I Want To Woo Her

1. QUANTUM TANTRA REVEALED

While working as a physics graduate student at Stanford in the early sixties  I was impressed by the boldness of the projects accomplished by my colleagues -- the construction of the giant Stanford Linear Accelerator, for instance, midwived by Wolfgang Panofsky, and the design and launching by Francis Everitt of Gravity Probe B which measured the spinning Earth's gravitomagnetic action on orbiting gyroscopes. I wondered also if Nick Herbert would be so blessed as to be involved in a physics project of comparable magnitude. And here's one hint my amusing Muse gave me as answer: Quantum Tantra.

Quantum tantra is physics-assisted deep union with nature.

The best summary of this quantum tantra notion can be found here.

 

Will the consequences of this quantum tantric way of thinking

 loom someday as impressively as CERN's Large Hadron Collider? 

 

2. QUANTUM TANTRA: FIVE OPENING MOVES

 

This original way of connecting with nature will probably involve a radical kind of RECEPTIVITY. See here for a handful of limericks faintly pointing in this direction.

 

The essence of quantum entanglement

is correlated readiness to respond.

--Henry Stapp 

 

 

3. HAPPY DOOMSDAY

All grownup galactic civilizations

enjoy a deep erotic connection with nature

while humans tinker with

a limited physics

mathematically beautiful

but suitable only for children.

Happy Doomsday celebrates the day humans finally join the Galactic Club.

 

4. NICK ABDUCTED BY ALIENS

May Earth experience This Opening soon.

 

5. ESALEN SUPER SYMPOSIUM IV

 

Esalen Meditation Hut

 A conference convened by Jeffrey Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics, Secret Body, How to Think Impossibly and Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. This meeting explored super powers, past, present, future, real and imagined, a perfect venue for Nick to present his quantum tantric speculations to an audience of interested peers. Click here for super powers.

Have you got something big, hot, and alive?

Have you been luckily electrified?

Then bring it here.

It's what we live for.

We'd love to be the garden

 In which your vision blooms.

--Nick's view of Esalen

 

6. KHALIQIUM

Perhaps quantum tantra will involve the discovery or synthesis of a novel physical substance which greatly facilitates deep union with nature. Nick calls this fictiitous substance Khaliqium after the name of his Muslim alter ego Dr Jabir 'abd al-Khaliq. Khaliqium is here. 

 

Physics, not Chemistry, is the passkey to reality.

Psychedelic drugs are training wheels

for quantum tantra. 

 

 

7. OPENING NIGHT 

 

We have to remember that what we observe

is not nature herself, but nature exposed

to our method of questioning.

--Werner Heisenberg

If questions of a different kind can be asked

then Nature will respond in a new language.

--Beverly Rubik

 

The Cosmological Sweetness

Came out to greet us.

See more here.

 

8. NO MORE SAFE SCIENCE

Deep Reality is waiting for us

To ask the right question.

See more here.

9. ELEMENTS OF TANTRA

Love every one of my Elements.

See more here.

 

10. I WANT TO WOO HER

Video by Al, Nick and Grok

"Haste to the Wedding" by Nick and August

The effective Anthem of Quantum Tantra:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Secret Body

Secret Body (2017) by Jeffrey Kripal

SECRET BODY
(for Jeffrey Kripal)

I was a Hidden Treasure
And desired to be known
Nearer to you
Than your pubic bone.

Every flower flaunts it
Every photon hides a clue
What She showed to crowds at Fatima
She's poised to show to me and you.

You want to make love to the Cosmic Beauty?
You yearn to do so right now?
Well, the Universe is telling you all that She needs
In the only way She knows how.

TEN YEARS OLD: QUANTUM TANTRA BLOG

Ten Years Old

Quantum Tantra Blog is now 10 years old. Happy Birthday, old friend!

During its life QTB has published 495 posts which have received more than 500,000 views. The blog is mainly a kind of diary of the major concerns and accomplishments of Nick Herbert and his alter ego Doctor Jabir 'abd al-Khaliq.

Nick's primary goal is to father a brand new physics (Quantum Tantra) which will connect us all with Nature in a more direct and intimate way. This quest has generated dozens of pages of quirky quantum tantric poetry but no concrete physical results as yet. But I continue to pursue this "impossible dream".

The quest begins with quantum mechanics, the most successful theory of the physical world ever devised, which comes at the price of physicists not knowing what this theory actually means: the "quantum reality problem" -- about which I wrote my first book Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics.

One of the important milestones in quantum reality research is Bell's Theorem in which Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proved that although the quantum facts are everywhere "local", the quantum reality underlying these fact must be "non-local". The term "non-local" essentially means "faster-than-light", which Albert Einstein declared verboten in physics.

John Stewart Bell: Reality is Non-local

But, in a truly peculiar twist of logic, Bell's faster-than-light proof applies only to REALITY not to the FACTS. Einstein's prohibition still holds for the world we can see; only the invisible reality behind these facts must be faster-than-light.

Bell's Theorem has led to many clever attempts to move FTL REALITY into FTL FACT. One of my hobbies is superluminal signaling schemes, many of which are described in my book Faster-Than-Light: Superluminal Loophole in Physics and in quite a few of my QTB blog posts.

In fact, exactly ten years ago, as I was just beginning this blog, I had just published, in the physics arXiv, a FTL communication scheme called ETCALLHOME which was refuted within 24 hours by Israeli physicist Lev Vaidman.

Demetrios Kalamidas: inventor of KISS

The most exciting FTL scheme reported in QTB was the KISS proposal of Demetrios Kalamidas which uses a kind of "fake news" effect to exploit quantum path entanglement to send superluminal signals. Six prominent physicists, including one of Kalamidas's former optics professors, were involved in KISS's eventual refutation.

KISS: A New Superluminal Commication Scheme
Demetrios: the Opera
The Kalamidas Experiment
FTL Signaling Made Easy
Kalamidas Refuted
The Kalamidas Experiment: Easy Pickings

The refutation by Wootters and Zurek of one of my own FTL schemes, called FLASH, led directly to the quantum no-cloning rule, a result important in the field of quantum computing since it proves that, unlike classical information, such as a jpg of your cat, which can be exactly copied, perfect cloning of quantum information violates the laws of Nature. The story of the discovery of the no-cloning rule is the centerpiece of David Kaiser's recent book How the Hippies Saved Physics which also recounts the adventures of some of my disreputable physics friends.

David Kaiser and some hippies who "saved physics"

Kaiser describes the Esalen Seminars on the Nature of Reality, hosted by myself and eccentric mathematician Saul-Paul Sirag, where for eight years prominent physicists were invited to discuss Bell's Theorem along the Big Sur cliffs and in the Esalen sulfur baths. Through the good graces of Fed Ex philanthropist Charles Brandon we were able to award, in Esalen's Big House, the Reality Prize to John Bell (theory) and John Clauser (experiment) for their decisive demonstration of quantum reality's necessary non-locality, possibly the first time these guys's important achievements were publicly recognized.

Esalen Reality Prize Day. Left to Right: Charles Brandon, Nick Herbert, Adriana Chernovska, John Clauser, Saul-Paul Sirag, Bernard D'Espagnat (John Bell's proxy), Henry Stapp. Nick's son Khola in front holding wine glass

Also in QTB, I describe my collaboration with Saul-Paul Sirag in elucidating the nature of the Sirag Numbers, a sequence of integers indirectly related to the quantum theory of angular momentum. Later, I give a brief biography of Saul-Paul (who was born in a concentration camp) as preface to a review of his new math book ADEX Theory: How the ADE Coxeter Graphs Unify Mathematics and Physics.

Saul-Paul Sirag, eccentric mathematician

In 2014, the city of Belfast celebrated the 50th anniversary of Bell's Theorem by naming a street in its Titanic district after his theorem and by hosting a museum exhibit of works of art inspired by Belfast-born John Bell. My song Bell's Theorem Blues was chosen as one of the exhibits and was performed by local (Boulder Creek) vocalist Joy Rush, pianist Jack Bowers with George Galt on harmonica. The festival could not afford to pay our fares to Ireland but you can listen to the recording we sent and read the lyrics here.

BC Blues Trio: George Galt, Jack Bowers, Joy Rush

In this blog I also recall my two meetings with John Stewart Bell at the home of Stanford physics professor Pierre Noyes.

In the spirit of our old quantum physics seminars, Esalen has been hosting invitational meetings on the more general topic of human Superpowers, initiated by one of its founders Michael Murphy and expanded by extraordinary religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal. Most of these superpowers are considered IMPOSSIBLE so they thought it might be fun to have a few physicists on board. I was invited to two of these seminars including one devoted to the extraordinary levitations of St Joseph of Copertino, chronicled in the recent book by Michael Grosso The Man Who Could Fly. This seminar inspired my own levitation project, a subset of my quantum tantra urge to learn to relate to Nature in radical new ways.

Jeff Kripal & Nick Herbert: Old Esalen Lodge

As part of my project to relate to Nature in brand new ways, I invented the Metaphase Typewriter, a quantum-random putative mechanical spirit medium. In common with all of Nick's efforts so far, this project seemed to utterly fail. But recently the Metaphase Typewriter was revived as an art project by Lynden Stone in Queensland, Australia and by Dmitry Morosov in Moscow.

Lynden Stone's Erwin's Puss

While Nick was waiting for the Messiah to come (a play on the name of the wonderful picture book about Esalen by Bernie Gunther : What to Do Till the Messiah Comes), he fell in with a bunch of rowdy Irish musicians in Santa Cruz, learned to play the Irish whistle, and became part of a band called Blarney which plays at private parties and (a few times) on stage. My biggest achievement as member of the wonderful Blarney band was the composition of a patter song, 32 Irish County Jig, that recites each of Ireland's 32 counties. I am really surprised that no one else had ever done this before.

Blarney Band: Matt Johnson, August O'Connor, Kim Fulton-Bennett, Nick Herbert

Then there is my poetry ("the kiss of death" according to my literary agent John Brockman). In Boulder Creek, for a dozen or so years, there arose a remarkably fertile poetry movement, which I call the Bistroscene after Conrad Santos's Boulder Creek Bistro where a majority of the action took place and where I premiered my quantum tantric poems and many others. Many of these performances were videoed by Alan and Sun Lundell (aka Dr and Mrs Future) and are still being rediscovered as Al and Sun transfer their ancient video formats to archival hard drive.

Kiss My Bare Art
The New Sex Robot
He Did Not Die
Harlot Nature
ZAM
2000-year-old Pickup Line
The Aphrodite Award
Los Gatos Apple Store
Maya

Celebrating the Irises
Mayday Play

Regarding weird literary output, it would be impossible to ignore my friend Rudy Rucker, the Lawrence Ferlinghetti of cyberspace. Rudy conceived and published Flurb, an online magazine of radically trippy inventions, including some of my own stuff and the most imaginative alien psychedelic I have even encountered -- James Worrad's Eye-High.

Since quantum tantra (the search for new doorways into Nature) is still in its embryonic stage, there is very little concrete accomplishments to which I can point. Here however are a few teasers:

Abu Asks About Quantum Tantra
No More Safe Science
Opening Night
Happy Doomsday
Greatest Pleasure
Elements of Tantra

Urge: A Short Opera about Reality
Tantric Jihad: the Video
Quantum Tantra Stripped Bare

In this short post, I cannot cover completely all ten years of my blog: I have decided to exclude the numerous book reviews and friends' obituaries (except for my two younger brothers Tom and Duke and my cat Onyx). Please click the tags for topics and people that interest you. My apologies to everyone I have left out. Although concrete quantum tantric research seems at an absolute standstill, I can at least briefly brag about six minor accomplishments:

Nick Herbert aka Dr. Jabir

I self-published two books of verse: Physics on All Fours and Harlot Nature;
I invented 99 new chakras: 99 Nick Chakras;
I invented a new (Ukrainian) holiday: YIDD;
I invented a new (imaginary) element: Khaliqium;
I invented a new (psychic) currency: Khlit Coin;
I devised a new proof that classical and quantum ESP powers must be precisely equal: Nick's Proof.

The quantum tantra posts with the most views ares:
1. Schrödinger's Proof for the Existence of God
2: Does Consciousness Create Reality?
3. Jailbait

Many thanks to all my viewers.

Happy 10th Birthday, dear Quantum Tantra Blog!

The Super Natural: A Book Review

The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal

For my 80th Christmas on this planet, I treated myself to a weird hardback book by two experienced explorers of strange phenomena that lie outside of what these days passes for science. Whitley Strieber is the author of Communion in which he describes his personal contact with "non-human beings" -- contact that continues in some form to this day. Jeff Kripal is the author of several scholarly and popular books on comparative religion with an emphasis on the particular experiences which gave rise to various religious beliefs and to alleged insights into the nature of reality.

This book features each of the specialists taking turns writing a chapter, so the book reads as a dialog between an experimenter (Whitney) and a theoretician (Jeff). But this simple distinction is blurred by the fact that Whitney theorizes about the meaning of his experiences and Jeff adds experiences of his own and of his colleagues to his theories of how to deal reasonably with unreasonable experiences. This taking turns works: each man respects the other's expertise but the two do not always agree.

A further feature of this book is the fact that after he published Communion, Whitley received hundreds of thousands (!) of letters from people all over the world that had had similar bizarre experiences many of which could be classified as some sort of non-human contact -- a valuable data base for those scholars of any persuasion interested in the study of unusual human experiences. Judging from the volume of Strieber's correspondence, experiences of this sort do not appear to be rare. But for obvious reasons, people rarely talk out loud about them. Would you?

Whitley attempts to describe his experiences without injecting his own interpretations, but admits that maintaining his objectivity is difficult because these events are characterized by ambiguity and by strong emotions -- primarily fear. Kripal takes the long view, arguing that emotionally powerful, ambiguous experiences of this sort have been happening to people thoughout all of recorded history. And that some of these "non-human contacts" -- Moses with the Burning Bush, Mohammed with the angel Gabriel, for example -- have led directly to the birth of new world religions that attracted billions of followers.

So, Jeff argues, such experiences are not unimportant for human history, but we are not required to see them in the same light as did their original participants. Neither are we required, Jeff adds, to view them thru the fundamentalist goggles of atheistic materialism. Let's be real scientists here, ladies and gentlemen, he urges. Let's try to set aside contemporary prejudices and work open-mindedly to discover what these strange not-so-rare experiences are trying to tell us about the nature of human (and non-human) reality.

As Whitley succinctly puts it: "We don't know what they are because we don't know what we are."

Jeff's tentative model for understanding such experiences is that each of us is part of a Larger Mind -- the "Human as Two" in Kripal's words -- part Human and part Divine. Divine and Human? Two ill-defined words like the words Classical and Quantum, which taken together make four important concepts that humans need to learn to use correctly (we haven't yet) if we hope to better understand the mental and physical reality of which we are made.

Can the notion of being part of a Larger Mind help us to understand such unusual phenomena as mathematical prodigies, lucky hunches, numinous coincidences, voices in the head, crisis telepathy, magical links between lovers, veridical visions, "the fickle finger of Fate", scientific, musical, artistic and poetic inspiration, plus the mysterious Zeitgeist itself -- that inexorable spirit of the times that seems to carry all before it like a flood -- perhaps even making sense of the unexpected election of President Donald Trump?

Strieber's way of acquiring knowledge by direct personal experience, rather than through books or teachers, fits into a religious category called Gnosticism which has a long tradition.

Jeff Kripal & Nick Herbert, Esalen Lodge, July 2010. photo: August O'Connor

Reading Kripal's description of ancient Gnosticism in The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, I was inspired (by Big Mind?) to add my own two centavos. Jeff's text forms its scholarly core, classical human Nick (and his divine quantum Muse) provide the title and the admonition. Let the following verse express one mindful collaborative response to this challenging and unusual book:

GNOSTICISM WITH THE GLOVES OFF
by Jeff Kripal & Nick Herbert

The ancient Gnostics
Did not know what we know:
They did not have 

Modern cosmology
Quantum physics
Evolutionary biology.

Therefore
In space-time habitation
Quantum mind alive in primate body
Our priestly task is clear:

First
Listen like a sly physician
To demons, aliens, angels,
Gods, efreets and witches.

Then
By the light of wildest intuition
Expose our wise men's trinity of theories
As hidden Holy Spirit, bitches!

As hidden Holy Spirit.

Image by Todd Stock, aka Dr Paradise

Advanced Studies

Doctor Jabir: astonished and wary

ADVANCED STUDIES
(for Mike Murphy and Jeffrey Kripal)

Every glance is Her glance
Every touch Her touch
Every smell is Her sexual attractant
Every meeting a teaching.

Music is enchanted speech
Every meal a sacrament
That turns bread and wine
Into the body of God.

How many physicists
Go surfing on Saturday?
And Sunday go speaking in tongues
At a Holy Roller Church in Oakland?

Esalen SuperNature 2016

Bridge over Hot Springs Creek, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA

For more than 50 years, Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA has been exploring the furtherest reaches of human nature inspired by its co-founder Michael Murphy's words: "We live only part of the life we are given."

Early this month (June 2016) I was invited by Michael Murphy and Jeffrey Kripal to participate in a conference on human superpowers which featured philosophers, historians, psychologists and physicists. Michael Murphy and former participants in earlier versions of this conference had produced a number of books on extraordinary human experiences in sports, in sex, in parapsychology labs, in religious ecstasy and in ordinary life.

Books by Jeffrey Kripal and Jenny Wade

Books by Ed Kelly and Michael Grosso

Books by Kelly et al and Michael Murphy

If this conference were a college class, these books would be part of the required reading. Each book (and several others) points in its own way beyond ordinary experience into the realm of powers and experiences utterly inexplicable by the currently fashionable materialist Weltanschauung (If you hang with philosophers, you've got to speak their language; with this group of specialists Nick felt almost entirely out of his depth.)

Esalen SuperNature 2016, opening circle

The conference was divided almost equally between theory and experience. The overarching tentative theoretical model for our explorations was a view of the universe in which an invisible Spirit immanent everywhere behind material form was progressively emerging in and through matter in increasingly sophisticated visible forms. This vision of a world spirit struggling to be born everywhere in Nature and particularly in human beings is a central theme in the philosophy of Shri Aurobindo, in Plotinus and the Neoplatonists and in Hegel's picture of an Absolute Zeitgeist emerging from infinite potential into finite actuality. Each of these three spirit-driven evolutionary philosophies had a representative at Esalen in the persons of Michael Murphy, Gary Shaw and Glenn Magee.

Coincidentally, when I arrived home, I discovered that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, had recently written a novel God's Debris espousing this very same evolutionary philosophy.

From my point of view, the notion of our world being brought into being moment-by-moment by a hidden potentia changing mysteriously into visible actuality seems entirely consistent with quantum physics. Physics however omits the God bit and regards these world-producing potentia/actuality transitions as perfectly random.

This might be a good place to mention Erwin Schrödinger's Proof for the Existence of God -- which might also be called "Schrödinger's I-am-That".

Another theoretical perspective was offered by Adam Crabtree, a psychotherapist from Toronto, who has researched the history of Mesmerism and uses trance states in his practice. Adam presented the case that trance states (extreme focus, exclusion of irrelevant perceptions and the marshalling of subliminal resources) could be a royal road to the understanding both of ordinary life and its supernormal extensions.

Jenny Wade describing Berzerkergang

On the experimental side, psychologist Jenny Wade presented material from her book Transcendent Sex, where she describes a wide variety of supernormal states experienced by normal, undrugged people "just having sex". Jenny then transited abruptly from love to war to describe techniques used historically and by modern warriors to attain an altered mental and physical state optimally conducive to destroying the foe.

The central experimental focus of the Esalen conference was Michael Grosso's presentation of material from his recent book, The Man Who Could Fly, St Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation.

Joseph of Copertino (1603-1663) was an Italian monk who was unexceptional in every way except for the fact that he was continually transported into ecstatic religious states during which he would rise from the Earth and levitate, sometimes for several minutes. Joseph had been ordained a priest and his levitations would so frequently accompany the Consecration of the Blessed Sacrament, that his superiors eventually forbid him from saying Mass in public because his levitations inevitably distracted the faithful from their prayers. The Catholic Church did everything they could to keep Joseph out of the public eye and even subjected him to several Inquisitions to determine whether his powers (which they could not deny) were from God or from the devil.

The case of St Joseph of Copertino is one of the most thoroughly documented facts of human levitation during religious ecstasy. More than 150 people put forth written testimony under oath (which was a lot more serious in the the 17th Century when oath-breakers might fear punishment in Hell). Hundreds and no doubt thousands witnessed this monk's marvelous flights over an extended period of 35 years. Father Joseph's flights were no one-shot miracle but a highly replicable set of phenomena occurring throughout his lifetime until the moment of his death.

OK, scientific materialists, explain this!

Ummph, ahh, gee-whiz, mass hallucination?

It is a curious fact that St Joseph's miraculous ascensions took place in Italy precisely at the time when his countryman Galileo (1564-1642) was laying the foundations of the mechanical science that would today confidently prove that Joseph's feats are impossible. Another curious coincidence is that the city of Cupertino, CA, the headquarters of Apple Computer, happens to be named after the levitating saint.

Miraculous Medal

 Two physicists, besides myself were invited to deal with Michael Grosso's exposition. But Hal Puthoff and Henry Stapp had conflicting schedules, so I was left by myself, by default "the house physicist", to confront these persuasively presented miracles with the vast explanatory structures of quantum mechanics, modern cosmology and general relativity.

I was frankly baffled.

Instead of getting into physics, I slyly chose another path. In Ohio, I had been educated in both a Catholic grade school (St Augustine's) and a pre-seminary Catholic boy's school (St Charles Borromeo) so I volunteered to explain what it felt like to dwell in the Catholic Weltanschauung, some taste perhaps of how people might have experienced the world in the days of Father Giuseppe of Copertino.

In the first place Catholics are everywhere surrounded by MAGIC. There's the holy water in every church (and in little bottles at home), there's medals, scapulars and holy cards (baseball-card-like pictures of the saints) topped off with the most magical medal of them all, the holy Miraculous Medal which confers a cornucopia of blessings on its wearers. There's the Marian rosary and the colorful liturgical calendar which hangs in every home plus the Seven Sacraments -- seven "outward signs" which represent direct channels to the Grace of God.

And all that just for starts. The primary magic, which as a Catholic you could experience every day if you wanted to, is the Mass, which in my day was performed in an ancient language that nobody understood. (Nick was an altar boy and participated on stage in hundreds of these magical demonstrations.) 

The Holy Mass. Of all the Catholic practices, none was so magical as this. The central fact of every Mass is that the words of the priest would cause the very God that created our Universe to reside in some mysterious way in the substance of Bread and Wine. And that Catholics could partake of the very Substance of the Divine simply by swallowing a small white wafer.

Heap big juju.

And this holy Catholic miracle -- the Mass and Transubstantiation -- happened every day.

I also related to the philosophers and psychologists how I subsequently lost my Catholic faith and met an angel in Berkeley.

Now back in Boulder Creek, doing my homework (reading some of the books on the list), I was eating breakfast (which for a Ukrainian like Nick inevitably involves a quart of beer) and suddenly came up with a way to explain the levitation of St Joseph.

It is of course not an adequate explanation, but an indication of a possible path to an explanation, a path that involves neither quantum mechanics nor relativity but a far more fundamental result in physics called Noether's Theorem after German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882 - 1935) who first derived it. Here is what Matthew Francis writing in Symmetry Magazine has to say about Noether's Theorem:

We are able to understand the world because it is predictable. If we drop a rubber ball, it falls down rather than flying up. But more specifically: if we drop the same ball from the same height over and over again, we know it will hit the ground with the same speed every time (within vagaries of air currents). That repeatability is a huge part of what makes physics effective.

The repeatability of the ball experiment is an example of what physicists call “the law of conservation of energy.” An equivalent way to put it is to say the force of gravity doesn’t change in strength from moment to moment.

The connection between those ways of thinking is a simple example of a deep principle called Noether’s theorem: Wherever a symmetry of nature exists, there is a conservation law attached to it, and vice versa. The theorem is named for arguably the greatest 20th century mathematician: Emmy Noether.

The falling-body reliability that Galileo first measured and that modern science abundantly confirms is a consequence of the Conservation Laws of Energy and of Momentum.

But Noether's Theorem proves that these two conservation laws derive from two basic SYMMETRIES in Nature -- the symmetries of TIME and of PLACE.

Conservation of Energy derives from the symmetry that as far as physics is concerned, ALL MOMENTS OF TIME have the same nature -- in physics there are no magic moments.

Conservation of Momentum derives from the symmetry that as far as physics is concerned, ALL LOCATIONS IN SPACE have the same nature -- in physics there are no privileged places.

However, our conscious experience does assign a special time and a special place to the world. We experience the world in the HERE and NOW. Conscious experience seems to break the universal time/space symmetry of physics and hence (via Noether's Theorem) opens the way for Mind to violate the laws of conservation of Energy and Momentum.

But perhaps human minds in their normal state exercise only a insignificant influence on Nature's basic time/space symmetries but in Mesmeric trances, sexual transports or religious ecstasies, the powerfully experienced here/nowness of consciousness might induce extraordinary acts that violate the cherished laws of physics over and over and over again.

Thus Emmy Noether can explain St. Joseph of Cupertino.

The details are left to the student.

Esalen SuperNature 2016 participants (photo by Daniel Bianchetta)

Letter to St. Charles

St. Charles Borromeo (1538 - 1584), Bishop of Milan

To Louis Fabro, Director of Alumni Affairs, St. Charles Borromeo Preparatory School, Columbus, Ohio.

As a 1954 St. Charles Borromeo alumnus who moved to California in the 60s, I have been enjoying reading in your newsletters about the changes taking place at my old high school.  After all the new construction, I'm sure I would not recognize the place. A lot of changes have occurred in 60 years including the new pedestrian bridge across Alum Creek near the site of the Mary Grotto where some of us--not me--would sneak behind to smoke cigarettes. Is there still a seminary on the grounds where boarding-school students would steal beer from the novitiate's refrigerators? I remember assisting as an altar boy at morning mass in the chapel when I came early to school. And being castigated by Monsignor Galen in math class which was not so unusual: Msgr. Galen's standards were high and few of us escaped this brilliant man's good-natured criticism.


Responding to your request for material for your Alumni News, here's what's been happening to Nick.

After graduating from St. Charles, I got a BA in physics from Ohio State and a PhD in Physics from Stanford.

I held various jobs in industry during the 60s and 70s, then dropped out of the mainstream to home school my son Khola and do physics at home--a decision which introduced me to many other independent researchers working at the edges of conventional science. During this time I wrote three books, the best-selling Quantum Reality, still in print and ebook, Faster Than Light, and Elemental Mind, a book about consciousness. In the late 70s, I was invited to teach and lead seminars at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA on the implications of Bell's Theorem, a new mathematical proof by Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, concerned not merely with experiments, nor with theories but with "reality itself". Two of my achievements in this area were the shortest proof of Bell's theorem and a thought experiment (called FLASH) which led directly to the discovery of the quantum No-Cloning Rule, a fundamental fact of nature that sets limits on the behavior of quantum computers. My work was recently publicized in MIT professor David Kaiser's popular book How the Hippies Saved Physics and in Supernature, a soon-to-be-released feature-length film by Jeffrey Kripal and Scott Hulan Jones dramatizing the 50-year history of Esalen Institute. I live in Boulder Creek, CA with my cat Onyx, work out twice a week, have published two books of quantum-erotic poetry and am learning to play the Irish whistle. Not such a bad life for a boy both of whose grandfathers were immigrants from the Ukraine who worked as coal miners in South-eastern Ohio. See what a difference a St Charles education can make!

Nick Herbert, St Charles Borromeo, Class of 1954

Dark Pool of Light

Beaver (Invisible) Swimming Through Reflection of Moon, Manset, Maine

One afternoon in the late 60s, I walked into Ron Thelin's Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street--planet Earth's very first head shop. The bulletin board was filled with personal messages, ads for goods, services and rooms. Off to one side I spotted a sparse message that concisely expressed the spirit of the 60s. "I am looking for marvels," it said. Plus a phone number.

All my life, I have been looking for marvels too, not satisfied with the surface of things. I compulsively read science fiction and haunt used book stores, constantly searching for fresh ideas. During my graduate studies at Stanford I worked part-time at the EastWest Bookshop in Menlo Park (now in Mountain View) which at that time was the largest occult book store on the West coast. So I tempered my reading of the occult works of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac with large doses of Manly P. Hall, Arthur Avalon and Aleister Crowley. Somewhere in this potent mix of Eastern and Western wisdom texts I came across a journal called Io, edited by Richard Grossinger. Grossinger was looking for marvels too and was publishing in Io various essays by himself and others on such high-weirdness topics as "Alchemy", "The Doctrine of Signatures", and "Oneirology". I recently learned from Wikipedia that almost 50 different volumes of Io were produced.

Richard Grossinger has written dozens of books--all composed in the same marvel-seeking style reflected in the pages of Io. His numerous books include Planet Medicine, Bardo of Waking Life and the autobiographical New Moon. From New Moon I learned that Richard is a member of the clan that started Grossinger's resort in the Catskills, linchpin of the legendary Borsch Belt where famous performers such as Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers and Henny Youngman made their debuts. In 1977 Grossinger and his wife, poet Lindy Hough, founded North Atlantic Books to promote their own works and the works of like-minded friends.

Now Richard has turned his marvel-obsessed mind to the most profound unsolved mystery of modern times--the problem of consciousness.

Grossinger's newest book Dark Pool of Light approaches the phenomenon of human consciousness from a dozen different directions, biological, psychological, mystical, prophetic and indeterminate. Dark Pool of Light is a physico-poetic symphony of words informed not only by Richard's reading in science but by his experiences at the Berkeley Psychic Institute and his participation in several other maverick mind-science ventures from Maine to California. Dark Pool of Light is obsessive, excessive, poetic, confessional, exhausting, touching, boring and brilliant--all at the same time. A truly remarkable literary performance.

Then just when you think he's done, he's not. Richard can't seem to get off the stage. The last dozen pages he calls "Deleted Scenes" consisting of snippets that were cut from the main text but considered too good to throw out. I read these gems first. I'm glad they were included.

There's something in this book (which runs to 3 volumes) for everyone--something to complain about and something to adore. Dark Pool of Light is like an astonishing high-wire performance at Grossinger's Catskills resort--you really want to keep watching this crazy-risky guy just to be there when he falls on his face. Well worth the price of admission.

But I'm not entirely unbiased concerning Richard's audacious intellectual high-wire act. The forwards to this book--the opening acts for Spielmeister Richard Grossinger--are short riffs by Nick Herbert and Jeffrey Kripal. Grossinger's Borsch Belt--it is alive and well!

Quantum Tantra Scrutinized

Scott Jones videoing Nick Herbert at home

For almost half a century, research at my quantum tantric ashram/laboratory in Boulder Creek, CA into new physics-based ways of connecting with nature has been carried out in relative anonymity. A few books of poetry (which no one takes seriously these days)  as well as private conversations and sporadic essays on this blog have revealed some of quantum tantra's aims and methods. But for the most part the quantum-tantric enterprise has been ignored by main-stream media.

Today all that changed.

This morning producer Jeffrey Kripal and videographer Scott Hulan Jones visited my home and photographed most everything--what I eat for breakfast (sausage and beer), my taste in art (prints of Hanuman, personal friends and psychedelic goddesses) as well as my secret sanctum high in the trees from which I like to observe life in the redwood forest after dark.

This Nick-intimate video will be part of a feature-length film on the history of Esalen Institute in which I played a small part in many different contexts--present at the creation, workshop attendee and presenter, guest and friend of many of the staff and long-time leader of seminars on quantum physics and the nature of reality.

Jeffrey hopes to finish the film Supernature in time for a celebration of Esalen's 50th anniversary which will be held in October 2012. I have received much benefit and inspiration from my association with Esalen so I consider opening my home to a video crew a small price to pay for all that Esalen has given me.

Happy fiftieth anniversary, bold, inventive, sexy Esalen Institute! May your second fifty years be even more exciting, sensual and innovative than the first.

Supernature--the Story of Esalen

Esalen Institute--a lab for exploring radical human possibilities.

I got my first glimpse of Esalen in February 1963. Stanford psychology grad student Allen Sidle and his wife told me about something hot happening in Big Sur. Together with Tom Records (who later joined a Gurdjieff group in New York) we drove south along the rugged California coast to a spot on the map labeled "Slate's Hot Springs", which boasted a cliff-side bath house, a lodge and several motel rooms.

We traveled down there to hear a Stanford religion professor talk about his mystical experience. Frederic Spiegelberg, author of many books on comparative religions, as a teacher at Stanford had deeply impressed both Dick Price and Michael Murphy, who were busy turning Slate's Hot Springs into a meditation and seminar center which they were calling "Esalen Institute".

Our little gang was privileged to witness Esalen in embryo--the place was barely six months old.

Professor Spiegelberg spoke that sunny afternoon to an audience of about 20 people, standing not in a traditional classroom but on the edge of a cliff with the Pacific Ocean as his backdrop. He told us of his trip to the ashram of Shri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India. Aurobindo was seated in a chair in a small room with a long line of devotees at the door who one by one came forward to receive his blessing. Spiegelberg awaited his turn, stepped forward, met the Master's gaze and was suddenly "X-rayed to the core" by some psychic emanation flowing from that being in the chair. The encounter lasted no more than a few seconds in "real time" but to Spiegelberg it seemed to last forever. He spent an hour attempting to describe to us what he could remember and express of this powerful and unexpected shaktipat experience in the presence of Aurobindo. It sounded to me an awfully lot like LSD.

I returned to Esalen many times: to hear Tim Leary speak, to participate with Ed Maupin in his "Symbo Experiment" in group telepathy, to attend meetings convened by Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Jeffrey Kripal, to explore with wife Betsy near-by Lime Kiln Creek and sometimes just to enjoy the baths. For several years, with Saul-Paul Sirag, I led seminars on quantum physics which are mentioned in Rice University professor Jeffrey Kripal's authoritative history Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.

Recently Kripal and Cinema Arts film producer Scott Hulan Jones have been constructing a film version of the history of Esalen with the working title Supernature: Esalen and the Human Potential. A big portion of the movie is already "in the can", and using material from the Esalen archives, they hope to complete a rough cut by September 2012, to coincide with the celebration of Esalen's 50th birthday.

You can view here the first Supernature trailer, featuring a few of "the hippies who saved physics", as well as founder Mike Murphy, Jeffrey Kripal and other Esalen worthies. To raise money for additional filming and editing, the Supernature crew is seeking funding via Kickstart. In its nearly fifty years of existence, Esalen Institute has transformed many thousands of lives. If you have benefited in any way from Esalen, kicking in to support Supernature would be a great way to return the favor.

Scott Hulan Jones at Esalen's Big House

Esalen SuperSymposium IV

Meditation Hut: Esalen Institute (photo by Judy Tart)

Rice University scholar of religion Jeffrey Kripal (Authors of the Impossible: the Paranormal and the Sacred, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom) in his recent authoritative history of Esalen Institute has characterized Esalen as a center for "western tantra" and as seeking to promote "a religion of no-religion". One outstanding feature of traditional religions is the notion of superpowers, allegedly possessed by gods, angels, saints and miracle workers. Kripal is interested in superpowers too and, under the auspices of the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, has convened three SuperSymposia on superpowers at Esalen, examining how non-religious superpowers have been portrayed 1) in science fiction, 2) in superhero comics and 3) in metaphysical films such as The Matrix.

This month Jeffrey convened a fourth SuperSymposium on "Superpowers at Esalen", to examine investigations of deep reality that were either initiated or fostered at Esalen, including extraordinary performance in sports, "miraculous" healing and unusual bodily phenomena, mystical, psychedelic and other altered states, nonlocality (''voodoo connections") in quantum physics, reincarnation, mediumistic communication with the dead, ESP and other psychic phenomena, as well as some "miscellaneous maybes"--that defy ordinary categories.

Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy has had an abiding interest in extraordinary sports performance and bodily transformations. Golf in the Kingdom, Jacob Atabet, The Future of the Body and In the Zone: Transcendent Experiences in Sport are a few of Murphy's books on the expanded body. Besides exploring extraordinary body states, Mike and his wife Dulce have initiated several programs in citizen diplomacy. Their reciprocal visits with Boris Yeltsin and other Russians could arguably be said to have contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. This year Esalen is sponsoring similar citizen exchanges between the US and China and a Middle East exchange program called The Abrahamic Family Reunion. At this SuperSymposium, Mike and Dulce recounted many stories about their Russian adventures including tales of interactions with US presidents, CIA and KGB agents as well as with many, many ordinary Russian citizens.

Reinforcing the Murphys' accounts of their adventures in the Soviet Union, cultural scholar Birgit Menzel, from Mainz, Germany. shared her own research on Russian folk culture, focusing on the Russian mystical tradition of shamans, wandering monks and holy fools as well as describing her studies of contemporary upwellings of esoteric spiritual practices in Russia since the fall of the communist state.

Don Hanlon Johnson (Body: Recovering our Sensual Wisdom) a pioneer in the field of Somatics, gave examples of remarkable experiences that can occur during deep massage. Don travelled to Russia with the Murphys, his education as a Jesuit priest giving him privileged access to Russian priests and monks. During our time together, Don Johnson introduced me to two "proofs" of the existence of God by St Thomas Aquinas, that my teachers in high school had failed to impart.

Religious scholar Dana Sawyer drew from his many trips to India, studying and meditating with the Dandi Sadhus, a sect of Hindu Swamis in the Vedanta tradition, to speak of his encounters with various Indian holy men. The bulk of Dana's presentation centered on the life and thought of Aldous Huxley, an influential Western intellectual (Brave New World, Island, The Perennial Philosophy, Doors of Perception) who was strongly influenced by the version of Vedanta he learned from Swami Prabhavananda while the Huxleys were living in Los Angeles. Sawyer, the author of a well-received recent biography of Aldous Huxley, described the role that psychedelics and Eastern philosophy played in Aldous's thinking not too far from one of Esalen's main meeting rooms, named "Huxley" in honor of the part that Huxley played in coining the phrase "human potential" and in inspiring the directions that Esalen would take in its formative years.

Stan and Christina Grof (LSD: Doorway to the Numinous, Spiritual Emergency) talked about psychedelics, spiritual emergence through mental breakdowns and their own way of inducing altered states through Holotropic Breathwork. For more than a dozen years, Stan and Christina were scholars in residence at Esalen, and, like Aldous Huxley, had much to do with shaping Esalen's character. I especially enjoyed sharing time with Stan whom I first met at a conference in Iceland in 1972.

Psychologist Charles Tart (The End of Materialism) and physicist Russell Targ (Limitless Mind: a Guide to Remote Viewing) presented examples of "superpowers" from the field of parapsychology. Russell gave examples of successful remote viewing experiments with untrained subjects, related many remarkable stories of the achievements of talented remote viewers (such as ex-police chief Pat Price), and showed films of psychic experiments with Uri Geller and details of his research on remote viewing at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA.

Nick Herbert explains quantum non-locality in Esalen's Big House

Physicist Nick Herbert (Quantum Reality) introduced the group to the "quantum physics code"--Dirac bra-ket notation-- and described two modern "superpowers"--quantum superposition and quantum entanglement--powers possessed by many quantum systems but not even describable in an ordinary world made of "things".

Physicist Elizabeth Rauscher (Orbiting the Moons of Pluto), who has worked with Russell Targ on remote viewing experiments at SRI, presented her model of eight-dimensional spacetime that attempts to make sense of the mind's apparent ability, in certain special situations, to transcend the limits of ordinary four-dimensional experience (3 of space and 1 of time).

In the Wednesday night presentation in "Huxley room" attended by Esalen staff and seminarians, Elizabeth described her founding and hosting at the Berkeley Radiation Lab of a study group that eventually grew to become "the hippies that saved physics", as chronicled in a brand-new book by David Kaiser, professor of science history at MIT. Nick Herbert explained "quantum non-locality" as a kind of invisible physics voodoo, unveiled for the first time in the Esalen community his conception of "quantum tantra", and then ranted in public about something he called "tantric jihad".

Adam Crabtree (From Mesmer to Freud, Trance Zero) is a Toronto psychotherapist and expert on the history of hypnotic induction. He is a charter member of Esalen CTR's long-running Survival Seminars and along with Ed and Emily Kelly is the editor of Irreducible Mind. Ed Kelly is a research psychologist whose current interest is the study of altered states using modern neuro-imaging techniques.

The currently fashionable philosophy of reductive materialism holds that mind is entirely a production of (yet to be discovered) physical processes in the brain. Irreducible Mind by Kelly, Kelly, Crabtree et al is a collection of experiments and experiences which suggest that the mind is more than the brain. And this book of inconvenient facts is 800 pages long. Like Galileo's critics who shunned his telescope, many scientists will refuse to open this book. But the world left Galileo's critics behind and they missed the chance to surf one of intellectual history's biggest waves.

Scott Hulan Jones, an independent film maker, is producing a feature-length film based on Jeffrey Kripal's Esalen: America and the Religion of No-Religion. As part of that project, whose working title is Supernature: the Story of Esalen, Jones and Richard Lacey recorded all of SuperSymposium IV on high-quality digital video. Watch for it soon at a theater near you.

In my mind's eye, the participants at Esalen SuperSymposium IV