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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with our special guest Douglas Quincer. His book is called The Quantum and the Dream, Visionary Consciousness, AI and the New Renaissance. Douglas, tell me a little bit about quantum theory. What exactly is that?
Well, it's always fun to go back to what Richard Feiman, one of the most brilliant people walking the planet in the twentieth century, who was a Nobel Prize winner in quantum physics, and he said, anyone who says they understand quantum theory doesn't, which is something you'd expect from a zen master to say.
Yes.
So I'm careful to point out in my book that whenever I speak about quantum theory from a scientific viewpoint, I quote a renowned scientist and footnote the quote, because I'm not a scientist and don't have a scientific background. But I getting to before and there's a book that one of the five or six best books, most influencier books ever read. Perhaps some of your listeners have heard of it, called The Dow of Physics by Fritz Geoff Copper, who is a high level physicist, and he wrote this
in nineteen seventy five. I didn't get to it till about nineteen eighty five, and he was about to give a talk on the coast of California, and he was sitting on a bench looking out over the Pacific Ocean when suddenly, he said, for some force, some light came down from the sky and he felt the whole ocean was dancing in some kind of vibrational dance. And he said it was one of the most extraordinary mystical experiences he ever had, and that got him thinking about any
connection between science and mysticism. And he was able to interview Werner Heisenberg, who was one of the founders of quantum theory, who confirmed that not only was Werner Heisenberg fascinated by spiritual mystical wisdom, but so is Nils Boor, the father of quantum theory. So is Erwin Schrodinger, who want a Nobel prize, and so was Wilf kang Poli who I referenced before, who was fascinated by his dreams and spent twenty years working on them with Carl Jung.
So what Kappa shows in his book to Doubt physicss have sold over a million copies and has been through three printings, and Copper says in his introduction it was a real risk publishing this book because back then it was considered blasphemy to consider science would have any connection with mystical wisdom, and yet it was. Some of the key founders of quantum theory were all totally into it,
and that can't be a coincidence, okay. And the reason they are is because, as they felt, there was a true affinity and that they're their experience with their love of and their respect for mystical spiritual wisdom was one of the reasons they were able to discover what has been the most successful scientific theory of all time. And the reason that you know, we can uh talk to each other around the world on a world wide web and all sorts of things that are available because of
because of quantum physics. So there, you know, Copper felt there was a clear connection. Uh, the major founders of quantum theory felt there was a major connection between the two. And as someone interested in philosophy, which literally means the love of wisdom, unfortunately that's not the way most philosophy is taught. It's very analytical and rational. There's a place
for that. But uh, my love of philosophy is the ability to ask big questions, knowing there's no certain answer, but in knowing, exploring, you know, and stretching the mind out as much as we can. And and that's what I love about quantum theory. It's it's there are so many visionaries who are convinced that there is a clear connection between the quantum level of reality and the unconscious mind.
How far, Douglas, can we push the mind to do these amazing things that we've been doing over the years.
Well, here's a good example of what's called white hemisphere thinking, which is the part of our brain that is wired for intuition, imaginative leaps, and exploring the more mystical. Albert Einstein was named by Time magazine the Person of the Century. Tough to argue it. Einstein credits his discovery of relativity with a thought experiment he was doing at a patent office where he was working. He couldn't get a job in academia because he didn't follow the rules of academia.
And he also said, and I authenticated the quote Einstein said, my entire career is based on a dream I had when I was eleven years old. Okay, so, and it was a very simple dream. He was eleven years old. He dreamt that he was sledding down a hill, and he kept going faster and faster and faster, and as he approached the speed of light, the whole sky started
refracting in beautiful colors. And you know, as an eleven year old, he had no idea what that meant, but as an adult thinking about light, it made him think that there has to be some connection between speed and light. And then he did a thought experiment where he visualized himself in his imagination chasing a light beam. Okay, his laboratory was his mind. He did not work in a physical laboratory, and a lot of scientists during his time
had hints of relativity but couldn't get to it. They were working in sophisticated laboratories and teaching at elite universities. Einstein was working a kind of easy job at a patent office to make some money, and he would do thought experiments, and in the one where he's chasing a light beam, when he caught up to it in his imagination time stopped, and that gave him the intuition, wait a minute, maybe light is the fastest thing in the
universe and nothing can go faster than that. So between that thought experiment, the laboratory of his mind and I would call dreams are examples of our working in the laboratory of the unconscious mind. He came up with relativity before anyone else did. So you might say, well, okay, that's great, but if we do thought experiments and we look and pay attention to our dreams, we're not going
to you know, we're not going to become Einstein. But there are loads of reasons, loads of examples of people whose lives are changed by working a dream or doing thought experiments, et cetera. And if you'd like George, my second dream teacher Jeremy Taylor his favorite example of how a nightmare changed history.
What happened?
Okay, in the mid nineteenth nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had not yet really kickstarted, and a lot of engineers were trying to work on the first mechanical selling machine, and none of them could get it to work efficiently. And one of those people was Elias Howe. Elias Howe was a very rational engineer. He wasn't interested in his dreams. He wasn't doing thought experiments. But one night he falls asleep and he has the following horrific nightmare. He's being
chased in a jungle by cannibals. They capture him, they tie his hands behind his back, they leave him back to the village. They put him in a pot of water, and they light a fire under it. Okay, And as the water starts boiling, he's panicking and oh my, you know, And but he notices that the hotter the water gets, the looser the ropes finding his hands are and he gets his hands free and he reaches for the side of the pot to pull himself out, and a cannibal
takes the spear and pushes him back in. Well determined to get out and not die, he tries to get out again, and another cannibal comes in with a spirit and pushes him back in, and he wakes up in a total sweat. Now he was glad it was just a nightmare, because it seemed pretty weird. But one of the images stuck in his mind, and that was that the spear of the cannibals all had holes towards the point of the spears. He kept going holes in the plant.
Holes in the plant. Now, I'm not a sewer, but those who do people when they hand so they thread a needle through the hole which is at the base of the needle. So the people working on a mechanical sewing machine assumed, right, we all like rationality and logic, it was logical that the machine would they would have it the thread automatically through a hole in the in the base of the of the needle. None of them
would get it to work. So although it sounded crazy to Elias, how he said, hole on the points, let me try it. He got out of bed, he went to his home laboratory and he reconfigured the gear mechanism so that he could get the thread going through a hold towards the point, and he developed the first efficient
selling machine, which kicked off the whole industrial revolution. So it's fair to say, George, that all of us who have clothes on right now owe a debt of gratitude to that nightmare of Elias house.
That's amazing. He and Eli Whitney with the cotton gin right.
I don't know if that was a dream or not. But without the nightmare, it might have taken a lot longer to get a working selling machine. So the point is that there are, you know, many examples where any of us who are willing to play with our dreams. And you know we call it dream work, but really dream played because our dreams, like our imaginations, like our intuition, they like to play with us. Okay, like a zen master, you know, who loves to throw a banana peel at
you metaphorically when you think you know too much. But Jeream, my second dream teacher, wonderful man, co founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, always said, and he taught you ange for fifty years around the world. All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness, including the most horrific nightmares. They're coming as deep teachers, okay, And I loved I was listening, you know during your break that didn't you describe your show or have an
announcer to describe the show as deep in the earth. Yes, I love that, because you see, we're taught that to get aspiration, inspiration, we have to look up towards the heavens. But as the ancient spiritual teachers in Asia, New you have to go down as well. And in the contum of the dream my book, I propose that Freud's publication of the Interpretation of Dreams in the first year of the Modern Age nineteen hundred and plants discover of the quantum.
They didn't know each other, and they wouldn't seem connected. And I'm proposing throughout my book giving evidence that they are connected through a synchron that they were a synchronicity. Why because Freud and Young surpassed him. But Freud gets the credit for starting the scientific revolution and looking at
the dreams and change culture. So Freud's publication of the Interpretation of Dreams started an interest in descending into the dark creative interior of the human mind, the unconscious right, and the quantum started a huge journey into the dark creative center of the subatomic world. And are they connected well? Young and Polly thought they were a lot of the quantum theorists thought they were, and I would certainly agree with them. And we can all participate in this in
many ways. We can do it with thought experiments, and I present a number of thought experiments in my book to get people started. We can do it by keeping a notebook and writing down our dreams and contemplating them and replaying them like a movie. And the more we replay them the more. Who knows, maybe there'll be a point, you know, in the sphere, and who knows where it's going to lead. So the right hemisphere of our brain
was given to us by evolution. It's it's geographically larger than the left hemisphere, which is the more which is the part of our brain that looks for details and tries to understand the world by breaking things into smaller parts. But we were given the larger, more intricately wired right hemisphere to do thought experiments, to tap into our dreams and to explore the mystery of life. And we can't do it the left hemisphere because the left hemisphere needs to be certain about things right, And.
They are different. Are the two hemisphere different, Douglas?
Yes, And I now know that I was a totally right hemisphere person all my life, but I know the terminology. The number one expert on this is a fabulous gentleman named Ian McGilchrist, and I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing him and having talks with him, and he wrote this brilliant book called the mastard is emissary the divided brain and the making of the Western world. And he
is over seventeen hundred footnotes. So he's a psychiatrist, and he is a neurologist, and he's done deep research, and he explains the difference from an evolutionary standpoint, and he gives it an example that I think makes it easier for us to understand. It. Turns out, George, that all living organisms who have brains have a divided brain left and right. Now, evolution doesn't keep things around for a long time if they're not working, so we can understand it.
Thinking of let's say a small bird like a robin. In order for that robin to survive, it has to hunt and peck for microscopic seeds in the ground. So therefore it needs to use the part of its brain, the left hemisphere, that is very capable of focusing in on very specific details. Without that ability, it's not going to find the seeds. It's not going to survive. However, it doesn't also tune into its right hemisphere, which seems the big picture. The right hemisphere is not just focused
on something. It tries to get the whole picture. That's the part of the brain that would recognize that there's a shadow overhead, and that shadows a hawk about to come down and make the robin lunch. So a robin could have the most sophisticated left hemisphere and be really good at finding microscopic seeds. But if it doesn't have a good right hemisphere while it's eating lunch, it will become lunch. So how does that apply to us? Well, look at helene and climate change and what it's doing.
We did a brilliant job as humanity in developing marvelous technologies that we all benefit from that were primarily done by scientists and engineers looking at how to break things down into parts and being very specific in the way they're focused on things. But by not tapping into a right hemisphere, we weren't aware of the fact that our technologies generated by fossil fuel were destroying the very environment
that keeps us alive. So we need to have a much better balance between left and right hemisphere if we're going to make it through the next forty years. As climate change is accelerating at paces, computers can't even
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