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Water, New Alchemy
& You
An interview with Captain Quantum: Fred Alan Wolf
by Tim Miejan
Perhaps one of the most influential public lecturers on quantum physics, Fred Alan
Wolf, Ph.D., a.k.a. Captain Quantum, is one of the keynote speakers in April at Bridging
the Water Gap: An International Water Conference. Dr. Wolf will present "From
Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to a New Vision of Mind and Time" from 7-9 p.m.
Saturday, April 16, at the Eisenhower Center, 1001 Highway 7, in Hopkins, Minn.
Daily admission to the conference is $16 in advance, $22 at the door, and featured
speaker tickets are an additional $25 in advance and $35 at the door. Ticket information
is at ticketweb.com or toll-free 1 (866) 468-3401, or at
www.aquaessenceresource.org/currents
Dr. Wolf is a physicist, writer and lecturer who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical
physics at UCLA in 1963. A professor of physics for many years, he is the author
of many books including Taking the Quantum Leap, Parallel Universes, The Dreaming
Universe, The Eagle's Quest, The Spiritual Universe, Mind into Matter and Matter
into Feeling. He appeared in the new movie phenomenon, What The Bleep Do We Know!?
He continues to write, lecture throughout the world and conduct research on the relationship
of quantum physics to consciousness.
He spoke with Edge Life
by phone from his office in San Francisco about his upcoming talk at Bridging the
Water Gap, his latest book The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time,
and much more.
You will speak on "From Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to a New Vision of Mind
and Time" at Bridging the Water Gap. What will you share with participants in
that talk?
Fred AlanWolf: I want to explain the new alchemy, which has to do with understanding
what I call the subjective and objective qualities of existence.
In the Greek way of dealing with alchemy, which was earth, air, fire and water, these
were the objective qualities. But, in order to understand earth, air, fire and water,
the subjective or mindset had to enter. When air and fire are experienced, we have
the sensation of heat or hotness. With earth and fire, we would experience that as
dry or dryness. If we're experiencing earth and water, we would experience that as
cold, and if it was air and water, we would experience that as moist, like rain.
So within the objective qualities -- things of earth, air, fire and water -- are
our subjective experiences of hot, cold, dry, and moist.
In the new alchemy, we have a similar kind of way of thinking. Our internal space
includes our intuitions, our thoughts, our senses and our feelings, and from these
we construct or build a picture of the outside world. From intuition and thought,
we construct time. We also construct space from thought and our sensations. From
our senses and our feelings, we experience energy, and from our intuitions and our
feelings, we experience motion.
There's always an inner and an outer, whether it's old alchemy -- earth, air, fire
and water, and the primary qualities of hot and cold, wet and dry -- to the new alchemy
-- intuition, thinking, sensing and feeling, and the outer qualities are time and
energy, space and movement.
I believe there are transformative things contained within this. Chemistry comes
about through the transformation of earth, air, fire and water. All chemistry is
just movement within those things, and so we experience the joys and the sorrows
of hot and cold, and dry and moist, because of these chemical transformations. In
a similar way, we create and experience a world of time, space, motion and energy,
through our intuitions, our thoughts, our sensing and our feeling.
I will be talking about how that all relates together and discussing the idea of
the relationships between such things as feeling and water, intuition and air, thought
and earth, and senses and fire.
You use a term in connection with your new books: new alchemy. How would you define
that?
Wolf: The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people,
if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry.
Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people,
smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted
to be richer.
The core idea for that transformation and the desire to do so doesn't start there.
I think its early beginnings probably starts a couple thousand years earlier in Egypt.
We find that alchemy has to do with magicians or magic and may even have roots in
the Chaldean people who lived in the land that we now call Iraq.
Abraham emerged and took a flock of people with him into Egypt. They were later called
the Hebrews because of the valleys that they came out of. The alchemy that they saw
was a transformative power within the individuals to affect the "out there"
reality -- and that, of course, is the basis of shamanism and is the basis for most
magical and so-called Third World belief systems.
So what you're describing as new alchemy is actually a reference to ancient alchemy?
Wolf: Yes, it's really a reference back to the ancient way of seeing "as
above, so below, as within, so without," which became obliterated in the Middle
Ages to only refer to the transformation of base metals into gold.
The real alchemy is transforming the base self into gold or into spiritual awareness.
That's really what new alchemy's all about. The reason I call it "new"
alchemy is because I began to see a way to write about that transformation in terms
of modern science, particularly in terms of what we call quantum physics. It's that
relationship that I wrote about in my book, Mind into Matter and Matter into Feeling.
I brought the symbols for that back to the most ancient form that Western minds know:
the Hebrew letters. The Hebrew letters seem to be the language of the alchemists.
In fact, if you look through any of the alchemical literature of that time, particularly
in Germany, you find that Hebrew symbols are all over their writings. That's where
Kabbalah comes into the equation, because Kabbalah deals specifically with the meaning
of the Hebrew letters and how they, themselves, are agents of the transformation
from within to without.
You've said that alchemy and Kabbalah are the two fields of intellectual inquiry
that have most affected the work you are doing. How have they influenced your work?
Wolf: Alchemy and Kabbalah are later developments in my thinking. I think the
primary interest has been the relationship of magic and mystery to logic and understanding.
Those are the primary driving forces of my life. I have this ability, for some reason,
to be able to hold both the Magical MysteryTour we're on in conjunction with the
logical rigor of understanding theoretical physics, which makes me kind of a rare
bird, because usually you're one or the other.
That has led me into questions about the nature of what this is we're doing, this
thing we call life and consciousness, and whether or not there is a God. What is
spirituality? What is the relationship of the obvious things that we see around us
to the things that we believe we understand within ourselves? This is the ancient
alchemical formula: "as above, so below, as within, so without." It's also
the basic truth to all shamanic healing and all shamanic ritual -- and if you go
back deep enough, it's the basis for all magic, that somehow we can influence the
"out there" by things we do "in here." By "in here"
I mean within the realm of the mind and spirit.
These are the things that interest me. I believe, or sense, that the universe has
not been constructed from a purely mechanical, logical, rational point of view, but
there is a magic afoot in the universe, that God can be looked at as a kind of a
magician in which we get to perform tricks ourselves, without knowing that we're
doing so.
I've always believed that as human beings we have much more power than we really
know we do, in terms of influencing things around us and things to come to us.
Wolf: I think that is basically a true statement, that there is a lot of power
-- meaning there is an ability to move and transform things. I think each human being
has that power, and it's often one that we are willing to relinquish to others. That
makes it possible for people to entice others through their speech or mannerisms,
or we see people on a movie screen who turn into God-like images, and actually they're
not. They're just ordinary folks who have believed in themselves enough to put out
that power. I think that that helps to awaken that power in others, particularly
in young people who then begin to either emulate or want to go off in their own direction.
So, I think that's part of what we're all here to do for each other.
What has been your life mission or the thread of inquiry that you have been pursuing
in your life?
Wolf: I look at my job today and, in fact, probably since the early beginning,
as a magician who has come to, let's say, unshackle people from thoughts that tend
to bind them and keep them from realizing potentials that they all have. I don't
see myself more than that. When I speak or when I offer ideas and explain how the
universe seems to work from the point of view that I've understood, it seems to give
people a lift -- an unshackling or freeing.
Opening them to possibility?
Wolf: Yes, opening to possibilities, and that seems to be what happens.
Your newest book is The Yoga of Time Travel, and in it you indicate that you are
a time traveler. How do you travel in time? Is this something we all do, but we don't
realize it?
Wolf: Well, we can all do it, and some of us do without realizing it. It really
has to do with a rather delicate relationship that exists between mind and matter.
To understand that, we have to begin to imagine what a universe would be like if
there wasn't anything in it called Mind. If that was the case, according to quantum
physics now, then every possibility would also come into existence as every other
possibility. Coins would land heads and tails at the same time. Colors would never
emerge because reds and blues and greens would all meld into white continuously.
There would be no such thing as color. All there would be are overlaps of possibilities
and that's all that could ever be seen. Electrons would never be confined within
atoms. Atoms would not be confined within molecules. Molecules would not be confined
within cellular tissue. Nothing would be in its place, so to speak. Everything would
just be constantly multiplying into what we might call a chaos of possibilities.
Then quantum mechanics comes in and notices that there is a thing that happens. The
chaos, which quantum mechanics predicts will occur, suddenly gets whittled down to
actualities, and these actualities are objectified. Electrons are no longer are all
over the universe. They're now confined within atoms, and the atoms are confined
within molecules. Things form and fit into logical, rational relationship to each
other as material objects.
They also form and fit into logical, rational relationship to each other in terms
of before and after, and where, and how far. Space and time, and matter and energy,
emerge from this thing, whatever this thing is, that changes everything from this
realm of infinite possibility into actual things with very limited possibilities.
Chairs no longer go flying off into space. Electrons don't just spontaneously bubble
out of atoms. Atoms stay together to form molecules, and human beings form and they
stay together more or less for 70-plus years.
The question is, what is it that changed from the quantum mechanical picture, which
we know adequately predicts the behavior of all stuff. The answer seems to be something
called consciousness, or mind.
There's no way to get out of having mind present in the universe, because of what
we understand from quantum physics. Now the question arises, "Well, what is
it doing?" What seems to be occurring is that it is limiting things. As it limits,
it puts everything in sequence -- and that sequence becomes what we call time. Things
are put into temporal sequence, and we call it time, one thing occurring after another.
The magic of it all is that we remember something that occurred in the past and begin
to see it in terms of the present, or vice versa, the present in terms of the past.
We even begin to see the future in terms of the present, and in terms of the past.
We have a sense of continuity, which gives us what we call a sense of time.
Then we begin to look at things that are out there that have been created in this
kind of "mind" way and begin to watch everything. Through our ability to
have remembrances of both what's coming and what's happening and what has happened,
we begin to piece together a logical picture of the world. We need all three senses
of time -- a sense of the future, a sense of the present, and a sense of the past
-- at all times to understand or experience what's happening right now. It's constantly
unfolding that way.
Otherwise it's chaotic.
Wolf: Otherwise it's very chaotic. We couldn't listen to music. We couldn't understand
each other. We couldn't even form sentences. We couldn't speak.
So it came to my mind then that what time travel is really all about is learning
how to move in and out of that realm where things get defined by the mind. I certainly
had it understood from the logics of quantum physics, but in order to understand
it in terms of experience, I had to see where anything like that had occurred in
the past. It came to my mind that in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in Indian spiritual
literature, and in the Bhagavad Gita, and when I started reading about outstanding
yogis and people of exceeding spiritual power such as Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda,
they all had the ability to do what we would call -- I don't know what you would
even call it -- psychic phenomenon, magic, transform objects, be able to perceive
the future, the past and the present simultaneously. Then I read that Buddha was
able to see all of his past lives, and I realized the only way any of these people
could do that is by being outside of time.
You couldn't be in time and do that. You had to be able to lift yourself outside
of the time stream -- and that essentially became what is called the yoga of time
travel.
The most common way people could do that would be a form of meditation in which you
don't get caught up in your thoughts and don't make patterns of logical consequences
follow as a result of your thinking process. It's very hard for most of us to do
that if we think about it. But if you start to watch the process by which things
come into being, and you begin to witness from the point of view of watching the
words form, then you're beginning to move into the non-temporal mindset, or that
which is free of time.
People who are creative often will spend hours doing something and come out of their
period of creation and not even notice that hours have passed. In that sense, they're
able to time travel. They don't really age in the same way they would have been if
they were just functioning in normal concern of survival.
Would that experience be similar to what the aborigines call the Dream Time?
Wolf: Dream Time is certainly an indication of it. I actually wrote about that
in a book called The Dreaming Universe. From what they told me, that is really part
of it. I'm not sure if it's all of it, or if it totally fits in with this idea.
I think you'd have to experience it to really know.
Wolf: Exactly. You'd have to experience it. The kinds of mystical experiences
that I have had definitely convinced me that I was able to get out of time. I have
had experiences, or brief glimpses, of being able to see the future and then come
back into time, and then go into extraordinary realms of the past. All this has been
something that I've been able to do, so for me it's not that much of a mystery. What's
amazing to me is I can't do it all the time. Maybe there's a good reason not to be
able to do it all the time, because we have a lot invested in just being here now.
We all get out, maybe for longer than we wish, because we all pass this mortal coil
more or less and so we certainly get a chance to experience it again, and we've experienced
it before we were born. So it's more or less our natural place of being, unless you
believe that the only time you're conscious is when you're alive.
You referred to some of your mystical experiences. Do they relate to the work
you did with the shamans in Peru?
Wolf: A lot of things occurred to me with shamans in Peru. I actually wrote a
whole book about it called The Eagle's Quest. There were a number of different kinds
of experiences that you learn from doing ritual and taking ayahuasca [a common tropical
forest hallucinogen used by remote tribal people who believe ayahuasca is the key
to understanding the native consciousness and perception of the world] with the Peruvian shamans that
you wouldn't get unless you had been with them, but every shamanic tradition, including
the Native American tradition of medicine and cleansing ritual, like the Sun Dance
or the sweat lodge.
They're all designed to free you from the mundane concerns of your temporal activity
and open you into the realm in which all this activity is seen as a subset rather
than being the only thing that is. They get you into what's called non-ordinary states
of consciousness. Most people who've never experienced them and only hear them described
tend to try to describe them in terms of the logical, rational way of looking at
things, the so-called scientific explanation, which often leaves a lot lacking and
doesn't really fulfill understanding the experience at all.
Science can't really explain it.
Wolf: I think it was Democritus (460-370 BC) who said about the mind: "Oh,
scientific mind. You get all your data from us, the senses, but without us you would
be nothing." That's sort of the idea that if we, in attempting to explain away
that which is experienced, the experience itself is diminished. Part of the problem
is that when you start to try to understand everything in terms of words, the understanding
of the words becomes the experience, and the experience gets lost.
The shamanic realm is to get you out of the word set. For skeptics, that's impossible,
and they just can't see that and it just makes no sense. They would see it as total
nonsense, and they're mystified, frankly, by people who are having these experiences.
It's very frustrating if you've never had an experience and somebody comes up to
you and says, "I've just been on a flying saucer." Your tendency is to
think, "Oh, this guy must be wacko, nuts, having an hallucination. None of that
can be true because none of that has ever happened to me."
It generally -- if I can use the word "generally" -- takes you into the
realm of your deepest fears and things that you're holding onto, things that usually
are encumbrances to your life process. Because it takes you there, it's sometimes
called a voyage into your own death. For most people, that's frightening enough,
so those who are brave enough to venture into it will come out with a new sense of
life, but they also know that they've been transformed and they can't go back to
the old ways anymore, and that's not always something that's comfortable for people.
And words really can't do justice to it.
Wolf: No, they really can't. In my book, I describe the variety of different
kinds of experiences I had, from seeing into the future to being inside the body
of a bird and feeling the bird consciousness, to being in a plane of existence with
beings that do not exist on this planet at all. And I described my experiences to
shamans who started to laugh, saying, "Oh, we know those guys."
And that struck me as being very funny. I took it as being, "Oh, wow, this is
fantastic!"
And they said, "Oh, yeah, we know those guys. We know who they are."
For them, these voyages into these plant spirits is nothing very special. They've
come to know them and trust them. They have conversations with ancestors who have
long since passed, hundreds of years ago. Several of them sit around a fireplace
after taking ayahuasca and begin having a conversation
with this being who has transcended from far back in time and now is talking to all
of them -- and they can all see him. A rational mind just can't deal with that.
From your perspective, how you describe healing? It seems to be quite an alchemical
process itself.
Wolf: Well, it is. There is a mystery to it. It doesn't always work according
to one's wishes. From that point of view, there's something magical afoot, and it's
something that is not always rational. And yet, we know that certain medicines we
take can induce one to get into the healing mode.
It seems to me that healing is the natural mode. It's what, if nothing else is taking
place, that will be taking place. Anything else, then, is something that has been
created. Therefore, illness is something out of balance, rather than something within
balance. It's been something that is created and it's been created for a purpose
and a reason, and that purpose or reason may not be obvious to the person that has
the disease. Nevertheless, there is something going on and it's not always easy to
find that out.
When I worked with various healers of one kind or another, very often what came up
was that there was an "inner" person who was controlling what was going
on in the life of the "outer" person, who thinks he's in control of his
life. That inner person has a vested interest in keeping the person from getting
well, so the healing doesn't take place. There's a real effort going on, too, because
there's a payoff that has been put into expectation, and so the healing doesn't work
as successfully in some people. It doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person because
you're not healing. It just means that there is something still to be worked on.
It's a question of what you can do to expose that dialogue between the inner and
the outer person
That's one way of looking at it. I'd have to think about that some more. It's still
a mystery to me.
Do you think quantum physics will change the way medical science looks at the human
body?
Wolf: I think it already has done so. Certainly in terms of technology, it's
made a tremendous impact, but medicine is still within the realm of what we might
call "objective" science. It's still part of the objective way of looking
at the world. But certainly, it could have pretty far-reaching effects once we begin
to look at the kinds of things that people can do to induce transformation in their
thinking, their sensing, their intuiting and their feelings -- and whether there's
some power there that can be unleashed that would cause blockages that were primarily
put in place through thought to be let go of.
I think a lot of psychological healing tends to work on that basis. We go into the
unconscious to find what's holding you back, so to speak, and I think there is an
unconscious body image that may be responsible for the unhealing that's taking place.
Again, you can't blame the person for creating that illness for themselves, because
it was a creation. If you could find out how you created it, you might be able to
find out a way to let go.
For more on Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D., visit www.fredalanwolf.com or e-mail questions@fredalanwolf.com
Tim Miejan is editor of Edge Life magazine. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free
1 (888) 776-5687 or e-mail editor@edgelife.net
Copyright © 2005 Tim Miejan, all rights reserved.
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