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Want to Travel Through Space and Time? Don’t Collapse Your Wave Function!

Technology is like stealing fire from the Gods, that’s one interpretation of the fire theft metaphor you see in mythology, most notably the Prometheus story, but it never satisfies because it is piecemeal, and the second we observe it, it freezes, its wave function collapses. So the more we get, the more we want, and the void is never filled. Part of the symbolism of the Cross is that the horizontal bar represents the divide between the conscious and unconscious, logic and emotion, and they have inversely proportional relationships. The more “Leviathans” that Logic destroys, the Dragon of the Ego grows and further suppresses the unconscious energies, spontaneity.

But an important step in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” developed at the turn of the 20th century with the discovery of Relativity, Hubble’s observations of an expanding Universe, and Quantum Mechanics. Overthrowing “determinism,” the prevailing theory at the turn of the century, these discoveries and their validation gave birth to most of the “magical” things in our lives today: radio, TV, computers, the internet, and on and on, all wonders of the mysterious Planck Length world making themselves known, felt, and realized in our “macro” conscious world of everyday living. This is one way that the horizontal cross and its barrier starts to be dissolved.

But also, ironically, the sense of Science being the great Antithesis of Religion, also was cut through like a lightening bolt from Zeus or Indra. In fact, beginning with Special Relativity and up to this day, the more Science digs and discovers, the more Mystery it finds. We find that Science is actually coming to the aide of Religion, at least religion in the since of Metaphysics and Mysticism, although even to this day this sense doesn’t not have much mindshare. Mostly because of the institutionalizing of the arts and sciences and their systems which produce “walled gardens” that can’t nourish each other. I talked about this a little bit in another article, “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.”

It’s important to realize that without a wave function you couldn’t be reading this message, PC’s couldn’t exist, the internet couldn’t exist, because its all based on the ability of the electron to exist simultaneaously at every point in space. Fortunately we can’t “observe” an electron, so its wave function doesn’t collapse, and our Micro Processors still compute, and our emails go through. Even more fortunate still for our bodies’ sake, or it would collapse. The electron cloud keeps all of our bodies’ trillions of molecules that are constantly colliding, stable. The electron cloud is based on the electron’s ablity to be in an infinite number of points around the nucleus, simultaneously. Fortunately, someone wishing to do us harm has not the sensory organs to observe our electrons and collapse their wave function!

Every object, including your body has a wave function. In fact the probability of the wave function's statistic looks exactly like you, your actual wave function, which is real, seeps into space and actually occupies the entire Universe. That is until you or someone else observes you. Then your wave function collapses, and you become frozen in space in time at the point they or you observe you. Want to travel or be in an infinite number of places simultaneouly like a God? Don't collapse your wave function! How do we do that? I don't know!!!!! But I have a few ideas. (Of course having an idea, itself, especially attached to the idea of myself having it, is automatically collapsing my wave function!) Until we get the engineering prowess, which will be at least thousands if not millions of years, to build Star Trek like devices, we are going to have to look at the Mystical route. I can't stop my neighbor from observing me. I can't stop even my dogs or cat from observing me, but if I were alone in a room, could I stop ME from observing ME? It seems to me (even saying "me" collapses my wave function) that observing myself, either in a mirror, or looking at parts of my body is very analogous, if not the same thing, to Ego. I. Look at your hand. The whole Universe is behind it, and when you look at it, it "freezes" it as separate from that Universe. MY HAND. Not the Universe's. It seems there would be one easy solution for not observing yourself: Close your eyes. But even when your eyes are closed, your other senses are involved with observing YOU, your sense of touch, smell, sound and even without those, your mind has only images of yourself as you have seen yourself for years, since you were born. That's a very ingrained image, one that perhaps gives birth to the Ego itself, and then once born, the Ego's needs, desires, and fears, propels one's body towards actions that keep it (the Ego) fed. This lock is not easily broken. Years upon years of habit are like mounds of soil and a rusty padlock in an indistinguishable field, on top of the treasure chest that is your Authentic Self (Self in the Eastern tradition as distinguished from Ego). The practice of Meditation and Yoga (re-linking, ie 're-ligio' to source or unseparation consciouness) are the only two practices I've encountered that show, perhaps, a way or solution to stop observing yourself and collapsing your wave function. Actually its been a long time since I've engaged these practices, so maybe I am writing this post to remind myself of their value and not the World. But the successful moments, even if fleeting, that I have had with these practices were very freeing in the sense that the gap between thought was achieved and these frozen architectures of the mind, these complexes as Jung would say, that have been years of memories in the making, seem to collapse in an instant. Can the simple act of meditation and yoga keep my Wave function alive and have me or you traveling to any point in the Universe (and perhaps time) instaneously, while at the same time keep one part of you, grounded, here on Earth, keeping your day job, keeping the bills paid? I don't know, but the feeling just occurred to me now, reading Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos and coming across a passage about Quantum Mechanics:
"To resolve the discrepency between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state-that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence. After we look at the electron, its wave function collapses, so the electron is now in a definite state and there is no more need for wave functions." - page 152 "Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which "collapses" the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes a definite reality. The wave function has served its purpose: it has given us the precise probability of finding the object in that particular state." - page 153
If I'm thinking of Eastern philosophy, the "Third Eye" represented as the red dot on the forehead of many Indians, is a symbol of observing without collapsing the wave function. "Seeing the infinite" as Blake would say. So before I walked into my bathroom and see my cat reclining on the chair, was he really on Mars and every other place in the Universe for that matter? Yes, according to Quantum Mechanics, which though is still just a theory, is the most successful scientific theory of all time and is responsible for the microchip and this Mac I'm writing on. So one must take pause. So if you want to travel through space and time, don't collapse your wave function! And one of the ironies is in order not to collapse it, you have to stop wanting not to collapse it! How else do you do it? I don't exactly know. My path might be different from yours and everyone else's. The Authurian Romances tell us "Each adventurer entered the forest in a different place and made his own path which had never been made before. To follow another's would have been a disgrace." So no one knows exactly, but mythologies give us hidden clues. The rest we have to find for ourself, and in our own way. What are your thoughts on this topic? Am I on to something, am I completely wrong, or somewhere in between? Love to have a conversation with you about it. Related Posts: 


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4 responses to “Want to Travel Through Space and Time? Don’t Collapse Your Wave Function!”

  1. Stephen Pickering Avatar

    Hi Aaron,

    This is a great thought. I’ve thought a lot about what happens when we sleep and dream too. It could be that the “wild” experiences we have are a result of automatically reaching a state where the Ego is so reduced that we enter a world of dramatically, if not infinitely increased possibilities.

    There’s also another idea that I read since writing this post. I’ll have to dig up where it’s from. I think it was from one of Brian Greene’s books. In he said that actually according to Schrodinger’s famous equation that waves don’t collapse. That this idea of collapsing to explain manifestation was only “snuck” in the theory, and that Schrodingder nor his equation ever agreed with it. That’s where the “Many Worlds” quantum theory came from. It was postulated that since nothing ever actually “collapses” then all possible things are occuring, only in “de cohered” states, and that what we actually experience is simply one of the Worlds, the one that we are “tuned” into. It’s like Television or Radio. Every possible transmission is coming into your living room, but your set is only tuned into one frequency.

    Still, I wonder, if nothing every collapses, how do we experience anything?

    But back to your point. I believe that sleeping and dreaming are a very important experience to be explored. They may be more than “illusions” but real experiences that when we reach that state we are able to “tune” into. I’d like to explore and think about it some more.

    Much appreciation for your comment!

  2. Aaron Walker Avatar

    hi all

    ever considered what happens to the body during sleep…. ? what collapses my wave function? perhaps the dream world is it…perhaps that is where i only exist….. unless another conscious observer is watching you …but still a serious consideration for ones thought….. do i exist in the solid form when i sleep? or am i just a wave of possibilities….at one with the universe and all that exciting kind of stuff….hmmmmm…also my room…is it still there …. or just a wave function??? can i exist in solid form, when my room is not being observed..and just a wave function… hmmm the mysteries of quantum mechanics!!!!

  3. Stephen Pickering Avatar

    Hey Jacob, Thanks so much for the comment. I find your insights fascinating. I guess that is because the electron can be in many if not an infinite places at once, hence, without adding mass, it increases volume?

    I’ll need to re read this post, to re gather my central idea. It’s so weird, when you’re reading books of this type you sort of get a deeper, “psychic” feel for what’s going on. But then after a while of not reading it, you forget. I kind of wish Michio and or Brian Greene would put out books of this type every year! I guess I just need to re read. It’s like at times when I’m “into” it I have a feel and insights on Quantum Mechanics and it’s deep physical as well as philosophical implications. And then when I quit reading for a while my Ego takes back over and I lose that “magical” sense, and everything seems mundane again.

    Do you know of any other authors or books that are similar to this one that I could read?

    Another thought: It could be that we don’t “realize” it because somehow the Ego gets in the way, blocking out “knowingness” or what the Indians refer to as “Chith.” In that sense “realizing” it could be what the Buddha meant by “Nirvana.”

  4. Jacob Miears Avatar
    Jacob Miears

    Hey man I just read this and I must say I agree with most everything you’ve said and I would even like to take your thoughts a step further. Every atom has central point the protons and neutrons which take up the majority of it’s mass; however, the electrons take up the majority of it’s volume, which kind of work like the atoms appendages in order for it to bond with other atoms. This ratio is extremely lop sided in that the volume far exceeds the mass. That being said we have trillions of neurotransmitters and neuro-receptors made up of these atomic compounds. So my point is, if quantum mechanics is correct. Given the total mass of the compounds which make up a human being, you could easily find the volume of space which a person truly takes up not just their body mass. I think you will find we interact with the entire universe without realizing it at all. Let me know what you think.

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