Reality Can`t Be Denied.

More often than not they were overwhelmed by their own findings, and they tried to deny their implications or explain them away. But that is the thing about reality: It is what it is and it can’t be denied. Niels Bohr, for example, the twentieth- century Danish physicist to whom we owe the understanding of the structure of atoms, brushed aside the strange aspects of the quantum world by claiming that they had nothing to say about what reality really is.

It is wrong to believe, or so he argued, that our experience of the world can tell us what the world is like. If you wanted to put his argument in a nutshell, you might say that you have no experience of things, but only of your experience of things. Thus, watching the world can tell you nothing about what the world is like. If your observations don’t make any sense, just forget about them. If you think about it, this view isn’t so stupid. Crying foul when it comes to the correspondence between the experience of things and the nature of things makes a lot of sense.

The objects around you, for example, are not like the light waves that bounce off of them and hit your eyes and make you see them. Similarly, the sensation of heat is not of the nature of heat. In physics, heat is motion. The atoms in things are constantly in motion. When a thing is hot, its atoms move faster than when it is cold. When you put a pot of water on a hot plate, you accelerate its molecules. Nevertheless, nobody has offered his or her mother- in- law a cup of freshly brewed tea and heard her scream out, “Ouch, too fast,” when she burned her mouth. The experience of hot and cold isn’t of fast and slow.

And so it goes, Niels Bohr said, with all experience: It tells us nothing about the essence of things. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicists of all times, wasn’t a friend of quantum physics, either. He had a kind of reasonable, commonsense view of the world that didn’t mesh well with the quantum theory. Throughout his life Einstein claimed that there was something wrong with this theory. Since he couldn’t deny its technical successes and its precision in predicting the outcome of measurements, he accused it of being incomplete; something, he said, was missing. Once the missing links, or “hidden variables,” were found, reality would be “reasonable” again. Einstein was an inspired man and not often off the mark. As it turns out, something is, indeed, missing in the world of atoms and molecules. However, whatever it is that is missing isn’t missing in the theory; it is missing in the visible reality. The problem isn’t that the theory is incomplete. The problem is that the visible surface of things is incomplete because it has little to say about the nonempirical realm of reality, where the cosmic potentiality has its home. Einstein’s protests, Bohr’s skepticism, and the qualms and raised eyebrows of many other pioneers couldn’t fix the formalism of quantum theory or stop its triumphs; the harder they tried, the more they discovered outrageous aspects of the physical reality. The specific forms that quantum physics had to adopt to describe the states of potentiality are waveforms. This formalism implies that the things we see in the world aren’t made up of material particles, but of waves; and that the universe is an ocean of waves— not waves of matter or energy, but nonmaterial, invisible waves in the realm of potentiality.

There are indications that these waves are hanging together like the water waves in an ocean, so that the nature of the cosmic potentiality is that of an indivisible wholeness— some call it the One— in which all things and people are interconnected. The things that you see in the world are somehow actualizations of waves; they are emanations out of the One.

We mustn’t forget that nobody can tell what is going on in the realm of potentiality and what its forms are. When we say that we can think that the realm of potentiality consists of waves, we mean that its interactions with the visible world show the properties of waves.

Find out more about Lothar Schafer's book Infinite Potential!