A Conversation With... Fred Alan

The Monthly Aspectarian: Fred, I usually like to start by having people briefly tell their stories. How did you start, and what were the changes you went through as you came to where you are now?

Fred Alan Wolf: The answer to that is really a talk in itself! In early childhood, I had an interest in magic. That propelled me into the study of physics because the world I was perceiving around me, even as a child, seemed to have this magical quality of just being all the things I wondered about. Magic seems to be a natural way to inquire into nature if one is interested in why things are the way they are. Conjuring, doing magic tricks, wondering how magicians did what they did, is what led me into an interest into studying science, into studying physics. That propelled me into the deeper aspects of physics, which became metaphysics, and from metaphysics into mysticism and spirituality.

TMA: To most minds, science and magic seem antithetical.

FAW: One of the reasons science has been invented is to deal with that conflict that arises between the mystical feeling that I think all scientists have when they first get into science -- and the need or desire for some kind of explanation, which I attribute to a need for security that all of us have. We want to understand the world in some way. It may not be the same way in different cultures, but we want to have some understanding which enables us to cope with the various probable and improbable things that seem to happen to us on a day-to-day basis, over a period of 10 or 20 or 30 years, on a whole life basis. We need to find some way to cope with that. The epitome of the need to explain to ourselves is science, and the need to live within the world with some kind of joy would be what we call the mystical or spiritual. And there is conflict. This conflict is in every scientist's mind and heart, and I think it's in every one of us, just more clearly seen in the conflicts of science.

I don't think any scientists would ever begin to say that science explains everything. I certainly don't think it does. Nor would any scientist be willing to accept the mystic's view of the world as the only explanation. There's this continual battleground between the spirit and the body or the soul and the mind which goes on in every one of us.

TMA: I have this working definition for magic, which goes: magic is the knowledge and purposeful operation of natural laws that most people don't know about.

FAW: That might be applicable to physics or quantum physics technology today. Technology is magic to most people. I doubt that there's a person alive today that has a complete understanding of all the technology that surrounds them in everyday life ... from the modern automobile to the computer, to films, television, the telephone, radio ... we know how to turn these gadgets on and off -- sometimes.

TMA: What's the most important thing you want to communicate to people in these days?

FAW: Things I've been thinking about continue in the same direction I've been going in since I was a kid. I want to know and continue to know, and continue to understand and have experiences of the magical universe as I see it. I want to communicate what I do understand and have learned about it to as many people as I can as a teacher and a writer, which is what I do ... because I enjoy making presentations and using multi-media. It gives me a chance to exercise that aspect of what little talent I have in this world. All of these are part of what I do and want to do and continue to do. My life is very enjoyable. Right now, I'm interested in something called New Alchemy, a way of dealing with the old and the new, which seems to be one of my favorite themes ... taking something very new and presenting it in the guise of something very old, and looking at the relationship, the contrast, which gets strong between the old and new -- and which brings out something both old and new. Within ourselves we can understand it at a deeper level than we could if we only saw it as something just old or something just new.

TMA: How has your understanding of things evolved?

FAW: I think my early understanding of things probably began with an attempt to solve problems. I saw life as a series of problems that arise from day to day and that a natural way to deal with them is first to clarify what the problem is by defining it, and then solve it by coming up with an answer. It was only in my later life as I began to explore more deeply what all this meant, that I realized that the problem-solution way of thinking was itself problematic and was generating a continual series of crazies in one's life. That's not the way people need to try to lead their lives to see the world in terms of problems-solutions. I'll give you an analogy. You're always walking around in the world with a hammer and you see anything that resembles a nail, you use the hammer on it. The problem is to drop the hammer in the first place. In my case, that means dropping the need to see everything in terms of problems having solutions. For example, human relationship is not a problem-solution type of situation.

TMA: What came after you realized the need to drop the hammer?

FAW: Experiences began to occur that I had previously ignored and denied in my life. Some of these were very upsetting, some were very enlightening. As a result of traveling and having these experiences, I began to see the world quite differently from the skewed point of view in which I was trained to look at the world. It completely altered my understanding of things and led into a greater interest and development in the metaphysical aspect of life.

TMA: When you go from the world of science into metaphysics, you can expect a backlash from the world of science.

FAW: That's been part of my life ever since I left the academic world in the mid-'70s and gave up the academe worldview or position, I was confronted with a lot of people who simply found what I was doing unacceptable to what they felt was the way for a Ph.D. to behave. Every book I write receives both negative and positive criticism and reviews. Fortunately, I think that most of my readers like what I write. I'm doing reasonably well in the writing business, but I do have a share of people who react very strongly to what I say. I guess that's maybe a good thing. Maybe it's not so bad that people react rather than say nothing at all.

TMA: Oh, much better than indifference.

FAW: Yes! In a way, I accept it and expect it and just continue going on.

TMA: I write a column for the magazine, called "My Current Opinion." Because it's my position that all you can ever really have is a current opinion. As you learn more, you realize that what you thought was real, wasn't. It's a continual peeling of the onion. As you've gone through the layers of your onion, what were the kind of changes in your view of the universe?

FAW: I have a lot of faith in my common-sensical understanding of the world. I accept my common senses. I accept the flaws in them as well as the benefits that come to me as a result of having those common senses. I have no problem with that. Whereas maybe before, when it was a hammer and nail situation, I maybe would be trying to get beyond my senses into something which left me solving my original problem but leaving me hanging in terms of everything else. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

You're in a relationship with somebody and something occurs which you may find displeasing and you want to correct the situation in some way. So you offer solutions to a problem which hasn't even arisen in the relationship, and as a result this creates a kind of a conflict and possibly even destroys the relationship. If you had let your common sense guide you, you'd realize that all you needed to do was to give your partner a hug. By common sense, I mean don't intellectualize everything into a problem when there's really no problem there in the first place. It's the acceptance that the universe is not a machine and it can't run entirely by cause-effect apparatuses and that human beings are certainly not machines and certainly don't run that way.

What I generally got has in a sense broadened my understanding so that I understand things commonly ,,, in an ordinary sense but in a deeper sense as well. So that even though what I'm saying sounds understandable, there is a depth to it that if one wants to get into it deeper, we can then peel off the layers and go into the deeper levels of what these things ultimately mean, finally reducing it down even to the level of quantum physics or to God or to Spirit. But ultimately, there's a kind of a common-sensical understanding and a deeper understanding. The people I work with in workshops and my writing and so forth, intuitively work with me with that understanding. They realize that I may be saying to them something very simple, but that there's a depth to it. If I say that I have a firm belief in God, they know that where I'm coming from is not necessarily just belief in a superficial way but because I have some deeper experience of what it means to have that kind of belief.

TMA: You're not talking about the guy with the long, white beard.

FAW: I'm not, and yet I am. I'm not dismissing the nature of God but at the same time I'm opening up the possibility that there's a deeper understanding to the mystery and the reasons why life is the mystery it is and why the problems in our life arise in the way they do.

TMA: In my early 20s, my limited logic told me there had to be "a way that it is." I was determined that in this lifetime I was going to find which of the ways that are laid out before us is it. Is it the Buddhist universe? Is it the Islamic universe? Is it the UFO universe? Later, I came to realize that the universe can accommodate all those versions, and that any model of the universe is just that, a model. And nobody can prove their version to anybody else.

FAW: That's right, and I think that's a very valuable insight, that whatever you believe is the universe turns out to be a universe.

TMA: One of the things in quantum physics that I find most fascinating is the idea that a reality blinks into existence when you put your consciousness on it and blinks out of existence when you take your consciousness away.

FAW: If you follow that to a logical conclusion, you find that there's only one Soul in the universe. One Consciousness capable of blinking it into reality and letting it go out of reality. If you are having that experience, then really, you're having it because you've identified with, or you are working with the recognition of, or you're part of, that single awareness. It's not that you have a mind and Mr. Jones has a mind and Mrs. Smith has a mind, but that you and Jones and Smith are all of one mind. The recognition that you're all of one mind, while it may sound nice, may sound spiritual -- there's actually, from a quantum physical point of view, a logical proof that one can make. The blinking on or off is a very important part of it. It indicates that mind, or this one Mind, is very much part of the physical world.

TMA: It's so interesting to follow this out. What people think of as the physical world is so very much more malleable than anybody would have ever guessed. I was playing with something recently whereby if you work with the parallel universes kind of model where any decision takes you into another one ... I was stuck in traffic on the freeway, and I projected joy. The more joy I could project out, the less traffic slowed me down. I kept raising the level of universes I was existing in by the amount of joy that I was able to project out. It's just fascinating what you can do.

FAW: It's hard for people to give up the objective, temporal control which they've learned so well to impart by the counting procedure of watching seconds tick by on the clock. But you have to remember that every clock is merely in agreement with other clocks that we set as a standard.

TMA: And yet at the same time that the physical plane is maya, illusion, when you stub your toe, it hurts.

FAW: If the physical world is maya, what's real? That's, of course, the question that drives everybody a little bit crazy. But reality is not just the physical world, it's the relationship of the mind with the physical world that gives the perception of reality. There is no reality without the perception of that reality. What the actual reality might be without a perception of reality is unknowable. We don't know what that is. We can only assume that what it is, is what it is when we're not looking -- an assumption that's fraught with a lot of problems. There's an ancient philosophical problem that goes something like this: I'm standing in a room looking out of the window at a garden. I decide to leave the room and go into the room next door and close the window so that it's completely black in there. What happened to the garden as a result of that? The answer is, if you were the only consciousness that ever was and ever is and ever will be, the garden is gone the minute you entered into the dark room. That's very mystical to people; they can't understand that. So the question is, suppose there's another person still looking and still sees the garden and I'm in the dark room seeing dark, what is that telling me? Basically what that's telling us is that part of you is still seeing light while part of you is seeing dark. But you yourself are neither in the dark nor in the light completely. You're one consciousness in what seems to be two parts, but it's still only one consciousness. Even though it seems to be in two places, it's really not.

This gets to Bishop Barkley's philosophical position, which is that everything is the Mind of God. This, I think, makes it quite tenable. Because if you make the assumption that there is separate consciousness, separate minds in the world, you're onto a real paradox because from your point of view, being of one mind, looking at the world and examining it and trying to figure out what are the rules that govern how the world operates, you come to the conclusion, based upon scientific tests, that quantum mechanics is what governs those rules of operation. So far, it's been in existence for more than 100 years and it seems to be a well-defined set of rules which seems to work in a universal way. What it predicts about the world is not what the world appears to be. It predicts very strange overlaps of reality and parallel realities and objects being in two places at the same time, and that sort of thing.

So then you wonder, how is it that objects don't appear at two places at the same time, and the world does seem to be overlapping, seems to be a single world. The result, according to our quantum mechanical understanding, is how often these paradoxes in quantum can be resolved is that when an observation occurs, all of it falls apart into a single reality and not multiple realities. And that's what mind does. If you accept that, then you're running into the problem of what happens if I'm looking at another person. How do I deal with that person? If I'm looking at that person with the eyes of my quantum mechanical understanding of that person, that person should be multiple, should be schizophrenic, should be multiple personality.

TMA: Which, in fact, they are.

FAW: According to my expectation, but if you asked them what they are, they'd say that they're perfectly phrenic, not schizophrenic, and as normal as anybody else. And so we run into a paradox, that the world according to the way I see it is one way; and the world they tell me about is in conflict with my understanding of the world. The only way out of the paradox is to assume that whatever is conscious in the world may not be just between my ears, but may exist on a kind of non-locality. It doesn't have any single location and this is the one working hypothesis that allows such opinions to form. It's not a question of separate consciousness, because that leads back to the paradox again.

TMA: I think that if you accept the One, then the only possibility of the illusion of separateness from the One is predicated on duality. And duality is much more than two. Duality is everything that exists seemingly outside of the One, or separate from the One.

If you accept that there is only the One, then the experience of the illusion of separateness from the One, of having your own singular existence seemingly separate from the One, is based on the concept of duality. Without duality, there can't be any "separate from the One."

FAW: Let's back up a few steps. If you accept that there's only One, then how is it that there's an experience of two?

TMA: It's an illusion, but we have it.

FAW: So from the point of view of unity, that would be illusory, or what you call maya. That's one way of answering the question. Another way you might answer is that even unity itself is inconceivable. It's unapproachable. It can't even be defined because the mere act of definition is to define and make a distinction between something and something else. The act of definition is, by its nature, dual, or duality, or separation. So you run into the problem of "By the way, it's a miracle."

In Kabbalah, you talk about the nature of numbers one and two, one being the unity, which is symbolized by Aleph, and two, which is symbolized by Bet. The symbol of Aleph is the great, undivided power of Spirit. The symbol of Bet, or two, is a house and also is symbolized by the act which separates an inside from an outside, or defines a boundary between left and right, or up and down, or any distinction at all. It's the act of the magician, that which suddenly brings into existence something from something else. The act of bringing into existence something from something else is a duality. The paradox is in recognizing that if we can see the distinction, if we can follow the magicians' trick, then there's something within us which is capable of resolving unity into duality, or maybe that the rule of unity is to form duality. Or it may be that you can't conceive of unity without duality.

TMA: Well, as Oliver always said to Stanley, "This another fine mess you've gotten me into."

(laughter)

FAW: These are the kinds of problems that you run into when you start combining the mystical insight from spirituality together with quantum physics.

TMA: We're left with this world which on the one hand is just amazing wonderful, and on the other hand seems to be going down the tubes. From my perspective, I pretty much see the world as a theme park. I'm on the Guy ride, you're on the Fred ride and we're both looking to upgrade our tickets. And yet, if we choose to take a role in the world, if we want to see ourselves as having something to do with trying to help make the world a better place, to keep it from crashing and burning, it becomes apparent to me that perhaps the only way to do that is to raise the level of mass consciousness. I think that mass consciousness makes the world the way it is as humans experience it. The work that you're involved in, and the work that I'm involved in is, I think, an attempt to help people raise their individual level of consciousness in order to raise the mass consciousness in order to -- well, save the whole thing.

FAW: Yes, that's true. I don't necessarily see myself trying to raise mass consciousness. That's another thing entirely. I just recognize the need or the desire of people to have something in their lives other than the obvious material benefits which life can offer them. I think that the spiritual insight or the mystical or the combination of spirit and science together may be important in our inner growth today. We all earn a livelihood, we all do something to maintain our existence in the world, and while we have certain priorities in our mind as to how much and what we should do better on, there is still, and always will be, the recognition that you can't have it all. That the more you strive in one direction, the more you're going to lack in another. The common lack in these days, in our culture, is the lack of some spiritual communion. The so-called masses (whatever that means) may be able to find communion one day a week in church or temple or wherever they go for the that period of time. But there are a lot of people who are intellectually quite stimulated, intelligent and capable of doing things, who also suffer this lack and they don't find it at church. Maybe the kind of thing that I do might appeal to them.

TMA: How do you see us making a difference? Obviously, you write your books, I publish my magazine. But we do have such things as global warming and things that need addressing now. I believe that a great victory has already been won utilizing mass consciousness with the end of the Cold War. I believe that was really brought about by the global peace meditations. A critical mass was reached in mass consciousness. It just rose up and struck down the Cold War. The same thing could be utilized for any other problem that exists on the planet. Does that fit in with your thinking at all?

FAW: It does, it certainly does. It fits in with the notion that there really is only one Mind, and that the thoughts that you're having, while they may seem very personal to you and very self-contained within your own head at the moment, those thoughts are being thought everywhere by somebody at some time in some form. Not necessarily in the same way that you're thinking now, but they're part of a collective consciousness -- as Carl Jung would say -- or in terms of the one Mind, as I say it.

I believe that the notion of evolution is also part of that. As life goes on from the eyeblink of a couple of thousand years ago when Yeshua walked the surface of this planet to the present moment, there's been a tremendous number of movements that have flowed out of that eyeblink. Everything from the early appearance of Mohammad to the scientific revolution we're living through right now, the knowledge information age. Years ago the scientific renaissance was beginning to form as a reaction to the mysticism that was clinging to Europe and was affecting everything from the politics of kings to the health of people dying of the Black Plague. This kind of thing means that we're living through an age of mental stress. By that, I mean there is a stress associated with our natural spiritual inclination because of the One mind, which we are, which is in conflict with the materialist stretch which began with Marxism and Darwinism and our current bent on scientific materialism.

It's like our minds are being stretched in a kind of Saran Wrap which is being pulled across the hands of time. We're caught in that warp. None of us can calmly think our way through this. We have to work through that warp, that stress which continually reverberates every time we come up with some new insight as to the nature of what is real, what isn't real. When I look at what I do with my life, I've been fortunate in the sense that I'm able to in a way break free of that Saran Wrap. I've made a few holes in it and am able to get out of the stretch for a while and have insights as to what's going on here. I see what I do in continual movement to awaken people from being caught in that stretch in the Saran plastic mold which says that things are pulled in certain directions only, and that's the way it has to go.

TMA: Do you have a statement of essence?

FAW: Although at times the world each of us lives in may seem to be a very dark place, it will always be able to give us some shining through. There's never an end to the shining which comes through the aura, what I call the magic, which is present. The mere fact that there is a world at all is so miraculous and so impossible to explain by anybody that one should, in recognition and in faith of that, be continually awestruck and continually joyful in spite of the obvious lacks which one may feel in one's life from time to time. The fact that we have this material form is no less miraculous and it may very well be that the common suffering that we see around us and that we feel within us may be the concomitant to, or the result of, the fact that we are spirits living in a material form.

Fred Alan Wolf holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and is well known for his simplification of the new physics. His newest book is Mind into Matter, which provides a new understanding of how the forces of purpose, creation and transformation within each of us, when used consciously, can enhance the meaning of our everyday life. He may be best known as the author of Taking the Quantum Leap which, in 1982, was the recipient of the prestigious National Book Award for Science.

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf will appear with award-winning author Lynda Dahl in Chicago and Milwaukee May 19 and 20 for their Author Seminar "Explore Conscious Creation: How Changing Your Mind Changes Your Physical Reality." Fred and Lynda will provide participants a day of inspiration and insights into the concept that we literally form our own realty through our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and expectations. The seminar will provide a "cutting edge" forum for interaction, dialogue and mind share with two of the most prestigious authors of their kind.