I was telling you in the previous episode that one of the things that attracted me to shamanism and esotericism was the possibility of obtaining magical protections against the dangers of life. Well, another motivation I had was the fascination with the unknown. Since I was a child I always liked science fiction stories, particularly those having to do with hidden dimensions or supernatural powers. Perhaps I sensed that those stories had to come from something real, that there surely were phenomena beyond what science could comprehend, and when I had my first experience with yagé, I knew I was right. I had experienced something totally supernatural firsthand, so how could I not decide to unravel all those mysteries and see how far the power of magic could really reach.
If you have followed the story of my spiritual path in this podcast, you will have already realized that although I lived many episodes that could be considered magical, they all happened within the field of phenomena of the mind. It could also be that the things I experienced, and that most users of psychoactives experience, are the manifestation of other dimensions, contacts with spiritual beings or even with extraterrestrial intelligences, but the truth is that whatever the origin, it can only be perceived with the mind and does not seem to have any effect on the material world, unless it is through the physical actions we carry out in it.
I cannot deny that this meant a slight frustration, because I imagined that sitting with wisdom keepers of the jungle, the Muiscas and the Sierra Nevada, I would manage to have those experiences they describe as traveling to other dimensions with full consciousness, or perhaps achieve miraculous healings or things like that. But on the other hand, as I have told up to now, in addition to everything I still have to narrate, I did have many mystical experiences, although, as I said, none that went beyond what can be associated with phenomena of the mind.
What happened then was that I stopped seeking supernatural experiences and became increasingly interested in the phenomena of nature that most people do not know about and that can be as interesting and surprising, or even much more so, than the supposed paranormal powers that esotericism, but above all occultism, promises.
Today I want to talk about some of these phenomena, which are real and have been proven by science, and I am going to put them in parallel with examples of paranormal phenomena that greatly excite magic apprentices but which, unfortunately, or rather fortunately, are pure human inventions.
The first phenomenon I discovered, and which for a good while led me to read articles and watch a good number of science communication videos, was the famous double-slit experiment of quantum physics. This is a real quantum physics experiment that I learned about, curiously, through a metaphysical theory; perhaps you remember the book The Secret, which was much talked about back in 2008, in which the author Rhonda Byrne describes something she calls a universal law called “the law of attraction”.
Do you believe in the law of attraction? How do you think it works? The theory of this law is very simple; it states that human beings have the ability to attract to ourselves everything that vibrates with the mental state we are in. In other words, if we have positive thoughts, we will attract positive things, and if we have negative thoughts, we will attract negative things.
This is something that metaphysics in general, and in particular a 1952 book called “The Power of Positive Thinking”, had already addressed, but the novelty of The Secret was that it hinted that the law of attraction, more than a psychological concept, was a natural law, comparable to gravity or thermodynamics.
Then, I think it was that same year or a year later, taking advantage of the success of The Secret, a documentary called “What the Bleep do We Know” became popular. This documentary went even further than The Secret and proposed that many concepts of spirituality and metaphysics had already been endorsed by scientific experiments, especially in the field of quantum physics.
One of these experiments shown in the documentary was precisely the double-slit experiment, which has recently been widely used by New Age practitioners to “prove” that consciousness has power over matter. At first I thought the documentary was right, and the truth is it is rather complicated to understand why it is not so, but I am going to try to explain it. Perhaps you will remember from physics class in school that light behaves as a particle and as a wave. We know it is made up of particles called photons, but that the way it propagates through space works like a wave, in which frequency is what generates the colors in visible light or the differences between infrared and ultraviolet.
The thing is that the same applies to any other quantum particle, such as electrons, protons or neutrons. Quantum refers to anything that has this dual wave-particle behavior. The double-slit experiment consists of firing a beam of electrons, similar to the one emitted inside one of those old cathode-ray televisions, and smashing it against a plate in which two thin slits had previously been made. Since the electron beam is not like a laser but rather like the beam of light from a flashlight, the electrons divide between the two slits and are projected onto the back of the room where the experiment is done.
The result that would be obtained if the electron beam were a stream of particles would be that two lines parallel to the two slits would be projected on the wall. However, since quantum particles propagate as waves, what is obtained is an interference pattern, that is, a series of bars of different thicknesses, similar to those that would be obtained if, instead of shooting electrons through the air, we threw a stone into a pond with the two slits under the water. The waves would cancel each other out and cut-off waves would arrive at the other end. I know this is difficult to visualize, so I included an image of the experiment on the podcast page. I also left the address of a YouTube video in which they explain how to do this experiment at home with a microscope and a laser: Double-slit experiment – homemade version.
This experiment is not new; it was invented in 1801 by the British scientist Thomas Young, who intended to prove that light indeed propagates as a wave. The problem is that many years later, when we had the technology to manipulate and detect individual quantum particles, the experiment was repeated to “see” the electrons passing through the slits. What the scientists wondered was how the electrons canceled each other out to form the interference pattern. So they repeated the experiment, but firing electron by electron and with a system that detected when the electron passed through one slit and when through the other. They started the system and, oh surprise! The electron gun and the electron detectors worked perfectly, but the interference pattern disappeared and, instead, the two bands of electrons appeared on the back screen, just as would be expected if electrons were particles.
I imagine that the physicists who did the experiment for the first time checked the whole setup 10 times and found no problem. Then, just to see what would happen, they removed the sensors from the slits but left everything else the same. They repeated the experiment and, voilà! The interference pattern appeared again.
This experiment has been repeated hundreds of times by scientists all over the world and the result is always the same: if any type of detector is placed — they have even placed cameras with electron microscopes — the interference pattern disappears. If it is removed, it appears again. It is as if the electrons knew whether they are being watched or not. If they are being watched, they behave as particles; if not, they behave as waves.
This was the reason why metaphysicians and New Age spiritualists all over the world came out to celebrate that it had been proven that consciousness determines the behavior of matter. That is what the documentary “What the Bleep do We Know” uses to demonstrate that if we think positive things, we can change reality to make them come true. Unfortunately, or as I always say, fortunately, because otherwise who knows how we would have already used such power, this is not so.
The truth is that it is very, very difficult to understand why the double-slit experiment does not prove that the observers' consciousness modifies in any way the way photons or electrons behave. The fact is that if the sensors are left running and the scientists leave the experiment room, when they come back they find the two parallel bands, and if they leave them off, when they come back they find the interference pattern. That is to say, it does not matter whether there is a human observer or not. The pseudoscientists then say that the electron knows they are going to look at the result later, so it decides whether to behave one way or the other, but then we already begin to realize that what matters to them is not understanding reality, but bending it to fit their beliefs.
There are several theories of what happens, and again, it is very complicated to understand for those of us who did not study physics. In any case, the phenomenon that occurs when sensors are present is known as the collapse of the wave function. This phenomenon only affects quantum objects and occurs because these particles, unlike the objects we can see, do not have a fixed position in space but exist in a limited region at the same time. That is, they propagate like a sea wave, which does not exist at a single point but simultaneously spreads from the open sea until it crashes against the beach in many places at once. In quantum mechanics, however, it is not that the particle is torn apart and distributed in many places, but that it exists in all places and in no place at the same time. What varies from one point to another is the probability that it is in that place or not. So, when the interference pattern appears on the wall, what we are really seeing is the probability that the electron was at each of those points. Mathematically it can be shown that this probability cancels out at some points, just as happens with waves when they overlap.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, what happens when sensors are added to the double-slit experiment is that the electron's probabilistic wave function collapses at a single point in space, forced by its interaction with a complex system, which would be the one formed by the experiment with the sensor. Something like quantum objects not manifesting in the reality of spacetime until they have to, in order to make sense of the reality around them.
Here we already realize that the result of the experiment does have something metaphysical about it anyway, although not necessarily related to human consciousness. Now, according to the metaphysicians, they say that we can control the collapse of the wave function of everything in the physical world, since we function as sensors and everything is made up of quantum particles.
The problem with that claim is that, although it is true that everyone and everything is built with quantum particles, when trillions of quantum particles come together, the probability of their wave functions combines, and there are so many that the probabilities begin to tend toward their absolute values by sheer brute force. In other words, it is like when you roll a die: while the die is in the air, it does not yet have an absolute value; it only has a 1/6 probability of landing on 1, 1/6 of landing on 2, and so on. When it falls, the probability function of the die collapses upon interacting with the floor and it is “revealed” which number it is.
However, if you roll a trillion dice at once, there are so many, so many, that if you counted how many landed on each of the 6 faces, you would surely find that 16.67% landed on 1, 16.67% on 2, 16.67% on 3, and so on with all the faces up to 6. This is proven by probability mathematics but also by experimentation. You can even do the experiment yourself: roll a die 10 times and write down how many times it landed on 1, how many on 2, how many on 3, and so on up to 6. You will see that maybe it lands 3 times on 3, 4 times on 2, once on 1, once on 5 and the last one on 6. In any case, you will see that it is possible that it never lands on some value or that it lands many times on another. However, if you repeat this experiment with 100 rolls and write down how many times it landed on each number, you will see how it approaches the ideal of an equal number of times per face. It is still likely that you will find one number that repeats more than the rest, but as you can imagine, if you do it 1 trillion times, you will achieve perfect equity.
For this same reason, the quantum probabilities of each electron of each atom of our body and of the rest of physical matter combine in such a way that we will never experience a wave function collapse no matter how many sensors they put on us. For this same reason, objects at our scale cannot experience other strange phenomena of subatomic particles either, such as the tunnel effect, in which particles disappear on one side of a physical barrier and immediately appear on the other side without having passed through the barrier, or quantum entanglement, in which the quantum state of one particle becomes entangled with that of another particle of the same system, and no matter how far the particles separate, even light-years apart, they will always collapse simultaneously.
It is evident that such things do not happen in our physical world, but that has not stopped many pseudoscientists from saying that human beings can use the power of the mind to walk through walls using the tunnel effect of our atoms, or create spiritual connections with another person to become “quantumly entangled” and be able to feel what the other feels regardless of distance.
As I told before, at first I let myself get excited about the possibilities of quantum physics within spirituality, and I have to admit that at some point I was one of those pseudoscientists who proclaimed that the double-slit experiment demonstrated that we can modify reality with our minds. However, when I studied enough and kept delving into the subject, there came a moment when, despite my disappointment, I had to accept that there was no relationship between positive thinking or mental visualization and quantum mechanics.
I also think that science communicators have failed to explain the consequences of the experiment in a simple way so that no one can take advantage of how strange the quantum world is to confuse and, in many cases, defraud people who want to believe in the balance between spirituality and science but do not have the time or the motivation to research such a complicated topic on their own.
Now we see healers everywhere supposedly using “quantum medicine”, “quantum therapies”, “quantum healing”, or seers who have been telling us for decades that we are about to take a “quantum leap”, or mediums who say they use quantum mechanics to communicate with the dead. All of this is what some call the “quantum fairy tale”.
I said I felt a slight frustration when I realized that, despite my desire for it to be true, the double-slit experiment does not prove at all that consciousness has any effect on the quantum world. However, this does not mean that consciousness is something trivial or that it has no relevance from the point of view of physics. Currently there are many scientists testing theories about the nature of consciousness, and in fact this is an important part of the science behind artificial intelligence. Michio Kaku, the famous Japanese-American science communicator, says that consciousness is not an exclusively human phenomenon but exists at many levels, and among those levels a motion sensor would meet the necessary characteristics to be recognized a minimum level of consciousness. A word processor like Microsoft Word would have a much higher level of consciousness, and Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa an even higher one, although far from the level of human or even animal consciousness.
For the elders of the jungle, everything has Spirit, which is another way of saying that everything has consciousness, so this could be a point of convergence between physics and ancestrality, although for now that is only an intriguing possibility.
And the truth is that there are still many phenomena for which science has not found a definitive explanation, and some of the possible solutions to those enigmas are truly more interesting and surprising than the pseudoscientific theories many are content with. On the other hand, there are many pseudoscientific theories that are already completely discarded by science and yet keep being recycled from time to time to distract the unwary and move them away from true spirituality. This is the case of theories such as the planet Hercobulus, the photon belt, the fifth dimension and the inversion of the Earth's polarity (although this last one is based on a real phenomenon, but very different from what the New Age promotes).
I say there are possibilities that science still seriously considers and that are fascinating, such as the case of the second possible explanation of the double-slit experiment. It is another interpretation of quantum mechanics and is known as the many-worlds interpretation. It is a solution to the problem of the wave function collapse proposed by the American mathematician and physicist Hugh Everett III. It is also known as the parallel universes interpretation, and what it suggests is that at the moment when the electron's function apparently collapses, that is, it “decides” to pass through one slit or the other, what really happens is that the whole universe collapses into one possible state of the previous cloud of probabilities, and from that moment it becomes a bifurcation of reality in which the electron took that path; but then, there will be another parallel universe in which the electron took the alternative path. If this is so, it would mean that every time an event happens anywhere in the Universe, in which the outcome of the event depends on the superposition of two quantum states, the whole Universe bifurcates into an alternative reality, but the other reality continues to exist in parallel, although undetectably, to our reality.
Another famous experiment, although in this case a mental one, related to the wave function is that of Schrödinger's cat. A thought experiment imagined by the Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Starting from the double-slit experiment, Schrödinger imagined putting a cat inside a box with a radioactive isotope with a 50% probability of decaying and 50% of not decaying, and a detector that would break a capsule with poison only if the isotope decays and therefore radiation is detected, even if it is from a single atom. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, since it depends on a quantum state, that is, whether the isotope decays or not, after a while the states “isotope decays” and “isotope does not decay” would be superposed, meaning the detector would become entangled with the isotope and the cat, and therefore the states “cat alive” and “cat dead” would be superposed. Only upon opening the box would the wave function collapse and the cat would adopt one of the two states: alive or dead.
This experiment, obviously, has never actually been carried out, first because it would be very cruel — although, to be frank, science has spared little animal suffering — and second, because the experiment makes no sense: the cat and the meter belong to the domain of traditional macro mechanics, and as we saw in the explanation of the double-slit experiment, even if no one looks inside the box, the mere fact that the meter is there would make the wave function collapse, so the cat would be alive unless the isotope decays. Schrödinger knew this because he did not propose the experiment seriously but as a way to mock the Copenhagen interpretation, with which he disagreed.
However, once again, our pseudoscientist friends have taken Schrödinger's experiment as true and use it to “prove” strange things such as that life and death always go together and I don't know what else. In any case, if the many-worlds interpretation were true, at the moment the isotope decays, the cat would die in that reality, but simultaneously a new parallel reality, or parallel universe, would be created in which the isotope did not decay and the cat kept on living and kicking.
Theoretical physicists have several theories that involve multiple universes. The many-worlds interpretation is only one; there is also string theory, in which quantum particles would actually be manifestations in three-dimensional spacetime of the vibration of strings that traverse 11 dimensions, that is, 8 dimensions more than the 3 of space and time. There is also the theory that inside black holes, all the matter absorbed by the hole creates a singularity that gives rise to a new Universe that would exist inside that hole, possibly with different physical laws. If that is so, then the most likely thing is that the Big Bang was the singularity of a black hole inside which our entire Universe would be, and from which we could not escape with the known physical laws.
Finally there would be the simulation theory, which you may have heard recently because Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said he believed the most likely thing is that we inhabit a simulation. According to this theory, popularized by the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, if with current technology we have achieved the level of realism in games and virtual reality, with barely 60 years of computing development, then a hypothetical hyper-advanced civilization with thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years of technological development would probably be capable of simulating an exact copy of physical reality and also simulating conscious beings to inhabit it. If this is so, taking into account that in a Universe with billions of Stars and potentially thousands of civilizations that reach this level of technological advancement, there would be many more simulations of reality than physical reality — of which there would only be one. Therefore, there is a greater chance that we inhabit one of thousands of simulations than the only material reality.
This theory also opens the door not only to the possibility that multiple universes exist, in this case simulated ones, but also to the possibility, almost a certainty in that case, that each universe would have a being or a group of beings with the power to shut down the simulation and potentially to alter it and affect the lives of the conscious beings inhabiting it. In other words, the simulation theory opens the door to the existence of God, or rather of Gods, since almost certainly there would be many more of them than possible universes.
Well, I am going to leave this journey through theoretical science here. If you felt confused by some of the concepts I shared today, I hope you at least understood on a general level what the theories we talked about are about. My goal with all these stories has been to show you two things: the first is that real science can be more interesting than pseudoscience. If you compare the theories I talked about here with the New Age theories you may have heard, I think you will agree with me that they are not so complex and bewildering, but rather tend to be too simple and generic.
This brings me to the second goal I hope to have fulfilled: that you realize that science is complex. I am an engineer and I have been informally studying these topics for at least 7 years, and I assure you I am very, very far from the level of understanding that any newly graduated physics or astrophysics student has. All these concepts I have mentioned are considered possible by physics, not because physicists with a diploma invented them, but because each of these theories is supported by advanced and complex mathematics that respects all known laws of physics, makes reasonable assumptions within the range of the possible, and has been verified by many other scientists who do not make the effort to believe but, on the contrary, do everything possible to destroy the theory, and only when they give up and accept that the theory is solid, its mathematics is incontrovertible and the assumptions have not yet been discredited, then it is considered a viable scientific theory.
During my years with the Muiscas, more than once I sat with tobacco in hand to talk about these topics with elders and other walkers, and many times we began to speculate about the nature of reality, the Universe and consciousness. Suddenly we would agree that something made sense, and from there we would begin to talk about the new theory as if it were a revealed ancestral truth. We said it was information that had been given to us from “above”, and surely many of those who listened to us believed that it was so. Well, today I take that word back, so that when you hear about those mystical epiphanies, you know where they come from and draw your own conclusions.
My recommendation, as always, is that we honor and respect the field of knowledge of science, which is all that cosmos that surrounds us, and that we dedicate ourselves to the spiritual exploration of all that cosmos we have under our skin. It is here that the inner worlds exist, heaven and hell, the astral plane, and that is the way spirituality and science are balanced.