The Body Eclectic (Part One)

Let's get together to fight this Holy Armagiddyon (One Love!)
So when the Man comes there will be no, no doom (One Song!)
Have pity on those whose chances grows t'inner
There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation - Bob Marley

An occasional guilty pleasure of mine is lurking on Democratic Underground's board of liberal "skeptics" of the Amazing Randi school. Some fascinating glimpses there of a kind of orphaned rationalism running scared. For instance, proudly alerting a moderator on the posting of CNN's Charlie Sheen poll results. ("I hate reading what passes for logic - It must be fun to live in their world.") My current favourite comment is this one:

I rue the day that the woo-woos discovered the term "quantum physics." It's become their catch-all phrase that they can apply to anything in order to imbue whatever idiocy they're on about with a veneer of scientific validity.

Naturally, skeptics who pride themselves on their scientific method would like to keep the "woo-woos" in Newtonian blinders, because the science has turned uncomfortably weird for those who mean to interpret the world by it. Quantum physics challenges, both in fact and by metaphor, too many assumptions of their classical method. Even 20th Century giants of mind without a stake in keeping the woo-woos down on the tinfoil farm abhored its inclination to demolish commonsense. Einstein called it, disparagingly, "spooky action at a distance", and even Schrödinger regretted ever having let his cat out of the box. ("I do not like it, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it.")

Niels Bohr, on the other hand, said "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." Since my McCoy-like disclosure goes something like I'm a blogger, Jim, not a theoretical physicist, I can't pretend that I understand it. That's the price of a humanities education, though I'm trying to make up for it. But science isn't the first, the only, nor even the best way to encounter the world. And while I find the implications of the physics shocking, I'm not surprised by them, since I'd already drawn the provisional conclusion that the universe is one damn weird place.

Whatever it is we do that gets labelled "conspiracy theory" needs to be interdisciplinary, because power, which is our real subject, is itself boundary-defying. Politics, we know, is a category of insufficent weight to account for the rulers of this world. "Deep Politics" is better, though while the depth may be right, the breadth is too narrow. Wherever there are means to power there will be attempts made by the already powerful to restrict access, reclassify knowledge and extend their own authority by secrecy and disinformation. And there are means to power everywhere, even in what was until recently, and is still popularly, regarded as the interstellar void. Because they are all aspects of the same power.

To my understanding, this is the significance of Zero Point: the subatomic is not best imagined as discrete, bouncing billiard balls, but as an ocean of quantum energy in perpetual flux. Einstein's "spooky action" doesn't actually happen at a true distance, but it's no less spooky, since at the quantum level Everything is Connected. (As Becker and Selden wrote 20 years ago in The Body Electric, "Every time you use your toaster, the fields around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so slightly.")

If the quantum flux could be tapped it would be a source of unimaginable power, able to bend space-time to the speed of thought and defy gravity, which Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov first suggested was not a force in its own right but rather a residual effect of zero point fluctuations caused by the presence of matter, or rather greater densities of charge. As we've seen, the ever-spooky Hal Puthoff, formerly of the NSA and naval intelligence, moved from SRI's remote viewing program into to zero point research. Puthoff claims "the evidence is pretty solid" that something is already happening, beyond theory, in the black budget world. (Free and virtually limitless energy might be alright for some, think the some with a means to power. As I wrote in January, "If the G-Engines are coming, they've probably already arrived. And they're not meant for the likes of us.")

But the implications of zero point extend further than its energy applications, no matter how revolutionary, to consciousness itself: back to Puthoff's remote viewing research and beyond.

Despite statistical results which far exceeded chance, the CIA was determined to stamp "failure" upon remote viewing, and even military occultist Michael Aquino felt compelled to call it an"eyeball roller". It's often better, for those who guard power's secrets, to be popularized as miserable failures. And the secret of remote viewing, and it's power, is not the projection of sight, but the connectedness of the viewer, at the level of quanta and code, to everything else in the universe.

Lynne McTaggart writes in The Field that Puthoff, considering how remote viewing might be possible, saw that it "argued strongly [for] a quantum, nonlocal effect":

With practice, people could enlarge their brain's receiving mechanisms to gain access to information stored in the Zero Point Field. This giant cryptogram, continually encoded with every atom in the universe, held all the information of the world - every sight and sound and smell. When remote viewers were "seeing" a particular scene, their minds weren't actually somehow transported to the scene. What they were seeing was the information that [had been] encoded in quantum fluctuation.... In a sense, the field allowed us to hold the whole universe inside us. Those good at remote viewing weren't seeing anything invisible to all the rest of us. All they were doing was dampening down the other distractions.

Hold the universe inside us. Imagine what would happen if the woo-woos ever found out about that. Imagine if those with the will to power already have.