Course Reference Materials

 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.”