 |
| Nick face-to-face with the Mystery |
|
It's customary at the beginning of the New Year to review the events of the Year Past. And Quantum Tantra Blog with its nose in the future and its ass in the past is no exception. The year 2012 witnessed many innovations some of which were recorded in this web journal, others of which were too personal, too complex or too unspeakable to put into words.
In Quantum Tantra 2012, I recorded three of the most profound experiences of my life —
a near-death experience with fellow Stanford physicist Chuck Buchanan on Mt Shasta,
a meeting with a discarnate "Angel" in Berkeley long before I had even heard of psychedelics. And
a first contact with the Galactic Telepaths triggered by smoking half a joint of very low-grade 60s-quality marijuana.
Year 2012 was a very creative period for Nick. He self-published
Harlot Nature, a new collection of quantum-tantric poetry and performed (for pay!) in a small Irish band called
Blarney. Lots of new poetry got published here, including
Happy YIDD,
In Fourteen Other Star Systems,
Kiss My Bare Art,
Greatest Pleasure,
Quantum ABCs,
Happy Doomsday,
No Holocaust/No Big Bang and
First Contact.
On the literary front, 2012 celebrated the publication of Richard Grossinger's
magnum opus on consciousness, the three-volume
Dark Pool of Light, to which Nick Herbert and Jeffrey Kripal each contributed prefaces. Sci-fi impresario Rudy Rucker reprinted (in both print and ebook) the amazingly unappreciated psychedelic classic
Be Not Content by William Craddock. Nick added
another original Feghoot story to the canon. And the Quantum Tantric Most Twisted Story of 2012 Award goes to James Worrad's sublime
Eye-High published in Rudy Rucker's überbizarre online zine
Flurb.
2012 marked the 10th anniversary of my wife Betsy's death which
I memorialize here.
And then a film crew
invaded the sanctity of Nick's Quantum Tantra Ashram to capture more scenes for
Supernature, a movie-history of Esalen Institute in which myself and
Saul-Paul Sirag played a small but essential part.
On top of this, Australian multimedia artist Lynden Stone was inspired by my Metaphase Typewriter — a quantum-based language generator Nick devised in the 70s as a possible physical channel to discarnate beings (reported in some detail in David Kaiser's best-selling
How the Hippies Saved Physics). Lynden conceived the
Metaphase Revival Project and reproduced Nick's Metaphase Typewriter (using modern ready-made hardware rather than starting from scratch as I did in the 70s) as an Art Project which she exhibited as artist-in-residence from Queensland at Philadelphia's Crane Gallery as
Encounters with Quantum in conjunction with conceptual artist Jon Keats's equally innovative
Quantum Marriage — a brand-new human linkage ceremony based on quantum entanglement.
On my own creative front, besides publishing
Harlot Nature and
a new Feghoot story, Nick presented interim results of his long-term project
to expand the number of body chakras — to 48, a seven-fold extension of the 7 classical chakras. Nick also discovered that half-baked proposals for faster-than-light signaling schemes based on "over-complete, non-orthogonal bases" could be directly tested on
the simplest version of quantum teleportation which produces such base states naturally as a consequence of the Hilbert-space dimensionality asymmetry between Alice and Bob — the conventional would-be FTL signalers — whose instruments are linked by a quantum-entangled photon pair.
As a finale to the year 2012, Nick discovered
YIDD — a brand-new Ukrainian feast day. And for dessert (Happy New Year!) published
a little known argument by physicist Erwin (the Cat-in-the-Box man) Schrödinger purporting to prove the existence of God.
Happy New Year to all my friends. May this new year be full for you of many happy surprises.
