About the future of humanity, your grinding self-deprecation, and why we kiss under the mistletoe

“We are in a time where the fundamental myth of civilization has collapsed, and a new myth is emerging.” Joseph Campbell says words to this effect in the famous PBS series The Power of Myth, back in 1988. Bill Moyers, leaning forward, wide-eyed, like a school child about to learn a big secret, whispers, “What is the new myth emerging?” Campbell leans in, and with his cherubic cheeks glowing, and says giddily, “Well, that’s just it, Bill! No one knows yet!”

In the 34 years since, I think we’ve gotten a foothold on what that new foundational myth is. The core idea of the old myth is: things are solid, different from one another and separate, and the universe operates on consistent physical rules. Theologians (the good ones, anyway) affirm that the God we imagine is a projection of our current understanding of how the universe works. In other words, any culture’s God is the representative of our fundamental cultural myth. We have an inner shared myth, we create God to run it. So, the God of western culture runs a universe where everything is in separate bits and has consistent rules. We must obey the rules.

We’ve taken the bait that science and religion are enemies, but both agree on this underlying myth: the universe was once not here, and then it separated from the nothingness - the void – and continued to separate into more and more physical bits, like carbon and oxygen, and those bits combined into separate bits like stars and planets, and reindeer, octopi, the covid virus, and us. As reality progresses, it separates again and again into different physical bits, all commanded by physical laws like gravity, time, and space. For both western science and religion, the foundational myth is a consistent flow of separate bits. The laws of physics and of God are the same wherever you go.

But…

A hundred years ago, quantum physicists started to realize that none of the above is true, at all. A totally bizarre, ludicrous, baloney-malarky idea began to appear: electrons were both a particle and a wave – at the same time. They were simultaneously solid matter and pure energy. Electrons could be in more than one place at the same time. They changed form when they were observed by us. They communicate across vast distances faster than the speed of light. Like a child announcing to its parents that they are non-binary, electrons declared that they weren’t going to follow the rules of the universe that we had laid out for them.

So, during this 100 recent years, ungodly relativism has poured forth across the world as science started to reveal a radical truth: that reality is based not on consistency, but on uncertainty, and underneath everything is not a set of unchanging, firm laws, but a field of ever-shifting energy with potential to become anything it seemed to want to become, at any time.  

For 100 years, science has reacted to this in the same variety of ways that parents and ministers have to the children, or to anyone who steps outside the foundational myth. Some shouted angrily, “You’re either an electron or you’re not!  You’re either matter or a wave. You’re either here or you’re over there! You’re either dead or alive.” But it didn’t matter what they shouted because it wasn’t true. If you want to know why conservative religious people are so upset nowadays, and polishing their guns for the coming holy war, it’s because what they say is true: “God’s” universal order is being threatened by these ideas.

And it goes even further. Not only does the word “either” not exist in the quantum universe, neither does the word “thing.” Quantum physics is telling us – through hundreds of repeated experiments – that, at the fundamental level of reality, there is no thing separate from another thing. Every shape that the field of quantum energy takes only has reality based on its relationship with the whole. Nothing exists separately from anything else. This is an absolute affront to western individualism.

For the past few hundred years, we totally fell in line with Isaac Newton telling us that the universe is made of individual particles governed by gravity, and we totally got on board with philosopher Rene Descartes (standing on the book of Genesis) telling us that the human mind makes us separate from an otherwise lifeless storm of matter. This foundational cultural myth “ripped us from the fabric of the universe,” as writer Danah Zohar said.  

So, if you’re feeling confused, frightened, at odds with your fellow humans, filled with rage (which is the last desperate attempt to restore by force the previous universe) just remember: it’s not you. It’s not (only) because of your flaws and your traumas and your inability to cope. The whole bleachers at the game have collapsed, and we are, together, falling into the great sea of transformation. (This is why you might want to be careful with the spiritual marketplace promising you “TRANSFORMATION!”)

And when, as you work your spiritual path, when you plunge into the cold waters of self doubt, where you wonder if you’re being stupid, or if you’re making it all up, when voices, the quiet ones inside, and the eviscerating ones in social media, try to convince you that you are a fool, all ego, just another “(fill in the category) idiot” pretending to be what you aren’t, remember give a chance to the idea that, when the bleachers collapse into the sea, everyone flails, and just do your best to make your flailing as graceful as possible. And as full of love as you can muster.

The future of humanity is the marriage between quantum physics and shamanism. Why? Because they see the same universe. One studies it, the other works with it directly. One is grounded in the logical, analytical, rational mind; the other uses the larger, freer, more fun-oriented, poetic mind. We need both in this marriage.

So what does all of this have to do with kissing under the mistletoe?

Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp, (d. 2018) spent the 20^th century making groundbreaking discoveries in the quantum mechanics of biophotons – how cells take in the smallest known particle of light, the photon, how they store light, and radiate it. He came to a conclusion that every living thing is communicating with every other thing, through light. Remember that in this emerging myth, nothing exists on its own. We are “light beings,” yes, but only because we exchange light with the rest of the universe. We are not beings because we “SHINE!” as so many workshops want to teach, which is the western model dressed in new age clothing. We are light beings because we all drink each other’s light. The old joke about heaven and hell comes to mind. Everyone sits around an extravagant banquet table loaded with food. But the forks are five feet long. Hell is where I try and fail to find a way to feed myself with that too-long of a fork. Heaven is where we learn to feed each other.

A fascinating element of Popp’s work is that heathy cells actually radiated less light than unhealthy cells – less, but more coherent light. He found that stress increased cells’ emission and incoherence of light. I know I’m stretching the analogy, but I certainly feel that when I’m stressed – which really means that I’ve fallen into some ego-hole, I’m emitting more energy, but with less coherence.

He found that cancerous cells emit vast and incoherent light. He knew that cells communicated through the exchange of light. In 1923, the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch discovered that plants’ roots could stimulate a neighboring plant's roots through the transfer of UV light if filtered through a crystal glass. So, Popp experimented with many plant extracts to see if the light in the cells of plants could coax the cancerous cell into a normal, healthy radiance. The single success was mistletoe, which was used on a woman volunteer, and within a year her terminal cancer was reversed.

So, when you are standing under that mistletoe, innocently hoping for that kiss, you can expand your inner universe by considering that what you may be asking for is that you and someone else can drink light together, and regulate your own cell’s light, guided by the mistletoe light-spirit, and as full of love as you can muster.

Blessings of light be yours at this solstice time.



For more on Fritz Albert Popp: “Are humans really beings of light? – Esalq”

Two accessible books on quantum physics:

• The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot
• The Field, Lynne McTaggart