTENTIALITY WAVES
Appendix for Chapter 2
HOW THE NONEMPIRICAL PART OF REALITY IS DISCOVERED IN THE VIRTUAL STATES OF ATOMS AND
MOLECULES
Notes
Sources
About the Author
Foreword
Deepak Chopra
Ideas turn into high drama when they walk on stage and change people’s
lives. In physics, traditionally honored as “the queen of the sciences,”
this happens very rarely. No queen is more aloof or enigmatic. When
Einstein discovered relativity, it was said (by the English philosopher
Bertrand Russell) that only three people in the world understood it.
Russell’s arithmetic wasn’t astronomically wrong if you were counting
people outside physics. Relativity shook the foundations of three major
concepts in the field: time, space, and gravity. The cosmos would never
be the same—but people’s everyday lives would.
Lothar Schäfer plunks a colorless word on stage—potential—which is
as mundane as relativity. It’s also the seed of an entirely new universe,
however, one that Einstein could never accept. The new universe
outlined here is conscious. We are thinking creatures because the cosmos
thinks. We breathe with life because the primal ingredients of life are
embedded in the fabric of Nature. Not just the elements that evolved
into organic chemicals. The process of life itself is basic to the universe
and has invisibly guided it since the Big Bang. A fan of James Joyce’s
writing once gushed that he used so many words. He replied that it
wasn’t the words, it was where you put them that matters. The universe
has taken its vocabulary of atoms and molecules and arranged them
precisely to give rise to human DNA and the human mind. This book
tells how and why that happened. We are the expressed potential of
creation, the way that Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the expressed potential of
his genius.
But it’s not the science that I want to emphasize first but its human
dimensions. No one, including Einstein himself, has had the nerve to
subtitle a book, as Lothar Schäfer does, “What quantum physics reveals
about how we should live.” It will be scandalous in many quarters that
he makes such a statement. Physics is proud not to apply to everyday
life. You and I raise a family, pursue our careers, and face our everyday
challenges without the slightest need to refer to the equations of Isaac
Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Every cell in the body obeys the
principles of physics discovered by these pioneers and others, but the
fact that physics speaks in mathematics removes it from the experience
of living.
Ironically, the gap widened enormously with the arrival of quantum
physics over a century ago. On one side, quantum mechanics
revolutionized the concept of the physical universe, turning certainty
into probabilities and unseating the very notion of solid particles. But on
the other side, everyday life goes on. How can Nature contain two
opposite worlds?
The everyday world, which is usually labeled Newtonian, surrounds us
through physical objects; our five senses feel, see, and hear what goes on
in the Newtonian world. Looking out into space, the vast distances
between the stars may awe us, and the empty void may send a shiver
through us. But planet Earth is the offspring of a familiar cosmos, in that
even the most distant galaxy is a secure physical thing.
The other world, the quantum domain, couldn’t be more different. Our
five senses cannot detect it. The existence of Nature’s building blocks
begins in virtual reality, that is, in a realm of reality that isn’t accessible
to our senses. All things are rooted in the unreachable realm of nothing.
That the entire cosmos could arise from a place that is beyond human
experience and unknowable, fits amazingly well with a saying from the
Vedic scriptures of ancient India: “It is that which is inconceivable but
by which all things are conceived.”
The familiar and the inconceivable. That defines the paradox of
modern physics in a word. It is sometimes called the mismatch between
the microscopic and the macroscopic, meaning that what holds true at
the tiniest scale in Nature, where the visible world emerges out of a
realm of invisible forms, does not hold true in our world of plants,
animals, rocks, and human beings. Worse, the quantum world is more
fundamental. It cannot be dismissed as a queer anomaly. Creation is
born here; genesis is now, taking place every nanosecond, with the
inconceivable void as our womb.
Even though the conscious mind cannot cross over the border where
matter ceases to exist (it is the quantum equivalent of Hamlet’s
“undiscover’d country from whose bourne no traveller returns”), Schäfer
argues that we are most at home there. The fact that we are conscious
beings derives from the womb of creation, the void that contains nothing
we can describe in words. But we can’t describe ourselves in words,
either. Not when it comes to consciousness. Consciousness simply is.
Each person is aware of being aware. In that regard, Hamlet asked the
wrong question. It’s not “To be or not to be?” but “To be conscious or
not to be conscious?” As hard as it is to imagine death, it’s infinitely
harder to imagine having no mind.
The mind is maker of reality. It doesn’t look on Nature like a customer
looking in a department store mirror, intrigued by a reflection. You and
your reality are one. If a sunset looks beautiful in your eyes, nothing in
physics or biology can explain why. Certain wavelengths of light strike
the retina of your eye. Electrical and chemical signals travel along the
optic nerve, reaching the visual cortex in the occipital lobe. Going
through several stages of neural processing, the photons that began as
emissions from the sun become a sunset.
What’s astonishing—and a complete mystery—is how you see the
sunset as a picture in reality, for there is no light in the brain, no images
of a sunset. The brain isn’t a camera, not remotely. Everything you see,
hear, touch, taste, and smell must be created by the mind. Other living
species don’t confront the same reality as you. A hummingbird or
honeybee, because it possesses an entirely different nervous system, lives
in an inconceivable reality. Even mammals closer to us on the
evolutionary chain inhabit a reality we cannot penetrate. A porpoise’s
auditory center occupies 75 percent of its brain. A porpoise interprets
reality through rapid clicking noises that are six times higher than
human hearing, emitted at a sound level of 170 decibels (the same range
as a space rocket on takeoff), and are spaced by a gap of 60 one-
thousandths of a second. By comparison, when an Olympic swimmer
wins a race by a few hundredths of a second, to a porpoise’s ear that is
as slow as a tortoise. But even more radical, if we used our hearing to
navigate through the world, a backseat driver would say, “You almost
side-swiped that truck. Are you deaf?”
Consciousness takes as many shapes as there are nervous systems to