Zero-Point Energy and the Nature of Consciousness

Zero-point energy:  the energy that remains when all other energy is removed from a system.   

Zero-point energy exists, and this discovery by quantum physicists, originating from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, reveals that there is still energy in a system, even in a complete vacuum, when it would otherwise appear that all matter and energy had been removed.  Everything is gone, and yet something remains.  The existence of zero-point energy suggests that there is "an intrinsic quantum fuzziness in the very nature of both energy and matter," a vast sea of pulsating energy, and that this fuzzy sea of probabilities manifests as an all-present, all-pervasive energy field throughout the Universe, its very fabric.  Or rather, it is the Universe:  the Zero-point Field.

Whoa.  This has serious implications for science, philosophy, spirituality, and theories of consciousness.  Three inescapable conclusions are that 1) there is no such thing as empty space, 2) we are all as eternal as the Universe in an ever present Now/Here, and 3) we are connected, quite literally, to everyone and everything else in the Universe.  


Pretty cool, eh?

We now turn to author Lynne McTaggart to elucidate more of these implications, from her excellent book, ambitiously and appropriately entitled, The Field:  The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe.

(We join our narrator as she is describing the award-winning work of an international collaborative team of physicists, neuroscientists, physicians, biologists, and psychologists that described how human cells, both brain and other, are receptive to light wave interference patterns emanating fundamentally from the Zero-point Field, thus providing a possible mechanism for perception, memory, imagination, and consciousness.  Shhh.  Listen.)

"All of this led to a heretical thought . . . Consciousness was a global phenomenon that occurred everywhere in the body, and not simply in our brains.  Consciousness, at its most basic, was coherent light . . . Their work presented itself as a unified theory of mind and matter, evidence of . . . a world of 'unbroken wholeness.'  The universe was a vast dynamic cobweb of energy exchange, with a basic substructure containing all possible versions of all possible forms of matter.  Nature was not blind and mechanistic, but open-ended, intelligent, purposeful, making use of a cohesive learning feedback process of information being fed back and forth between organisms and their environment.  Its unifying mechanism was not a fortunate mistake but information which had been encoded and transmitted everywhere at once.

Biology was a quantum process.  All the processes of the body, including cell communication, were triggered by quantum fluctuations, and all higher brain functions and consciousness also appeared to function at the quantum level.  (This) set off the most outrageous idea of all: . . . memory doesn't reside in our brain at all, but instead is stored in the Zero Point Field.

Our brain is not a storage mechanism but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of ordinary perception.  (Perhaps) all of our cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Zero Point Field.  This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity--and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes as fragments but often as a miraculous whole.  An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in The Field.

The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world.  It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand.  It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality--our very sense of separateness.  If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world begin?  Where was consciousness--encased inside our bodies or out there in The Field?  Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected.

The implications of this were too huge to ignore.  The idea of a system of exchanged and patterned energy and its memory and recall in the Zero Point Field hinted at all manner of possibility for human beings and their relation to the world.   (Undiscerning) physicists had set mankind back for many decades.  In ignoring the effect of the Zero Point Field, they'd eliminated the possibility of interconnectedness and obscured a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles.  What they'd been doing, in renormalizing their equations, was a little like subtracting out God."

Dude. May the Force be with you.