I visited Nick Herbert last month and we talked about his notion of quantum tantra once again. (Photos are here in an unrelated post.) Nick said that everything is alive and that, even you can’t attain telepathy with objects, you can develop relationships with them. He says that you’ll decide which object to relate to on the basis of affinity—just as you do when selecting friends. Nick suggest that the first things you’d want to be in touch with would be the organs of your body.

It was 2002 when Nick first started talking about quantum tantra to me, and I read the details in his brilliant essay, “Holistic Physics: An Introduction to Quantum Tantra.” I used his ideas a bit in Frek and the Elixir and mentioned it in my non-fiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. I’ve blogged about quantum tantra a few times before: here are the past blog links.

Nick points out that the brain is, like any physical object, a quantum system. And he feels that quantum mechanics accounts for our consciousness. Quantum systems can evolve in two modes:

(Chunky) In a series of discrete Newtonian-style wave-collapses brought on by repeated observations.

(Smooth) In a continuous, overlapping-universes style of evolution of state according to Schrödinger’s Wave Equation.

Our communicable, standard mental content is all chunky, and this is the kind of thing we try and mimic when we write programs for artificial intelligence.

The abrupt transition from mixed state to pure state can be seen as the act of adopting a specific opinion or plan. Each type of question or measurement of mental state enforces a choice among the question’s own implicit set of possible answers. Even beginning to consider a question initiates a delimiting process.

It’s unpleasant when someone substitutes interrogation for the natural flow of conversation—and throws you through a series of chunky collapses. And it’s still more unpleasant when the grilling is for some mercenary cause. You have every reason to discard or ignore the surveys with which institutions pester you.

Nick remarks that the smooth mode is closer to how our inner mental experience feels. That is, upon introspection, my consciousness feels analog, like a of wave on pond.

The continuous evolution of mixed states corresponds to the transcendent sensation of being merged with the world, or, putting it more simply, to the everyday activity of being alert without consciously thinking much of anything. In this mode you aren’t deliberately watching or evaluating your thoughts.

The soul might perhaps be given a scientific meaning as one’s immediate perception of one’s coherent uncollapsed wave function, particularly as it is entangled with the uncollapsed universal wave function of the cosmos.

Nick says that it will require a new physics and a new psychology to specify the details of the correspondence between mental phenomena and quantum states.

You should be able to couple your smooth mental state to the state of another person (or even to the state of another object), and thus attain a unique relationship that Nick terms rapprochement.

A caveat here is that, for quantum theoretic reasons, the link between the two systems isn’t of a kind that can leave memory traces, otherwise the link is functioning as an observation that collapses the quantum states of the systems, reducing the consciousness to the chunky mode. Nick speaks of a non-collapsing connection as an oblivious link.

Nick chuckles over the fact that cannabis reduces one’s short-term memory to the point where, indeed, a stoned conversation could, at least figuratively, be thought of as an oblivious link.

If you don’t remember anything about your rapprochement with someone or something, can it be said to have affected you at all? Oh yes. Your wave state will indeed have changed from the interaction, and when you later go and “observe” your mental state (e.g. by asking yourself questions about what you believe), you will obtain a different probability spectrum of outputs than you would have before the rapprochement.

Nick is a hylozoist—that is, he believes, as I do, that objects are alive and conscious. He proposes that both smooth and chunky consciousness can be found in every physical system. Thinking at a higher level, he remarks that synchronicity might be evidence that we’re all parts of some higher being. The higher mind’s ideas filter down into remote oblivious links.

If you want more, here’s an entry on Nick’s Quantum Tantra blog with a link to a video of him holding forth in Boulder Creek. (And it’s not a coincidence that the word “tantra” is related to sex!)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m combining and polishing my collected journals for the twenty-one year period 1990 to 2011. I might publish them in some form next year, perhaps only as print-on-demand and as e-book. It’ll be two volumes, one 1990-2002, the other 2002-2011. Here’s a cool passage that I happened to be editing today. Today’s illos are recent ones, from Los Gatos, Santa Cruz, and Ardenwood Farm.

It’s early April, 2002, and I’m in Torino, Italy, to give some kind of talk. I’m now sitting on my bed in the City Hotel in Torino. The sound of opera singing from across the hall is very loud, I guess it’s on their radio? Or maybe it’s some live person or persons rehearsing opera? Bellowing. Cute, in a way. Just the thing to remind me I’m in Italy.

I go outside and do my my initial Mars Rover number, trundling around the streets. It’s cold and raining. The streets are so Italian. It’s so wonderful, so amazing that this parallel un-iverse is now and ever ongoing, and that all I have to do is to get in a plane and take a lengthy but not really all that difficult eighteen hour journey to access this plane of existence.

I see a nice café on a side street full of women in pairs and threes and fours, sitting at tables drinking coffee and eating pastries, all of them talking to each other, all of them using their hands to talk, and the quick visual effect of looking in through the tinted glass was of a tide pool of anemones with their tendrils waving.

Now it’s 2 am and I’m having this jet-lag insomnia Camper Van Beethoven Eyes of Fatima interlude.

“Take the hands off the clock—you’re gonna be here for a whiiiiile.”

(Camper Van plays this with warpy, snit-snit, down-the-wormhole bad-acid guitar licks in the background, you understand.)

I open the door to the night balcony and it’s raining outside. I’ve been looking forward to this moment. There’s nothing like jet-lag when you’re traveling alone and you can turn the light on and fire up the lap-top, my drug of choice these days.

So now I’ll work on my current novel. Or maybe on a journal entry.

What if I didn’t have my books to define myself by? It would be tough—to just live in the light of day and not to have my daily scene lit by the footlights of the literary stage. It would mean going back to life at degree zero, like my life was when I was a young Nobody from Nowhere.

Yet even back then I had my portable footlight with me, its generator pooting along. What fuel was the footlight generator running on back then? Irony, viewing things at a remove. Drinking or getting high used to help with that. My concomitant physical malaise acted as objective correlatives for an artist’s neurasthenic alienation.

An artist feels emotionally different from his or her fellows. But, just to deconstruct that old trope—from listening to people talk about themselves over the years, I’ve found that most people feel different from others. Even the seemingly bland dummies are alienated, it’s just that the bland dummies don’t have the talent for making a geschrei about it. A raucous tumult.

And, second deconstruction, it is occasionally possible to be, or at least to feign to be, a Whitmanesque yea-saying artist who fully embraces the daily things, like Jack K. going, “Wow, what great apple pie! With ice-cream on it! Yes!”

I had a little moment of that joy-with-the-given at the San Francisco airport, simply enjoying the architecture, the awesome height of the vaulted hall, the light glancing off the shiny stone floors and rendering everything in shades of greenish gray, and us travelers scattered about like the stylized figures in a maquette.

And I got another hit of that while changing planes in Amsterdam, simply looking out at the friggin’ light poles around the airfield, enjoying how they were grouped. And here and now, for that matter, I take a simple, non-alienated joy in being awake alone at night in Italy, with the sound of rain outside, at the leading edge of spring, me here with my fingers and my words and my hard-drive, sketching, sketching, sketching.

“What a sweet thing is perspective,” as Paolo Ucello used to say.

Ding dong goes the elevator, bringing my opera-singing neighbors back to their room. 3 am. I’m gonna be here for awhile.