Consciousness at the Quantum Level

In April, I attended my fourth Science of Consciousness Conference (TSC). Sitting near a waterfall behind the conference hotel one day, I asked a woman nearby about the timing of an evening event. She noted my name tag identifying me as an author and asked me what I had written. I told her about my book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, and she told me she wanted to write a book. When I mentioned that she might talk to my editor who was attending the conference, she said, “The universe brought us together to convey this information.”

 Now, what is more likely: with so many authors at the conference peddling their books, there was a greater than average chance she would meet someone with this information; or, had the universe conspired to bring us together for that hillside moment?

I’ve been moving in mystical arenas for some time. It started with my oneness experience in San Antonio, TX, where, standing awestruck in the Spanish market, awash in foreign, sights, sounds and smells, I lost my sense of individual identity and felt ultimate bliss. Only one word seemed sufficient to describe it: Nirvana. My next moment brought terror. After a dear friend claimed to be channeling an angel in my backyard, I read a book on dissociative identity disorder late into the night. Finally asleep, I was awakened by a dream image of a patient lying on a psychiatrist’s couch. With eyes rolling, mouth neon-lit, a Darth Vader-like voice shouted out: “Freud only got it half right! Read the two Hyperion poems!

In my book, I describe how this enigmatic message led me to Jung and Keats, along with an exploration of paranormal connections in poets of genius and their great creativity. My book brought me an invitation to a symposium on “Further Reaches of the Imagination” at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Here, assembled scholars told tales of bizarre, unexplainable phenomena in their lives. I recounted my San Antonio experience and how I had returned to the same spot to recapture it and, sadly, NADA happened this time. They all shouted out at once: “You forgot to lick the blue water ice!” Indeed, that final element, that I had theorized in a paper submitted before the conference, had possibly tipped me into a state of synchronized brain hemispheres and supplied the key to unlock cosmic consciousness.

Now at the Science of Consciousness Conference, my former experiences, Esalen, and uncanny science all seemed to meet up. Garry Nolan, a physicist participating at Esalen had claimed that the time-space continuum could speak to us at the cellular level, if we have the proper antenna. He had been working with Dean Radin, who would also be speaking at the Consciousness Conference on remote viewing. Apparently, only one in a thousand can do it. Garry had also mentioned Marjorie Woollacott’s book, Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind (Rowman & Littlefield; Oct 15, 2015), which describes her conversion from pure neuroscientist to a believer in so much more by the touch of a guru during a meditation session. Not remembering Garry’s reference to Dr. Woollacott, I was now sitting right in front of her at a morning workshop in Tucson.

                               

But, here’s where it gets really interesting. All signs at the Consciousness Conference were tying anomalous events to hard science. First, let’s consider the claims of spirit mediums. Arnaud Delorme judged mediumship to be an altered state of consciousness. Julia Mossbridge had a model of mind that especially spoke to me: the non-conscious mind is actually the puppet master controlling the more limited conscious mind. Whereas the conscious mind does not normally access future events, precognition and presentiment are “fast-thinking, system one processes” the non-conscious mind uses to prepare us for the future. It is in fact a survival mechanism. I thought back to my precognition as a young college student on a park bench who got the startling precognition that I would marry a guy who happened to be walking by at the time. Indeed, I did marry him. My future had been preordained or in some sense already existed.

I had read medium researcher Julie Beischel's book, Investigating Mediums, before coming to the conference. She was too sick to attend, so her husband stepped in for her. In her book, she cites the possible role of the right hemisphere in mediumship and references its higher level of negative emotions, which I say definitely points to the right hemisphere. One of the mediums she tested noted that her energy shifted and came in on the left. Julie says trauma is always a part of the mediums’ mix, as I do in my research on poets, along with the role of maternal attachment and loss.

In the Unity of Consciousness workshop, Joran Josipovic explained that the right angular gyrus integrates body mapping, so that people with injury to this part of the brain have mystical experiences since they cannot feel their bodies. He also differentiated high entropy versus low entropy states in the brain: the former characterizes psychedelic states, infant consciousness, REM sleep and dreaming, NDE’s, magical thinking and temporal lobe epilepsy, all of which produce divergent thinking and creativity.

Stu Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, professor, and original founder of the Science of Consciousness Conference along with David Chalmers, believes the brain evolved to feel good. Here’s a piece he wrote that explains his thesis in simple terms:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stuart-hameroff/darwin-versus-deepak-whic_b_7481048.html

Deepak Chopra gave an amazing talk on the Conscious Universe. He believes EVERYTHING is conscious. Body/Mind should be seen as a unified wholeness of experience. The true self generates qualia (our perceptions of what’s out there). Consciousness is a formless, primitive, ontological entity existing at the quantum level. He also has a new book out on how we can change our genes.

Rudolph Tanzi, who co-authors books with Deepak, had good news about Alzheimer’s disease. The bad news is that the disease is found in 40-50% of people over 85 and that it starts in your 40’s. Tangles in the neurons produce a neuro-inflammatory response; inflammation, not the tangles, is the real issue. The good news is that they’re working on a way to stop the degenerative process before it starts. He mentioned Cat’s claw extract (Cognitive Clarity TM), which is now available; meditation, exercise, and diet (less red meat), along with 7-8 hours of sleep each night to clear out the brain.

Time and consciousness melded into one big theme at the conference. As I’m running out of time (and space), I’ll be brief. Reality, it seems, is a handshake between waves going forward and backward in time. Quantum entanglement occurs in time. The most important function of the brain is to predict the future. The quantum field is in some sense eternal. We exist in electromagnetic light fields. The brain is an electric organ and a pattern detector.

An aside about mentions of Julian Jaynes, whose theory on the right hemisphere was an early inspiration to me: a graduate student at Columbia began his talk citing Jaynes’s book, without verifying or attesting to his theory, and ended his talk referencing Jaynes. Before coming to the conference I had read Allan Combs’s Consciousness Explained Better (a riposte to Daniel Dennett’s early salvo called Consciousness Explained (1992)). Combs opens his own book with Jaynes's initial paragraph, in all its metaphoric musing and alliterative allusions, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I sought out Combs at the conference to tell him how much I enjoyed his very readable book. He waxed elegiac on Jaynes, not for his theory so much as for the beauty of the writing, considering it the best of its kind in the 20th century.

Final quips and quotes of note: Mental health issues arise from problems in time and space, problems distinguishing self from other. The grandfather of all the senses is the basic tendency to either approach or avoid. Is this good for me or bad for me? Self-preservation asks us to avoid, while self-development suggests we adapt. The Self is both part and whole and when we have no body to maintain we feel bliss (remember that in a Oneness experience we lose our sense of the body’s limits). Our prefrontal lobes are not totally developed until our 20’s and consciousness narrows as a function of age. As we know more, we see less. Rat studies show that the brain is hyperactive in the dying process as it is trying to save the heart in the absence of oxygen. Serotonin surges. These two findings might account for NDEs. Only 5 % of people survive heart attacks and 20 % of them have NDEs. Light is associated with death, mystical experiences and gurus, like Alain Forget, who gives light energy to open the hearts of his students, claiming he is multi-dimensional when he does it. I felt energy pouring out from my heart in my spontaneous San Antonio experience and saw sparks of light spreading out seemingly infinitely beyond me.

It seems I had come to the right place at the right time to get answers to the mysteries of my own heart and mind in a throng of like-minded folks dedicated to understanding consciousness. We are singular and infinite all at once, both awaiting spontaneous gifts of knowledge and struggling hard to make sense of our and others' experiences. I should add that there was a lot of support for belief in reincarnation amongst the presenters.

“In all chaos there is cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order.” C.G. Jung

 “Heaven lies about in our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.” Wordsworth

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” Leonardo da Vinci

The Eye of the Beholder

In 1976, Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes attributed the voices of the gods to the right hemisphere in pre-literate civilizations, claiming that a residual dissociative effect could be found in poets, prophets, musicians, the hypnotized and schizophrenics of the modern age. In his book, he included drawings of faces with lop-sided smiles, mirror images of each other, that he had presented to 1,000 people in a test.

                                            A                              B

Jaynes wanted to test which hemisphere was judging the facial expression. Reading direction, apparently, is independent of reading a facial expression. In 1976, as today, research has shown that recognizing facial expressions is primarily a right-hemispheric function.* Jaynes found that 80% of right-handers chose B, while 55% of left-handers chose A, showing that more than half of the latter were using their left hemispheres to read the facial expression. He also thought that if you were completely left-lateralized, left-handed in every way, you would be even more likely to chose A.

I found this curious because I am left-handed in every way, plus left eye and foot dominant, yet I chose B without hesitation. It seems to me that Jaynes was not taking into account atypical lateralization. He may have been assuming that if you are left-handed your hemispheric functions would be switched so that your language was on the right and visuo-spatial functions, including recognition of faces and facial expressions, were on the left. In fact, we now know that there can be a number of different configurations for brain functions, including both language and visuo-spatial functions on the right. So, an extremely left-side lateralized person, like I am, could still chose B.

When I posted these images on Facebook, I had just read an article in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Scientific American Mind. The author, Richard Wiseman, was saying that we are ALL in some sense “Wired for Weird,” ready to believe in ghosts or see facial images where there are none, using our natural pattern recognition, agency-detection and facial recognition abilities. However, people with a highly active right hemisphere are more likely to claim they are clairvoyant, telepathic, have dream precognition or see faces in unlikely places. Beginning in the late 1990’s, Wiseman reported, neuropsychologist Peter Brugger has been finding that right-hemisphere dominant people, judged by a variety of means, are indeed more likely to believe in and/or have experienced paranormal events. Other researchers have also come to this same conclusion.

As it must be pretty clear by now, I’m very interested in the creative abilities and special skills of people who are right-hemisphere dominant for language. When I first presented this test to My Left-handed Facebook Friends** and general Facebook Friends, 16 people responded and many more since then. In the initial test, the responses split right down the middle. Eight people chose A and 8 people chose B. Six lefties chose A, as Jaynes had predicted, using their right hemisphere. The lefties and right-handers who chose B would have been judging the smile from the right. The right-handers who chose A were atypical, using their left hemisphere to judge the facial expression.

As the facial expression test isn't really testing for over-all dominance, I would like people who have taken it, and any others who would like to join in, to take it one step further. If you report your results in the comment section, please let me know as well if you are left- right- or mixed-handed. Here are 4 simple things to do:

1. Cross your arms across your chest. Which hand is up?
2. If you play a sport, do you use your left or right hand/foot?Walk up stairs. Which foot do you place up first?
3. Make a triangle with your index fingers and thumbs together in front of your face. Look at an object in the distance closing each eye alternately. Which eye makes the object appear in the center of the triangle.
4. When you write, is your hand position facing up or do you curl in your hand? For example,  President Obama sharply curls in his left hand; Clinton writes straight up. How about when you eat? Do you curl in your hand? Sometimes right-handers curl in their hands also, so they are probably right dominant for language. One of my sons, who benefits from my left-handed genes, curls in his right hand when he writes and eats.

Thanks to any and all who take part in my test! Please also let me know if you believe in or have ever experienced any paranormal events, like telepathy or precognition.


* [R]ecent research suggests that the right hemisphere may be best at processing patterns like voice contour, facial expression, aspects of size and quantity, gestalt aspects of the world which, from a developmental perspective, represent the way children begin to learn about cognitive areas like music, art, mathematics or language. This quote is from a great up-to-date article.
** Now a Facebook page called "Right Mind Matters" for all people with enhanced right dominance, whether left-, right-, or mixed handed.

Hearing the Voice, Getting it Right

 Once, in a frightening dream, a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch shouted at me: “Freud only got it half right!” Following this ambiguous remark, the Darth Vader-like voice bellowed a command: “Read the two Hyperion poems!” After twenty years of research, I am now attempting to explain the neurological and psychological origins of the dissociative knowledge that has entered some of history's greatest poetic minds.

Victor Hugo once heard a voice declare “Au travail, grand homme!” His mind, altered by loss of a loved one and political exile, had transformed the sound of the waves crashing around his island home into a command to get to work. He spent two and a half years attempting to contact the dead during his exile, writing the immortal Les Misérables and reams of poetry as well. Soliciting the advice of the dead poets and prophets he had long admired helped him dull the pain of his diminished, alienated universe. Other great poets were also impelled by traumas and losses to explore similar means of consolation.

American poet James Merrill spent 20 years contacting the dead using a Ouija board with his companion David Jackson. The dissociative words, spelled out in haste and often with humor, described the history and invisible functioning of the universe that would be molded into Merrill's brilliant and self-consoling 560-page poem, The Changing Light at Sandover.

William Butler Yeats accessed voices through his wife, Georgie. She either spoke the words while asleep, as Yeats wrote them down, or produced automatic handwriting. Like Merrill with Jackson, Yeats would construct a grand scheme to order the universe, where he held an important position. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s voice came to him like Hugo's, transformed in the rush of wind and waves. Highly poetic and personal language poured forth, combating loss and entraining truth and beauty in its wake.

Neither poet nor prophet, I am just a scribe trying to get it right. I wish I could get the words from a Ouija board (much more convenient than Hugo’s laborious table tapping in family séances) or from an inspired rush of wind or waves titillating my mind in a self-hushed trance. Outside of my original dream message, I have never received any other dissociative knowledge. I have read the scientific literature and analyzed other's creative voices to make sense of the phenomenon.

In my doctoral days, I had studied how the mythic mother ruled in early human history; how she was dethroned by patriarchal forces; but also how she inevitably returns in times of crisis in the mythic undercurrents of literature, especially in poetry. Matriarchal myth studies subsided in the wake of the crisis experience of a close friend of mine. After her mother’s death, she claimed to hear the voices of angels advising and consoling her, helping her deal with life and grief as well as to become an intuitive healer. Her experience led me to the poets, as my dream "mad" man pointed the way.

The first book that helped me make sense of her experience was Julian Jaynes's, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Here, he located the voices of the gods in the right temporal lobe of the brain.  Due to migrations, historical catastrophes, and, especially, the beginning of literacy, the voices fell silent and self-consciousness was born. Mental “breakdowns” can return one to a “bicameral” or dissociative mind. Jaynes’s theory was compelling, yet 
controversial, and needed updating with current scientific research.

Jung also experienced voices and visions and used these perceptions to construct his account of individual psychic life and the connections that bind us all. A line in his biography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in fact, eerily replicated my dream message: “Freud was only considering half of the whole.” Freud’s "half" theorized the sexually desired birth mother, while Jung’s "half" longed for the mythical Great Mother. Could it be both were right?

Jung’s work is enormously helpful in understanding the voices. Yet, modern neuroscience reaffirms Freud in the sense that the infantile relation to the mother can alter the brain, not through sexual longing but through psychic wounding. Since many neuroscientists now agree that the wounding occurs in the right hemisphere, perhaps by adding Freud's maternal half to Jung's mythic half we find our way to a deeper truth.

Tallying the mythic mothers, the mother-mediated crises, the voices of female angels and the poetic muses, I felt that everything was constellating around the mother, the original other who we were until we developed a separate consciousness. The mother mirrored the child, who internalized her presence until he or she could regulate their own emotions. Dr. Allan N. Schore’s book, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self,  identified and located this process in the right hemisphere. No longer a metaphorical construct, the feminine was literally hardwired into the child’s mind. Here, in the pre-verbal matrix of the emerging self, maternal wounds can scar a child. An abusive, neglectful, or lost mother, as well as a smothering one, could create problems of boundary loss or self-control issues so common in pathological disorders. Later crises, especially the death or loss of loved ones, can open old wounds.

Poetic words are an embodiment. Confronted with loss, abandonment, or fear of death, words may arise unbidden, seeking to construct a hierarchy to defend against that chaotic absence. The mind reels without an internal stabilizing principle. A void must be filled; order must be restored. An all-encompassing premise becomes a presence containing the grief and giving the injured self a larger, comforting space to inhabit—the one vacated by the mother.

The locus of that new ordering--the right temporal lobe--uses the raw materials of memory as well as snatches of bits from the natural world around it to create, much like in a dream. Its fears and preferred ways of making sense of the world will color its creations. The loss and the proclivities appeared again and again as I studied the minds of great poets who heard voices or used dissociative techniques to access them. Analyzing their ability to put their preoccupations into words tells us not only about the poetic process but also about ourselves—our common human psychology, our preoccupations and our ability to create.

This study sheds light on commonly observed phenomena, explained from the dual optic of neuropsychology and poetry. Why does a disordered sense of self so often result in conflicted impressions of gender? Why does the disordered self so often use religious or mythic imagery? Why does religion itself so often constellate around gender issues and death? Sorting through the evidence that neuroscience and the poets provide, my book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, attempts to make sense of it all, while fully appreciating the great mystery and beauty of the creating mind.