Another Look at Quantum Consciousness

I have had this book called Quantum Consciousness by Stephen Wolinksy (1993) for quite some time and have even started reading it a long time ago. But I wasn't much impressed by it then. Last night, my eyes strayed upon its cover again and for some reason which I did not understand, I reached out my hands towards it and started to leaf through it again.  This time, my feeling was completely different. When I turned through various parts of it quickly, I was surprised how often I kept on repeating silently to myself, "of course!". Why the difference? In the meantime, I had read various books on quantum physics, Buddhism, Taoism, William James, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Carl Rogers, Assaglioni, David Bohm and done some meditations. Therefore when I read references to them, they rang some bells for me. Now I find this book a fascinating account of one person's search for that ultimate unity which I have been looking for too, which in some ways resembled but went much further than mine and can relate to it in ways that were not previously possible. The same book. A changed reader!

 

According to Colin Wilson, who wrote a foreword, the book is "one of the most interesting psychologies since Abraham Maslow." Whether everyone will find the book useful cannot be predicted but it certainly represents a very "interesting" approach to some form of  "spirituality" , to some sense of "unity" and integration, which is the aim of many types of religion. Maslow emphasized the role of peak experiences and "the higher ceilings of human consciousness",  Frankl  the importance of finding a certain central meaning and purpose of a person's life, Ludwig Binswinger the need to get "inside" a patient's neurosis instead of importing to him the psychoanalyst's own prejudices, Assaglioni the need to get at the core of a person's being so that he can develop towards what he calls the Superconscious  and Carl Rogers, the need to establish an emotional rapport with the patient and not to push him before he is ready for further emotional insight and the need to allow the latter's psyche to achieve its break-through in its own time and in the meantime to keep an open but sensitive mind. William James insightfully pointed out in his book On Vital Reserve, that the human individual usually lives "far within his limits" and that he may possess various powers which he "habitually fails to use" and that man's central problem is what he calls an "inveterate habit of inferiority to our full self.".

 

To Wilson, one of the most interesting developments is Eugene T Gendrin's technique of "focusing" by which the patient is encouraged to "focus" on his feeling of "unhappiness" and to express it in words. Wolinsky however, is a "workshop junkie": he spent 6 years in India and then 12 years doing meditations at the end of which he realized that "the witness not only witnesses and is mindful of what passes through his mind and body but is the creative source of it" and he started to teach workshop upon his return from India in 1982.  Wolinsky relates this experience to Heisenberg's discovery that in quantum measurement, the results pf measurements are directly influenced by what the experimental scientist wishes to measure: the momentum or the position of the quantum "particle" ( Heisenberg's Principle of Quantum Indeterminacy) and hence the role of human consciousness in even the most theoretically "objective" measurement of the forces of nature. What Wolinsky calls "quantum psychology" is simply a psychology based on the realization that at the quantum level, everything, rocks, plants, animals, human beings etc is ultimately built of the same basic materials or waves ie. quantum energy and that in that sense we and the world are "one". This led him to develop his visualising or focusing technique in meditation for "pulling beyond the creative observer" to achieve what Wolinksy calls a "no state state" so that the meditator will "experience" what David Bohm calls the unitive "implicate order" instead of the usually divisive "explicate order': "the unbroken wholeness which connects us all.", or in the words of traditional religion, the Christian unio mystico  or in Hindu tat tvam asi ( That thou art) or what Franklin Merrel-Wolff in his Pathways Through to Space calls the "ambrosia quality" or a feeling of freedom (from the "false self") peace, ecstasy and joy when one finds one's deepest level of one's own identity which may last for days on end.

 

In this book, Wolinsky sets out a series of 85 meditation or contemplation exercises to be done within 15 days either alone or through leaderless study groups through which he teaches us how to systemmatically work on our own consciousness to achieve that kind of liberation from the stranglehold of our "false self"  upon our body, our mind and our emotions, to "personally experience" how all our mental states whether they be pleasure, sadness, anger, envy, fear, greed, longing, despair, misery, guilt, whether we normally consider them good or bad are merely forms of energy so as to free ourselves from its effects. The final realization and the ultimate consciousness is not that we "have" freedom but that we "are" freedom.

 

Wolinsky does say that the exercises are "not meant as the only way or the 'cure all': and that his experience is that they "work best when done with an open mind, putting your definitions of the world, both inner and outer, aside, using a 'what if this is true' 'suppose' or 'let's look at this as a possibility' attitude."  Wolinsky says that his method does not "exclude anything: rather, it includes modern psychology, Eastern or Middle Eastern philosophy and practices". He says that his quantum psychology merely points out a direction or a way of viewing the problem of human suffering and that his book is not intended as the end but only a beginning, a place where we can all join hands and develop our own approaches to re-membering and re-connecting to that underlying quantum reality" .

 

Wolinsky relates the story of an Indian Guru Ramana Maharishi who when one of his disciples implored him on his deathbed "Please don't go", replied, "Where can I go?". To Wolinksy, ultimately quantum consciousness does not exist because there would have to be something separate from it to say it did!  

 

He ends the book with a song by John Lennon:

 

                                         Imagine

          

                            Imagine there's no Heaven

                            It's easy if you try

                            No Hell below us

                            Above us the only sky

                            Imagine all the people             

                            Living for Today

 

                           Imagine there's no countries

                           It isn't hard to do

                           Nothing to kill or die for

                           And no religion too.

                           Imagine all the people

                           Living Life in peace.

 

                          You may say I'm a dreamer

                          But I'm not the only one

                          I hope someday you'll join us

                          And the world will be as one.

 

                          Imagine no possessions,

                          I wonder if you can

                          No need for greed or hunger

                          A brotherhood/sisterhood of man,

                          Imagine all the people

                          Sharing all the world.

 

                          You may say I'm a dreamer

                          But I am not the only one

                          I hope one day you'll join us

                          And the world will be as ONE.