Perhaps not literally, but metaphorically -- as in a dream.
What if life is actually a dream?
A dream created by your thoughts!
What then???
This rational "scientific" view of the way the world works is the legacy of Isaac Newton. In 1687 Newton published Principia in which he gave us a very powerful model of the cosmos as a great machine in which a body stays at rest unless acted on by a force. Just watching the body has no effect on it. Over the centuries Newtonian science swept away the "superstitious" magical world view which preceded it, firmly establishing its supremacy --- the only valid way to judge reality.
Newtonian science has given us incredible power. Using Newtonian science we have put men on the moon. The long history of successes of Newtonian science has completely convinced the "mainstream". This model of how reality functions has become so firmly entrenched that people have come to believe the world really does behave this way, and that anyone who questions the mechanical Newtonian model of reality is irrational.
But this "scientific" view of reality is based on the science of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The twentieth century brought revolutions in physics, revolutionary concepts of the way the world works. Physicists now realize that while the Newtonian model of the universe (upon which the prevalent paradigm is based) is quite accurate for describing some phenomena, it is totally inaccurate for describing other phenomena. The incredible power of the new view of the way the world works is revealed by such "successes" as lasers and H-bombs.
The new physics, whose accuracy physicists have verified to an absolutely incredible degree, demands that we think about the universe in a way which is radically different from the prevalent paradigm. It shows that the Cosmos actually works in mind boggling ways --- ways suspiciously like those taught by ancient spiritual traditions --- ways that we think of as superstitious magic. Yet this new knowledge has hardly affected the way most people think about the world they live in.
Steeped in the Newtonian way of thinking, even the Nobel prize winning founding fathers of this new science of Quantum Mechanics found it hard to accept the incredible things it said about the way the world works. Neils Bohr, one of the most important figures in the development of Quantum Mechanics, said "Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum Theory has not understood it."Erwin Schrodinger whose wave equation is a foundation stone said "I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it." Some of Albert Einstein's lesser known work was a stepping stone to the development of Quantum Mechanics. Yet Einstein could never reconcile himself to the outrageous implications of Quantum Mechanics. He kept inventing thought experiments to prove that it wasn't correct and Bohr kept pointing out what Einstein was overlooking, telling Einstein "No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical."
Still people who pride themselves on being logical, rational and scientific would reject as obviously impossible phenomena which Quantum Physics has shown to exist, such as the experimentally verified fact that if you continuously observe a system to see if it behaves in a particular way which you have chosen, then it always behaves in precisely that fashion --- regardless of what it would have done if you had not observed it. And they would equally reject phenomena which have a similar character, such as the power of holding a thought in your mind with great emotion to make that thought become a reality.
We all dream our life into existence. But often, not realizing the power of our dreams, we manifest the dream of a world we do not want. Whatever you envision with great intensity, really feeling how wonderful or how terrible it is, you will bring into your life. It doesn't matter whether it is what you want or what you don't want (anti-war and other protesters take note).
The logical, rational, "scientific" person will reject this as superstition. But the experience of many people shows that it is valid. If we are to bring the world we desire into reality, we must accept the validity of this phenomenon and actually implement it in our lives and in our societies. There are many subtle aspects of this phenomenon (Conscious Creation or Creative Visualization) which people are still investigating. It will be looked at from various points of view on this web site.
I am very interested in the way my thoughts create my reality. Over and over I have seen that when I have unhappy thoughts they are soon followed by physical pain. I resent someone asking me to do something I don't want to do. Soon I have pain in my leg whenever I try to do anything. I hobble around. I can hardly climb in and out of bed. The pain stays with me for two weeks, until I finally manage to let go of the resentment. Then the pain disappears, magically.
On the other hand, I meet someone and greatly enjoy their company. I want to see them again. For a couple days I feel a warm glow as I think about that person. Then, magically, we run into each other. Pure "coincidence". We have both gone where we would ordinarily not go.
As a physicist I am interested in a phenomenon in Quantum Physics (the Watched Pot phenomenon or Quantum Zeno effect) which is similar to the phenomenon of creating your reality by what you think. The essence of the Watched Pot phenomenon is that you can produce any result at all by not doing anything other than observing.
Admittedly even physicists have neglected this effect in spite of its incredible implications. Even though my training is as a physicist, I had not encountered it until I read about it in one of Fred Alan Wolf's books. Of course, when I was in school in the 50s the effect had not yet been "discovered" by physicists. In 1980 the Nobel prize winning physicist Yakir Aharonov said, in a paper in the Physical Review:
"... if one checks by continuous observations if a given quantum system evolves from some initial state, to some other final state, along a specific trajectory in Hilbert space, the result is always positive, whether or not the system would have done so on its own accord."
In other words, if you watch a system continuously to see if it behaves in a particular way (which you have chosen arbitrarily), then it will always behave in precisely that way, regardless of what it would have done if you were not watching! You don't have to do anything to the system, simply observe it!
Just as the logical, rational, "scientific" person would call the possibility of your thoughts creating your reality impossible, so too they would call the Quantum Zeno effect impossible. Yet it follows from Quantum Theory and has been verified experimentally.
My favorite example of the Watched Pot phenomenon involves polarized light. Polaroid sunglasses let through vertically polarized light while blocking horizontally polarized light. Since light reflected from a horizontal surface is partially or totally horizontally polarized, the sunglasses cut out reflected glare letting you see more clearly.
If you start with unpolarized light and pass it through a device that lets only horizontally polarized light through, you will have horizontally polarized light. Now if you let that impinge on a device that lets only vertically polarized light through, none of the light will go through.
But if you ask on the way to the vertical filter if the light is polarized at 45˚, half of the light will say "Yes, I'm polarized at 45˚." and go through. When this light arrives at the vertical filter half of it (a quarter of the original light) will say "Yes, I'm vertically polarized." and go through. Thus by making one observation a quarter of the originally horizontally polarized light will change to vertically polarized.
If you ask the horizontally polarized light if it is polarized at 10˚ to the horizontal by letting it impinge on a device which only lets light which is polarized at 10˚ through, then 96.985% of the light will pass through. If you have a series of devices each rotated 10˚ from the previous one, then 96.985% of the light incident on each will pass through -- and 75.9% of the original light will pass through the final vertical filter! If you make the rotation 1˚ instead of 10˚ then 99.9695% will pass through at each stage and 97.3% of the original light will pass through the final vertical filter!
This effect results from only checking to see what the light is doing, not from actually doing anything to rotate the plane of polarization of the light. There are crystals which will rotate the plane of polarization of light passing through them. The amount of rotation depends on the thickness of the crystal that the light passes through. Suppose we pass horizontally polarized light through 90 slices of such a crystal which are each of a thickness to rotate the plane of polarization by 1˚, but after each slice we check to see if the light is horizontally polarized by passing it through a device which only lets horizontally polarized light through. 97.3% of the light will go through and still be horizontally polarized! Even though all of it would have been changed to vertical polarization if we hadn't kept checking!
