Duo Duels on Non-duality, the Quantum Potential, and the Nature of Consciousness

Duo Duels on Non-duality, the Quantum Potential, and the Nature of Consciousness with Basil Hiley and Jena Axelrod From the series Dualities: The Marriage of Opposites

Join quantum physicist Basil Hiley and Pari Center’s Jena Axelrod in a dynamic discussion on the structure of our universe, the quantum potential, the nature of consciousness, and the paradigm shift they both see as being necessary in the West.

Nondual philosophy teaches that, ‘the multiplicity of the universe is reducible to one essential reality.’ The conclusion is that reality is a dynamic process accessible and known to people through music, art, transpersonal psychology, Buddhism, physics, and many more, if not all, fields. The Western worldview favours the mechanistic, static, ridgid, and as such has lost the sense of dynamism, and interconnectedness prevalent in most indigenous cultures, Eastern philosophies, and in the science of the quantum potential.

Both Basil and Jena perceive nonduality as a core truth of our reality. Basil approaches the nature of reality, and the quantum potential, from the perspective of math and physics; Jena approaches the nature of reality, and of our unified consciousness from within, via the experiential internal explorations of a psychonaut.

How then might these two seem to converge in their shared worldview—a nondual explanation of the nature of our dynamic reality—when approaching their queries from such disparate angles? Like Bohr’s complementarity, Basil and Jena may evidence that seemingly oppositional explanations of a phenomenon might be the fullest way to describe that phenomenon.

Basil Hiley will introduce us to his latest discoveries on the structure of the universe and how they relate to the quantum potential, a central concept of the de Broglie-Bohm formulation from David Bohm’s 1952 paper, A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables, which was later expanded upon by Bohm and Hiley. Jena will interject as Basil’s mathematical points become too abstract for a lay audience, and will redirect the discussion back toward the real world practical application and meaning of these concepts!

The Wholeness of Quantum Reality: An Interview with Physicist Basil Hiley

George Musser

So I am not a Bohmian in the Bohmian mechanics sense. Chris Fuchs came down to me once after a lecture and says, "How nice it is to meet a Bohmian." And I said: "I beg your pardon? Where?" I'm not a Bohmian. What we are discussing is not mechanics. Bohm says in his quantum-theory book, the original one, quantum mechanics is a misnomer. It should be called quantum non-mechanics.

Because you shouldn't think of it in terms of a mechanistic motion of particles?

Yes, it's nothing like that. It's not mechanism. It organicism. It's organic. Nature is more organic than we think it is. And then you can understand why life arose, because if nature is organic, it has the possibility of life in it.

Let's start this way. You're looking for a fundamental particle. So you divide the material into atoms and think: this is where the real essence lies. Rutherford divided the atom and found the nucleus. OK. The nucleus is where matter resides. And then you look inside the nucleus and you find neutrons. OK, now we're there. But then there's quarks and we've never got a hold of a quark. We take a proton, an anti-proton, and it goes, poof, into radiation. So where is the solidity of matter? Where does it lie? Because wherever we look at it…

…it falls through our fingers.