Paradigm Shifts

People that spoke with William Shockley in the 1960s all said the same thing. They said it was like talking to God.

Shockley helped invent and commercialize the transistor. A transistor is a small, simple machine that for the first time made information electronic and automatic. It was the next step in a very important thread of innovation passing through Claude Shannon, the developer of information theory, who was himself influenced by an obscure self-taught French philosopher named George Boole, hence the term "boolean logic". George Boole, who studied the "laws of thought" was inspired by researching the polytheism of the ancient Egyptians and Persians. From there it gets murky, but the thread always connects to the source. It's true what they say, if you want a new idea read an old book.

One does not get a jet engine by improving the propeller. One does not breed horses until they give birth to a car. Telephones did not come from research on mail. Where on earth did the inspiration for the transistor and these other "leaps" of innovation come from to begin with?

Paradigm shifts are discontinuities of innovation. Yes making faster horses is innovative. Making lighter and stronger propellers is innovative. But there is a different kind of innovation too. These leaps happen, but the circumstances surrounding them are always mysterious. Where do they come from?

Paradigm shifts come from the spirit world. There are very powerful forces that do not want you to believe this. I do not care if you do or not. But it is true. Every great scientist, is also a mystic.

Physicist and scientific leader J Robert Oppenheimer was obsessed with eastern religions. He studied them his whole life. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita when the atom bomb was first detonated. Erwin Schrodinger discusses his inspiration from the ancient Vedas in his essay What is Life?. Groundbreaking mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was quite the mystic. He was very direct in saying that his inspiration came from spirits, but nobody would listen. Albert Einstein extensively studied occult researcher Helena Blavatsky. He died with Isis Unveiled at his bedside. He talked about wanting to know "God's thoughts". Richard Feynman, in The Meaning of it All, wrote how man's advancement comes from both scientific adventure and the advancement of religious ethics. Though he was not religious, he experimented extensively with out of body experiences in float tanks. In fact, the float tank was invented by his friend fringe researcher and neuroscientist John Lilly, who claimed he could under certain conditions (often involving psychedelics) he could communicate with dolphins. I think he could.

David Bohm, pioneer of quantum physics, was one of the most adept at bridging the science and the spirit. His dialogues with Krishnamurti would be a great next step if you would like to go deeper.

Now let's go way back. Pythagoras and Aristotle made journeys to India to learn from the "men who knew". Some stories say they spent days within the great pyramid listening to Thoth. It is well known that ancient Indian texts containing the "Pythagorean Theorem" existed before Pythagoras was even born.

Political innovators have always been spiritual as well. The founding of the United States of America was a paradigm shift of government. And the founding fathers were all spiritual. In fact, the primary reason they struck out on their own was to escape religious oppression.

It is true for philosophers as well. Where did almost all Greek philosophers and Roman emperors and stoics gain their insights? At Eleusis! They did psychedelics above what they believed to be a portal to the spirit world. The Eleusinian Mystery cult held rituals like clockwork for 2000 years.

Musical innovators have of course always been inspired by spiritual practice and psychedelics. Mozart was quite candid that his music was divine. I believe him. David Bowie could not have been much clearer that he was an alien. Nobody listened. There are too many examples here to mention.

Innovative authors have taken their stories from the spirit world as well. Numerous divinely inspired and channeled "religious" texts have clearly lead to countless paradigm shifts in culture and technology. Consider for example how the Old Testament taught sanitation. The technology of the story itself came from mythology. We started with only stories of gods and the spirit world. Any story involving a human as a hero or a participant is a copy. Hollywood, whether they realize it or not, tells the Hero's Journey of Jesus over and over again. Philip K Dick wrote both fiction and non-fiction about his communication with spirits. Carl Jung spent much of his career traversing the spirit world, without the use of drugs, in which he quickly found that his experiences were not hallucinations. He was interacting with conscious beings. He painted them in The Red Book.

People would roll their eyes when Steve Jobs would talk about the sacred aspects of technology, that he was on a spiritual mission. Oh Steve you're so crazy...They did the same to Theodore Newton Vail, who was on a spiritual quest to spread the gospel of the telephone, they did the same to John D Rockefeller who said he was on a mission from God to make oil. Nikola Tesla said he talked to aliens on his radios that would give him ideas. He was serious. I think he really did.

Spiritual innovators have always been ignored and oppressed, even though they made tons of people tons of money even though they became very rich and powerful and influential the spiritual aspects of their inspiration were oppressed.

Nobody would listen. They would ask and ask and ask "where did the inspiration come from" but they would not listen to the answer. They could not accept it. They refused to believe it. Surely inspiration must come from expensive degrees from ancient universities. Surely it comes from money and "hard work" and luck. Yes those things help, but innovation, especially leaps of innovation, come from the spirit world. That is where we are from to begin with.

Let's look at a few more modern stories in closer detail.

Paul Dirac was perhaps the most influential physicist of the 20th century. His inspirations and contributions are far too storied and numerous to even begin to record here. The Dirac equation was literally a quantum leap of mankind's understanding of and ability to model the universe. Yes he worked tirelessly in his lab yes he went to conferences yes his peers were brilliant and had many good ideas. But the Dirac equation itself, came to him out of a fire. The flames spoke to him and showed him the equation. He did not invent it. He discovered it. This fact is on Wikipedia but it is not properly emphasized. If you read his actual writings, if you listen to him actually talk, you will hear that the Dirac equation came to him through a portal in a fire. If that sounds mystical that is because it is.

Erwin Schrodinger made immense contributions to science as well. And he did it in the same way. Schrodinger was wrestling with the physics of life and the universe and everybody was having a very hard time grasping the statistical nature of quantum mechanics. So what to do? Did Erwin throw himself deeper in to the lab? Did he run more and more experiments? Did he ravenously devour books and papers? Yes he did all these things. But most importantly, he went camping. He got his mistress and got in a car and rented a cabin deep in the woods. But he needed things to be quieter still. He left his mistress in the cabin, and journeyed even deeper in to the woods, alone. But he needed things to be quieter still. He put pearls in his ears to block out all sound, and he sat at the base of a tree, to think. And then, at last, he heard it. He saw it. He figured it out. The equation. The sacred equation. Schrodinger first saw his famous equation describing the statistical nature of the quantum wavefunction there. Not in the lab. Not at a conference. Not in a paper. In the woods. In nature. At the quietest place he could find.

Albert Hoffman is best known for discovering LSD, but even if he never had, he would be remembered as an incredible chemist. People are tempted to call this momentous event an "accident". Nothing could be farther from the truth. Hoffman was not a careless chemist making accidents. He was a genius. Everybody in the world of chemistry respected him and continued to respect him until his death at the age of 102. Hoffman was interested in alkaloids of ergot and began synthesizing them in his lab, which he would then send to an analytical lab for testing. It was relatively boring, routine work. He synthesized a few dozen, sent them to the lab, and they sent back reports.

The lab said that there was nothing interesting about LSD-25. Nope nothing at all. Just ignore it. Move on. But he could not. Something told Hoffman that LSD was special. He couldn't get the idea out of his head, so one day he decided to test it on himself. And the rest is history. Hoffman later found LSD was an amazing tool to access the very world that had told him about LSD! They were trying to communicate! There are substances that grow out of the ground that let you access the spirit world too!

This was huge. Psychedelics revolutionized not just psychiatry, but culture. And though they have been oppressed, called "drugs" like they had anything in common with alcohol or cocaine or caffeine, they remain incredible tools for innovation and exploration in the spirit world. If you take caffeine 5 times you get the same experience every time. If you take LSD 5 times you have very different experiences each time. That was when we found the brain does not secrete consciousness, it receives it. It receives it from the spirit world. Studying a radio receiver without studying the transmitter would be very confusing. Psychedelics are not drugs. They are spaceships. Not what you expected a spaceship to look like? Well I am sure the horse breeders did not recognize the design of the automobile.

Hoffman's friend Stanislav Grof put it well when he said psychedelics could be used to study consciousness the way microscopes were used to study biology and telescopes were used to study astronomy. Can you imagine being an astronomer in a world where telescopes were illegal or a biologist in a world where microscopes were illegal? And yet lots of people are studying consciousness and intelligence without even using psychedelics! No wonder the work is so inefficient.

One person who understood the benefit of this "microscope" was Kary Mullis, who had an LSD experience which lead to the development of PCR, the polymerase chain reaction that revolutionized biological research. He did not have to go deep in to the woods. He did not have to stare in to a fire. He did not hear a quiet voice. It was right there. He saw it. It was easy. It was obvious. It was not a "hallucination". He had seen something very real. He had seen what nobody else had been able to see. Francis Crick also experimented with LSD but it is unclear if he first saw the structure of DNA while on a trip. While the use of genetic technology has been oppressed and perverted by some, it was a paradigm shift.

Spiritual technology has its uses more directly as well. Zoom and video chat is not a new technology. In fact they are a primitive form of remote viewing, a very old technology. The US military has conducted extensive research on remote viewing, with several outstanding results, like locating a downed Russian spy plane in Africa, even though the satellites could not, even though it was covered by jungle canopy. Jimmy Carter said it was the strangest and most memorable occurrence of his whole presidency. Even here the practitioners were amateurs. When fighting Native Americans in the American Southwest the US military noticed that no efforts to obscure their position were working. The tribes simply always had better intelligence than they did. They later found it was the shamans using remote viewing to spy on them. To them it was not a matter of debate or belief, it was simply a matter of military strategy. And so when they found a shaman they would brutally kill them and all remotely related family members. To this day there are precious few remaining Native American shaman bloodlines as a result of this massacre.

Francis Bacon knew. He was saying these exact same things! The enlightenment came not from denying the spirit, it came from embracing the true spirit. What was needed was to throw off the chains of the church of materialism, the false church, the church placing itself with its costumes and its hierarchy and expensive buildings in between man and God. In fact it was Martin Luther who laid the groundwork for Bacon and the enlightenment. Empiricism is not materialism. It is a better way to study both nature and the spirit. Bacon predicted a New Atlantis, a place where scientific and spiritual research could at last exist in harmony. I think this will happen. I think I will help build it.

You may think "well I have done psychedelics and I did not unlock some earth-shattering innovation". Of course not. You do not meet the Queen of England every time you get on an airplane. Meeting the Queen of England requires not just an airplane, it requires a large number of special circumstances. You may not even need an airplane to meet her. Paradigm shifts are similar. In fact I can feel one coming right now.

A lot of innovation is iteration. A lot of work had to be done to make these breakthroughs of physics and biology in to technologies and products and companies. But there is another kind of innovation too. A kind of communication with the spirit world from which we come. You do not have to believe me. But if you would only purify yourself, if only you would clean and adjust your antenna, if only you would learn to listen, you would hear and see the most beautiful things. And you could help bring them to the world that needs them.

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