what about these GREAT THINKERS, WICCAN?
are they great?
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12. Physics
by L. James Hammond
© L. James Hammond 2008
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Physics and the Occult There is a striking agreement between modern physics and modern philosophy/psychology. To summarize modern physics is to review the ideas weve discussed earlier in this book; instead of calling this chapter Physics, I could have called it Summary of the Previous Chapters.
In an earlier chapter, I wrote,
Mind and matter overlap; there is no pure spirit, divorced from matter, and there is no dead matter, lacking all spirit and energy. The whole universe is suffused with energy, with a kind of consciousness.
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This conclusion was based on philosophy and psychology, but it agrees with the conclusions of physics. Einsteins famous equation, e=mc2, says that there is enormous energy in all matter. Mass is only a form of energy.... Even the tiniest, the very tiniest particle of matter has within it a tremendous amount of concentrated energy.
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But Einsteins theory isnt the only way in which modern science confirms what I wrote earlier; quantum mechanics also confirms it.
The astounding discovery awaiting newcomers to physics is that the evidence gathered in the development of quantum mechanics indicates that subatomic particles constantly appear to be making decisions! More than that, the decisions they seem to make are based on decisions made elsewhere. Subatomic particles seem to know
instantaneously what decisions are made elsewhere, and elsewhere can be as far away as another galaxy! ....The central mystery of quantum theory, wrote Henry Stapp, is, How does information get around so quick? ....The philosophical implication of quantum mechanics is that all of the things in our universe (including us) that appear to exist independently are actually parts of one all-encompassing organic pattern, and that no parts of that pattern are ever really separate from it or from each other.
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Stapps question, How does information get around so quick? is also a key question in occult studies. If someone is killed in a car accident in New York, and their mother, who is in California, senses that something is wrong with them, the question arises, How does information get around so quick? One wonders if physicists like Stapp realized that students of the occult were asking the same questions they were asking. Physics is merging with philosophy/psychology, just as Western thought is merging with Eastern thought. Are we on the brink of a grand synthesis a philosophy that will unite the sciences and the humanities, West and East?
How does information get around so quick in the world of subatomic particles, and in the human world? It seems that particles and people can exert some sort of influence from a distance (action-at-a-distance). Newton was a rational thinker who sought clear causes and effects, hence he angrily rejected the possibility of action-at-a-distance:
That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.
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Newton tried to show that the whole universe was like a pool table, with objects influencing each other by their momentum and contact. Now, however, physicists are finding that a ball on one pool table can influence a ball on a different table, without coming into contact with it. Newtons mechanical worldview is breaking down, and the old concept of action-at-a-distance is coming back into favor.
How does information get around so quick? How can particles know what other particles are doing? Some physicists are reaching for Jungs concept of synchronicity.
5 Physicists are unable to explain quantum phenomena in physical terms, Newtonian terms, so theyre reaching out to psychology, to the occult, for explanations. Theyre reaching out to an acausal principle (synchronicity). Theyre moving away from the bedrock of rational-scientific thinking: causality. (Wouldnt Newton be horrified?) Niels Bohr said that quantum mechanics entails, the necessity of a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.
6 Newtons world is crumbling!
Heres an experiment that troubles Newtonians: two paired particles, with opposite spin, are sent in opposite directions. The spin of one of the particles is changed. The other particles spin also changes, at the same instant, without any apparent cause.
Somehow the particle traveling in area B knows that its twin in area A is spinning
right instead of
up and so it spins
left instead of
down. In other words,
what we did in area A... affected what happened in area B. This strange phenomenon is known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) effect.... Physicists realized that this peculiar situation raises a critical question: How can two of anything communicate so quickly?
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Conversations With Great Thinkers: Physics