of our particular consciousness....1
This is a message from a man of limitless mind, who invites us to visit the nonlocal existence beyond space and time.
WHAT WE MEAN BY NONLOCALITY
We live in a “nonlocal” reality, which is to say that we can be affected by events that are distant from our ordinary awareness. This is an alarming idea for an experimental physicist, because it means that laboratory experiments are subject to outside influences that may be beyond the scientist’s control or knowledge. In fact, the data from precognition research strongly suggest that an experiment could, in principle, be affected by a signal sent from the future! So a short answer to the question, “How is it that I can psychically describe a distant object?” is that the object is not as distant as it appears. To me, these data suggest that all of space-time is available to your consciousness, right where you are. You are always on the edge.
Nonlocality is a property of both time and space. In a vivid example of nonlocality, studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and reared apart show that the twins share striking similarities in their tastes, interests, spouses, experiences, and professions, beyond what one could reasonably ascribe to their common DNA. One famous set of twins reared far apart were both named Jim by their adoptive parents. Although they never communicated, each twin married a woman named Betty, divorced her, and then married a woman named Linda. They were both firemen, and each had felt a compulsion to build a circular white bench around a tree in his backyard just before coming to their first meeting at the University of Minnesota. I can believe that there might be fireman genes, or music genes, but I don’t believe that there are Linda genes, Betty genes, or white bench genes. This looks to me like a nonlocal telepathic connection — inexplicable, but real.2
The physics of nonlocality is fundamental to quantum theory. The most exciting research in physics today is the investigation of what physicist David Bohm calls “quantum interconnectedness,” or nonlocal correlations. This idea was first proposed in 1935 in a paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) as evidence of a “defect” in quantum theory. In this paper, Einstein called non-local correlation a “ghostly” action at a distance.3 The seeming paradox of EPR was later formulated as a mathematical proof by J. S. Bell.4 It has now been repeatedly demonstrated that two quanta of light, given off from a single source and traveling at the speed of light in opposite directions, can maintain their connection to one another. We find that such photons are affected by what happens to their twins, even many miles away. John Clauser (with Stuart Freedman) at the University of California at Berkeley, was the first to demonstrate nonlocality in the laboratory. He recently described to me his impressions of these experiments, saying, “Quantum experiments have been carried out with twin photons, electrons, atoms, and even large atomic structures such as 60-carbon-atom Bucky balls. It may be impossible to keep anything in a box anymore.”5
Bell further emphasizes: “No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.” That is to say, the measurement of the polarization of one photon determines the polarization of the other photon at its distant measurement site. This surprising coherence between distant entities is called “nonlocality” by Bell, Bohm, Clauser, and others. Physicist Henry Stapp of the University of California at Berkeley states that these quantum connections could be the “most profound discovery in all of science.”6
Einstein, of course, was correct in saying that there was a correlation between photons receding from each other at the speed of light. It seems, however, that he was mistaken in his concern about the correlation violating relativity theory, because so far it appears that it does not. That is, there is no faster-than-light signaling. EPR analysis from the 1930s, together with contemporary experiments, gives scientific support to the current view of nonlocal connectedness. My colleagues and I do not believe, however, that EPR-type correlations are, in themselves, the explanation for mind-to-mind connections, but we do think that they are an unequivocal laboratory example of the nonlocal nature of our universe. And it is this nonlocality that makes these EPR and ESP connections possible.
Data from dream research also provide convincing evidence that our minds have access to events occurring in distant places — and even into the future. The latter was demonstrated by W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time,7 in which he recorded, verified, and published his precognitive dreams, as well as by remote-viewing research performed at SRI and Princeton University. The Princeton research showed conclusively that remote viewing exists, with a departure from chance expectation of 10-10 (odds of one in ten billion). They found, from 277 formal remote viewing trials, that there is no evidence for a decrease in accuracy or reliability when looking days into the future or thousands of miles into the distance. That is, it is no harder to describe tomorrow’s remote viewing target location than it is to describe today’s.8
Immanuel Kant states that space and time are but modes of human perception, not attributes of the physical world. These modes are powerful filters of our own invention, and they often serve to limit our experience.
I know, based on experimental data from psi research in my laboratory at SRI, that a viewer can focus attention at a specific location anywhere on the planet (or off of it) and often describe what is there. The SRI experiments showed that the viewer is not bound by present time. In contemporary physics, we call this ability to focus attention on distant points in space-time “nonlocal awareness.” Data from the past twenty-five years have shown that a remote viewer can answer any question about events anywhere in the past, present, or future, and be correct more than two-thirds of the time. For an experienced viewer, the rate of correct answers can be much higher.
Physicist David Bohm argues that we greatly misunderstand the illusion of separation in space and time. In his textbook, The Undivided Universe, he defuses the illusion of separation as he writes about quantum interconnectedness: “The essential features of the implicate order are that the whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything, and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.”9
This fundamental statement describes the metaphor of the holographic ordering of the universe. It says that, like a hologram, each region of space-time contains information about every other point in space-time. This information is readily available to our awareness. In the holographic universe of David Bohm, there is a unity of consciousness — a “greater collective mind” — with no boundaries of space or time.
From the current paradigm of modern physics, there is no contradiction between the data of remote viewing and the experienced oneness of consciousness. Nobel-prizewinning physicist Eugene Wigner has written, “The laws of quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without recourse to the concept of consciousness.”10
THE PHYSICS OF MIRACLES
The most satisfactory physical description of psi phenomena that I have examined (with theoretical physicist Elizabeth Rauscher) is a nonlocal mathematical model of space-time known as “complex Minkowski space.”11 Herman Minkowski invented the four-dimensional space-time that Einstein used to describe his special relativity. Ordinary Minkowski space consists of three real space dimensions (x, y, z) and one imaginary time dimension (ict), in which “i” is the square root of –1, “c” is the speed of light, and “t” is time. This model is consistent with the foundations of quantum mechanics, Maxwell’s formalism for electromagnetism, and the theory of relativity. It is very important that any model constructed to describe psi must not at the same time generate weird or incorrect physics.
The complex Minkowski space is a purely geometrical model formulated in terms of space and time coordinates, in which each of the familiar three spatial (distance) and one temporal (time) coordinates is expanded by two into their real and imaginary parts — making a total of six spatial and two temporal coordinates. There are now three real and three imaginary spatial coordinates, together with the real and imaginary time coordinate.
The metric (the standard of how we measure distance and time) of this complex eight-space is a measure of the structure of space-time where we live. Within this structure, we can define the manner in which one physically