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Quantum Consciousness – Where Ancient Wisdom and Science Meet | by Catherine Shainberg Ph.D.

We have reached a remarkable point in the history of science and mysticism: they might agree on the nature of consciousness.

Facing the split between two opposing worldviews, the Gaon (Genius) of Vilna, an eighteenth-century Lithuanian Talmudist and kabbalist, prophesied that mysticism and science – seeming to fundamentally diverge and go their separate ways – would ultimately rejoin in a grand unified world view, ushering in a new awakening. Through his eyes and perceptions as a kabbalist, he may have seen as we Dreamers see it, that consciousness is a fundamental force in the universe.

How did we get here?

In the twentieth century the Nobel prize winning quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger struggled to outline a unified field theory, declaring – as had the mystics for centuries – that there is only one consciousness pervading all universes. Where it exists or how to define it was yet unknown. Today scientists say they have identified a connection between consciousness and quantum physics. It may be the connection is, as one scientist wrote, a “quantum wave that connects to the rest of the universe.”

Collaborators – Nobel Prize winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D. and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D. – suggest that consciousness is a quantum wave facilitated by microtubules  – small “transportation systems”  in the cells that make sure the substances the body needs get to where they are needed.  The collective wave activity of cells and neurons is believed to create consciousness.  This rising wave dissolves separateness and creates oneness.

In the scientific rigorousness of today, each form is separated and fixed in an algorithm whose various routes are automated.  Yet when I asked a friend of mine, with serious scientific credentials,  Do you love your daughter? “ He replied “Of course, I love my daughter!” – Prove it!, I said. But he couldn’t prove it to scientific standards because love is a feeling whose routes are neither linear or rational,  but are all encompassing. Whether at one point or another, it is all love.

 

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The “quantum wave” is the movement into oneness in consciousness. It happens in our bodies, for sure.  Yet,  if we believe Pembroke and Hameroff,  it also contains all information we need.  They hold that microtubules are structured like fractals, allowing quanta to bring those cells into their respective shapes, that is, form. And fractals, from our perspective as Dreamers, get really interesting.  What’s a fractal, you ask?

Fractals are structures that exist between dimensions, neither 2-D, nor 3-D.  Mathematically, they repeat as beautiful patterns. Infinitely themselves, they generate a seemingly impossible and paradoxical effect:  a structure that has finite area but no boundaries.   Like the florets of a cauliflower or your own blood vessels, the pattern repeats but at smaller and smaller sizes, infinitely.   Fractals also repeat in patterns in the works of artists like Escher, Pollock, and even the graphic I use here to illustrate this idea. They are simple structures with infinite complexity that, as Cristiane de Morais Smith, a Dutch physicist holds, “could be the structures that support the mysterious depths of our minds.”

Thus, like the mystics of old, scientists are beginning to identify an “architecture of consciousness” simultaneously existing in all worlds at once, a grand alignment whose beauty and order awes us.   As prophesied by the Gaon of Vilna we are returning to a unified field of consciousness, where science and mysticism meet again, where the new rejoins the old.

From my perspective, this all seems akin to the DreamField, the universal repository of images, infinitely interacting, constructing patterns and forms seemingly out of mystery, carrying the essence of our being to the places that need it in our consciousness, and thereby manifesting life as we know it.

Indeed, a river – a wave – runs through us.

We can stretch this too far or speak beyond our knowledge –  and so much about “quantum consciousness” remains speculative and unknown.  Yet this I know from my experience and from the Kabbalah of Light:  we are one consciousness and it pervades everything.

Was it easier to live in a world where the earth was the center of the universe and its seven planets orbited around it in an ordered fashion? Galileo proved it wasn’t true, of course, and we thank him for it, but the feelings of safety, comfort, and togetherness that the prior cosmology offered are lost to us. For more than five centuries, we have lived dependent on a scientific order to tell us how the world functions, ignoring the transcendent, the holy, and the mysterious as if they were false. We no longer need to do that.

If “quantum consciousness” is true, then science validates what we have known as Dreamers: that we can trust our own intuition, our inspiration, our imagination, our feelings of love and compassion, our devotion to an unseen God, to heal our loneliness and bring us back together into a oneness of aliveness and experience, of consciousness and of dreaming.

The common denominator that makes us one is that we – the humans, the animals, the fish and the birds, the vegetation and trees, the sun, the moon, and stars – all live in an alive and experiencing universe, all rhythmically singing in chorus this great symphony of oneness that the mystics call consciousness.

Listen to the psalmist from the 5th century BCE exalt the consciousness of all species:

“Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.” (Psalm 96:11-12)

Holding steady against the definition of reality advanced by science until now, the Kabbalists, like all mystics, have continued to see the world bathed in consciousness. They call it “immanence” and give it a female name, Shechinah. Receptive pool, fluid filled vacuum, mirror image of her mate, the transcendent God, she “extends from the earth to the firmament…from one end of the world to the other.” (Chagigah 12a).

Containing all God’s dream, ever recreating itself, with its myriad forms, they all interact together. Whether in close proximity or at a huge distance, they are forever bathed in one consciousness and moved by its currents, its waves. In other words – whether in a human form, a tree, a fish, a rock, it’s still one consciousness – and “to subdivide it makes no sense” as Deepak Chopra said so well.

Exercise: Dialoguing with Consciousness

Close your eyes. Breathe out three times, counting from 3 to 1.

See  and feel yourself bathing in a fluid womb-like luminescence that contains all of creation –  the trees, the birds, the fish, the animals, the stars, the planets. Feel yourself dissolving in this luminescence, becoming one with all consciousness. Sense being rocked by the current of this great fluid womblike luminescence.

Breathe out. Hear the roar, the slosh, the shush, the hum, the whisper of consciousness. Ask a question, hear-see the answer bursting through time and space to reach you instantly. Feel the joy.

Breathing out, return to your shape with something changed. What has changed?

Breathe out. Open your eyes.

Interesting in how you can use Saphire Imagery to explore today’s most pressing topics and themes? This Spring and Summer, Catherine is hosting an exclusive workshop series designed to expand your awareness and trigger transformation. You can learn more here!