The following list of reference books are used to prepare the course
materials for presentation, but do not represent the required
readings for the course. They do represent, however, a superb summary
of the history, scope and perspective on the wide variety of subjects
addressed, and would feel right at home on any analyst's bookshelf.
Quantum Reality – Beyond the New
Physics – An Excursion Into Metaphysics and the Meaning of Reality.
Nick Herbert, 1985.
“The
search for a picture of 'the way the world really is' is an
enterprise that transcends the narrow interests of theoretical
physics. For better or for worse, humans have tended to pattern their
domestic, social, and political arrangements according to the
dominant vision of a physical reality. Inevitably the cosmic view
trickles down to the most mundane details of everyday life”.
Quantum Consciousness – The Guide
to Experiencing Quantum Psychology.
Stephen Wolinsky, 1993.
“Psychotherapy
is based on the principles of Newtonian physics … a reductionist
view of the world : everything reduced down to small units, acting
and reacting upon one another, in a cause-and-effect measurable,
predictable pattern. When these principles are translated into
psychotherapeutic assumptions, each person is viewed as a separate
entity, clearly disconnected from every other person, who goes
through the day experiencing a linear series of stimulus-response,
cause-and-effect relationships. By contrast, in the quantum approach
to consciousness, the facts of observer-created realities and the
inherent connectedness of all things are recognized and experienced …
While most forms of therapy focus on helping the client become a
'whole' person, Quantum Psychology expands this context of whole
personhood to include the rest of the universe”.
The Tao of Chaos – Quantum
Consciousness Volume II.
Stephen Wolinsky, 1994.
“In
the hard sciences, a Theory
of Everything would
be a monumental breakthrough. Unquestionably in the soft sciences of
psychology and human behavior what is needed is a unified theory that
can explain all the whys and wherefores of human behavior – why
changes occur or do not occur and a view of reality that offers a
scientific view of human interactions and behavior. This would
include what is the 'purpose,' if any, of the discomfort and pain we
all experience.”
God
is Not Dead – What Quantum Physics tells us about our origins and
how we should live.
Amit Goswami, 2008.
“The
Quantum Signature of God. We experience a quantum object, but only
when we choose a particular facet of its possibility wave; only then,
the quantum possibilities of an object transform into an actual event
of our experience. … Our exercise of choice, the event physicists
call the collapse of the possibility wave, is the power of God's
downward causation. And the way God's downward causation works is
this; for many objects and many events, the choice is made in such a
way that objective predictions of quantum probability hold; yet, in
individual events, the scope of creative subjectivity is retained.”
Entangled
Minds – Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality.
Dean Radin, 2006.
“One
of the most surprising discoveries of modern physics is that objects
aren't as separate as they may seem. When you drill down into the
core of even the most solid-looking material, separateness dissolves.
All that remains, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat in Alice
in Wonderland, are
the relationships extending curiously through time and space. These
connections were predicted by quantum theory and were called “spooky
action at a distance” by Albert Einstein. One of the founders of
quantum theory, Edwin Schrodinger, dubbed this peculiarity
entanglement,
and said 'I would not call that one
but
rather the
characteristic
trait of quantum mechanics.”
Quantum
Psychology – How Brain Software Programs You and Your World.
Robert Anton Wilson, 1990.
“Transactional
psychology … [states] that we cannot know any abstract 'Truth' but
only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles
as
our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals that it receives
every second. Transactionalism also holds that we do not passively
receive data from the universe but actively 'create' the form in
which we interpret the data as fast as we receive it.”
Quantum
Enigma – Physics Encounters Consciousness.
Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, 2011.
“Quantum
theory tells that the observation of an object can instantaneously
influence the behavior of another greatly distant object – even
if no physical force connects the two. Quantum
theory also tells us that an object can be in two places at the same
time. Its existence at the particular place where it happens to be
found becomes an actuality only
upon its observation. Quantum
theory thus denies the existence of a physically real world
independent of its observation. Classical physics explains the world
quite well; it's just the 'details' it can't handle. Quantum physics
handles the details perfectly; it's just the world it can't explain.”
Synchronicity
– An Acausal Connecting Principle.
C. G. Jung, 1960
“Natural
laws are statistical
truths,
which means that they are completely valid only when we are dealing
with macrophysical quantities. In the realm of very small quantities
prediction becomes uncertain, if not impossible, because very small
quantities no longer behave in accordance with the known natural law.
The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural
law is causality.
But
if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only
statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal
principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes
and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors
which would be necessary for an explanation.”
Synchronicity
– Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe.
Joseph Cambray, 2009
“Synchronicity
as 'a meaningful coincidence' and 'an acausal connecting principle'
was a provocative hypothesis when it first was published and has
remained so up to the present. In it C. G. Jung aimed at expanding
the Western world's core conceptions of nature and the psyche. By
requiring that we include and make room for unique individual
experiences of life in our most fundamental philosophical and
scientific views of the world, Jung challenged the status quo, urging
us to go beyond the readily explainable, beyond the restrictions of a
cause-effect reductive description of the world, to seeing the
psyche as embedded into the substance of the world.”
Wholeness
and the Implicate Order.
David Bohm, 1980
“Fragmentation
and Wholeness. … society as a whole has developed in such a way
that it is broken up into separate nations and different religious,
political, economic, racial groups, etc. Man's natural environment
has correspondingly been seen as an aggregate of separately existent
parts, to be exploited by different groups of people. Similarly, each
individual human being has been fragmented into a large number of
separate and conflicting compartments, according to his different
desires, aims, ambitions, loyalties, psychological characteristics,
etc., to such an extent that it is generally accepted that some
degree of neurosis is inevitable, while many individuals going beyond
the 'normal' limits of fragmentation are classified as paranoid,
schizoid, psychotic, etc.”
Taking
the Quantum Leap.
Fred Allen Wolf, 1989
“Perfect
determinism, from heartbreak to an empire's rise and fall, was no
more than the inevitable workings of the Great Machine. The laws of
physics are to be obeyed, because it is impossible to disobey them.
The dream of an ultimate understanding of nature was the discovery of
the hidden force that was the cause of the yet-to-be. Once this force
was found, there would be no room for free will, salvation, and
damnation, or for love and hate. … Ethics, morality, pride and
prejudice were jokes. You may imagine that you are a free-thinking
person, but even that imagination is nothing but the universal
clockwork turning in some yet-to-be-discovered way.”
Dark
Pool of Light, Volume One, The Neuroscience , Evolution, and Ontology
of Consciousness.
Richard Grossinger, 2012.
“Behaviorism
is fundamentally 'a refusal to talk about consciousness' or, more
diplomatically, to do away with it by dismissing its primacy or by
feigning to account for it otherwise. Behaviorists 'believe', at
least as a working hypothesis, that whatever might go on 'inside' an
organism was irrelevant to a scientific explanation of that
organism's behavior. They proposed to treat all organisms, including
humans, as black boxes, hoping to discover objective laws relating
the box's inputs (stimuli) to the box's behavior (response) without
ever having to include the box's 'experiences' as a factor in their
calculations, ignoring what seems to be the most important feature of
human life – what it feels like from the inside. They prefer
behavior dry – hold the mayo!”
Physics
in Mind. A Quantum View of the Brain.
Werner Lowenstein. 2013.
“It
takes a while to warm to the notions of a quantum-computing brain –
it's never easy to break the ice in matters concerning the
bewildering quantum world. But in this case it is perhaps even less
so, because the macroscopic electrical signals are so glaringly
conspicuous in peripheral nerves, spinal cord, and brain that one is
wont to shrug off the thought of something as esoteric as quantum
waves. However, when those waves are harnessed for operations of
logic, they will do wonders.”
How
the Hippies Saved Physics. Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum
Revival.
David Kaiser, 2012.
“Before
the war, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger had held one
model in mind for the aspiring physicist. A physicist should aim,
above all, to be a Kulturtrager
– a
bearer of culture – as comfortable reciting passages of Goethe's
Faust from
memory or admiring a Mozart sonata as jousting over the strange world
of the quantum. The physicists who came of age during and after World
War II crafted a rather different identity for themselves. Watching
their mentors stride through the corridors of power, advising
generals, lecturing politicians, and consulting for major industries,
few sought to mimic the other-worldly, detached demeanor of the
prewar days. Philosophical engagement with quantum theory, which had
once seemed inseparable from working on quantum theory itself,
rapidly fell out of fashion, Those few physicists who continued to
wrestle with the seemingly outlandish features of quantum mechanics
found their activity shoved ever more sharply into the margins.”
Brainwashed,
The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.
Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld. 2013.
“Neuroimaging
is a young science, barely out of its infancy, really. In such a
fledgling enterprise, the half-life of facts can be especially brief.
To regard research findings as settled wisdom is folly, especially
when they emanate from a technology whose implications are still so
poorly understood. As any good scientist knows, there will always be
questions to hone, theories to refine, and techniques to perfect.
Nonetheless, scientific humility can readily give rise to exuberance.
When it does, the media often seem to have a ringside seat at the
spectacle.”
The
God Factory (The God Series).
Mike Hockney. Hyperreality Books. 2011.
“Carl
Jung wrote: "[There are] sufficient reasons [for believing that]
the psychic lies embedded in something that appears to be of a
non-psychic nature." He spoke of "a cosmic order
independent of our choice and distinct from the world of
phenomena." He said, "The background of microphysics
and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore
neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most
be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental.
The
neutral tertium
quid
(third thing) that Jung was desperately seeking to identify is of
course mathematics. It is neither pure mind nor pure matter but gives
rise to both and explains everything about how they interact. All
interaction between minds and bodies is mediated mathematically and
minds and bodies are, at root, mathematical entities. Mathematics is
EVERYTHING. There is absolutely nothing else. The only reason why the
universe is ordered and intelligible is that it is mathematical. A
non-mathematical universe is an impossibility. Without mathematics,
without the dimensionless points that constitute the building blocks
of all mathematics, nothing could exist.”
Star
Wave, Mind, Consciousness and Quantum Physics.
Fred Allen Wolf. Macmillan Publishing Company. 1984.
“Today
I believe that mathematics and its application to the physical world
govern the operations of our psyches. My faith in this belief has led
me to write this book. I believe that the laws of modern physics, the
laws of quantum mechanics, apply to our psyches as profoundly as they
do to the physical world we all inhabit. I believe this more than I
believe in any religious or spiritual leader's dream. Science is the
answer, provided we learn how to deal with our fear of the seemingly
inaccessible world of abstraction, the world of mathematics and
quantum physics.”
Elemental
Mind. Nick
Herbert. Plume/Penguin. 1984
“The
Copenhagen picture holds that the unobserved world that sustains this
one is not ordinary, and that the act of observation drastically
modifies this strange substratum, changing it at every moment into
the world of the everyday. Heisenberg's picture attempts to say more
about the deep substratum: it is made of tendencies, of
possibilities, not actualities. The quantum wholeness picture adds to
Heisenberg's specifications the notion that the substratum's "parts"
are intimately linked together in a particularly quantum way. Von
Neumann extends the Copenhagen picture by revealing more about the
mysterious measurement process: a measurement only happens in some
mind, he says. Von Neumann's hypothesis not only makes room for mind
but gives it an independent role to play in constructing the
phenomenal world. Von Neumann's model of reality treats mind as
"e1emental," as fundamental as quarks and gluons for the
proper functioning of the universe.”
