What is the true nature of reality?
What is the true nature of reality? Good question. Most people think it’s impossible to know, but they are mistaken. You will know the truth once you have read this article, and once you do, you will have the foundation you need to begin to take full charge of your life. Fear and doubt will diminish, and with effort and right action, your desires will manifest.
A physics experiment will begin to open the eyes of anyone willing to see the truth. It’s called the “Double Slit Experiment,” and the strange but revealing phenomenon associated with it, “The Participating Observer.” The findings of this experiment are straightforward, and grasping their implication of prime importance to understanding how to harness the creative force.
Scientists have known for more than a hundred years that light can behave both as waves and as particles (photons), but until 1905 they thought it was comprised only of waves. Thomas Young (1773-1829) demonstrated in 1803 that light is waves by placing a screen with two parallel slits between a source of light—sunlight coming through a hole in a screen—and a wall. Each slit could be covered with a piece of cloth. These slits were razor thin, not as wide as the wavelength of the light. When waves of any kind pass through an opening not as wide as they are, the waves diffract. This was the case with one slit open. A fuzzy circle of light appeared on the wall.
When both slits were uncovered, alternating bands of light and darkness appeared, the center band being the brightest. Scientists call this a zebra pattern. The areas of light and dark resulted from what is known in wave mechanics as interference. Waves overlap and reinforce each other in some places and in others they cancel each other out. The bands of light on the wall indicated where one wave crest overlapped another crest. The dark areas showed where a crest and a trough met and canceled each other out.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that revealed light also behaves as if it consists of particles. He did so by using the photoelectric effect. When light hits the surface of a metal, it jars electrons loose from the atoms in the metal and sends them flying off as though struck by tiny billiard balls. So, Thomas Young demonstrated light is waves, and Einstein demonstrated it is particles. This sort of paradox is what led scientists to develop quantum mechanics.
Now let’s consider a double slit experiment constructed to determine what happens when those conducting the experiment observe or do not observe which slits the photons of light pass through. This time a gun is used that fires one photon at a time. I first read about this experiment more than twenty years ago in an article entitled, “Faster Than What?” in the June 19, 1995 issue of Newsweek. It reported on a paper to be published by a well-known quantum physicist, Raymond Chiao, then teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.
Much later, in July 2008, I reviewed the facts of this experiment as they are presented here with a guest on a radio show I hosted at the time, the noted quantum physicist Henry P. Stapp, author of, MINDFUL UNIVERSE: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (Springer, 2007). He indicated I understood them correctly.
Both slits were open and a detector was used to determine which slit a photon passed through. A record was made of where each one hit. Only one photon at a time was shot, so one would suppose there could be no interference. This was the case. The photons did not make a zebra pattern. Rather, they made marks, tiny dots, on a screen.
When the detector was turned off, however, and it was not known which slit a photon passed through, the zebra pattern appeared. In other words, without the detector the particles behaved like waves even though they were fired one at a time. Imagine the stir this caused among those conducting the experiment. In the Newsweek article reporting on this, Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was quoted as saying this is the “central mystery” quantum mechanics, that something as intangible as knowledge—in this case, which slit a photon went through—changes something as concrete as a pattern on a screen.
But how could knowledge change the behavior of particles shot from a gun? Conventional science cannot produce an explanation because a tenet of conventional science is that the brain produces consciousness, awareness, and thought, and that means consciousness, awareness, and thought are confined within a person’s skull. Since it would be ludicrous to suggest that thought enclosed inside a person’s head could be capable of having an effect on photons shot from a gun, it ought to be clear to everyone the tenet must be false. Consciousness is not confined inside the skull. Yet many scientists tenaciously cling to the tenet, saying there must be two different sets of laws of physics: a small (subatomic world) set, and a macro world (the one we live in) set. Somewhere between these two worlds, the laws of physics must change.
This does not hold water. First, it doesn’t explain why thought contained in someone’s head should change things at the subatomic level, or anywhere else. Second, other experiments refute the contention two different laws of physics exist. One such experiment involves large (carbon 60) molecules called “buckyballs,” so big they can be seen and therefore are part of the macro world. Research shows they exhibit the same quantum properties as infinitely small particles. Another is an experiment conducted in 2002 that involved crystals. It produced quantum ridges half an inch high—large enough to be measured with a conventional macro world ruler.
What makes more sense is what William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) is thought to have been the first to say: “The simplest explanation is the best.” The researcher’s ability to know—his or her consciousness—causes the waves to collapse into particles that form a pattern. In other words, when the researcher can access the knowledge, the zebra pattern does not occur. If he cannot access it, the zebra pattern appears. This was verified by setting up the experiment several ways. In the first, the detectors were in front of the two slits. In the second, researchers placed detectors between the screen and the two slits, i.e., after the photons had passed through the slits. As in the original experiment, knowing about a photon’s behavior at the two slits made the zebra pattern vanish. When the detectors were switched off, the zebra stripes returned.
In a third variation, a detector was placed before the slits and a mechanism erased the knowledge after the photon had passed through. The same thing happened. The zebra pattern returned. The result was the same no matter which way the experiment was set up—before the slits, after the slits, or before the slits and then erased. Whether or not the researcher was able to know where each photon hit determined the presence of the zebra pattern, or the lack of it. Versions of the experiment were carried out at the University of Munich and at the University of Maryland. The behavior of the photons, the researchers report, “is changed by how we are going to look at them.”
The question is, how? As mentioned above, the answer escapes scientists who refuse to think outside the materialist box, but as soon as one is willing to step outside those four walls, the answer is obvious. Consciousness—mind and thought—creates reality. Before it is observed, reality—in this case a multitude of photons fired through slits—exists as non-material potential in the form of waves. Observed, the waves collapse into something more solid—photons that form a pattern. What the researcher conducting the experiment believes ought to be the result, is the result—marks on a screen where the photons hit he or she fired from the photon gun. That fact, dear reader, is the essential truth you need to know: mind creates reality. This book will explain and expand upon this, but that is the crux of the matter when it comes to creating the reality and life you want.
I am not the only person alive today who knows mind does this. A small number of people smarter than I am do so as well, perhaps most famously, Robert Lanza, M.D., author of Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, and Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death.
No matter what—whether it’s where photons hit a screen or a beautiful sunset—until observed, whatever comes into being exists first as pure potential in the form of waves—a field of them with unlimited potential. As was written by Gary Zukav in his book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (HarperOne, 2001):
. . . the philosophical implication of quantum mechanics is that all of the things in our universe (including us) that appear to exist independently are actually parts of one all-encompassing organic pattern, and that no parts of that pattern are ever really separate from it or from each other.
To this I will add that underlying this seamless organic pattern—everywhere and in all directions—is mind. The entire field of waves is mind until it manifests, and then the only place we know for certain it exists is in a mind that observes it.
Consider this. You are looking at a computer, or perhaps a device or smart phone, reading these words. How do you know the device is real? You can feel it, right? You can see it. But what you see and what you feel is created in your head by impulses picked up by your sense of touch and the retinas of your eyes, and then transmitted along nerve pathways to your brain, which unscrambles the signals in order to create a three-dimensional image. The only place you can be sure the book actually exists is in your mind. One scientist, astrophysicist Thomas Campbell, has advanced a theory that in this reality, you, me, and everyone else exists in what might be compared to a computer simulation game in a Play Station or Xbox, and our bodies are like avatars in the game. Our consciousness, which is not actually located in our brain but somewhere else, makes decisions and manipulates our bodies accordingly. This may seem absurd the first time you hear it, but Campbell may be as close as anyone has come to the truth—at least until now. Keep reading and decide for yourself.
Speaking of absurd, how does twenty-first century science explain physical reality? Quantum physicists have developed what they call “String Theory” in an attempt to explain how subatomic particles form out of vibrations, but they don’t say what is vibrating or where the vibrations come from, according to what I have read, including The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (Alfred A. Knoph, 2004) by Rhodes Scholar and physicist, Brian Greene. I say it is mind, and that mind, which is also energy, creates matter, as in E=MC2. I am about to provide evidence to support this contention, evidence that was collected by a college professor I spoke with named Stephen Braude. At the time, Dr. Braude was a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and I had just read his book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (The University of Chicago Press, 2007). I interviewed him on the radio show I hosted at the time called, The Truth about Life.
The interview did not disappoint. Dr. Braude related several well documented and amazing stories of mind over matter, but perhaps the most fantastic, as well as the one that supports the contention that mind creates matter, had to do with Katie, a woman born in Tennessee, the tenth of twelve children.
Katie is apparently a simple woman. Illiterate, at the time Dr. Braude wrote the book about her, she lived in Florida with her husband and worked as a domestic. She was also a psychic who’d had documented successes helping the police solve crimes. In one instance she was able to describe the details of the case so thoroughly and accurately, the police regarded her as a suspect until those actually responsible were apprehended. She apparently also was able to apport objects—in other words, she somehow caused them to disappear in one place and reappear in another. And that’s not all. Seeds reportedly germinated rapidly in her cupped hands. Observers claim to have seen her bend metal, and she was both a healer and a medium or channel.
Being illiterate, she could not read or write in her native English, but she had been video taped writing quatrains in medieval French similar both in style and content to the quatrains of Nostradamus. Most amazing, perhaps, is what appeared spontaneously on her skin—on her hands, face, arms, legs, and back—apparently out of thin air. It looks like gold leaf, a thin version of the wrapping on a Hersey’s Kiss. Katie could not control when this happened, but Dr. Braude and other witnesses saw the foil materialize firsthand. He even videotaped it appearing on her skin.
I just stopped typing and checked. As of this writing, footage from this video can be seen on YouTube. I suggest you have a look. To go to it, CLICK HERE.
Dr. Braude has taken the foil to be analyzed. It turns out not to be gold at all, but brass—approximately 80 percent copper and 20 percent zinc.
Dr. Braude thinks there’s a reason she produces brass and not gold. I’ll explain shortly, but first let me say that eyewitness reports even by credible witnesses such as Dr. Braude and other researchers who have studied Katie are not going to convince ardent skeptics who cling to materialism. They cannot let go of the materialist tenet that brains create consciousness when in fact brains are simply a way to connect and integrate our consciousness and our bodies so that we can operate in this dimension. This will be discussed further in an upcoming chapter, including the obvious implication that this reality is not your home.
So, where does the brass foil that appears on Katie’s skin come from? There is no other plausible explanation: Her mind creates it. In fact Dr. Braude believes she produces brass rather than gold for a reason. You see, Katie has a difficult and tense relationship with her husband. Once she apported a carving set. It just appeared. And her husband—apparently nonplussed—said, “So what? It’s not worth anything.” Soon afterward, gold colored foil began appearing on Katie’s skin. But it wasn’t real gold, it was fool’s gold—brass. Dr. Braude thinks this is how she gets back at her husband. Katie’s mind—albeit the unconscious part—creates matter in the form of brass foil.
This being the case, why should it be difficult to believe the Infinite Mind underlying everything created us, and the dimension we inhabit? The physical universe had to come from something. One thing quantum physicists agree on is that the physical universe isn’t really physical. It is vibrations, and subatomic particles are not particles. As we already know, they are vibrations—waves. Observation turns waves into things, as in the double slit experiment. Mind—combined with belief—creates reality. It follows that if what I will call Infinite Mind creates us, we in turn create our personal reality with our beliefs. If our current reality isn’t one we like, we need to change our beliefs. Much is said about this in my book, Amazing Truth and How to Profit from it.
