Evan Harris Walker - The Physics Of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind And The Meaning Of Life

EVAN HARRIS WALKER, PH.D.

EVAN HARRIS WALKER, PH.D.

This book is dedicated to the memories of my parents, Eva Victoria Harris Walker and James William Walker, and to Merilyn Ann Zehnder, without whom there would be nothing.

I have always felt that a well-developed intellect must embrace both an artistic sense and an understanding of scientific reasoning-and it follows that, fully developed, these sensibilities will, of themselves, ultimately demand their unification. This work is an outgrowth of that vision. Both the meaning of life and the physics of consciousness must, ultimately, become one understanding.

This book looks to both of these sensibilities for its inspiration, and it finds these sources not just in the museums of art and the catalogues of scientific research, but in the people who have influenced and breathed life into this work: Merilyn Ann Zehnder, my parents, Eva Victoria Harris Walker and James William Walker; friends who were a part of this story, among them Tom Whittson and Maitland Maclntyre; family and those who have otherwise added to my life: my brother James (Jimmie) William Walker, Jr., his wife Eileen Newton Walker, and family of James Willam III, Michael Pittman, Lee Newton, Helen Harris and Caroline Irwin, and theirs; Steve Blumenthal, S. Fred Singer, Elsa Pilarinou, Warren Hillstrom, Jo Carroll, Eduardo Palomino, Marian Buchannan, Alice Ferguson Holmes, Catherine Stathers, Gertrude and Ralph Neal; my wife, Helen Marie Moseley Walker; and those who have striven to make this work the book that it has become, Brian Nolan, Eric Edwards, Jay Jackson, Marco Pavia, Amanda Cook, Connie Day, and especially the perseverance of David Hiatt and Jeffrey Robbins.

-Menandes

As I walked down the steps from her apartment, my mind went back over the years. My mind went back to things that have been and that I have done, the things of my life and the things of this day. I will write of this, someday. I will tell what happened here. But time is needed for its meaning to grow clear, to become part of the perspective that gives life meaning. Time is needed for these images to be reflected in the history of my life.

My mind went back to the things I must say here-back to an image, to a terrible image, to a vision of my future and of my purpose. My mind went back there.

She lay there dead. I have spent half a century trying to understand that moment. There had been such wonderful moments. There had been then the times of walks to the park, luscious southern summer days, forever summer in my mind-captured forever in the memories of our play; of games of tennis and walks to town; of my own jaunts to visit, climbing the long hill to Clermont Drive, then up the nearly vertical two flights of stone steps that mounted the steep front lawn to her house. My mind goes back to those times, to the time before she lay there dead.

I had seen and shared with her the full youthful joy of love. She had written for me her simple, direct poems about her love for me, and I had written my poems-awkward, stilted efforts to speak beyond my years or my knowledge, but still speaking of this new emotion. And then this ended. Leukemia came to claim her. There was a last glimpse through the open door of her hospital room as she lay there on her last day, and then death closed her eyes.

My last sight of her was at Rideout's Funeral Home in Homewood. A day later she lay next to her father, beneath the soil of Jackson, Mississippi. She had gone home.

Years have passed, years in which the questions have persisted every day. The pain has given way to the searching, to the quest to find out what we really are and what, if anything, remains when the tissues of the brain and body have ceased their functions. The years have passed, and the questions have persisted. Where is home? Is there any home?

I remember one particular day at Auburn. I sat on an open grassy ridge near the college. Above me spread a blue sky filled with those puffy white clouds that seem never to come anymore. I sat there till the sun set and then till dusk quieted the land to the distant hills. I sat there asking, praying for some sign that she existed. There was absolutely nothing but the sky, the white puffy clouds, the grassy ridge, the distant hills, and the sun that set and ended the day.

The pain faded many years ago, to be replaced by other pains in other days. But the questions have remained. The questions have been there to prod me on in my search for answers, answers that are more than just promises and assurances designed to comfort. And I have found some of the answers. There are answers, answers to the questions like "What are we really?" There are answers to our search for the meaning of our lives and the nature of our universe. There are answers to my quest, to your quest to know the fabric of reality, to know our meaning, our destiny, and to find home-that corner of the world that smiles for us.