April 17, 2013

You Are a Crest on the Surface of the Ocean of Potentiality.

Quote.

When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.

It seems that we are proceeding from one scandalous claim to another. First we are being asked to believe that our personal potential is part of a cosmic potentiality. Then we are asked to believe that the cosmic potentiality is a field of invisible states, like ghosts, but real ghosts to which we owe our existence.

And now, we are supposed to believe that all the separate things and all people of this world are somehow connected in this invisible field: ordinary things such as the table I write on and the furniture in your home, your grandmother and a shepherd in Anatolia – all of us belong to the realm of the One and are interconnected in it. Give me a break! The choice of words here is echoing what Einstein had to say about the empty forms and potentiality waves of quantum theory: Always ready to make fun of them, he called them fields of ghosts. This shows that he took them seriously, or he wouldn’t have wasted any time on them.

Let’s deal first with the possible interconnectedness of seemingly separate things. You can think about this in the following way. If you’ve ever fl own over an ocean or large body of water, sometimes, when the weather is right, you can see some white patches on the water below: tiny white dots that suddenly appear, like out of nothing, move around, one this way, one that way, and fade out of existence again. It is really a beautiful sight and a fascinating play of forms, and it is easily understood: The white patches are the crests of waves in the agitated ocean. Now, here is the interesting thing: You can’t see these waves, because you are too far up; you can see only the crests. But you have no doubt that waves are there— you may even say that you know it— and if anybody tried to tell you that the white spots on the water were some sort of big white fish, you would not believe it. Furthermore, when you see how each of the patches is going its own way and couldn’t care less about what the others are doing, you can’t be fooled into thinking that the waves are isolated and independent appearances, because you just know that the waves in an ocean aren’t independent but conjoined in one giant movement of the whole.

This is a useful experience, because now, when you look out into the world and see the things and people around you, you will not be fooled into thinking they are separate and independent appearances because you know that they are the patches on the surface of an agitated ocean: the ocean of potentiality. In this nonmaterial ocean, which seems alive and more mindlike than thinglike, the waves constantly build up to new empirical possibilities and perhaps even to new forms of thinking that may find consciousness in a human mind. After each transition from “the possible to the factual,” as one of the great pioneers of quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg, described it, the evolution of “tendencies or possibilities” for future actual events starts anew, but now from a different starting point than before, so that the universe is evolving.

Physicist Hans- Peter Dürr, longtime coworker of Heisenberg’s, has called this a learning process. With the experiences that it makes through us, the cosmic potentiality is learning. It constantly manifests and reabsorbs. There is a continuous fl ux from the evolution of tendencies to their actualizations— empirical events— and from empirical events to new tendencies. Each new state of potentiality carries in it, like a stigma, the memory of the last state. You are a white crest on the surface of this ocean.

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  1. Nobuaki Yokokawa

    I can't contents wrote English.

  2. Marie Maher

    just purchased Infinite Potential, eager to read

  3. Jakki Blough

    Way to go Dr. Schafer... From a previous student

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