Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2021
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Cosmic Dance
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The great writer John Steinbeck wrote, “To my certain knowledge, many people conceal experiences for fear of ridicule. How many people have heard or felt something that so outraged their sense of what should be that the whole thing was brushed quickly away, like dirt under a rug?” Steinbeck intuitively knew that the universe is far stranger than the average person realizes, as did Charles Fort before him, and that many strange events happen in this world of ours. They shouldn’t frighten informed people the way they would have in the past.
That fine Welsh writer Arthur Machen had an otherworldly experience that profoundly changed him, and incorporated that magic in his works, particularly in his last novel ‘The Green Round.’
But still, the average person today lives mentally in a Newtonian universe, while the reality is that the universe is strongly non-Newtonian. Our whole society is structured on an antiquated, Newtonian notion of how things work. Our sciences, aside from physics, operate on strongly Newtonian ideas, particularly medicine and biology. This is not just wrong, it is profoundly dangerous.
A person today may realize that solid matter is an illusion, hiding the quantum dance of uncertainty, at an intellectual level, but in day to day life treats ‘solid’ matter as something to knock up against. The eastern mystics long ago realized the truth, that what we perceive with our multiple senses is an illusion – Maya – not reality, and worked on ways to pierce the veil and perceive the cosmic dance as it really is.
Western science denied this truth until Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Planck and others saw glimpses of the other, hidden reality, and laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, how the Universe really works. It is no accident that many of them looked to eastern mysticism for answers.
The door into this strange, wonderful, and sometimes frightening, reality was first opened for me by my old friend Robert Anton Wilson, in my opinion one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th Century. RAW, as I call him in shorthand, understood quantum reality in an intuitive, magical way, and incorporated that understanding in his writings. In a virtual way, he took my hand and led me through that door, approaching and reaching that brave new world through humor. As he said, “The music of the spheres contains a loony laugh.”
My little book COSMIC DANCE is, in many ways, a tribute to RAW, and my attempt to carry forward his work that was cut short by his untimely death.
I’ve done my best to live in the real world, the magical world of quantum physics, which seems so counterintuitive and illogical to our normal ways of thinking. But this is how things really work. Much of our advanced technology only works because quantum physics is the way the Universe works behind the veil. The quantum computers now being developed will change science in radical ways.
I firmly believe that human progress will depend on each of us coming to grips with quantum reality and changing our thought processes to admit the Magic of quantum reality. It’s fast approaching, whether we’re ready or not. Elon Musk and other advanced thinkers are warning us of the dire consequences of not being on board the quantum train.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author and former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 13th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read Bob Shell’s, first essay on civil war, click here: https://tonyward.com/bob-shell-in-praise-of-reality/
Editor’s Note: If you like Bob Shell’s blog posts, you’re sure to like his new book, COSMIC DANCE by Bob Shell (ISBN: 9781799224747, $ 12.95 book, $ 5.99 eBook) available now on Amazon.com . The book, his 26th, is a collection of essays written over the last twelve years in prison, none published anywhere before. It is subtitled, “A biologist’s reflections on space, time, reality, evolution, and the nature of consciousness,” which describes it pretty well. You can read a sample section and reviews on Amazon.com.