Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Kelly Howell: Welcome back to Theatre of the Mind. Your host, Kelly Howell. So, today we are going to be speaking with physicist Fred Alan Wolf, a.k.a. "Dr. Quantum." He is wellknown for his simplification of the new physics and is best known as the author of "Taking the Quantum Leap, " which in 1982 was the recipient of the prestigious National Book Award for Science. And if you saw "What the Bleep Do We Know!?, " you might remember him in the movie. So here we go with the interview.


Well, Fred, thanks for coming on the show today. I'm a huge fan of yours, I've got a couple of your books here, actually four of them; I loved "Taking the Quantum Leap" and "Parallel Universes." I think they're great books.
Fred Alan Wolf, PhD: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Kelly: You're a movie star after being in "What the Bleep Do We Know!?, " huh?
Fred: Well, that really has been a boost to my career.
Kelly: Has it?
Fred: Yes, it jumped me into a whole different level and a whole different set of circumstances... travel circumstances, upped my speaking fees. [laughter]
Kelly: All right. I bet it sold a lot more books, too.
Fred: Well, I think it did. I really think it did help in book sales.
Kelly: Mmhmm. Are you working on any new books?
Fred: Yes, I am.
Kelly: What are you working on?
Fred: Well, it's a project that I've been researching now for a couple of months. It has to do with what I call... well, it's hard to say. I would call it "sharing God's mind."
Kelly: Oh?
Fred: And it deals with the number of things that physicists have been dealing with in trying to decide how it is that observers, when observing things, affect the world out there. What causes that effect? How do things change just by looking at them?


The new book is going deeper into this. Specifically, it's exploring the one area that I touched on in "The Spiritual Universe, " and also in "The Yoga of Time Travel, " which has to do with there being one mind of which we all partake, rather than individual minds that are clearly demarked and separate from each other. So, by getting into the one mind idea, and showing how quantum physics, particularly with something we call "quantum field theory, " in the movie we talked about the quantum field, so this is going to be a book about that field, what the nature of that field is. And, from that, we should be able to understand even deeper and at a deeper level, using scientific understanding, why it is that physicists like myself believe there's only one mind of which we all have a small part of, a kind of reflection of that one mind, in the same way that one person could be standing in front of 100 mirrors and see 100 people.
Kelly: I want to read this book! [laughter]
Fred: Well, it won't be out until the fall. I'm just getting the proposal written right now. I expect to have it done by February, but then it goes through the usual things that books go through when they get into a publisher's hand. There's editing and all and all sorts of things that have to be handled. But thank you for your interest.
Kelly: Oh, yeah, I love your books. One of the main messages in "What the Bleep" was we can structure reality, right?
Fred: Right.
Kelly: One of the things that I always mused on is, why does it take so long?
Fred: Well, let me answer the question in a simple, metaphorical way. In order to build a cathedral, you don't slap up a two by four in ten minutes.
Kelly: Right.
Fred: So what you call "creating a reality" depends upon the nature of what it is you're trying to create. If you're trying to create something which involves lots of people and lots of different things, then one of the laws of the universe is that things have inertia, and inertia means they resist change. So, you have to deal with that all the time, and you have to influence. Things will change, but they resist it. It doesn't mean they won't do it at all, but they resist. Everything resists change. That's the nature of having a physical world. And if you don't take that into account, if that, for example, were absent from our world, if we didn't have any resistance to change, then everybody, at every instant, would be able to create everything they want at this moment.
Kelly: Right. [laughter]
Fred: The problem with that would be that everybody would be walking around in their own world and there would be no communication, virtually none, because everybody would be like cuckoo people in an insane asylum. You ever watch people in an insane asylum? Each one is in their own world. They're having a wonderful time, and the only problem they have is bumping into others in their own worlds. They are all what I call "ego trapped, " and this is a big problem. So, if everybody just created their own reality, willynilly, there would be nothing in the world which would allow for love, for communication, for understanding, for new insight into how things work. Because we get that from each other, and we can't get that if there's no resistance.
Kelly: So where do you see resistance come from?
Fred: It starts, you know, it's part of physics, it's part of the general understanding of the nature of the world. We now understand it in terms of, we have a measure for it, we call it mass. The common measure of mass that you use every day is called weight. You step on a scale and what you're actually measuring is your mass, and the attraction of that mass to the earth. That's what the balance on the scale is actually measuring. It's measuring the resistance that it offers to the force of attraction between the earth and your body.
Kelly: Mmhmm.
Fred: And that force of attraction is normally called your weight. That's what you measure every time you step on a scale.
Kelly: OK.
Fred: So the mass you have determines how much you weigh.
Kelly: Mmhmm.
Fred: If you were on a different planet, or say, for example, the moon, the gravitational pull on you would be onesixth the amount that it is on the earth. So, if you weighed, say, 180 pounds on the earth, you would only weight 30 pounds on the moon.
Kelly: What a great diet, huh? [laughter]
Fred: Of course, the thing that you have to, of course, recognize is that nothing has really changed.
Kelly: Right.
Fred: Your mass is still the same. You'll be as overweight or underweight as you were on the world. But instead of using the word "weight, " it'd be more accurate to say you're "overmassed" or "undermassed." So, mass is what is the measure of resistance. If you asked me, "Why is there mass?", well, that gets into the whole mystery of the nature of reality itself. Why is there something rather than nothing? There is no definitive answer for that, because whatever answer I give would presuppose something that would be more abstract and more removed. Then we get into all kinds of possibilities.
Kelly: What is the physicist's answer for that question? What is reality?
Fred: Well, it depends. I don't think physicists would answer the question, "What is reality?" because it has so many overarcing possible levels on which one could approach reality. Is reality the reality that you experience? How does that compare to the reality that, say, somebody living in Australia is experiencing, or somebody in the middle of the desert would experience? I mean, each of those different experiences would have, would be experiencing a different reality. So reality would depend on whether you're looking at something, you're feeling something, whether you're eating something. These things change. What a physicist would say in general is that reality consists of energy and matter and our, I'm going to use the word "appreciation" of such, meaning our ability to sense it.
Kelly: Right, which our sense and perception just plays a big part in everything.
Fred: And how and what our senses do, and why they work the way they work, and so forth, probably has more to do with an evolution of the ability to sense the world that has changed over the years. We know that we, when we see the world, the world that we see is a world of color.


We know that other animals, I think dogs, I don't remember this for a fact, but, I think that dogs are basically colorblind, and they don't see colors. Or, maybe they have fewer specialized rods which are sensitive to specialized cones which are sensitive to the various difference frequencies of light that come in. Red cones, and blue ones, and green ones, I think, are the ones we have. Maybe dogs only have two of those or one of those.
Kelly: But they have many more olfactory sensors, or something.
Fred: Yes, and so they can smell things and hear things that we can't smell nor hear. So, their world of sensation, their sensate world is very different. The honeybee has a very different sensate world from the world that I experience. Honeybees can literally see ultraviolet, which is something I can't. They can see it as color, or sense it, or it affects their optical system in some way that would give them sensation of seeing whether something is giving off much ultraviolet or has a lot of ultraviolet. For example, I think that's one of the things that bees do in order to find out where they're going, even on a cloudy day, because they can sense the ultraviolet, possibly, from the sun.
Kelly: What do you think about the holographic theory of the universe?
Fred: Well, it's a terminology that's used. It's really a very complicated idea, and I'm not sure that I can even explain it intelligently. I don't think I understand it well enough in terms of what is expressed in the models that currently astrophysicists and cosmologists are referring to when they use that terminology. Of course, a hologram that we talk about and how it works, that's something that I do understand. But, that's a different thing.
Kelly: Mmhmm, mmhmm. How is observation, just in a mundane example, how is observation an act of creation?
Fred: When you go to create something brand new, for example, let's use the example of baking a cake, you don't just, I mean, nowadays, you can just take a cake out of a package and bake it. But in the old days, we used to be able to, the way you bake a cake is, we assembled the ingredients of a cake, mixed them together, and certain chemical reactions would take place. Then that thing would be put in an oven and that would enhance and further the chemical reactions, and then the creation would be a question of our participation, with the whole thing coming into being. The cake that would be produced by Cook A might be, even though they used the same ingredients, might be very different from the cake that was cooked by Cook B, for example. One cake froze, the other cake fell, there could be a number of different variations on what gets created even though the ingredients are the same.
Kelly: Mmhmm.
Fred: Observers are kind of like that. The action of observation is not one of, I mean, this is what commonly people think when they observe something, they think, "Well, I'm seeing it, but it was already there before I saw it, " or "It had been put there at the time I looked at it." In other words, there's a fairness and outthere, outthere, that people would normally assume is correct and that their observation had nothing to do with it being there, or with the shape that it was found in that they saw or experienced or any of these attributes that they had. They just say, "It was there. I saw it." And that's the normal way we deal with the world, and it's a way that works for nearly everything we do.
Kelly: Mmhmm.
Fred: However, the world really doesn't work that way. It turns out that everything in the world, to some extent, is blurry. By that I mean that nothing is absolutely, distinctly the same every moment to moment. Everything blurs, and the amount of blurring depends on this thing we call inertia. It depends on how much matter there is in the thing itself. By a thing I mean something that's defined as a thing as far as your choice to go about looking at it. For example, I can look at a table by looking down on the table and it appears as a flat board. If I look at it from beneath, it looks like a house. And what I'm trying to say is that things depend on how they're looked at
Kelly: OK.
Fred: I'm using these as metaphors.
Kelly: Right.
Fred: But it's even more than that. The thing itself, if it has a lot of mass, it tends to blur very slightly. In fact, it hardly blurs at all, and that's where we get the notion that things look the same whether I'm looking at them or not. However, when you start getting in to smaller objects, particularly the objects that are used by us in the act of observing the world, which means our brains and nervous systems and all of the apparatuses associated with those, our ability to sense the world, to smell it, to feel it, to taste it, et cetera, all those things or all those processes that we're using are really based upon molecular and atomic physics. In other words, they're more refined, less mass involved than the actual acts that are being carried out to constitute an observation, even of a large object. So, it's in that place that the reality that is being perceived is being shaped.


It's kind of as if the way we shape things is that we carry around in our back pockets, so to speak, a set of filters, and we use these filters different ways, depending on who and what and how we're going to look at something. When I look at my boss at my corporation, the filter I use is, "Yes sir, yes sir, whatever you want sir, yes sir, yes sir." When I come home to look at my wife, perhaps my filter is, "Yes ma'am, yes ma'am, OK, OK, " or it could be, "You do what I say!" People have different filters. When you look at your children, the way you look at them and how you treat them, and that sort of thing, this is the clearest thing we call creation.


This is where you're creating. This is where a human being is making this happen. As a result, the thing that's being observed, in this case, the wife, the boss or the child, is responding according to the observation you're making of it. You may not be able to predict the response, it could be anywhere or anything, but whatever it is, it's definitely in response to you. So, if you tend to be a grouch, then people will respond to you a certain way. They might not always respond to you grouchily, they may respond to you with indifference because you may be old, and if you're an old grouch, people don't necessarily get upset with you, because they know you don't have the physical power to beat them up anymore. But, if you're a young grouch, people might get really upset with you if you're grouchy. You follow what I'm saying here?
Kelly: Yeah, yeah.
Fred: So this is how you create your reality. There's nothing magical about it in a certain sense, it's just that most of us are not aware that we do this. We think that everything has been done before us. We think everything's out there. We think, "My kid, that nasty, snotty kid, is going to be the same nasty, snotty kid as when I left this morning. He'll be hooting and hollering and I'll have to spank him and blahblahblah, you nasty kid!" When mom or dad comes home, he's the same old nasty kid, because he's got the same old way of looking at the kid.
Kelly: [laughter]
Fred: And that's why the kid's going to respond a similar way. Even if you think it, if you feel it, and your words are, "Oh, I really love you. I love you, " but you know the person hates you, but he's saying the word "love" in a way that you realize is hate. So you don't respond that way. That's why lots of kids grow up in households where mothers say, "Well, I acted like I loved him, I mean, I acted that way, " and the kid says, "You never loved me, " and the kid's right, because he never felt the love, because the adult was, for whatever reason, incapable of changing her way of being in the world so that she could express that love to her child. She was still using a way of dealing with the world, as she would deal with her boss, for example, or somebody that she didn't like in grade school.
Kelly: Well, that kind of goes back to what you were saying about the observer.
Fred: These are the acts of the observer, in plain language. It's really very simple. At this level of the game, quantum physics is basically the level of the game, which tells us that none of that is fixed. All of that, all of the guises we use to look at the world, can be changed and changed willynilly, changed at your will, rather than you having to always look the same way at the same person.


You don't. You have to always behave the same way all the time when you are in a certain situation. You don't.
Kelly: In your experience, what is the best way to change the observer?
Fred: You have to observe yourself observing. You have to take a moment out and ask yourself a subtle question. What's going on here? Why did I do that? Or, did I do that? You have to begin to question your own observation.


So the best way is to become aware of it. Once I come on the scene and tell you this is what you can do, most people respond by realizing they can become aware of what they normally consider they were unaware of. They can look at it.
Kelly: Yeah. Meditation is a great way of beginning to see.
Fred: Meditation is a good way to look at it. Meditation will help because in meditation you can watch the film of your mind constantly unreel.
Kelly: You can stand back from that film and observe it and choose to either go along with it or not.
Fred: Well, yes, if you already understand that then you have the answer.
Kelly: Well, I think that's why it's so hard for people to meditate, because we get so caught up in our mental movies. To take that one step that you're talking about, to step back and observe that inner movie or the observer well, who is the observer?
Fred: God is the observer. You are the observer and you are God. Even though you hear the words and you may say the words, it's very hard to live those words because most of us get trapped in certain ways of dealing with the world and they are very compelling. They are very addictive and they are also very necessary in some cases for the survival of the body to forget that you are God.


Spirituality is the understanding of this. That's all it is, there is nothing more than that. If once you are reminded of that and can live with that and understand that, then the natural things which arise from that understanding such as forgiveness and love of self and love of your self most people don't love themselves you can let go of a lot of stuff, once you have accepted that you are the God presence yourself.


There is no separation. There never has been. You were never born. You're never going to die. You have to identify with that part of you; it's really not a part of you, it's the whole of you. You have to identify with who you really are.


Many people as they go through life get a chance to do that from time to time. It can happen in so called near death experiences. It can happen as a result of the death of a loved one like a mother or a father or a child. That can kindle this. It can happen with drugs. Drugs can often induce it. In the jungles of Peru, people use Ayahuasca to bring that out. They use Peyote in the Mexican highlands. So it depends on what part of the world. If you're in Native America, they use fasting and sensory deprivation, such as going into a hut with hot rocks burning a socalled sweat lodge.


So there are many ways of inducing and getting you out of your ego. But getting you out of your ego means surrendering your desire to survive. Because everyone wants to survive, they want their cake and they want to eat it too. You can't have both. Survival means ego. Once you decide that you're going to go to the other realm, what you are saying is, "I give up my life". That's how anybody that understands this, that's how the extraordinary acts, for example during the Vietnam War you saw Buddhist monks burn themselves. That's why they could do that.


They had totally surrendered. They were no longer concerned with their ego, which means survival. Once you understand that, then you can decide how to play your game. I'm not suggesting everybody light themselves up because that would be crazy. There would be no need for that. This universe has been created for a reason. The whole idea is to find out why it is you're here and why you chose to be here and be able to accept that as a responsible being.
Kelly: What do you think is the meaning of life?
Fred: Life is a game. It's a theatre. It's a play. It's a drama. It's a comedy. That part of us, whether it's God itself or herself or itself, or part of the game, we're addicted to it. Addiction to life and to having matter is basically what it's all about.


Now, you can ask, why do we do that? Look at the child mind. Well here's the reason. Well why is that the reason? Well the reason is because that's the reason. Oh, well why is that the reason that that's the reason? You can ask why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why and it leads you nowhere.


So you might as well understand that there is no way to go here. No one has an answer because any answer you give just leads to another question. So you understand that questioning it and answering it is not the way to understand this. The way to understand it is by experiencing it and letting go of any kind of questions that just dog chasing his tail.
Kelly: Well, I kind of have to ask you questions, sorry.
Fred: Oh, I know, I question all the time too.
Kelly: Well, Fred, do you have any workshops, lectures, seminars coming up?
Fred: Well, they're all posted on my web page. It's fredalanwolf.com. Spell my name right if you have access to the Web. I list all of the various things I'm doing. Places where I'm speaking, countries where I'm going to right now I only have a couple of events coming up. I'm leaving for Chile at the end of July and then I'll be in LA for a festival and then after that I'll be traveling to England for another whole day workshop on experiencing the very things we're talking about on the show.
Kelly: Everything's listed on your website.
Fred: Everything's on my website, yeah. It's fredalanwolf.com.
Kelly: Well, thanks for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it, Fred.
Fred: You're very welcome, and thanks for having me.
Kelly: OK. Take care and good luck with everything.
Fred: Thank you.
Kelly: Theatre of the Mind will be going live on Voice America, your net radio starting in October, October 24th to be exact. It will be an hourlong show similar to what we're doing now. I'll keep you posted on broadcast times as we get closer.


During these shows this is what's really cool you'll be able to call an 800 number and speak with our guests and me directly. So if you have any special requests for show topics or guests you want to talk to or listen to, now's the time to speak up. Shoot me an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Sorry, but that was all I could get on Gmail, al the good names were taken.


Until next time, be well.
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