Universal Interconnectedness | Science & Spirituality

So welcome, or welcome back. And there's a chair here which, as you may know, means it's time for a one of our dialogues. And it's time for me to briefly incarnate as a talk show host. And I always. I have to resist the temptation when people, when I have dialogue partners, when they come on stage, say, welcome to the show. I have not had many scientists as dialogue partners. I had Peter Russell, who is not a scientist, but who has a good scientific background, but. But otherwise, I don't recall having. Well, I had a conversation with Deepak Chopra, who also has, of course, a scientific background but is not a scientist as such. And the reason may be that my science IQ is very low. It could be due to an undeveloped left brain, who knows? Not only that, I know that I never do well. I only tried it once. To be honest, I don't do well in IQ tests. But my consolation is that IQ tests do not measure the whole spectrum of intelligence, but only a very small segment of intelligence. And basically IQ tests are not how intelligent you are, but how good you are at IQ tests. So I have some books here. My guest today is scientist Lotha Schaefer, who was born in Germany but taught for, I believe, 40 years at the University of Arkansas as professor of physical chemistry. And about maybe a year ago or so, I received this book that he wrote not long ago with a foreword by Deepak Chopra. And the title of the book is Infinite Potential. Infinite Potential. The subtitle is very interesting. It what Quantum Physics Reveals about How We Should Live. That's very intriguing because nobody had thought of quantum physics as being able to reveal to us how we should live.

So.

I get so many books sent every month, manuscripts, books, and it's not even possible to read them all, or even a few pages sometimes. And then when I travel, the books accumulate. And when I get back home, it's a huge pile. And my intention is always that eventually I will get to it. And of course, then they pile up more and more. That's one of my challenges. But for some reason, I don't know whether it was Deepak Chopra having written a foreword. I opened it and immediately responded. Something within responded, and as I read, continued reading a few more pages then, I didn't start from the very beginning at first, but now, of course, I have read the whole book, even almost the whole book twice. But when I first looked at it, I didn't start from the very beginning, but a little bit into the book and I came across a passage that I want to Read to you in a minute. That sounded so similar to what I often say in talks. And I know that that's not where he got it. So I didn't get it from him, and he didn't get it from me. Because when he wrote the book, he had never even heard of me. So then, obviously, it was something that is produced, like everything, by the. The one universal consciousness that came to a realization and expressed it in a similar way. And I'll read that to you in a minute. But before that, just one brief look at another book he wrote a few years ago. It has a very interesting title, In Search of Divine Reality. Science as a Source of Inspiration. Now, before you read this book, I think he would agree. I would highly recommend that you start with this book because this is more challenging. It's a very erudite and scholarly examination. It's wonderful. My intention is to get my teeth into it this summer when I have plenty of spare time. So I'll be reading it. But I have opened it here and there, and it's always wonderfully fascinating. And for those who are familiar with the German language, there's a German version of it. It's not exactly a translation. It's a reworking, it seems. And the title is somewhat different from the English title, which translates as Hidden Reality. And the subtitle is How Quantum Physics Can Lead Us to Transcendence. Now, I'll read that this was one of the first things that jumped out of this book when I first opened it. So this is a little passage that I will read to you, and then I will invite Lothar up on stage. He addresses here the interconnectedness of seemingly separate things. You can think about this in the following way. If you've ever flown over an ocean or a large body of water, sometimes when the weather is right, you can see some white patches on the water below. Tiny white dots that suddenly appear, like out of nothing, move around one this way, one that way, and fade out of existence again. It is really a beautiful sight and a fascinating play of forms. And it is easily understood. The white patches are the crests of waves in the agitated ocean. Now, here's the interesting thing. You can't see these waves because you are too far up. You can only see the crests, but you have no doubt that the waves are there. You may even say that you know it. And if anybody tried to tell you that the white spots in the water were some sort sort of big white fish, you would not believe it. Furthermore, when you see how each of the Patches is going its own way and couldn't care less about what the others are doing. You can't be fooled into thinking that the waves are isolated, independent appearances, because you just know that the waves in an ocean are not independent, but conjoined in one giant movement of the whole. This is a useful experience because now when you look out into the world and see the things and people around you, you will not be fooled into thinking they are separate and independent appearances, because you know that they are the patches on the surface of an agitated ocean, the ocean of potentiality. In this non material ocean, which seems alive and more mind like than thing like, the waves constantly build up to new empirical possibilities and perhaps even to new forms of thinking that may find consciousness in a human mind after each transition from the possible to the factual. As one of the great pioneers of quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg, described it. The evolution of tendencies or possibilities for future actual events starts anew, but now from a different starting point than before, so that the universe is evolving. Physicist Hans Peter Dure, longtime co worker of Heisenberg's, has called this a learning process. With the experiences that it makes through us. The cosmic potentiality is learning. It constantly manifests and reabsorbs. There is a continuous flux from the evolution of tendencies to their actualizations, empirical events. And from empirical events to new tendencies. Each new state of potentiality carries in it like a stigma, the memory of the last state. You are a white crest on the surface of this ocean. So the one manifesting through you, thinking through you, perceiving through you, then going back within and then re emerging. Wonderful image. Now the interesting thing is that Lotha Schaefer, our guest, did not arrive at this realization through going within, but going, examining matter and going so deep into matter where matter wasn't matter anymore. And so going. And he came to the same conclusion that mystics or I myself arrived at by going within. Very interesting. Now I'm going to ask him in a minute how that happened, the process by which he arrived at that conclusion. So I'd like to welcome Lothar Schaefer. He will come up here in a minute. We don't have any music to play while he comes up to the stage.

Is it on?

Yes. So thank you for this wonderful book. And you told me that or you wrote to me sometime after this book came out, somebody mentioned my name to you. And then you said, who is that? I never heard of him. But then you looked at a book and you saw certain similarities and you were surprised. And then I think you sent the book to me, or the publisher sent it, but with a letter written by you.

Well, you know, it doesn't sound likely, but I didn't know of you. Well, you know, you hear names and so on, but I didn't know of you. And now I've nearly read all of your books and I'm thinking, how. How does it happen? I mean, you have written things and I can say before me that I've written, but I didn't copy that. You get the strong feeling of a connectedness. Yes, and none that is under our control. But there is a mental background, a spiritual background. And if you open your mind, you have to open your mind, then you can be connected and then also you can be connected with different minds and so on. This, this is, in a way, not classical science, because classical science was materialism and still is.

This is materialism, right?

Yeah, the classical science. Classical science, in a way, has been found to be insufficient. But most scientists still are classical. They don't like the change.

Yes. So despite all these discoveries in quantum. Quantum physics, the mainstream science is really still. The philosophical foundation is the classical science.

Yes, the business is still. So, you see, in the beginning, Newton, he said, God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable particles, so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces. Nature is lasting. It's materialism. The early French scientists, they said there are two kinds of stuff, extended stuff and thinking stuff. But it had to be stuff. And it was, of course, a progress compared to the terrible things that happened in the spiritual world before that. It was a liberation. And it also led to development, led to technology. All the things we have, I mean, they developed within this framework up to 1900. And then was the beginning of quantum physics. And quantum physics is a kind of idealism. It says that there is a part of the world that we cannot see, but it is real. But before that happened, physics became so successful. Then it entered biology, and in the theory of evolution, you know, having or not having stuff is the essence of life. If you don't get it, somebody else gets it. If he gets it, he eats you. No, you get it, you eat him. And it has often been said, but I think it is wrong. Science has nothing to do with ethics. No. If this is what the world is like, then having or not having stuff and being aggressive is what you should be. That's a virtue. Somebody is a kind person. Forget about him. He'll already be toast before he knows.

Survival. Survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest. And that becomes an underlying assumption, philosophical assumption, that spreads. And even people who know very little about Darwin or his theory, it seeps into everybody's mind. And as on the substratum of their minds, there is that, that mindset, that philosophy. And that, in a way, is still prevalent.

And it is what we teach our children. It is what we teach in schools. Quantum physics says it is wrong. Why do we not teach quantum physics in high school? I don't know that it is conscious, but unconsciously, we don't want our children to know this. We want them to become good consumers, not spiritual minds. It's bad for business. But quantum physics, quantum theory, also the extension to chemistry. Quantum chemistry is a sort of idealism because it says that the basis of the world is not things, but its forms, non material forms. If you, as science has done, pursue the nature of things, of matter, to the foundation, then all of a sudden you end up with elementary particles, molecules, electrons and so on. And then all of a sudden, something happens. When such these things are particles, they have such mass and so on, it is constant. But when they are on their own, like in a vacuum, they're never completely alone, but in a vacuum they are very. There are much fewer interactions when they do not interact. When you have an electron and it doesn't interact, it vanishes. It becomes a wave. That wave is extended in space. You can't see it. The thing leaves the empirical world. The wave doesn't have units of matter or energy. It's just a form. It's a pattern of information. Out of this form, the particle can jump out again. I'm not sure physicists know exactly where it gets the mass. Maybe a Higgs field, and it doesn't matter. We can think that all material particles, all things, are made of particles. All these particles came into existence like this. So the entire visible world is an emanation out of a realm of forms. Ultimately, the forms have no units of mass or energy. They're just information. We don't see them. They appear to us as waves. So maybe we can think it's like an ocean. They are wave like, but we don't really see. And that is also important because it says there is a part of the world that is non empirical. We cannot see it. Science cannot say anything about it. You don't know how mad scientists can get. When I say something like that.

That.

Guy, that it's like a traitor because what does it say? It says there is a part of reality where science cannot enter. Science can deal with the empirical world. And yes, it deals with this very well. You make experiments, you observe, you learn a lot. Then there is a part, the visible comes out of the non visible. We can only guess or have like blessed person, like you have an inspiration. We can say it probably consists of something that we have to call forms. Maybe there are waves. And when there are waves, you think they're hanging together like waves in an ocean. It means the hidden reality is a wholeness. The forms are patterns of information. So you can think if there is information. Normally information is meant for a mind. Does it mean there's a cosmic mind?

Would you compare what you call the forms to what in the human beings? Also something that you cannot see. Thoughts. Are those the thoughts of the universe? Those forms.

Now you can start thinking. I've sometimes said this. In 1900, before the beginning of quantum physics, the age of classical physics, you could not believe in science, have a religious faith and be logically consistent. At that age, it was stupid to believe in something. Now, I don't want to say it is not reasonable not to have a spiritual faith. But you can believe in science in the order of the world and have a spiritual conviction. And it is logically consistent. Nobody can tell you what you have to think. I mean, that's up to you.