Science: Universal Mind Over
Matter
"Bend! Bend! Bend!" forty seekers shout in unison. They hold up assorted knives and forks at the command of their instructor, Jack Houck, who says he is in charge of advanced research "at a major aerospace company."
Talking about the "field effect" and the "mind connection," PK (psychokinesis) party-giver Houck urges the attentive audience (each paid $20 to attend his workshop) to "realize your potential for applying your mind. Put your mind into that silverware and COMMAND it to bend. Then let it happen!"
Houck's theory is that under paranormal mind-control, metal becomes soft for a five-to-thirty-second "time window." During that interval, a person with good PK power can, with only light pressure, bend and shape the malleable silverware.
At least half of those attending the spoon-bending seminar were able to twist their silverware (which Houck provides and then retrieves after the workshop). Some spoons were only slightly bent. But the man next to me (a friend of Houck's and a PK-party veteran) wrapped his stainless steel fork around itself until it looked like a pretzel.
Unfortunately, my spoon — price sticker of fifteen cents from the St. Vincent de Paul Society still affixed — wouldn't cooperate. I didn't qualify for one of Houck's "Certified Warm Former" buttons, which he hands out to successful "graduates" at his PK parties. Interestingly, Houck won't
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demonstrate spoon-bending by doing it himself. And he refused to identify the aircraft company that employed him when I asked.1
About forty adepts hold PK parties, Tupperware style, all over the world, Houck said, adding that 85% of the 8000 persons who have attended his sessions since 1981 have bent silver. But he allowed that "very scientific and analytical" people may not be able to make PK do their bidding.
Not being sure I fit that category, I tried harder. More pressure. Both hands. A little more . . . more. Yeah! Steady as she bends.
I pocketed the evidence. (And even now as I write, St. Vincent's spoon, with its one right-angled bend in the narrowest part of the stem, hangs as a memento from the lamp above my computer.)
Houck talks about "buckling bowls," "time shifts" — sending information telepathically at one time and receiving it from another — remote viewing, psychic farming, and making soybean seeds sprout on command. (He has some along, moistened just this morning. Nobody has any luck, however, despite loud commands of "Sprout! Sprout! Sprout!")
The importance of it all, Houck intones, is "the shift I see in people regarding self-confidence . . . . They can see the power of positive thinking to change their lives through positive commands."
New Age parlor games? Or evidence that the mind can control physical objects? Or, maybe, that the material world is only an illusion; consciousness is all that's real.
"Mysticism is just tomorrow's science, dreamed today," Marshall McLuhan once said.2
Or put in the characteristically optimistic words of the chief Aquarian conspirator, Marilyn Ferguson: "Science is only now verifying what humankind has known intuitively since the dawn of history."3
Robert Ellwood believes New Age thinkers seek legitimization by linking parapsychology, right/left brain models, ESP, and the like to scientific respectability. At the same time, Ellwood noted during an interview in his cubbyhole office at the University of Southern California, New Agers make a "desperate attempt" to assert human autonomy in a
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world that seems to be totally dominated by science and technology.4
There also appears to be a similarity between PK chanting "Yes, Yes, Yes! Cool moss, cool moss, cool moss!" as they cross beds of glowing embers in one of the hottest fads of the 1980s.
Cool Mind over Hot Coals?
"Just holding the thought in your mind that you're not going to injure your feet alters the chemistry of your body," insisted Tolly Burkan, once professionally known as Tolly the Clown and of late one of firewalking's most renowned gurus. "Indeed, at many firewalking rituals . . . belief is reportedly all that is needed."5
But Al Seckel, a physicist who heads the Southern California Skeptics society, said several Skeptics did the firewalk. One took the pre-walk training to still fear and instill "mind over matter"; the other just appeared at the proper time and hotfooted it through the embers. Neither was burned, Seckel said.6
"People can tolerate brief walks through coals. Wet feet also help," he added.
Debunkers aside, the workings of the mind often resist rational analysis. The jury is still out on whether there is a paranormal world exempt from generally known — or at least accepted — natural law.
"There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural . . . We should strive to fill those gaps of ignorance," says Edgar D. Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut.7 In 1973, Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, California, to investigate PSI, which is shorthand for phenomena that escape traditional scientific definitions, including telepathy, clairvoyance (broadly referred to as ESP), precognition, and PK (psychokinesis).
Across the Golden Gate Bridge at the Center for Applied Intuition (CAI) in San Francisco, scientists say things like, "Tune in to your center and trust what you hear," and they
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describe intuition as "your direct knowledge without benefit of access to information or learning."
This New Age organization uses a team of channelers — "intuitives," or "expert acumen persons," CAI prefers to call them — to obtain a "consensus" about such things as the physics of earthquakes, the nonphysical aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, and where to dig for precious ore or archaeological treasure.
"We've done things that would make parapsychologists' hair stand on end," confided CAI director William Kautz, who for thirty-one years was a staff scientist at prestigious SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California. "It's hard to raise the money to validate [the findings] . . . but we've a tiger by the tail."8
Farther down the coast in Los Angeles, the Mobius Group, an unusual exploration and research organization, stirred up more than mud in Egypt's Alexandria Harbor several years ago when they uncovered ruins of what they claimed were the ancient palaces of Antony and Cleopatra. Through "psychic archaeology" the Mobius team of archaeologists and eleven psychics discovered what were believed to be the underwater buildings that had eluded searchers for more than 100 years. Two Egyptian archaeologists promptly disputed the findings, saying the pillars could have come from any harbor facilities.9
Parapsychology — which achieved some respectability in 1969 when the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science made the Parapsychological Association a full member organization — is still a marginal science. Problems of validation persist, while disclosures of deceptions, shoddy and ignorant research, and failed predictions have sidelined much of parapsychology in the eyes of the mainstream scientific community.
To those who already believe in the paranormal, scientific evidence is unnecessary; for the stubbornly resistant, no amount of proof is convincing.
But there is a second plank in the bridge New Agers seek to build between science and the mystical view of universal mind over matter: modern physics and quantum theory. To get a handle on that, we need to backtrack for a moment to Descartes, Newton, and Einstein.
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René Descartes (1596-1650), the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician, used an analytic method to break thoughts and problems into pieces which he then arranged into logical order and sequence. And Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) expanded the Cartesian concept of the universe into the "billiard" model. This has frequently been illustrated by depicting the atom as a nucleus surrounded by electrons, which orbit it like tiny billiard balls. Newton's three-dimensional geometric universe operated according to exact mathematical laws of motion in the context of absolute time and space — "an arena of perfectly coordinated cause and effect," said New Age Journal writer Doug Stewart.
"Those who shared his mechanistic worldview argued that everything, from weather to the movement of stars, could surely be predicted if only we had the tools and the time to measure the events leading up to them. Chaos was neither mysterious nor random, just complicated."10
Modern science orbited Newton's universe for nearly two centuries — until an unknown Swiss patent clerk published a "modest" little scientific treatise in 1905 called "The Special Theory of Relativity." And, as Alice and Stephen Lawhead suggest, Albert Einstein's E equals mc2 collided with the old Newtonian physics in a way that has made relative a key word ever since — especially for the New Age.11
Einstein's famous equation stated that matter and energy are not strictly separate; all mass has energy, and matter may be turned into energy. Space and time are relative to each other and in relation to the fixed speed of light. Einstein's discovery set off explosions in the scientific world, both figuratively and literally.
Tucked away in the neat formula was the revolutionary concept that the universe as observed by the human senses was not necessarily the universe as it really existed. Newtonian notions of independent reality, order, and intelligibility crumbled. An ardent theist, Einstein (1879-1955) was deeply troubled by the implications of unpredictable behavior of atomic particles demanded by his theory. "God does not play dice with the universe," he insisted. Or, as he also expressed it: "God may be subtle, but He is not malicious."12
Science writer K.C. Cole neatly capsulized it: "In the realm of the very small, where quantum mechanics rule,
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every thing appears acausal, elusive. You cannot put your finger on a particular atomic particle as you would on a die. You cannot hit an electron with a known force and say at precisely what speed and direction it will fly off. You cannot follow its movements and say precisely where or how it will wind up. You can only say where it will probably be moving. Atomic particles do not obey the classic Newtonian laws of cause and effect; they are governed by the dictates of chance."13
Just five years before Einstein's relativity treatise was published, Max Planck (1858—1947) fathered quantum theory: the idea that "matter absorbed heat energy and emitted light energy discontinuously" in unexpected bursts called "energy packets." Einstein later called them "quanta."14 Together, Einstein's relativity theories and quantum mechanics came to be referred to as the "new physics."
While quantum theory has prospered among scientists and solved some atomic mysteries, it has created others. One of the most perplexing is central to Werner Heisenberg's famous "uncertainty principle," which he enunciated around 1927. Simply stated, his theory describes limitations in our knowledge of subatomic particles, since observation at that level — such as bouncing particles off other particles — interferes with the phenomenon being observed. In other words, measuring one quantity renders impossible the simultaneous measurement of a related quantity. Thus, the more you know about momentum, the less you know about position, because by the very act of measurement you change the latter.
Heisenberg's principle has sometimes been compared with trying to fix the position of a tomato seed; the gelatinous blob is so slick that by attempting to pinpoint its location, you move it. But science writer Douglas R. Hofstadter warns that the uncertainty principle "is more than an epistemological restriction on human observers; it is a reflection of uncertainties in nature itself. Quantum-mechanical reality does not correspond to macroscopic reality. It's not just that we cannot know a particle's position and momentum simultaneously; it doesn't even have definite position and momentum simultaneously!"15
According to quantum thinkers, then, no one can predict a precise future by examining the present. The basic particles
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of the universe interact too mysteriously. "The deeper we penetrate," says physicist Max Born, "the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance."16
David Bohm, another heavyweight theoretical physicist, says: "The primary emphasis is now on undivided wholeness, in which the observing instrument is not separated from what is observed."17
Although these brief explanations may oversimplify the complex theorems of modern physics, they should be sufficient for our purposes here: to gain an initial understanding of how all this relates to New Age.
The connection, in the New Age worldview, is the confluence of mysticism and quantum physics, intuitive meaning and spirituality. This construct is predicated upon a sense of the oneness of all existence and the cyclical rhythms of life and death. And to explicate these ideas, we turn to Austrian physicist Fritjof Capra and French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Teilhard (1881—1955), whom Marilyn Ferguson found to be the single most influential individual in the thinking of 185 New Agers she surveyed, made major contributions to twentieth century thought, primarily in his theory of evolution.18 In his law of "complexity-consciousness," Teilhard stated that evolution moves toward increasing complexity. This increase is accompanied by a corresponding rise of consciousness, or awareness, culminating in human evolution; and, finally, a point of convergence, which he called "Omega," is reached. To Teilhard this was God, the Center of centers, and specifically, Christ.
In his writings — considered unorthodox and suppressed by the Roman Catholic church — Teilhard talked about multiplicity and unity; the one, the many. Matter and energy, said the priest, are a single principle, two aspects of one energy. And he considered spirit to be a function of matter.
So intimate was the relationship between matter and spirit for Teilhard, summarized Clarice Lolich, that "he described matter as 'the matrix of consciousness' and consciousness as being 'born from the womb of matter.' " In fact, Teilhard was not even afraid to speak of matter becoming spirit: "There is
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in the world neither spirit nor matter: The 'stuff of the universe' is rather spirit-matter.' "19
With Teilhard's theories of progressive evolution and unification of world consciousness in place, along with the quantum physics view of fundamental reality as a shimmering web of vibrant pulsating energy, enter physicist Fritjof Capra, a leading New Age exponent.
Rushing in where the majority of contemporary scientists fear to tread, Capra has become a major mouthpiece for the New Age contention that modern science irrefutably supports mysticism and the "universal One." In his influential and much-quoted book, The Tao of Physics, the University of California, Berkeley, physicist declares:
[T]he basic elements of the Eastern world view are also those of the world view emerging from modern physics . . . . Eastern thought and, more generally, mystical thought, provide a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science; a conception of the world in which man's scientific discoveries can be in perfect harmony with his spiritual aims and religious beliefs . . . The further we penetrate into the submicroscopic world, the more we shall realize how the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting and ever-moving components with man being an integral part of this system.20
Capra's views stem at least in part from a "visionary experience" he had while he sat on a beach meditating — and which he acknowledged was primed by psychedelic herbs: "I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance . . . . I 'saw' cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses: I 'saw' the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy, I felt its rhythm and 'heard' its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus."21
In his later book, The Turning Point, Capra elaborated on Heisenberg's theory that observation affects the object observed. The electron, Capra said, "does not have objective properties independent of my mind."22
Other scientists have taken Capra to task for overstating the
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uncertainty principle. It is the detection apparatus, not the observer as a human being, that influences the measurement, they maintain. Indeed, a distant star, observed now, has been behaving like a star for eons without human observation. Capra's assertion is rather like saying that trees only fall in the forest if someone is there to see and hear them topple.
In fact, authentic science itself is not possible without some form of objective reality. Illusion cannot be measured.
"I may give you the greatest description of my observation of molecules, but if my reality doesn't correspond to yours, it means nothing," explains Dean C. Halverson, a critic of world religions and the New Age. "We do change things by observing and measuring, but we don't create, or actualize, them" in process.23
In what their critics consider a quantum leap of logic, New Age scientists like Capra thrust consciousness into the metaphysical driver's seat. Rather than recording reality, they say, we determine it.24
New Age spokesman Michael Talbot avers: "The entire physical universe itself is nothing more than patterns of neuronal energy firing off inside our heads . . . . There is no physical world 'out there.' Consciousness creates all."25
New Age apologists are usually quick to appropriate scientific breakthroughs as props for their worldview. At the time of this writing, however, I was unaware of any material by New Age systematizers tying the "string" theory of eminent physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to New Age assumptions about energy and matter.
K.C. Cole describes modern superstring theory as the hypothesis that "the universe started with ten dimensions, six of which retracted after the 'Big Bang' into space far smaller than even that occupied by subatomic particles."26
Witten's string theory, Coles maintains, "could provide entirely new answers to fundamental questions asked by philosophers, poets and theologians since the beginning of human time: Why is the universe the way it is and what is the origin of matter?" Cole does point out that no evidence other than "mathematical consistency" supports the existence of six extra dimensions; but, he says, if the theory is correct, mathematical inconsistencies that have plagued scientists'
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previous efforts to reconcile quantum theory and gravity "wondrously disappear."27
Yet superstring theory remains just that — theory — and Witten's work can't be tested in a lab. It may be a hundred years before its value and applications, if any, can be known, Witten himself acknowledged.
String theory may be too arcane to unravel, but New Age science types have picked up on the holographic phenomenon to support the grandiose theory that every part of the universe contains every other piece.
The hologram, a three-dimensional photograph made from light (laser) beams, was invented by Dennis Gabor in 1947. Here's how Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi describe it in The Three-Pound Universe: "Unlike an ordinary two-dimensional photograph, a hologram is an eerily lifelike three-dimensional image. Its code, stored on the film, bears no resemblance to the object photographed, but is a record of the light waves scattered by the object. Suppose you drop two pebbles into a still pond and then immediately freeze the rippled surface. In the overlapping wavefronts is stored a complete record of the pebbles' passage through a moment of time. So it is with a hologram."28
The hologram can store almost infinite quantities of information in almost no space, and any part of the hologram contains information about the whole. "The 'message' in a hologram is paradoxically located everywhere and nowhere."29
In 1966, Stanford psychology professor Karl Pribram proposed that for these very reasons, the brain functions holographically. An organ the size of a grapefruit can contain a lifetime of memories, and brain functions do not seem to be located in specific parts of the brain. For example, stroke victims don't lose discrete parts of their memory "bank" — memories from 1975-80 or all words beginning with the letter "B."
Pribram went on to speculate that perhaps the entire cosmos is simply a gigantic hologram! In such a universe, New Age exponents suggest, information about the whole is available at its every point, and consciousness somehow contains a mechanism which psychically affects reality itself.30
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Hooper and Teresi found little support for Pribram's holographic brain child among the scientists they interviewed, 31 but the concept is popular among New Age theorists. And the holographic paradigm lights up significant ramifications:
(1) If the whole is contained in each of its parts, God is sheer light waves and mathematics. The supernatural is part of nature.
(2) The New Age slogan, "You create your own reality" becomes a reality.
(3) The paranormal becomes possible. We can all become psychics because we have equal access to the "One."
Shades of Jung's collective unconscious!
Suggests Marilyn Ferguson: "In this framework, psychic phenomena are only by-products of the simultaneous-everywhere matrix. Individual brains are bits of the greater hologram. They have access under certain circumstances to all the information in the total cybernetic system.
"In a nutshell, the holographic supertheory says that our brains mathematically construct 'hard' reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension transcending time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe."32
During an interview in her spacious hilltop home in Los Angeles, I asked Ferguson if her thinking has changed since 1980 when she wrote The Aquarian Conspiracy. Does she still believe science supports mysticism?
"Even more so!" she exclaimed without hesitation. "Astro-physicists may be the ones to discover God. Or, maybe . . . molecular biologists."
I find it interesting that Ken Wilber, another New Age writer and scientist, has edited a book whose major thrust is that modern physics "offers no positive support (let alone proof) for a mystical worldview." Yet he takes pains to point out that every one of the eight physicists whose writings comprise the book — including Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg — was a mystic.
"There are certain similarities between the worldview of the new physics and that of mysticism, the physicists
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believe," Wilber writes, "but these similarities, where they are not purely accidental, are trivial when compared with the vast and profound differences between them."
And then Wilber repeats this bit of wisdom: "To hitch a religious philosophy to a contemporary science is a sure route to its obsolescence."33
Chapter 21 || Table of Contents
1. Jack Houck, interview with author, San Francisco, Calif., 7 November 1987.
2. Cited in Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 262.
3. Ibid., 152.
4. Robert Ellwood, interview with author, Los Angeles, Calif., 14 December 1987.
5. Beth Ann Drier, "The Curious Hot Foot It to a New Fad," Los Angeles Times, 11 April 1984, pt. 1, 1.
6. Al Seckel's lecture was delivered 4 November 1987 at California State University at Fullerton.
7. Edgar D. Mitchell to readers of his bimonthly Noetics Bulletin (n.d.).
8. William Kautz related this information to the author, 8 November 1987, during the Celebration of Innovation workshop in San Francisco.
9. Los Angeles Times, 13 January 1980, pt. 1, 2, and 20 January 1980, pt. 1, 2; Paul Dean, "Psychic Discovery of a Queen's Palace?" Los Angeles Times, 25 January 1980, pt. 4, 1; Robert J. Mandell, "Some Insights into Psychic Abilities," Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1981, pt. 5, 3.
10. Doug Stewart, "The Chaos Connection," New Age Journal (April 1986): 17.
11. Alice Lawhead and Stephen Lawhead, Pilgrim's Guide to the New Age (Batavia, Ill.: Lion Publishing Corp., 1986), 8.
12. Quoted in Fred Alan Wolf, Taking the Quantum Leap (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 151.
13. K.C. Cole, "Why Einstein May Have Been Wrong," Discover Magazine (December 1984): 36.
14. Wolf, Taking the Quantum Leap, 63.
15. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 465.
16. Cited in Stewart, "The Chaos Connection," 17.
17. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 134.
18. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 420.
19. Clarice Lolich, "An Explication of the Theory of Simultaneous Interior Combustion in Its Study of the Relationship between Matter and Spirit," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Humanistic Studies, Del Mar, Calif., 1986.
20. Fritjof Capra, Tao of Physics (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1975), 25.
21. Ibid., 11.
22. Fritjof Capra, Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 87.
23. Dean C. Halverson, interview with author, Denver, Colo., 1 December 1987.
24. Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 98.
25. Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 54, 152.
26. K.C. Cole, "A Theory of Everything," New York Times Magazine, 18 October 1987, 22, 24.
27. Ibid., 25.
28. Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, Three-Pound Universe: Revolutionary Discoveries about the Brain from the Chemistry of the Mind to the New Frontiers of the Soul (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 346.
29. Ibid., 348.
30. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age, 99.
31. Hooper and Teresi, Three-Pound Universe, 351.
32. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 182.
33. Ken Wilber, ed., Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala Publications, 1984), preface, 5, 27.
