Marc Seifer - Transcending the Speed of Light: Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and the Fifth Dimension

For Lois, the light of my life

TRANSCENDING THE SPEED OF
LIGHT

How is it possible for consciousness to exist in the physical universe? This is the classic mind-body problem that has eluded philosophers for many generations. Now it appears that answers are within reach. The depth of Marc Seifers scholarship and the clarity of his thinking make this book a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the frontiers of consciousness research.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, PH.D.,
DEAN OF CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES RESEARCH,
UNIVERSITY OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH

This book by Marc Seifer is truly a tremendous work! It represents a remarkable accomplishment of gathering an enormous amount of relevant material and taking the reader through a lifetime of meticulous research! I know of no other book that does all of that so thoroughly, and I highly recommend this book to any and all readers who are seriously interested in the puzzling problem of the nature of mind and consciousness. Marcs work is an epochal achievement that will offer new thoughts to the reader for many decades to come.

COL. TOM BEARDEN (RETIRED),
AUTHOR OFEXCALIBUR BRIEFING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been published without the support of Inner Traditions. I would like to thank Ehud Sperling, Jeanie Levitan, Mindy Branstetter, Nancy Yeilding, and the rest of the ITI staff. I would also like to thank: Daniel G. Freedman, my masters thesis mentor at the University of Chicago; Roger Pearson, the dean at Providence College, for encouraging me; Howard Smukler, the first director of the MetaScience Foundation; Professor Stanley Krippner, who oversaw some of my graduate studies on such topics as synchronicity and precognition; Elliott Shriftman, Sandy Neuschatz, Godfrey Jordan, Lynn Sevigny, Tom Bearden, Ron Hatch, John White, Uri Geller, my brother and sister Bruce Seifer and Meri Shardin, and Edwin Gora, professor emeritus, for giving me numerous articles on the quantum physics of consciousness; and my father, Stanley Seifer, and my mother, Thelma Imber Seifer, for sending me numerous cogent articles related to this topic.

The book has been heavily influenced by such writers and thinkers as G. W. Leibniz, Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, Arnold Sommerfeld, Charles Muss, Nikola Tesla, Arthur Koestler, David Bohm, Rudolf Steiner, Lobsang Rampa, Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller, Henri Bergson, John Ott, Royal Rife, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Landis, Paul Kammerer, and Carl Jung. Some important inspirations stem from the work of Dennis Gabor, the discoverer and developer of holography/3-D photography, and such books as George Gamows Thirty Years That Shook Physics, Fritjof Capras The Tao of Physics, books by Lincoln Barnett and James Coleman that explain Einsteins theories, and the amazing P. D. Ouspensky and his masterwork, New Model of the Universe.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

I first met Marc Seifer in the 1970s at a parapsychology conference in Washington, D.C. At that time, I had just finished a decade of conducting experiments with anomalous dreams at Brooklyns Maimonides Medical Center Dream Laboratory. In fact, Marc told me that after he received his masters degree, he had visited Maimonides with the hope of apprenticing with me, but he found that I had moved to California, where I had begun teaching at Saybrook Graduate School.

A few years later, Marc enrolled at Saybrook, and I became his doctoral mentor. At that time, in the early 1980s, Marc conducted several independent studies on such topics as synchronicity and precognition. Even though neither of us knew it at the time, that work planted the seeds for this book.

As I have suggested in my autobiography, Song of the Siren, investigating this field is a tricky and hazardous matter because there are many blind alleys, several unknown variables, and no hard-and-fast rules as to what will make an ultimate contribution to human knowledge.

In Dream Telepathy, Montague Ullman, Alan Vaughan, and I presented the results of the controlled laboratory experiments we had conducted, which presented compelling evidence suggesting that some type of thought transference can occur while people are dreaming. Although other researchers amassed additional data, the serious study of such topics as telepathy in academic and medical environments remains virtually nonexistent, over three decades later. It is against this backdrop that Marc has continued his valiant work, performing his own studies in seeking to understand humanitys unknown capacities, and, beyond that, attempting to develop an overarching paradigm to explain these anomalous, puzzling phenomena.

My colleagues in parapsychological circles and I are endeavoring to further the field of research into human consciousness and to bring the results of our quest to the attention of the mainstream academic and medical communities. For the most part, these communities have yet to take such topics as telepathy seriously. One common question is, But how do you explain your results? What are the mechanisms for telepathy and the other phenomena you are studying? Marc has attempted to provide some answers to such questions. He is not trying to demonstrate that anomalous phenomena exist. A plethora of books and journal articles make this case. Instead, he cites anecdotes from his own life that illustrate putative synchronicity, telepathy, and precognition. These experiences will help many readers pay closer attention to exploring their own life experiences for possible instances of baffling phenomena that are difficult to explain in conventional terms.

Taking his cues from Ren Descartes, who began his speculations with a premise of doubting everything, and Thomas Kuhn, who suggested that scientific progress rests on the explanation of anomalies, Marc reexamines Descartes mind/body dualistic paradigm and Einsteins supposition that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. The mind for Marc is part of this physical world, a world that transcends the dualistic paradigm. Yet, paradoxically, it also has a transcendent function, and thus may inhabit a realm in which the speed of light has little relevance. Like many other writers, Marc calls this realm inner space or hyperspace, although he gives the term his own unique spin.

To understand this realm, Marc calls for a program that will combine aspects of physics and psychology. His goal appears to be multifaceted. Not only is he attempting to provide his own description of the term consciousness in a way that portrays aspects of mind embedded in the structure of matter, but he also seeks to question some of the basic tenets of quantum physics. For example, he wants to reintroduce the long-discarded concept of ether to provide answers to some unexplained aspects of gravity, the spin of elementary particles, and, needless to say, psychic phenomena.

Basing his case on a wide variety of sources, Marc suggests that for physicists to produce the long-sought grand unification theory they must, by necessity, include the mind of the observer and the very process of consciousness itself. In Marcs paradigm, consciousness is a force comparable to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

I have my reservations about some aspects of this treatise, but not with its goal, namely to set the stage for establishing a paradigm for integrating consciousness into the structure of the spacetime continuum. Volition, intention, and expectancy play a role in experiments conducted by both psychologists and physicists; perhaps they play a role in weaving the fabric of reality itself.