1

Do you believe in psychic energy?

In other words, do you believe that there is some force or energy that emanates from our mind/soul/mental state (or chakras, auras, etc), that can effect others around us?

Do we impact people beyond what we simply say and do and show them?

Man, I feel like Miss Cleo (z”l!) here, asking questions about psychic powers.  Now I just need a 1-800 number…  anywho…  no more questions for my invisible reader…

2

I do.  I don’t know why or how, but I truly believe that we are constantly transmitting and receiving unnameable and unknowable ‘things’ from our fellow human beings.  And some transmit and/or receive more than others.

I think this has two key manifestations, at least in my life:

a) Where one lives is important.  On one hand, I’d argue seclusion deprives us from the natural and needed energies of one another, or it leaves us overly vulnerable and hogtied to the energies of just a few other individuals.  On the other hand, cities can be wonderful, or cities can be miserable.

I recently moved to a new building at the top of Rincon Hill, the ‘new’ vertical neighborhood in San Francisco.  The city in it’s infinite wisdom has decided to put the city’s new residential density at the location where all financial district traffic hits the freeway.  The streets are concrete walled, as friendly as wall street on the weekend, but constantly in massive gridlock as 4 streets, and 2,000 new condos, meet the on ramp to the Bay Bridge.

If I open my windows, I can hear the honking and yelling below.  But I don’t have to.  I believe that with the massive number of pissed off people within 100 yards of my residence, the psychic energy around Rincon Hill is simply toxic.

(My yogi, Nick Palladino, had this to say about it, agreeing in concept: I’m there either because it means I need to work through feeling that negativity while staying above it, or because I’m meant to do something about the negative energy.  I’m afraid that second ship has sailed).

b) Who one is around is important.  And actually being around them is key.  As I’ve pontificated on previously in this blog, I think we are losing an incredible amount of…  life?  community?  connection?  humanity?… by replacing our physical interactions with digital ones.  If we believe in the power of being face to face with people (which goes beyond the psychic energy part, but we shouldn’t dismiss it), we may really need to reassess our community and social priorities and methods.

3

Okay, let’s leave Miss Cleo territory, get back to real things.  All that talk of connection without anything physically tangible is quite pseudo, ostensibly.

Let’s talk about Quantum mechanics.  Or more specifically, Quantum Entanglement.  (bear with me, despite scary terms, the concepts are incredible, and I’ll try to abbreviate them enough, while avoiding the truly mind-bending, to be intelligible…I hope).

Quantum Entanglement is when two particles are entangled – meaning when the action or movement of one particle impacts the other particle.  It would be like having two coins on your desk, and if you pushed one coin away, the other coin would suddenly pull closer.  If you spin one coin clockwise, the other would start to spin counter-clockwise.  Using Bell’s theorem (which established a lot of these ‘rules’), the movement of one coin would cause the instantaneous movement of the other.

Trippy, yes.  Pseudo-seeming, yes.  But let’s take it further before we go back to the science/scientists.

Quantum entanglement also says that the distance of the two particles doesn’t matter.  So with the coin analogy, if I moved my coin, the entangled coin anywhere in the universe would instantaneously move as well.

4

Two obvious issues with Quantum Entanglement: First, if instantaneous movement happens at incredibly long distances, it violates Einstein’s claim that no energy or matter can go faster than the speed of light.  Second, how the hell?  Before quantum mechanics, scientists always assumed “local realism”, where things were only impacted by tangible forces in their locale.  aka common sense based on our human experience.

On the first problem of Einstein – His conclusion about the entanglement?  “Spooky action at a distance.”  It didn’t make sense to him.

Which also gets into the second problem.  Einstein said that if locality weren’t true, then our scientific laws based on empirical proof would be impossible to uphold.  “Spooky action” indeed.

Note that although this spooky action at a distance thing seems far fetched, Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation was initially established as “action at a distance,” negating (for a while) the locality requirement.

Next logical question to me was, how do two particles get entangled?  Simple – by starting as one and getting split into two.  I say simple, and it’s obviously incredibly technically difficult, but in the end, entangles particles are simply particles that started as one.

There is another up and coming method though, which is simply putting two particles in the same ‘bath’, whether magnetic, heat, or something fancier that I don’t understand.  Done right, particles become entangled, though often for shorter periods of time and with more variability.

Sounds like people, no?

5

Ok, enough science, let’s get back to real life.  Facts:

We (humanity) are actively splitting particles to create entangled particles for use in many areas.

Quantum computers are now a reality, though still in their infancy.  Using entangled particles to process data has the potential to make computers 100 million times faster than a current chip, which leads into area where computers have unfathomable processing ability.

But, coolest of all, and the impetus for my returning to quantum theory talk, is a satellite just launched by the Chinese:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101071-china-launches-worlds-first-quantum-communications-satellite/

THIS IS INCREDIBLE.

China has launched a spacecraft with one of their entangled particles to test communication back to earth using the entanglement.

Hopefully all my scientific meanderings above drive home the point of how mind-blowing a concept this is, and could be – this is absolutely groundbreaking and the stuff of sci-fi (there are many books with communications across the solar system relying on entangled particles).

6

Back to Miss Cleo!

Quantum entanglement tells me, without a doubt, that there are ties between things that we cannot see and may never understand.  That particles throughout our universe are intricately weaved, like fascia of the infinite.

Quantum theory tells us that there are two ways for this entanglement to happen: a) The two particles come from the same, once-whole particle.  And relating to things bigger than particles, I just want to note one key agreement between science and religion: we all come from one. Or, b) two particles spend enough time together in adverse conditions, and become entangled to varying degrees depending on the duration and adversity.

7

The scientific question of “is it entangled” comes down to this: whether the correlation between two objects is more than what can be explained by local forces.

This is why I believe there is something greater – my life has been full of connections with people where the actual connection is far more than anything that makes sense, especially given time and space.

And one of my goals is to focus on those people, the human entanglements that I have developed.  And then maybe my yogi was correct – my time spent among dense negativity is simply a path to remind me of the connections that we ignore because they aren’t based on locality.