My work of late, and wherefore I know not, has suffered the slings and arrows of being summarily flattened by the academy. This is the primary signal I needed to understand the work does have the gravitas and gravitational attraction which I have personally experienced.
Thus this book has been entitled Gravity’s Compassionate Quantum Angels, which expresses, in one awkward phrase perhaps, the failure of the academy to flatten and deaden and destroy these luminous ideas.
We have become light bearers, beings of luminous grace, receivers and transmitters — emergent intelligence that receives information, transforms information as energy, into luminous new forms which have never before existed. We, the universe, and every thing we can imagine, are transformative, ever changing, and ever coming into beingness.
Sometimes — rarely, almost never — we human beings stumble upon ideas so radically novel they cannot possibly be true, and if true may never be understood. The encountering of such “struck by lightning” ideas marks the moment a new scientific paradigm can begin to take shape and which, over time, may become inevitable.
For this to happen the idea must be subjected to scientific and philosophical rigor, over time, and must gradually reshape the thinking of each human who seriously encounters it. Over time, recycling through the educated consciousness of successive humans, the idea is either summarily rejected, or its truth becomes clearer and is finally accepted.
Such an idea is the one we call quantum — from quanta, tiny packets of energy. The word is inadequate, as words alone are, to describe this most transformative idea ever to arise to change human thought, philosophy, science, religion, and the whole of human civilization.
In my work I have observed that the idea of quantum was expressed in thought long before any word for it existed — long before such highly evolved processes as science and philosophy could come to be. The concept most likely first arose among shamans, brightening or frightening the minds of earlier humans who did not possess a way to articulate or adequately explain such a blindingly complex recognition. It is also possible that those of us who have studied the petroglyphs and cave paintings and archaeological evidence have misinterpreted them, and missed the inherent meaning entirely.
In the broad pantheon of Western history, it was philosophers like Heraclitus, spiritual and philosophical masters like Jesus, philosopher-poets like Dante and Shakespeare, artists like Botticelli and Leonardo, who first described quantum.
The concept that we cannot step in the same river twice; the concept that we are one with God; the recognition that we and the universe are connected by compassionate grace — three different ways of expressing quantum.
Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli painted quantum mathematics and philosophy into being. Shakespeare reminded us that there is far more to heaven and earth than exists in our philosophy. The American founders expressed the profound understanding that we could engineer a government system based upon unalienable rights — rights granted by God at conception, sovereign rights that no earthly force, no fellow human, no institution or set of laws could take away. The full scientific glory of the moment of conception is sealed by science — in recent years, photographic evidence of the zinc flash which occurs at that moment.
Profound as these insights are, of such monumental significance and import to all human endeavour, the tendency of our civilization is to minimize them — to flatten them into more easily accessible ideas which strip them of all their meaning.
Every human who ever dared to illustrate and describe quantum has been dismissed by having the work flattened into meaningless words. Even those who attempted to bring mathematical and scientific rigor to quantum have seen their ideas reduced to fragments. Einstein, who expressed dismay at the idea that God could play dice with the universe, and who described spooky action at a distance (Einstein, Podolsky & Rosen 1935), saw his thinking flattened into platitudes. Other early 20th-century scientific pioneers watched the uncertainty principle, the collapse of wave functions, and cats both alive and dead become demoted to absurdity.
Genuinely powerful ideas are flattened at a very high price. The very suppression of the idea exacts an enormous personal and civilization-wide cost. Suppressing such a monumental recognition unleashes dark, devious, and highly destructive psychosocial tendencies in the individual and in society as a whole (Festinger 1957; Jung 1959). In point of fact, the cost of suppression is far greater than any imagined calculation of the price of allowing the idea to percolate into existence.
The cost of having flattened such a brilliant concept into meaninglessness has cost our civilizations a degree of socioeconomic destruction, brutally paid out in diverting economic and resource wealth to the work of suppression itself.
If we look deeply enough, we can see that the civilizations which formed in the past 12,000 years have, in many respects, evolved to brutally suppress information which did not support the civilizational hierarchy. These civilizations were built on concepts which required enormous energy and resources to manipulate the population into believing — so irrational and illogical were they:
• Man is the center of the universe.
• Earth is the center of the galaxy.
• God controls all human life and created the universe in one day.
• The universe is a clockwork orange — a mechanical Newtonian machine.
This clockwork-orange belief system has created a civilization which more resembles an unstable recursive loop destined to fail — a vortex circling the bathtub drain — than a verifiable, defensible, stable system. Maintaining such a system, based upon the negative feedback of a recursive loop, is vastly expensive in resources, energy, and dollars, and destroys human well-being, human pursuit of happiness, and human health.
The whole explosion of violence which has been the 20th century, and which now explodes into the 21st, is testament to the wages of suppression — evidence of the actual cost in lives, in economic and ecological destruction, and in dollars, resources, and energy.
But as Sherlock Holmes and Jesus both understood, truth will out. Coming out now, defying the cost of suppression, and emerging steadily into the light of day is the brilliant idea of quantum: quantum philosophy, quantum physics, quantum mathematics, quantum science.
To understand quantum requires the embracing of all possible paradoxes, and requires throwing the idea of a clockwork-orange universe to the dumpster. Anyone wishing to see the cost in violence should watch Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; those wishing to see the cost to technological innovation should watch 2001: A Space Odyssey; those wishing to see the psychological cost should watch Eyes Wide Shut.
To this long violent history one might also trace the history of music — from the first sounds made by humans, transmitted emotional resonance into the resonance and vibration of percussion and singing. In the beginning was the word — or music, or sound, or, as Nikola Tesla had it, resonance and vibration. Folk songs of every civilization carried this forward, until in the Florentine Renaissance they crystallized into structured harmonics and mathematically constructed forms, transferable via a complex language of notation. From the Renaissance forward into the sacred polyphony of the early masters; into the Baroque of Vivaldi and the constellation of composers around him; into Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.
As we have described at length, both church and state appropriated these forms to attract people into accepting whatever ideas were deemed acceptable. Certain harmonious, deliberate compositions were endorsed; certain more free-flowing and at times disharmonious music — especially that of one Paganini — was summarily rejected, leading to Paganini being dubbed the Devil’s Violinist. Whole genres were dismissed to the far periphery, relegated to outlier status, not of serious interest, never submitted to the consideration of the academy.
In the 20th century this outlier status became the crucible of musical innovation — taking the form of one Jerry Lee Lewis, one Elvis Presley, one John Coltrane. Once again the music of the people became appropriated by corporation, state, and church, carefully promoted with the stamp of societal approval. Here we must recognize that the beautiful golden architectural majesty of the music itself was never appropriated — the infinite golden thread of the topological architecture never flattened, never corruptible. All the musicians recognize this at some level, even as their careers are managed by corporate, church, and state profit centers.
The truth will out, and out it now comes. The Quantum Renaissance, the American Renaissance, is already underway and explodes into being with the force with which it was once suppressed — energy, subjected to suppression, bursting forth with the equivalent energy with which it was suppressed.
│ E~release~ = E~suppressed~ │ (1)
d ⁄ dt (E~idea~ + E~suppression~) = 0 (2)
Technologically we have reached the point where no degree of suppression will serve to keep the truth from outing. Our technology, having sprung forth as a jaguar from Jobs’s and Wozniak’s garage, will not be suppressed. And although appropriated by the military, the government, the church, and the institutions of academia, the fact of the truth the technology represents will not allow further suppression.
Our music and art support this, as if the luminous creativity of all human beings throughout all evolutionary time now rises to be what it was always meant to be. In the beginning was the word, the sound, the resonant frequencies — and in the end now find the beginning.
Breaking free from the subsidized constraints of the negative recursive loop, into the freedom of the quantum universe, where the only sin is failing to comprehend that everything we are, and will ever know, is the constantly unfolding into being of perpetual emergence.
From this moment forward, attempts to flatten the mathematically beautiful topological architecture of ourselves and the universe will be summarily rejected. In my writing you will find many instances where the academy attempts to rewrite these ideas — to flatten them into meaningless, insignificant, inarticulate insignificance. But the day is fast approaching when the attempt to flatten the ideas, the music, the art which communicates Quantum Comprehension, will no longer serve — and will implode into non-being with the same equal force with which it once attempted to suppress.
Some might call this Karma, and perhaps that is the best term. But to avoid any contamination by new-age sycophantic flattening, we will stay with the beautiful mathematical architecture of the topological geometry.
It was the least I could do. From my position as Seamstress for the Band, I have taken the trouble to rewrite the First Law of Thermodynamics for y’all:
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transmitted.
This is the First Law (Clausius 1865; Atkins 2010) re-stitched for the work at hand: the accent moved from conservation to transmission, because transmission is what the seamstress actually does.
Such a really tough job, to be the seamstress for the band — but someone has got to do it. There is holy work to be done in patching up the quantum jeans for the kids in the band. All to be found in the quality of the stitches, and in the braided integrity of the luminous unspooled, unspooling thread.
Stabbing it with their steely knives never meant a thing. Unknown to them was the bottom line of quantum science: that you can check out anytime you please, but y’all can never leave.
This essay is an excerpt from one of my earliest books: Gravity’s Compassionate Quantum Angels.
