Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Menas Kafatos. I’ll read a brief bio here. Dr. Menas Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics and Director of Excellence at Chapman University. He received his BA in Physics from Cornell in 1967, PhD from MIT in ’72, and after post-doctoral work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, he joined George Mason University and was University Professor of Interdisciplinary Sciences there from ’84 through 2008. He has authored and co-authored numerous books, including The Conscious Universe, The Non-Local Universe, and Principles of Integrative Science. I’ll link to a more detailed biography of Menas for those who would like to read it. Is there anything else you’d like to add to that, Menas, before we plunge in?
Menas: No, my research interests are consciousness and quantum physics, and also on climate change and natural hazards.
Rick: Good. We’ll talk about both of those today.
Menas: OK.
Rick: And you were also a student or disciple of Swami Muktananda back in the ’70s, right?
Menas: Yeah, back in the early. No, not the ’70s, back in the ’80s.
Rick: And have you maintained some sort of spiritual practice ever since then?
Menas: I carry out meditation, yeah, I do meditation.
Rick: Okay, good.
Menas: Yeah.
Rick: I should say that Menas and I know each other a little bit from the Science and Nonduality Conferences, which I’ve attended for the past three years. I’ve always enjoyed his presentations. We had breakfast together this last time. So I’ve been wanting to interview Menas for a while now.
Menas: Thank you, Rick.
Rick: Oh, you’re welcome. So it’s funny, I was… Well, let me start with the point here. There are critics who say that the physics and consciousness parallels are metaphorical and not actual. But since that guy who wrote the Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra, there have been physicists who have been drawing parallels between spirituality and physics. And conferences like the Science and Nonduality Conference always have guys like you and John Hagelin and so on, drawing such parallels. Yet even in your book at one point you say, “It’s impossible to conclude that Eastern metaphysics legitimates modern physics or that modern physics legitimates Eastern metaphysics.” Go ahead and respond to that and then I’m going to ask you a question that a friend of mine sent in that relates to this.
Menas: Sure. They don’t correspond one to one because consciousness – okay, let’s leave metaphysics out – consciousness, if it is the underlying reality, if it is the stuff, so to speak, that the universe is made of, then it’s not physical. And therefore if you are developing physical theories, you can only reach up to a certain point. And what we’re hinting at in The Conscious Universe with Bob Nadeau and some of my other writings is that there is this complementarity, what I now call generalized complementarity, between the physical, if you like, and the mental, or let’s say the physical and the consciousness level. And if consciousness is primary, then you can’t expect that the physical will be identical to it. So I don’t think we can come up with physics theories that will prove consciousness.
Rick: But then physics deals with a lot of stuff these days that’s not physical.
Menas: Correct.
Rick: I mean, so much of the cutting edge of physics is dealing with a realm that is beyond the physical.
Menas: Correct. Well, let’s talk a little bit about what I mean by physical here. When I say physical, I mean anything that is within space and time, space-time. Okay? And if it’s outside space-time, then it’s non-physical.
Rick: OK.
Menas: So certainly consciousness can be outside of space and time. So it’s more primary, okay? In fact, in my view, and I think a number of other physicists, space-time itself is not primary, but emerges, emerges from the deeper layers. So how can we get as close as possible to consciousness? Well, consciousness ultimately is the experience or the awareness of existence. It’s the existence itself and the experience or awareness of existence. And that cannot be put into physics. And the best way to get as close as possible to consciousness, and this is some recent work I’m doing, is to take the mathematics as far as possible. Mathematics, as you know, is the language of science, so it’s more primary than physics itself. In fact, abstract physics is really nothing more than mathematics. So that’s the approach. Take it as far as you can through the mathematics. Then somebody may say, “Well, okay, then the universe is made of mathematics.” And in fact, this is what Max Tegmark would hold. But then the question is, “Well, where is the math? Where is mathematics residing? Is it some sort of platonic realm, or where is it?” And of course, the answer to that is, well… again, it’s both. It’s both in the mind or in the consciousness, and beyond the consciousness. I’m talking about human consciousness. So the main point here is that the universe, or Reality, with a capital R, is made of complementary entities that seem to not be identical to each other. And if you try to make them identical, then you run into problems. And of course, the most classical one of those complementarities is wave-particle duality, or the wave-particle complementarity in quantum physics. So the universe is made of the appearance of opposites, which are, however, complementary. All springing out from consciousness, which itself is being an awareness of being. That’s the best I can do.
Rick: That’s pretty good. Here’s a question that a friend of mine asked. I was pondering this question the last couple of days. And then just out of the blue, this friend of mine in London sent in a question related to this – and he didn’t even know I was going to be interviewing a physicist in a couple of days – but he said, “A lot of teachers talk about quantum physics and the fact that essentially modern physics has told us that the ground of reality is emptiness, something which the mystics have said for thousands of years. They point to this as evidence that mysticism and modern physics agree with one another. Also, a lot of teachers say that spirituality is about experience – experiential realization – rather than belief or intellectual musings. Therefore I would like to know, how can we be sure that the ground of reality per modern physics is the same emptiness experienced in Samadhi, or is it emptiness related to the human nervous system rather than the same emptiness talked about in science? How can we be sure that just because a person experiences emptiness, that it is not just a coincidence, and this is also the nature of atoms on a fundamental level? It feels like the human nervous system is built on the macro level rather than the micro level. Much less the subatomic level. It may be that the emptiness a person experiences is just the result of complete balance in their nervous system rather than a direct mirror of the fundamental nature of the subatomic realm. So you kind of addressed that, but maybe give it another spin.
Menas: Well, this is actually a very good question. The quantum vacuum from which the virtual particles spring out and where, of course, you have ultimately the ground of quantum field theory – let’s say super strings – I believe it’s not the same as the emptiness of the conscious awareness, okay? So there are three principles, and I might as well talk about the three principles now. In my most recent development – and it’s not in the conscious universe – we’re hinting at it, but we didn’t have it developed as now. The three principles are universal complementarity, and I will leave out the universal. So we’ll say Complementarity, if you like, with a capital C. Recursion, which really means: As here, so elsewhere. As above, so below. What you see here also occurs somewhere else. And the third principle is sentience. You can call it creative interaction, but we like the term sentience because actually sentience is creative interaction, but also has a little bit more. You can sense your environment. You can build things out of the environment. And you can have new entities form. And basically, if you like, it’s a quote-unquote ‘primitive awareness’ that even, you know, cells can have. More primitive than human awareness or human consciousness. So the word consciousness is of course a very loaded term, and that’s where most of the problems arise. We have one word to explain or to refer to unconscious awareness, conscious awareness, human awareness, what I just call sentience, so-called primitive sensing. We have one word for all of these things. Subconscious. And for example, in India, in the old schools, philosophers’ schools, they have many different words for consciousness. And again, the analogy here is we only have – in the West – we only have one word for snow, but the Eskimos have like 30 words for snow. And for us, the snow is the snow, right? Something white that, you know, that’s made of water, and that falls from the sky. But they, of course, have different ways to talk about it. So consciousness, to make a long story short, operates universally through these principles. And those principles, if you think about them, you will see that they operate at all levels. So from that point of view, I would say there are parallels between metaphysics and physics, okay? Because of the operation of universal principles. And the universal principles are manifesting the existence of consciousness. But I would not derive physics from consciousness or consciousness from physics.
Rick: Would it be fair to say that both spiritually, spiritual aspirants, especially Eastern ones, and physicists, each seek to know or understand ultimate reality but they’ve taken very different methods to do that. And if they have been successful, and certainly in the East there are many, many people who are said to have attained enlightenment – which is supposed to be the sort of experiential grounding in the ultimate reality, the ground state of the universe – then physics might be poking around in that field with mathematics. But could it really be, and maybe they’re not capable, maybe the human nervous system is an instrument sophisticated enough to investigate that field, and no large hadron collider or anything comes close to that degree of sophistication. And therefore physicists can only hope to sort of reach it in a sort of distant, vicarious way. But still, wouldn’t it be fair to say that even if they don’t actually realize it, physicists are trying to arrive at an understanding of the ground of being that mystics have actually understood for a long time now?
Menas: Again, I would say keep in mind complementarity. The two are the opposite pair, or the opposite poles of a pair, which is complementary. One does not displace the other. You cannot –
Rick: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that.
Menas: – right. So now the parallels. The parallels are through these principles. And exactly right what you said. Physicists, we believe that there’s one reality. So the mystics also believe there’s only one reality. Physicists will say, “Well, we don’t have all the laws. We don’t understand everything, but we keep at it.” Well, the mystics will probably tell you pretty much the same thing. Keep at it. Of course, there is eventually, supposedly, a dichotomy when somebody reaches the highest level. But in terms of ordinary human experience, you try both ways, let’s say. And one gets you into the physical understanding, or the understanding of the physical universe. The other is perhaps getting you to understand even more your own experience, or to live your own experience. Ultimately, it cannot be a matter of understanding as an object, because consciousness is this subject itself. And that’s where it departs from science. That’s what we’re trying to say in The Conscious Universe. If you try to prove consciousness from the point of view of an external object, it’s like John Archibald Wheeler’s famous drawing where the eye turns around and tries to see the eye. Can’t do it. The eye cannot see the eye. Whenever you see your eye, it’s a reflection, something else, either in a camera or a mirror. You can’t have the eye look at the eye. You can’t have the ear hear the ear. You know what I’m saying? So, there’s something else that is manifesting, and I would say it’s the one behind the scene, behind the hearing, behind the taste, behind the five senses. The world of everyday experience, we experience it through the five senses, and we see objects. I see you now in the camera. You see me in the camera. But from your subjective experience, you’re the subject. And from my subjective experience, I am the subject. So, you can’t get the subject out of the way. And in fact, if you think about it… if you keep going the same way, there’s really only one subject, and both you and I are aspects of that subject. In the same way, when we study the universe we study aspects of the universe. We cannot study the entire enchilada, so to speak. We cannot study the entire universe. Why? Well, for the very simple reason that the universe contains – if you want to put it that way – or is in, consciousness. And therefore, no matter how many physical principles you come up with, you won’t be able to get to this subjective experience.
Rick: So here’s a couple of Gita verses for you, based on what you just said. One is that verse that the self realizes itself by itself. Like you said about the eye, the self is not something which can step apart from itself and observe itself, because it is the observer. And yet the realization of that comes through it realizing itself by itself. Second thing is that verse where it says that one perceives the self in all beings and all beings in the self. So, what you said to me a minute ago about, for me, you’re the object and I’m the subject, and vice versa, if we both had the requisite level of consciousness, we would only see the self in looking at one another. What was Muktananda’s famous phrase, “God dwells within you as you?”
Menas: Right.
Rick: But obviously, God doesn’t just dwell within. God is omnipresent. So, if we could perceive things right, we would see God in all things. As well as discover God within the self, correct?
Menas: Correct. I generally avoid using the word God, because it immediately brings in concepts about God. Which God? Is it the monotheistic God? Is it the polytheistic God? Is the God Zoroaster? Or is it the God of the prophets? And of course, the answer to this is all of the above. But, in terms of modern science, perhaps a better term – well, not a better or worse – but let’s say a more useful term if you want to talk about neuroscience, is actually consciousness. Because then you tie it to conscious awareness. Somebody may say, “Well, but ultimately God and consciousness are the same, aren’t they?”. Well, I would say… if you want to tell me what is consciousness, then I can tell you if it is God or vice versa. And of course, if it is the sum total of everything that exists, then fine. But then, what have we said? What have we done to advance our own understanding of the physical universe? So, what again are the parallels between, let’s say, perennial philosophy, or mysticism – as you want to call it – and natural philosophy? That’s what Newton used to call science. So, they’re both philosophy, natural philosophy and perennial philosophy. What they have in common is this understanding – deep understanding – that the universe is knowable. It can be known. But having said that, because of the complementarities, because of recursion, and all these infinite relationships, you can’t possibly know it all through the human mind and the human brain. We only have – and I think Dave Bohm actually talked about it – the implicate order. He had a very nice image for that. You can think of the implicate order as being more or less like this camera here. It gives you three dimensional appearance, but you see any part of it as a two dimensional cut. So, right now you see me on a flat screen. In order to see another aspect of me, I have to do this, or I have to move around the camera, and then you get a different view of me. So the implicate order, if you like, has an infinite set of views that eventually manifest as what Bohm called the explicate order. And what we see around us is the explicate order. And through the explicate order, now I’m putting this, may not have been asserted exactly the way Dave Bohm talked about it, but this is my understanding of it. Through the explicate order we begin to get a sense of the implicate order. But you cannot see, quote unquote, the implicate order just with the explicate eyes, or the explicate ears.
Rick: If I understand what you’re saying, though, if you talk to some people who, let me just use the words easily without having to pussyfoot around them, but you know, people who are enlightened, let’s say.
Menas: Okay.
Rick: Then, some people will say, “Well, actually, when I perceive anything, I’m perceiving the implicate order in it. I primarily appreciate or perceive the intelligence that ultimately comprises the world of objects, and only in a sort of a secondary sense do I see them as objects.” In fact, in Sanskrit, there’s a term, “lesha-vidya,” which means “faint remains of ignorance.”
Menas: Right.
Rick: And the understanding is that primarily, one is seeing the world as Brahman. You’ve heard that phrase, you know, “I am That, Thou art That, all of this is That.” But in a secondary sense, you need to see telephones as telephones and cars as cars or you couldn’t function in the world. So there has to be at least a sheen of duality and multiplicity on the ocean of unity in order for life to be lived.
Menas: That’s a beautiful way to describe it, I guess. Now the question is, “Who is realized and who is not realized?” And of course again, they will tell you, or I read that, for someone who is realized they don’t consider anybody else not being realized.
Rick: Right, because when they look at people, what do they see?
Menas: Right.
Rick: Pure consciousness, pure intelligence.
Menas: They see unity of consciousness. So they say, “Oh, okay, this particular being or whatever, this connection or condensed form of consciousness is Rick Archer, or Menas Kafatos”, and they think they’re individuals. So that is the great play of universal consciousness. It just creates images of itself and then forgets that it creates the images and takes the images as the real thing. And I guess maybe – and I said I’m not going to get into religion, so I won’t get into much of the religion. But some of this big controversy, for example, that had to do at the time of the Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox, in terms of icons. They had the iconoclasts, they had the icono-friends, and they were on opposite sides of the spectrum. And the iconoclasts were saying, “Well, you have an icon to see the divine? That’s absurd. The divine is beyond the icon.” On the other hand, they would say, “Well, the icon gets you into that feeling, so you’re communing with the divine.” So actually, in modern day interpretation, they were both right.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, I would say.
Menas: You know, many times in human history and human endeavors, we find out that we’re arguing about things forever, have wars, that really are just complementary aspects of one or the other.
Rick: Yeah, it reminds me of Gulliver’s Travels, where they had a big fight about the small enders and the big enders, you know?
Menas: Right, right.
Rick: Which end to crack their hard-boiled egg on.
Menas: Right, exactly. So, yeah.
Rick: It’s funny, you know, you just reminded me that today is the Ides of March, and so it’s –
Menas: Oh, that’s right.
Rick: – the world is sort of like a play, if you will, and it’s like Julius Caesar has forgotten that he’s just an actor playing Julius Caesar. He thinks he’s really Julius Caesar, and he’s going to get stabbed, and –
Menas: Right.
Rick: – all that stuff. So, we’ve all kind of forgotten our true identity.
Menas: So the true identity is hidden. And that’s, again, if you take the mystical approach, is hidden from experience through the sensory body. So, we identify ourselves with the body, and the ego then becomes encapsulated into the body. And then I say, “Well, I’m Menas Kafatos. I’m a physicist. I am, you know, director of the Center of Excellence. My job is at Chapman University. I’m sitting right now in Marina del Rey talking through Skype with my friend, Rick Archer.” Okay, so yes, at that level of reality, all of that is correct. However, that’s not permanent. And when they were saying that only Brahman is real, they meant after all, or overall. Because this body will fall down one day. It will disappear. It will be decomposed into pretty much molecules, organic at the beginning. And eventually even the organic molecules will be part of the earth, of the ground. And of course, as you know, the ground itself has a lot of organic molecules. So it will go back to the soup that we call the geosphere, or the Gaia. And so, where is Menas in that new situation?
Rick: Yeah.
Menas: Where does he reside? Okay, when, you know, or let’s say, if we don’t want to think about our end, because death is always something we cannot, we don’t want to handle it. Let’s think about our birth. What happened before we’re born, before we were conceived? Where were we? So, okay, the reductionists or the physicalists will say, “You didn’t exist. You started existing from the moment that there was the conception, you know, that you were conceived in your mother’s womb. And when you’re gone, you’re gone. And that’s the end of it.” So, that’s one point of view. And that is of course the ego point of view. And it’s actually pretty miserable, if you think about it, because –
Rick: Scary.
Menas: – the ego is born and then it dies, and that’s the end of it. So, the ego does want to die. But from the point of view of the self, there’s no death. It’s only transformation.
Rick: Yeah, you know, I actually, on this show, I don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to kowtow to people who have that perspective, you know, that it’s only in the material world, and, you know, when you’re dead, you’re dead. I kind of blow right past that, because most of this audience has also already blown right past that.
Menas: Right.
Rick: Yeah. And, what you just said kind of brings up an interesting point. Which is that, you know, you’re talking about, well, when you die, you’re going to decompose, you’re going to go back to organic elements and so on. But it seems to me that if we see anything as physical, or, you know, either biological or organic, you know, inanimate, or anything, we’re actually not looking close enough, because if you look closer, you get down to a less physical level. Closer still, a less physical level.
Menas: Yes, yes.
Rick: And, you know, so human beings are almost just like lenses, which kind of focus us in within a certain strata of perception, which is ultimately not real. Who was it? I have a quote from somebody here, von Neumann, I think, talking about the collapse of –
Menas: Oh von Neumann, yeah.
Rick: – yeah. I can’t find it at the moment, but –
Menas: Yeah, von Neumann advanced what we now call the orthodox view of quantum theory, and I believe it’s still the golden – what I talk about in my talks – is that it’s still the golden standard. Any interpretation of quantum theory has to do at least as well as von Neumann theory. And as far as I’m concerned, why give up the von Neumann theory, you know, favor something else, if something else has got to do at least as well as the von Neumann theory?
Rick: Yeah, what he said, a quote I found, “The wave function collapses in the consciousness of human beings.” And I don’t know as well as you do what that actually means.
Menas: So, yeah, we can say what it means, yeah.
Rick: Go ahead.
Menas: Well, what it really means is that the knowledge or the collapse is in our knowledge of or awareness of an external object. Now, we know something specific, and that’s the collapse. And of course, in his case, he said the whole thing is quantum. So from that point of view, he went beyond the Copenhagen interpretation. Now we’re getting a little bit into specifics. Because the Copenhagen interpretation had this duality between the microcosm or the quantum world and the microcosm. And if you have a duality, you always have a problem, how do you bridge the duality? How do you go from one to the other? von Neumann said, “No, it’s all quantum.” It appears, it appears as classical.
Rick: Right.
Menas: Okay? And those people, and there are many of them, and many physicists, even today, even after so many years of quantum theory, they go back over and over again. And of course, the biggest proponent was Einstein himself. And say, “Well, where is the objective reality?” And there has to be an objective reality. As you said, Rick, when you focus in more and more, it dissolves and eventually becomes a quantum field. And beyond that, it becomes the super strings. And beyond that, it becomes the quantum foam, the Wheeler, or if you like, what Wheeler would say, everything dissolves and the phenomenon is not the phenomenon until it’s a recorded phenomenon. So, where does it dissolve? Well, it dissolves into the quantum foam or Planck on Planck scale. And is there something beyond that? Well, of course, there has to be something beyond that because we still don’t have subjective experience.
Rick: Right.
Menas: Everything I said up to this point, I didn’t, you know, I didn’t – there’s no subjective experience. So, we have to have the qualia. The qualia are views of reality through the experiential self. Okay? And in fact, some of us now, Deepak Chopra and myself, for example, we say that what is more fundamental than quarks or quanta is qualia. They’re all cubed, right? So, we say cube, you know, the qualia is the most fundamental aspect of this quanta and quarks. Quarks, of course, being solid matter and quanta being the mesons or the field aspects.
Rick: And just once more, define qualia?
Menas: Qualia are the subjective experiences. So, everything that you see, hear, feel are qualia. You either have a sensory input, you have a feeling, you have a mental construct.
Rick: But then qualia –
Menas: All of this, all of this are qualia.
Rick: – but qualia still wouldn’t be ultimate because it’s still an observer, observed process of observation situation. There’s still that three-fold structure there. So, if you want to take it even deeper, you get down to pure consciousness itself, where that three-fold structure hasn’t emerged.
Menas: You’re absolutely right. The qualia arise as soon as you have a separate object. If you, and actually in the East or in the old schools, they call it Maya. And of course, there have been a lot of books written about Maya and what is a Maya, etcetera, etcetera. And of course, those sages said, “Maya is the most un-understood power of the Lord.” You try to understand Maya, you’re gonna be sucked in and you’re never going to escape. So, Maya is actually the veiling or the, if you like, the cloaking. You put like a, something over your head and now, or a mask. You put a mask over it and now you look like somebody else. So, this cloak or mask is where the object-subject division. In fact, the mathematics I was talking about, primary mathematics I was talking about is where you get as close as possible to the object-subject division. And that, even at the highest levels, there is this complementarity. You know, the identity begins to have the experience of the That. I am That, right? When the statement, “I am That,” what does ‘That’ mean? ‘That’, of course, is universal consciousness and ‘I’ is also universal consciousness, right? So, when you say, “I am That,” basically, at that level, you say, “Oh, I am everything.” There’s no difference between That and me. But, there is the beginning. There is just the faint beginning of a division. Okay? It’s not happening yet. The division becomes absolute and inseparable and the two sides of the river, if you like, are split. There’s no bridge between them. When you have the object as being separate from the subject. And in fact, von Neumann, the same guy, said, “In physics, you always have object-subject split.” And therefore, science can only get us up to a certain point.
Rick: Yeah, sure. I mean, given the tools that physics has at its disposal, that’s the best you can do.
Menas: Right, right.
Rick: Did you ever hear that story about Maya, where, I forget who it was, Lord Krishna or Narayana or somebody, is with his disciple and his disciple says, “Tell me about Maya,” and he says, “Okay, fine, but I’m thirsty. Would you get me a glass of water first?” So he sends him off for some water and the guy gets to the well and he sees this real pretty girl there and he falls in love with her and he marries her and they have kids and this, that and the other thing, and then some big disaster happens and they’re all about to drown or something and he remembers the Lord, he says, “Help me, help me,” and boom, the whole thing disappears and he’s standing there with his master again and the master says, “Well, where’s my water?”
Menas: Right. It’s a little similar to the Zen koans. Another, of course, story along those lines is, and it is in the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna asks Krishna, and of course he’s a charioteer, and says, “Can you please show me your cosmic form?” And Krishna says, “Are you sure you want to see that?” And he says, “Yes, I really want to see your cosmic form.” And he says, “Okay, here it goes.” So, and he’s blown back because he sees infinite universes, he sees his relatives that he’s about ready to kill in the big battle that’s going to take place, he sees the walls disappearing in fire and drowning and universes with explosions and all of that, and of course, birth and death, he sees everything taking place and he’s completely overwhelmed. He says, “You know, Lord, please take away that cosmic form, just give me back your old form.” And of course, Krishna comes back to him and he’s another human being and his friend, and the moral of the story is, it’s better to just stick with a friend rather than try to have the cosmic consciousness type of vision.
Rick: Yeah, another moral of the story might be that, you know, whereas you can experience consciousness in its pure form as unbounded, you better not try to incorporate all the myriad details of the universe within the capacity of a human nervous system, because it really wasn’t designed to take in that much.
Menas: The human, I mean, we still don’t know exactly why it was designed, but I think you’re probably right. It was designed for us to live and experience quote-unquote ‘everyday life’, right? And it’s actually doing very well with that, thank you. You know, it’s also designed to make us escape from hungry tigers or whatever. We have turned the tables around, of course, as it is now on tigers and all the other animals to the point that we’re driving them to extinction. But in any case, it was an evolutionary product, the human brain and human awareness. So, there is evolution. It’s not that there’s no evolution and everything was just created, right? There’s evolution, but the evolution we’re talking about is self-directed. If you like, it’s made, and that’s where quantum theory comes in. Quantum is part of the whole thing. It’s driven by quantum principles and allows probabilistically to get to high, to this, if you like, to this peaks where something now is manifest from a huge complex field where the field is mostly empty and you don’t really have experience of just about anything. So, we have to keep that in mind that actually our brain, perhaps in your cortex, itself is complementary. It’s very obvious. We have a left brain, a right brain. As you know, the two brains, the way they interact with each other, sometimes they feel that the other one is an enemy. It says, “Who are you?” And it’s the same being. It’s just a different, different part of the brain. So, complementarity is building from the get-go. And so, in my view, rather than trying to understand the universe ad infinitum, because that will be a mission impossible, and rather than trying to understand consciousness rather than experiencing it, let’s see if there are these universal principles and they apply at every level. And then through them, perhaps, we have the common ground for understanding brain science as well as quantum physics. It’s actually very rational and very pragmatic, I would say.
Rick: There’s a phrase in Sanskrit, in the Greek Veda, something that goes, “Richo akshare parame vyoman,” and it goes on, I don’t know the rest of it, but the essence of it is that all the impulses of intelligence which govern the universe, they reside in the transcendent, they reside in consciousness. And if you can know consciousness fully and be that in its fullness, then you gain the benefit of all knowledge, as it were, because you’re residing on that level from which nature itself is governed.
Menas: Right.
Rick: And without having to know all the specific myriad details of physics and chemistry and biology, which would be humanly impossible, you can live in the goal of all those disciplines and all conceivable disciplines and derive the benefit that would be had were you to somehow go through the study of them all, which again is impossible.
Menas: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
Rick: There’s a point that I’ve been having in the back of my mind for the last 15 minutes and I’ve been playing around with all this in order to lead up to it, and it would be this. If everything is ultimately consciousness, if we can agree on that, then everything is really nothing but consciousness. When we say “ultimately,” it means that is essentially and ultimately what it is. So what’s actually happening is that when we are perceiving the world and driving our car and playing with our dog and all that stuff, what’s actually happening is that consciousness itself, through a self-interacting process, is playing with itself and it’s appearing to create forms through which it can play within itself, but there’s really nothing that, if you analyze it clearly enough, could be said to be anything other than consciousness.
Menas: That’s a beautiful way to put it. And the role of the cloaking or the Maya or, if you like, the limiting principle, is to make it appear as something else.
Rick: So that play can take place.
Menas: So the play can take place. In fact, we all know that when we go to the movies, right? It’s just a movie, right? When we go to a play and we watch, let’s say, a Shakespeare play or an ancient Greek tragedy or whatever, we know it’s a play. And in fact, Aeschylus, you know, ancient Greece, he gave a definition of tragedy and comedy. And basically, from what I remember, it was to uplift the observer or to uplift the human being who watches the whole thing. Because you see these things happening out there. You see it on the stage, right? You see really horrible things happening, like the son killing the mother, like Oedipus and all of that. And the wife killing the husband and etcetera, etcetera. Or Zeus doing this and that. All these things happening. And you say at the end of the play, “Oh, that was a good play. Let’s go home now.” And of course, similar thing you get with comedy. We get that with the laugher. So essentially, you transcend your own existence by seeing the play out there. And that’s why movies are so popular. That’s why Hollywood is such a great enterprise, so to speak, right? But we forget. And of course, an actor who forgets that he’s just an actor or she’s an actor becomes ridiculous, right? Suppose Sean Connery was going around – and he’s a good actor, he’s played in many different roles – suppose he went around and considered himself to be 007. Because he was quite famous, 007 –
Rick: I heard that the guy who played the original Superman ended up dying by jumping off a building because he thought he could fly. I don’t know if that’s true, but I heard that.
Menas: – oh my God. Poor guy. Well, he found out that of course gravity still works. So, but OK. We don’t know about the first Superman. But certainly in terms of Sean Connery. And of course, Sean Connery is not doing that. He’s not saying, “Oh, I’m 007.” He’s moved on. Indiana Jones and all of that. And all the roles. So, we forget that we’re playing a role and we identify with the role rather than the play.
Rick: And it would almost seem that if we couldn’t, it would almost seem that forgetting was necessary. I mean, I want to get into this thing about the Einstein-Bohr debate and whether the universe or the moon is there if nobody’s perceiving it and so on. But it seems to me that relates to us in a way. Because first of all, not only the moon but the sun. It took billions of years before heavy elements were developed to the point where we could have biological systems which could evolve to the point where anybody could even think about this stuff.
Menas: Right.
Rick: And yet the universe actually was developing through all those billions of years without any sentient beings who could perceive it. So, wasn’t Einstein right? I mean, the moon was there before there was anyone but perhaps moths to be able to see the moon. The moths didn’t create the moon. It had been developing through splitting off from the sun or from the earth and becoming cooler and so on.
Menas: Okay. So, here is, I’m going to be heretic. And I’m going to say that they’re both right.
Rick: Paradox.
Menas: So, here is the big debate between the two. They were talking past each other. Of course Einstein is right. Yeah, the moon is there even when nobody is looking at it. Okay. But who is that nobody is looking at it? Are we talking about human observers? Yeah, the moon is there when no human observers observe. Well, you say, well, what about, okay, before human observers, what about apes? What about the great apes? What about plants? Even before that, well, the plants certainly know the sun is there because they move their leaves in a particular way to capture the sun, the maximum solar light. And probably they do something with the moon as well. We’re not sure about that. So, yes, I mean, of course the moon is there even if human awareness is not there. But Bohr was also right because you can’t, at the end of the day, and this is why I’ve reached the conclusion, that you can’t get consciousness out of the whole thing. It’s in here. It’s always there. You might say, well, okay, it’s not, it’s not humans. Well, but if you go, if it goes all the way to the bottom and the entire thing is conscious, then the hard problem, the so-called hard problem, disappears and becomes a trivial problem.
Rick: Explain what the hard problem is for the benefit of listeners.
Menas: The hard problem has been, poses a question, how can we explain the qualia? How can we get the experience of red, the color red? There’s nothing in physics, in fact, Schrรถdinger was very famous to say that there’s nothing in physics or quantum physics that will give you the color red and have you understand it. So you experience it. This is what we call qualia, right? This is what qualia is. So you can’t get the qualia out of the picture. You can’t get the experience out of the picture. So the question is meaningful and it’s also meaningless. And Bohr would say, the question is meaningless because you’re asking a question within an observational context. And this is of course what Wheeler would say. It’s a context that you’re asking. It’s not that the moon is not there when nobody’s asking because you are watching the moon and that’s the context right now we’re talking about. It’s not something that it’s out there that you only think about it and you imagine.
Rick: Yeah.
Menas: Complementarity. Again, complementarity. Paradoxical. It’s both. It is there and it’s not there. Now, my point of view and I would say von Neumann’s point of view, Henry Staff’s point of view, I would think also to a large extent John Hagelin, I would say of course Deepak Chopra, I think Rick, you two are in that camp, and many, many, actually many of us, Rudy Tansey, Subhash Kak, etcetera, Neil –
Rick: Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Menas: – yeah. And Neil Theise.
Rick: Oh, Neil Theise. Okay.
Menas: Yeah. All of us, and many of us, I’m not going to say any more, but let’s say, let’s just take von Neumann’s point of view.
Rick: Thanks for putting me in such august company, by the way.
Menas: Well, yeah. Of course. Heisenberg and Schrรถdinger and Planck. There is the august right there. Max Planck. And Bohr, Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli. All of these proponents of quantum theory. Okay. And even Einstein to a large extent. Einstein was really struggling with either or type of situations. All we’re saying is that the subject or the observer, and I’m using my own terms, is one. Schrรถdinger said that the subjective experience is one. There’s only one subject. There’s not really many, many subjects. So, if that’s the case, then Einstein’s statement or question is meaningless because everything is conscious. So, what do you mean when nobody’s there? You mean when no consciousness is there? But if we start with the assumption that everything is consciousness, then the hard problem disappears and Einstein’s question disappears.
Rick: Right. So, whether it’s ten seconds after the Big Bang or ten billion years after the Big Bang and sentient life has evolved, there’s still only one observer.
Menas: There’s still one observer.
Rick: Yeah.
Menas: And in fact, when we look at, you know, there’s now the delayed choice experiments that are being performed by using light from distant quasars. The delayed choice experiment was proposed by John Archibald Wheeler to show this paradox that the past, the present, and the future are tied together through the act of observation. Through the, again, the context of observation. So, now actually, you know, the last nanosecond, you make a choice here in the laboratory about the two paths followed by a distant quasar that give you either the particle aspect or the wave aspect. And you say, “Well, how can that be because the light left at distant quasar four billion years ago?” And now you do something and it gives you one or the other. So, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a few meters in the laboratory or ten billion light years away. It’s the context, the observation. So, the observer, you cannot get the observer out.
Rick: Right.
Menas: You cannot get the observer out.
Rick: And I think the important point to keep coming back to is that not only is there one observer, but that which is observed is essentially identical to the observer itself. You know, the self realizes itself. The self perceives itself and it, you know, through the self-interacting dynamics, it appears to take on specific precipitated forms, but it’s really only consciousness playing within itself.
Menas: It would be like having, and of course there are places like that, and they can be very good, but they’re also tough plays. There could be only one actor, and one act, right?
Rick: Yeah.
Menas: And the actor just keeps talking. And of course, as I say, there are plays like that. They are difficult, maybe not as exciting because you don’t have duality in there, or it’s a perceived duality, or maybe it’s a duality within the person who is talking to himself or something. But it’s so much easier if we have the objective reality out there, and that’s why the universe is created to give us this objective, so-called objective reality. But as you said, the two poles or the two aspects are the same thing. And at the end of the day, they’re really nothing more than, if you like, mirror phantoms or mirror images that consciousness creates on the self or on its self-mirror. It’s a magical mirror. It’s a strange mirror because you cannot see. In a regular mirror, you see yourself. It’s like the Wheeler eye seeing itself. In the regular mirror, you see yourself in the mirror, and you see other things inside the mirror. This mirror we’re talking about is self-conscious or self-aware. It projects on itself, itself. So it’s a strange mirror. It’s a magical mirror.
Rick: Yeah, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spent years giving lectures on this dynamics of how when existence becomes conscious, then consciousness becomes intelligent and begins to assume the role of creative intelligence. He went into it in great, great detail about how the bifurcation or the manifestation takes place from fundamental unity, and yet ultimately it doesn’t take place, it just appears to be taking place. It’s this cosmic rigmarole. It’s interesting stuff. But basically when someone would ask him in a simple way why the universe manifested, he would just say, “There’s no fun in loneliness.” And other times he would say, “It’s for the sake of the expansion of happiness, for the expansion of bliss, expansion of joy.”
Menas: Right, right. Or I would add, or maybe I’ll paraphrase a little bit, “Its nature is to create infinite universes.”
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Menas: And of course, one final way to say it, “Why not?”
Rick: Right, nothing else to do.
Menas: Why not, right. So yes, there is creative moments taking place all the time. It’s not just one creation at the beginning by an external God, but the whole thing is conscious, and that’s what I mean when I say the Conscious Universe is self-driven. However, you cannot prove it. You cannot prove it from the outside, because we are inside.
Rick: But you can prove it from the inside.
Menas: You can experience from the inside.
Rick: Yeah.
Menas: And if proof is experience, you can experience from the inside, but you cannot prove it as a separate object, because again it would be like the eye trying to see the eye.
Rick: Trying to see itself, yeah.
Menas: Yeah.
Rick: But experiencing it from the inside, I mean, how difficult is it to get the level of technical and intellectual sophistication to be able to operate the Large Hadron Collider and interpret its findings? Only a handful of people on the planet have perhaps achieved that level of sophistication, but millions of people practice spiritual techniques, practice meditation, and if those techniques systematically lead to the experience of consciousness in its pure form and the stable foundation of that, the permanent establishment of that, then for those people, they have proven it to themselves. They’ve sort of discovered the ground state of existence in a way that’s completely satisfactory from their perspective at least.
Menas: Yes.
Rick: You know, to heck with that, anybody else thinks. It’s like you’re the only one there at your graduation and you enjoy the bliss of that state.
Menas: Well, it’s, but I actually, I would go a little bit further. I would say yes, of course, to understand the engineering, amazing engineering that has gone into the (Large Hadron) Collider, you know, and what really took to basically millions and millions of observations to get a little blip that we call the Higgs boson, right? That’s, of course, that you got to have a technical training, you got to have a PhD probably, etcetera, etcetera, either in physics or engineer, etcetera, etcetera. However, I claim that the fundamentals of general relativity, the fundamentals of quantum theory, if indeed these are fundamental theories about the universe, should be understood by everybody. Not the mathematics, not when you start, not when you start writing, of course, as you know, the field equations of Einstein are a bear. You know, even Einstein himself, he hung around the mathematicians because he couldn’t handle it by himself. So, you know, you guys figure out how to solve these equations or whatever. They’re very nasty. And same thing with quantum theory, of course, Schrรถdinger’s equation really only has been solved, you know, exactly for hydrogen and you know, more or less, you know, the molecular hydrogen, I mean, atomic hydrogen, and of course, we know more or less molecular hydrogen, how to go. But beyond helium, you run against big problems in terms of solving the Schrรถdinger’s equation. But the Schrรถdinger’s equation is correct, right? So the point is that these ways of us understanding the universe only get us to a certain level. And there should be foundational principles. So that is really the main point I want to make here. Foundational principles that can be understood or experienced by everybody. So I tell, when I give my talk about quantum theory, I pretty much talk about the three principles, complementarity, recursion, and sentience. And I say, “Okay, let’s see, do they apply to your everyday life?” And I give examples. And within ten minutes, they all say, “Yeah, actually, they do apply to all of us.” I say, “Well, you know what? They apply to the physical world, they apply to the mental world, and they apply to the biological world.” So maybe let’s start with those. If you really want to get down to the nitty-gritty of quantum field theory and you want to really tackle the bear that’s called super strings, good luck to you, right? You know, the brightest minds now, mathematical physicists are going to that. And it’s, even people like myself, you know, can’t really tackle that, can’t really handle it. I mean, I can understand the basics. But to really get down to all this different kind of mathematics and need for the super strings is, you have to have spent many years studying this stuff. So, you know, what are we trying to do? Are we trying to, and that’s why, you know, there is a danger. And I’m not saying that Fritjof Capra didn’t do a huge service, but there is a danger of cheapening both sides. You know, if you say, “Well, yeah, quantum theory proves Eastern mysticism, or Eastern mysticism really proves quantum theory.” No, it doesn’t. Neither of them proves the other. They are the parallels, and they are perhaps the parallels, I would say, through these principles. But one cannot be derived from the other.
Rick: I don’t think either of them really needs the other, you know? I mean, the mystics are happy in their subjective experience, and the physicists are happy in their laboratories with their mathematics and so on. And it’s nice for them to touch base at conferences and so on and compare notes, but they’re each doing their own thing, they’re each in their own Dharma, you know?
Menas: Well, yeah, but there are some of us who are trying to bridge the two, and say, you know, and how do you bridge the two? Well, they have the dialogue. They have the dialogue with no expectations, so to speak. They have the dialogue, so, “Okay, we’re going to have a dialogue, you know, let’s see. Oh, I see. Oh, is that what you’re saying? Hmm.” Actually, we have that, you know, we actually have that principle as well. So, you can have a dialogue, but, you know, it’s not a dialogue that you expect from the beginning to prove one that is correct and the other is not correct, or to prove that one is derived from the other.
Rick: Yeah.
Menas: It’s not a dialogue. It’s like an absolute statement.
Rick: So, you’re saying that, you know, the layman, such as myself, without an understanding of the mathematics, can intuit from his own experience, if it’s pointed out clearly, some of these principles that quantum physicists deal with, such as complementarity, recursion, and sentience.
Menas: Right.
Rick: Let’s tick off a list. You’ve got those three. We have quantum entanglement. We have –
Menas: Quantum entanglement is part of complementarity.
Rick: – all right. And then we have indeterminacy. We have non-locality. So, let’s go through some of these terms and talk about what they mean and how they can be sort of intuited, at least, in everyday experience, or at least in deep spiritual experience.
Menas: So, you asked actually a very good question. You brought in some other principles. And the question that some of us are tackling or playing with is, which ones are more fundamental? And of course, you can replace the three principles I mentioned with something else, but we find that these three principles –
Rick: Subsume the others?
Menas: Subsume a large set of the others.
Rick: OK.
Menas: Maybe not everything. So, it’s a continuous search.
Rick: Including non-locality, one of these?
Menas: Yeah. Non-locality, of course, is the wave-particle duality is complementarity, because non-locality comes because of the wave aspects.
Rick: So, let’s pick apart complementarity first.
Menas: Complementarity is Bohr’s stated, and he actually picked that one, even though they knew about non-locality. So, he must have had the right hunch. So, we’re just following his steps. He picked complementarity as the fundamental way that we interact with nature, he said. So, the Heisenberg picture and the Schrรถdinger picture are complementary pictures, mathematical pictures of the quantum. The wave and the particle are complementary aspects. The energy and the time are complementary aspects. And in fact, you ultimately tie the quantum quantities, you tie them to the uncertainty principle, because in fact, they are what we call non-commuting variables. And I don’t need to go into the details there. But basically, you know, they’re both there, but they’re not there at the same time. And that gives rise to the uncertainty. So, the uncertainty –
Rick: OK. Now, hang on. We might be losing people here. So, you’re losing me a little bit. So, in a nutshell, what is complementarity?
Menas: In a nutshell, complementarity is a principle that – I’ll just paraphrase it – the opposites are not absolute, but they are in a particular context, in the context of which you are studying. So, complementarity is the way we interact with nature. And complementarity is a good way to account for the wave-particle duality and the measurement theory and quantum theory, which of course is fundamental aspects of quantum theory.
Rick: Would it also relate to something you said in your book? You quoted Heraclitus as saying that the tension between opposites keeps the whole from passing away.
Menas: Exactly.
Rick: OK.
Menas: Right.
Rick: Yeah. In fact, I’ve been told by some spiritual teachers that the whole mythology of gods and demons battling each other all the time is a sort of symbolic representation of the opposition of forces that has to be structured into relative creation in order for it not to just fold back on itself into the unmanifest and disappear.
Menas: Right, right, right. So, that’s the yin-yang from the East, and of course, Niels Bohr, actually, his coat of arms basically had the yin-yang symbol, because he felt that complementarity was fundamental.
Rick: Right. And so, you said that non-locality is part of complementarity.
Menas: Because of the wave aspect.
Rick: Because of the wave aspect. And non-locality, as I understand it, you can have a particle here, and then on the other side of the universe, the other side of the galaxy, you can have a kind of a complementary or connected particle, and if one turns up, the other turns down instantaneously, in complete violation of the speed of light and any kind of relative influences that could connect the two of them.
Menas: Right. So, in complete violation of the speed of light in space-time. So, maybe this connectivity is outside of space-time.
Rick: And it’s pretty well established that this is the case, right? And that it works this way.
Menas: It’s pretty much established. You know, the ‘aspect experiments’ that were carried out in France were repeated later on by the team in Geneva, and they were carried out in the same way in Geneva. And now we even have this delayed choice experiment which actually proves or says that in fact even in time you have entanglement.
Rick: Okay. So, that’s what entanglement is? This thing we just described? The two particles?
Menas: Right.
Rick: Okay. For some reason Maurizio wants to make that the theme of the next Science and Non-Duality Conference. So, we’ll see how much we can all talk about entanglement for a weekend.
Menas: Well, entanglement of course also implies love, implies, you know, if you come from that point of view, you know, mother-child entanglement. But in physics it’s very, very specific, yeah.
Rick: Yeah. And so, are physicists tearing their hair out, if they have any, about how this could possibly work? Or have some of them just ignored it? Or what resolution have they come to understand how two things, you know, vastly distant from one another could communicate instantaneously?
Menas: A number of quantum physicists like d’Espagnat and ลปurek, etcetera etcetera, Henry Stapp, etcetera, would say, “Yeah, of course, elementary, my dear Watson, of course. It’s just the way it is. It’s quantum.” The realists, and of course among them Einstein was the most famous one, they say, “Well, we don’t have the complete picture here.” This so-called EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) experiment. “Something is missing here.” The quantum physicists who work with this, and in fact, you know, Bell himself, when he wrote the Bell’s theorem, the Bell inequalities, basically he was trying to show that quantum theory is not right. And the EPR experiments as performed by Aspect and Gisin, G-I-S-I-N, Nicolas Gisin in Geneva, show that in fact there is violations of the principle of locality that you would get in a classical, in a local classical universe. And therefore the universe is definitely non-local, the way quantum theory says it’s non-local. So that’s one school. Of course there are these specialties. Then there are specialists. There are those who have not given up on the hidden, so-called hidden variables. And one of them was in fact Dave Bohm, who was a protege of Albert Einstein. And Dave Bohm came up with these beautiful hidden variables, but again these experiments show that hidden variables don’t work. So then people are saying, “Well, maybe we don’t have the complete picture because there’s always noise in the results and therefore it could be that we don’t really see non-locality.” And in fact you don’t really see non-locality. You infer non-locality. You conclude there is non-locality, but you cannot see it directly. And so –
Rick: Presumably it works that way.
Menas: Yeah. Right. So that’s another school of thought. I don’t think that’s going to go very far. Over and over again all the efforts that have been done have not been borne out in the laboratory. And then there is a vast pool of people that are just agnostic. They don’t know what it is. But actually I would say that as we said in our book, The Non-Local Universe, that this non-locality is perhaps one of the biggest, if you like, findings of modern science.
Rick: Yeah. Perhaps you and I would understand this in terms of the sort of the infinitely correlated nature of creation. On page 179 of the book you just referred to you said, “Each individual particle of the system in a certain sense at any one time exists simultaneously in every part of space occupied by the system.”
Menas: Right.
Rick: And the system is the entire cosmos.
Menas: Right.
Rick: So it’s like –
Menas: This is recursion now.
Rick: Yeah. Okay. Great. We’re getting into recursion. So recursion then means that each particle in some sense on some deep level is infinitely correlated with each other particle in the universe?
Menas: Each particle contains the whole. The whole contains all the particles. And as you will see very quickly, the three principles are intimately tied together. There’s not two, three separate principles.
Rick: Does the word holographic come in here?
Menas: Exactly. They’re all holographically complementing each other. You know, complementarity, recursion, and creative interactivity or sentience, they are all part of each other. You can’t have one without the other. It’s sort of like the Trinity. You get into theology, you know, the three aspects you cannot, or Brahma, Vishnu, you know, you got in Shiva, you got in the East, you cannot separate the three. They’re always there.
Rick: The way I want to understand it is that if each particle, the way each particle would contain the whole is that each particle is ultimately consciousness. And how, you know, you can’t have like a gallon of consciousness versus a swimming pool of consciousness versus an ocean of consciousness. Consciousness, whether it’s just beyond any kind of spatial or volumetric considerations, it’s infinite in its nature. And so any point which is ultimately seen to be consciousness would naturally contain the whole because consciousness contains the whole.
Menas: Right. So this is exactly what Schrรถdinger just said. He said you cannot divide consciousness. You cannot, you know, there’s only singular. There’s only singular. So I think we’re all saying the same thing. And then because of this holography or if you like scaling variance, what you see here happens everywhere. Therefore, what you see here in a particle contains the whole and the whole contains the particles. So that’s the second principle. But the second principle is really part of the first principle. The first principle is really part of the second principle. They’re all really interconnected. There are three of them.
Rick: Kind of like the Moe, Larry, and Curly.
Menas: Yeah, something like that. You can’t get them. Or if you like the quarks, you can split them to the point that, yeah. The strong force is very strong because you cannot split the particles apart.
Rick: So have we done justice? I mean, sure, we could spend the whole time talking about recursion, but what more should we say that’s really essential to know about recursion?
Menas: Well, actually, you may say, “Well, what is in quantum theory that gives you recursion?” And I would say the Pauli exclusion principle is recursion, right there.
Rick: Which is?
Menas: The Pauli exclusion principle tells you that you can only put a certain number of electrons, let’s say, or a certain number of quanta of a certain kind. Like electrons. Not photons, because you can put an infinite number of photons together, but not electrons. You can put only a maximum number together in a particular state. And it is because of the Pauli exclusion principle that you have chemical bonds. That you have atoms. That you have molecules. If you didn’t have the Pauli exclusion principle there would be no atoms. There would be no molecules. There would be just the ground state. And then you would not have structure. So whenever people say, “Oh, we don’t really see quantum effects in everyday life.” And I always say, “Absolutely not. You see them with your own eyes all the time. Your eyes see quantum effects all the time.” If you mean, we’re not seeing non-trivial quantum effects like non-locality and entanglement. Yes, those are not easy to see, quote unquote. But whenever I see a plant out there, from my window, I see a tree, it’s because of the Pauli exclusion principle that it has the structure that it has. It’s as simple as that.
Rick: So the Pauli exclusion principle gives sort of discreteness and structure to things.
Menas: It gives discreteness.
Rick: It keeps everything from just being an amorphous soup.
Menas: It gives, exactly. It prevents, as you exactly just said, from everything just becoming an amorphous soup of like a cloud. A cloud, if our universe is like a cloud or a huge plasma with no structure, that’s not our universe. Of course, there’s a lot of plasma in our universe, a lot of clouds of hydrogen, etcetera, etcetera.
Rick: But it tends to aggregate into –
Menas: It tends to aggregate and tends to form structures and eventually planets and eventually human beings and eventually plants. And the plants exist or the human beings exist because of this so-called covalent bonds. We have, four carbon, you have four equal space bonds which allow carbon to become very stable. It’s a very stable glue that you can glue together large numbers of atoms to form molecules.
Rick: So could the Pauli exclusion principle be credited with having kick-started the universe itself or for having diversity spring from uniformity or not so much, maybe it emerged later?
Menas: It emerged later. Of course, it’s always there. I mean, when the universe was just one atom or the matter’s original one atom, there was no structure in terms of particles and this is, of course, a super string. Then what you had was basically a super string and what you had was basically a recursion or if you like the same – then the whole and the part were one and the same thing. You know, they were just one huge soup. As the universe cooled down, quote unquote, and it became cooler in terms of the temperature, then you start having condensations or symmetry breakings, okay? Symmetry breakings that are the – symmetry breakings that took away the symmetries from the primordial soup and now allow structures to start being built. And of course, when it was cool enough, then you got atoms and molecules. But it’s inherent. It is part of the whole thing. The Pauli exclusion principle, or if you like a more general term, it’s the quantum statistics, because you can have photons which don’t obey the exclusion principle and you can pack them, as many of them together as you want. So that’s another kind of structure that actually liquid helium is that way. It shows those kind of – they’re called bosons. Those particles are called bosons.
Rick: So the relevance of this to the whole spiritual angle, could it be that the principles we’re talking about here are responsible for the emergence of structure and specification and complexity and without which we wouldn’t have these marvelous perceiving apparatus with which to talk about this and perceive the universe and all. There needed to be a sort of individuation in order for universality to become a living reality and not just sort of an unmanifest reality in and of itself without anyone living it or experiencing it.
Menas: Right. I guess that’s what’s going on. But then we don’t have an explanation why. It’s just –
Rick: Well, we can poke around with some explanations. In fact, that’s kind of the next area I’d like to get into. But I think maybe your point on sentience would be a segue to that. So tell us about sentience.
Menas: Well, sentience, how do you prove that something is conscious? Well, it’s impossible, right? I can’t really prove that you’re conscious. But it’s highly unlikely that you’re not conscious and I am conscious and we’re interacting, OK? Highly unlikely. So it’s all by reasonableness. And I would say the universe at the end of the day – and maybe that’s where Occam’s razor comes in – at the end of the day, the universe can be understood and it’s a reasonable universe. It’s not a crazy universe. It’s not a universe where nothing makes sense, etcetera, etcetera. Though maybe there are other universes like that, but not our universe. So sentience allows for even molecules, let’s say, to come together and form DNA. For the – let’s say the four bases to come together, form DNA and then have two strands of DNA and then you have the genetic code in there and you get them in the mitochondria, you get them in the cells, etcetera, etcetera. All of that is sentience. The molecule senses the environment and creates more elaborate structures, OK? You say, “Well, can that just be nonlinear dynamic – a dynamical system?” Dynamical systems exhibit exactly that, but we are adding the element of some sort of primitive awareness, OK? An atom is aware of its environment. Even an electron is aware that there’s a proton around. Otherwise, they will not come together. So is an atom conscious? Well, it is sentient in that sense, but it’s not humanly aware like we are.
Rick: No, and probably skeptics would – I don’t know what skeptics would say – but they would probably say something like “Well, it has nothing to do with consciousness. It just has to do with forces of attraction, electromagnetism and so on that cause this stuff to work the way it does.” But you shouldn’t bring any kind of intelligence or consciousness into the equation.
Menas: Well, I’m not bringing intelligence, but then we’re back to the question of – and I guess that’s a fundamental question for von Neumann – where is the divide? Where is the cut between conscious and unconscious? Where is the divide between life and non-life? Because today, in fact, we know that what we used to think of, you know, characteristics of life, you can have those in very, very primitive forms that don’t really seem to be living, right, in the sense of even cells. So I would say that today we know way more than we used to, and I cannot prove it. None of these principles can be proven, by the way. They’re not principles to be proven. They’re axiomatic starting points. Okay?
Rick: They can’t be proven by scientific method as it’s ordinarily applied, but I still think that all this stuff can be explored.
Menas: It can be explored.
Rick: In a mystical sense, you know.
Menas: It can be explored, right.
Rick: Yeah, and thereby can be proven to anyone who does sufficiently deep exploration, to their satisfaction. But how could they convince somebody else? You know, if I’m experiencing the world in terms of myself, I can say that to somebody, but they’re going to say, “Yeah, you’re going to have to say to that person, ‘Well, you’ve got to do the same experiment I did, meditate for 20 years or something, and then you’ll agree with me.'”
Menas: Well, and of course, as you know, there are different kinds of meditations and different kinds of experience.
Rick: It’s not standardized.
Menas: It’s not standardized. But there are some general principles apply there as well. I would say that rather than trying to, you know, they say they cannot be proven because they are like the axioms of mathematics. You take them as the beginning, but you don’t stop there. You come back and look at the loop and say, “Do these things really actually make sense?” “Oh, yeah, actually they do because they seem to apply everywhere.” “Huh, so maybe my original hunch is not just a meaningless statement, ‘Well, you know, everything is connected or something,'” You know, something like that. But it actually can give you some insights. For example, I’ve used it with Neil Theise to talk about biological structures, the complementarity. And Niels Bohr himself talked about that, and so he took it beyond the quantum realm. You cannot prove them, and if you make them too simple, then people say, “Well, really, you are now saying the obvious.” But all three of them taken together, I think they give us deep insights. I would say that in today’s world, and this is now I may jump up on a soapbox, in today’s world which is ruled by duality and by us versus them, we are right, they are wrong, which is getting us pretty darn close to self-extinction, pretty close. Maybe we need to look at a different paradigm, philosophical paradigm and say, “You know, maybe we are one.” You know, maybe in fact it is, these complementaries are not, complementary truths are not opposite and denying each other, but they reinforce each other. If you like there is a unity in diversity and a diversity in unity? And right now we are just focused on the diversity. We are saying, “Yeah, I’m different from you. If you are saying that, I must say something the opposite, because you are different from me.”
Rick: Yeah, so diversity needs an infusion of unity on all levels, and if that infusion were sufficient, then I imagine there are so many different conflicts and squabbles that could be harmoniously resolved, just by seeing things from a bigger context.
Menas: See the bigger picture. For example, the three principles, the second principle says, “Everywhere is here as above,” so what you experience, or maybe I’m experiencing, what you feel, maybe I feel. So that actually opens up the whole issue of love or compassion, because if indeed it is reflected in everything else, well, you know, I don’t want to do something harm to you, because by doing that I’m really harming myself. And then of course the third principle is that, after all, structures and sentience allow for complicated structures to arise and evolution to take place.
Rick: Now you said earlier that you didn’t really use the word “God” too much, because it’s so easily misunderstood and you just miscommunicate if you use it too much. But I’ll tell you, when I hear explanations of intelligent design, for instance, here’s a definition of it from Dictionary, “The theory that life or the universe cannot have arisen by chance, and was designed or created by some intelligent entity.” Now the word “entity” to me is too localized and isolated, but if we broaden it out to think of intelligence as being like the ocean of existence, and it has inherent intelligence in its nature, then to me it helps to put a lot of the pieces of the puzzle together. I mean, when you look at anything, you know, the way a heart beats or the way a cell functions or anything, there’s so much – I can’t help but keep using the word – so much intelligence inherent in it. Bio-centrism, for instance, this guy Robert Lanza talks about 200 different variables that had they been even slightly different, life as we know it, or even the universe itself, could not have arisen. So does that sound to you like kind of billion balls running into each other? Or is there some sort of intelligence that permeates and pervades this whole thing and thereby orchestrates it in ways that boggle the mind?
Menas: It’s not an entity.
Rick: Well, entity is localized.
Menas: Exactly.
Rick: Big guy in a cloud with a beard.
Menas: Exactly.
Rick: I’m not saying that.
Menas: Right. I know you’re not, but I think a lot of, well, and again, I’m not saying that and you’re not saying that, so maybe what they’re saying, let them say it the way they want to. But the intelligent design people, maybe they have an agenda. Maybe there’s an agenda there.
Rick: Sure, get the Bible in the schools or whatever. M Or whatever. Yes, of course, there is an intelligence, universal intelligence, but it’s self-driven. The entire universe, it’s the conscious universe. It’s not, “Oh, there’s God and there’s the universe.”
Rick: Right. But it’s all one big wholeness.
Menas: It’s all one big whole.
Rick: You can’t separate God from it.
Menas: Exactly.
Rick: That’s where we’re defining God.
Menas: Exactly. So I generally, again, I don’t want to get into these arguments because then there are other people that are much better, of course, than I am in terms of theology and they should carry out those arguments in the other realm. I’m perfectly happy to talk about consciousness and draw the parallels, if you like, and see where that takes us.
Rick: Well, I don’t present it as an argument. Imagine if we had some intelligent design people here, it might turn into one. But I’m presenting it in terms of our understanding of you as a physicist and me as a layman who has had, you and me both have had spiritual practice for many years, and just trying to understand this stuff in a way that makes it a little bit more sumptuous than to just use the more dry kinds of terminology. As you know, religious, or rather enlightened people become very devotional, generally. Ramana Maharshi and Shankara and many others, they’re not content with just a heartless cognition of reality. Their hearts begin to blossom and they begin to sing hymns to God or to Arunachala or whatever. And they speak of the marvel of the Creator who seems to be running this show. So I kind of think that that’s where spirituality is going and has already gone for many people. And it would be nice for physics to be able to walk hand in hand with it as it goes there.
Menas: That would be marvelous, yes. And again, it’s a different kind of walled view, so to speak. But to claim that all you need to do is slip a coin ‘n’ number of times where ‘n’ goes to infinity and aha, you get Hamlet or you get the Ninth Symphony, and it’s all nothing more than random processes that somehow combine to form. It’s just not enough seconds in the universe to do that. I mean, you would need to have a universe much older than the observable universe we live in, if you wanted to have everything happen by flips of coins, 50/50 chance.
Rick: And even if it had somehow gone that way and brought us to where we are now, wouldn’t it all start to fall apart immediately? I mean, the second law of thermodynamics, we’d be dust in no time. So there’s obviously something which counteracts entropy and keeps breathing life and orderliness into creation.
Menas: Right. Of course, as you know, for living organisms, we go against entropy. We have a so-called negative entropy, because we use the environment to survive. Of course, the universe, the environment is running downhill, but life goes uphill. It goes against the downhill aspect. And so, yeah, okay, it’s all random. If you also, from the point of view of metaphysics or like a philosophical, ontological view of reality, oneself, if you take that seriously, then there’s no purpose in life. There’s no ethics. There’s no ethos. There’s no, you know, if it’s all just a bunch of random things, and of course some physicists, they remain nameless, say exactly that. They say, yeah, it’s all meaningless, and well, okay. So what do you tell a kid that is disturbed and maybe is contemplating suicide, because it’s, it’s just no meaning in his or her life. You have to come out and say, well, actually, there is meaning. And don’t take your life. Otherwise, why not take our lives? You know, I mean, you know, why not? What the heck? It’s all random anyway. It’s all happened by accident. And of course, as you know, this multiverse idea that somehow we just happen to live in the right universe. And there are
Rick: Seems very improbable to me. I mean, we even see in this universe that life exists in the most inhospitable places, you know, the bottom of the ocean, the ice in Antarctica. It’s like life just, whew. And if we, you know, if we think of what we’ve been defining as life in a deeper sense – intelligence, consciousness – then it exists in outer space. It exists in the heart of the sun. I mean, everything is, well, here’s a quote from your book by Thales of Miletus: “There’s a pervasive unifying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns. The world is full of gods and the unifying substance is charged with spiritual presence.” I don’t even have a problem with the world is full of Gods. I would just see that as organizing principles, impulses of intelligence, which actually are sentient, to use your sentience term, which are as conscious as you and I are, which have a role or function perhaps unseen to us, but which are every bit as real as rabbits and kangaroos.
Menas: And in ancient Greek mythology or the Hindu mythology, the gods were as real as you and me, as you said. Now, were they real or were they not real? Well, again, it’s a different context. What do you mean by that? Are they real? They were definitely real in the stories and in the sacrifices performed and perhaps even, I don’t know, getting some, if you pray enough to them, something might happen that would not happen otherwise. You know, we don’t really know the full picture here.
Rick: I’m going to interview a guy next week who claims to perceive them all the time.
Menas: Okay.
Rick: Here’s another quote from your book that relates to this, “Parts constitute a genuine whole when the universal principle of order is inside the parts and thereby adjusts each to all so that they interlock and become mutually complementary.” So that again to me is a fancy way of saying omnipresent intelligence. There’s a sort of order inherent in everything, not God in a cloud with the beards, but just permeating every iota of existence that is, you could say orchestrating it, but orchestrating it makes it sound like it’s separate, like the conductor is separate from the orchestra. Really it’s within it. It’s what we were saying earlier, consciousness functioning or playing within itself.
Menas: Yeah, it’s the old model, which back then, which of course is a clockwork universe, that if you see a clock, then there must be somebody who made the clock. But the universe is not a clock and so the analogy breaks down very quickly. And so the entity as the clock is, is not an external entity, the whole thing is the entity.
Rick: It’s an inside job.
Menas: It’s self-driven. Quantum mechanically self-driven, otherwise the probabilities would never take place.
Rick: I interviewed John Hagelin a couple of months ago and he said something that I’ve been thinking about ever since. Maybe you could shed a little light on it and then we’ll wrap up in a few minutes. But we were talking about relativistic time dilation and how as you approach the speed of light, time seems to slow down. He said – correct me if I’m not doing justice to that – but he said that from the photon’s perspective, if you’re riding on the photon, so to speak, if you’re going at the speed of light, space collapses. So that let’s say the photons from the Andromeda galaxy, which to us as stationary observers look like they’ve taken 200 million years to get here, from their perspective as it were, have arrived instantaneously.
Menas: Two million, two million years.
Rick: Two million, okay.
Menas: Two million, two million years.
Rick: Two million.
Menas: Yeah.
Rick: But, you know, whatever. So what do you say to that?
Menas: He’s right. Yeah. Basically space collapses and there’s only now. For a photon, there’s only, there’s no time passage.
Rick: So who’s to say that our perspective is any more valid than the perspective of, the photon’s perspective?
Menas: It’s not. It’s just, again, the context. From the point of view of the photon, of course, we are not photons. We have photons in our bodies, but we have physical, you know, we have quarks, we have, you know, other particles that make up our bodies, make molecules. So we have a finite mass. Photons have zero mass. From the point of view of zero mass, basically you can have energy. Photons have energy, but the time that it takes to go from one space point to another space, or I should say space-time point to another space-time point, is of zero length in this so-called geodesic way of looking at things. And therefore you are everywhere. It takes you no time to go from here to Andromeda. And in fact, a photon, if you like, is eternal. But of course, once it gets absorbed, it’s not eternal anymore because it’s something else that happened, right? But through space, if a photon from the sun, once it leaves the sun and travels to the end of the universe, it travels in no time, even though for us it may take two billion years or ten billion years to get there.
Rick: Yeah, which seems to me to speak to the kind of elastic nature of perspective. It’s all about perspective and that, you know, we again are like filters which sort of structure a kind of a space-time solidity or, you know, what’s the word, sort of a kind of a lethargy, not lethargy, I don’t know the word I’m looking for, but we’ve kind of structured, we’ve created a structure through the mechanism of our physiologies of our consciousness, which is we take as being so real and we take for granted to such a great extent, but which is really not what’s going on, you know, at all. I mean, if we just think of it as from the perspective of the photon, it’s a completely different universe and every much as real from that perspective as our –
Menas: Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you take it from the point of view of neutrino, and I will leave aside the question whether neutrinos have zero mass or finite mass, neutrinos are not like photons, okay? They are fermions. But neutrinos mediate the weak force, okay? They’re part of the weak force. They don’t mediate the weak force, but they are part of the weak force. And so, if a neutrino has zero mass, it will travel like a photon from here to there in no time. However, because of its spin properties, it will interact with matter in a different way than photons do. So, the perspective of a neutrino is different than the perspective of a photon.
Rick: Interesting. And there are so many perspectives.
Menas: There are so many perspectives.
Rick: Infinite blind men feeling a very big elephant.
Menas: Well, the thing about this elephant is that it’s infinitely –
Rick: Infinite elephant.
Menas: – infinite elephant and infinite complexity in the elephant. And in fact, it does not look like an elephant at all. It’s all elephants and all alliance and everything else put together.
Rick: Okay, here’s a final thing. And you might even want to say, “I don’t want to talk about this. We’ll do it another time.” But some guy sent in a question. And he said, “I’m interested in knowing how they think quantum physics could shed light on phenomena such as subtle bodies,” meaning perhaps angels, ghosts, subtle beings, which perhaps relates to hidden sector matter, “distant healing, precognition, remote viewing, telepathy.” It’s really fascinating that in some cases, complete recovery from severe injuries and diseases take place very rapidly. And Ida Murjani and some of your other guests are excellent examples of such radical healing, which the mainstream biomechanical model of medicine cannot account for. That’s just really an elaboration on his point about healing. But there’s all this sort of far out stuff that seems to happen at a distance or without precognition. It’s not bound by time or by space. So how would you as a physicist relate to all that?
Menas: Well, if they are real, if this phenomenon is real, and of course what I would advise or what I would propose is that more research is needed. I mean, it’s not a cop-out, but it is, you know, we need more research. We need to be asking the right questions. If you ask the wrong questions, you’re going to get wrong answers. So we need to be asking the right questions. But within the quantum view of reality, such things may not be that peculiar. You have non-locality. You have entanglement. If you start thinking in those terms, then maybe these things will make some sense. However, they have to be demonstrated. And as you know, they’re difficult to demonstrate because of statistics. So there is a statistical problem that enters the picture. And most of the arguments that go back and forth has to do with statistics and whether you believe statistics or you don’t believe statistics. So for now, I think that discussion will –
Rick: That’s like a whole other discussion.
Menas: It’s a whole other discussion, but I would say within the context of the non-locality and let’s say recursion and entanglement and complementarity, you take them all together, well, maybe there’s something to them. But then we have to talk about specific things happening in space-time and specific measurements that are made, and that is an entirely different story.
Rick: In the beginning of the interview, you mentioned an interest in climate change, and you’re addressing that through some of your work. And in your book, you actually managed to tie non-locality to climate change to a certain extent. In conclusion of this interview, do you want to say a few words about that and how you feel?
Menas: Yeah. So let me just finish on one of the previous thoughts.
Rick: Oh, sure.
Menas: Yeah. This so-called psi-phenomenon, I think they ought to be opened up to scientific scrutiny and to scientific research. And in fact, there’s a lot of –
Rick: Yeah, Dean Radin and people like that.
Menas: Dean Radin, for example, and Darrell Bam and etcetera, they have really followed, as far as I can tell, to impeccable scientific criteria to carry out these experiments. So it’s time, I think, for this phenomenon to really be admitted as not necessarily true or not true, but admitted within the context of scientific methodology and not be excluded, because then if you exclude something like that, you are practicing dogmatism.
Rick: Yeah. And the reason it gets excluded is it doesn’t fit the paradigm of those who don’t want to sort of accept that there may be more to the universe than the gross material nature of it. And science, quantum physics, has, at least a century ago, proven them wrong anyway.
Menas: Right. And if we just went with established points of view, there would be no quantum revolution, there would be no theory of relativity, and there would be no electromagnetic theory for that matter. All these things came up because some physicist or some brave physicists started questioning and said, “Well, maybe this, we don’t have the full picture.” Now, it’s not necessarily perhaps the same, identical, the same with the science research, but I would say, “Hey, you know, okay, establish the criteria and don’t always deny the research to be done, you know, because it’s far out.”
Rick: It’s not scientific to do that.
Menas: Right.
Rick: To deny it.
Menas: Right.
Rick: And you want to say a word or two about climate change?
Menas: Well, climate change, in a way, it’s actually similar. You have a complementarity, right? And this is something that the two sides, again, are arguing with each other. They are shouting at each other, more or less like the creationists and the evolutionists, you know. They’re shouting at each other, and maybe they ought to take a look at each other’s point of view. So, indeed, there is a climate change. And, indeed, something’s going on. There’s no doubt about it. The polar ice is melting, okay? I mean, sorry, but our satellites show that. Now, whether it is, you know, just all of it, global warming, and how much of it is due to greenhouse gas, you know, burning fossil fuels, etcetera, etcetera, perhaps can be debated. In my mind, I would say the vast majority of scientists would believe that it is real, and it is human fingers are at present.
Rick: Ninety-seven percent of climatologists believe that. There was some story that came out the other day that only 50-something percent of meteorologists believe that, but meteorologists are your TV weathermen. They’re not climatologists. Ninety-seven percent of climatologists believe that global warming is real and man-made.
Menas: So, 97 or 95 percent believe that it is real. Of course, the atmospheric scientists or the meteorologists, they’re looking at it from a different perspective. I think the arguments that go back and forth have to do with what if scenarios, what if we stop burning fossil fuels, and the economic factors enter the picture, okay? Now, I’m not saying that scientists do not address these issues. In fact, they are part of this new interdisciplinary field of science. I mean, that’s what it really means, or maybe some people call it transdisciplinary. You even go beyond science. You have to bring economics, energy policy, etcetera, etcetera, international policy. All of these things have to be brought together. I think the problem is that it’s not a simple solution. We actually are doing some of that research here at Chapman University, and we’re asking a much more limited set of questions, like what are the possible effects of climate change, future climate change, on agriculture in the southwest United States? Very specific, okay? And that, if you wrap your hands around it that way, you can maybe make some progress. But I would say that to deny global warming and not do anything about it, it’s getting us closer and closer to the precipice. And we have to – when I talk about this in my class – I say, well, if somebody told you that, you know, you have a risk, perhaps, of heart attack because, you know, some markers or some things in your family history. And you say, well, doctor, you have not proven that I’m going to have a heart attack. And of course, the doctor cannot prove that you’re going to have a heart attack. But would you go around foolishly doing the same things that you were doing before if you knew that, well, there is a little bit of higher probability in my case that probably there will be a heart attack, okay? Then maybe I should exercise. Maybe I should not eat this many fats, you know, polyunsaturated fats and all of that. Or I should really not eat so much fried food or maybe cut down a little bit on the consumption of meat or whatever, whatever you favor.
Rick: If there’s a chance that it’s true.
Menas: If it’s a chance, nice.
Rick: The implications of it panning out are so catastrophic.
Menas: Exactly.
Rick: That we – and you know, it’s like –
Menas: And irreversible, irreversible. That’s the thing.
Rick: And you know, as some people point out, it doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not. Of course, it matters. But the argument doesn’t have to be resolved because the solutions to it are so economically exciting and technologically exciting and would produce such a better world for us anyway that we ought to make a moonshot effort to implement them and –
Menas: Yeah, absolutely.
Rick: – do all we can to get renewable technologies to the forefront.
Menas: Right. So here’s – I just read that yesterday – here’s again a situation where us versus them, rather us together. So the us versus them is the U.S. and China. And I’m not going to take either point of view here. But they are producing 50% of the –
Rick: Oh, the pollution?
Menas: – the carbon dioxide, you know, that is released by burning fossil fuels and burning. 25% to 95% more or less. Actually, China has just surpassed the U.S. Okay. So even though the two main culprits, they violently disagree with each other about what to do about it. Okay. Come on, guys. And now they actually, in terms of the U.N. framework, right, they are saying, no, the U.N. framework says something completely different. The Chinese will say, well, it doesn’t put the blame or the onus on the developing nations, but it puts it on the developed nations or the industrial nations. And the U.S. rightly says, well, you know, but this is not a static situation. Things have really changed. And now you still have – you know, the Chinese are producing a lot more pollution than they used to. Clearly, both sides are right. And of course, now they are beginning to say, well, maybe we should just talk to each other directly. Okay. You guys just talk to each other. So rather than posturing and all of that. But a lot of these problems, the scientific problems, have become political problems and then become posturing problems. And then Congress –
Rick: What –
Menas: – and then Congress gets involved and then –
Rick: Yeah, right. And most of them don’t even understand science.
Menas: Right.
Rick: But, you know, what puts this discussion in the context of this whole interview is that if you, you know, you have this sort of irresolvable conflict going on on one level. If you step it up to the bigger picture –
Menas: Right.
Rick: – then our competition should not be over bickering over who’s producing the most carbon. It should be over, you know, who can sort of succeed in the race to find, you know, environmentally friendly technologies. And if the U.S. were to succeed, for instance, we’d be selling those to China.
Menas: Right. Right.
Rick: So we’d win.
Menas: We’ll make like bandits. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. But instead the fossil fuel industry controls the Congress and so most of the Congress doesn’t even believe that global warming is real and on and on we go.
Menas: Right.
Rick: But there’s hope. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Menas: Well, there’s hope at the end of the tunnel because, in fact, human beings are human beings and people are now – in fact, what may turn things around in China is that people are gasping for air.
Rick: They can’t breathe.
Menas: They can’t breathe. You look at those pictures of Shanghai or Beijing, you know, and people –
Rick: They’re all wearing masks.
Menas: – they’re all wearing masks and people are now becoming very upset. They say, “Hey, you know, who told you that I – “, okay, I mean, the government there never said, “Oh, it’s one or the other.” You know, you’re either going to gas to death or you’re going to have economic development. If they put it that way, people say, “Well, I’m not really sure about that. Do you really want to do that?” You know, again, it’s not a black and white issue, but, you know, of course, they’re trying to develop economically. It’s all of that, but it all has to be done within the right context again.
Rick: Yeah. There it is. Here we go. There’s a quote from the Gita, Chapter 4, Verse 7 and 8. Lord Krishna says, “Whenever Dharma, the power which sustains evolution, is in decay and a Dharma flourishes, then I create myself to protect the righteous and destroy the wicked. I establish Dharma firmly. I take birth age after age.” And the way I would interpret this in the light of this conversation is not that the blue guy is going to come back and walk around, but that there will be and is actually already an upsurge of spiritual substance, to quote this fellow from your book that I quoted earlier, spiritual presence in the world that is reaching epidemic proportions and perhaps even a tipping point, just as much as climate change is reaching a tipping point, and that it’s nature’s response to counterbalance a dire situation. And that again speaks to the fact that this is not a mechanistic universe, it’s an intelligent one.
Menas: Right, right. Okay, sounds good.
Rick: Sounds good.
Menas: Sounds good. I think those are good words to end our discussion.
Rick: Alrighty. Well, thanks. Let me make a few concluding remarks of a general nature. So I’ve been speaking with Menas Kafatos, I hope I pronounced that right. I’m not sure I’m getting it right.
Menas: Kafatos
Rick: Kafatos?
Menas: Okay.
Rick: And this is part of an ongoing series of interviews. There are 220-something of them now, and they can all be found at batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. You’ll find there an alphabetical index, a chronological index, a discussion group about each interview, a button to click if you’d like to donate, a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, a bunch of other things. So that’s that. And if you’d like to see Menas, hear him speak, he’ll be at the Science and Nonduality Conference in San Jose in the fall. You’re going again, right?
Menas: Yes.
Rick: And I’ll be there as well. I’ll have one big happy reunion. It’s a lot of fun. So thanks for listening or watching.
Menas: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you Rick.
Rick: Yeah. And we’ll see you all next week. Oh, one other thing that’s on the site, which I forgot to mention, there’s a link to click to subscribe to this as an audio podcast if you’d like to just listen and not see our pretty faces. All right. Thanks.
Menas: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Rick: See you later. Bye.
Menas: Bye-bye. Thank you.