Processmind as a Force Field in Everyday Life and Near Death

Just about everyone wonders now and then if there is some kind of intelligence organizing the apparently random and creative events in personal life and the universe. Are those events haphazard ... or is some kind of "mind" at work in the background? How might our awareness of such events influence them?

In my practice, I have often wondered about the mysterious power that seems to appear throughout life, especially in moments of crisis and near death. What is this power that not only produces the most amazing and helpful experiences but is also behind our ongoing difficulties and conflicts, our environmental problems ... and our ability to make peaceful changes? Science and spiritual traditions both contribute answers. Yet in the twenty-first century, we are far from a consensus about what or who we are, and what, if anything, arranges or "co-creates" our fate.

Modern leading scientists such as Albert Einstein as well as ancient world spiritual traditions have believed there is an intelligent cosmic force behind it all. Yet Einstein doubted that science had found it. In a 1926 letter to his colleague Max Born, he made a remark now well-known among theoretical physicists: "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One."

Today, about a century after the discoveries of quantum theory and relativity, cosmologists are still wondering about "the secret of the Old One." Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies refer to the intelligent force Einstein sought as the "mind of God." Some theoretical physicists hope to find this "mind" in unified field theories or related concepts. C. G. Jung, Roberto Assagioli, and other depth psychologists speak of a "collective unconscious," the "transpersonal Self," or some type of transcendent or "unitive" consciousness. Quoting sixteenth-century alchemists, Jung and his friend Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist, speculated about unified psychophysical region of experience—the "Unus Mundus." Religions have always spoken of the design, powers, and wisdom of the universe in terms of a Self, a God, or gods.

I call Einstein's "Old One" the processmind. By processmind I mean an organizing factor—perhaps the organizing factor—that operates both in our personal lives and in the universe. Studying and experiencing this processmind will connect the now separate disciplines of psychology, sociology, physics, and mysticism and provide new useful ways to relate to one another and the environment. The processmind is both inside of you and, at the same time, apparently connected to everything you notice. I will show that your processmind is in your brain yet is also "nonlocal," allowing you to be in several places at the same time.

When I first began writing, I was afraid that this nonlocal nature of the processmind, foreshadowed in quantum physics, might sound too strange. But then I realized that at least some people sense nonlocality every morning in those hypnagogic states just between sleeping and waking. In this "half sleep—half awake" state a kind of dreamlike intelligence frequently gives us "nonlocal" information about people and things in distant places. A physicist might call this experience the psychological counterpart of "quantum entanglement" (which I explain in a later chapter). Today I realize that the processmind is not just a specific altered state of consciousness; it defines the lifestyle and political view we need to resolve the deepest outer as well as inner conflicts.

In any case, the processmind can be experienced as a kind of force field. It is an active, intelligent "space" between the observer and observed. It is both you and me and the "us" we share. It is connected to the facts of everyday reality but also independent of them. After much exploring, both in myself and in people near death, I think it likely that the processmind has qualities that extend beyond our present concepts of life and death.

Quantum Mind and Processmind

The concept of the processmind expands upon all my earlier work, especially the book Quantum Mind, which I wrote about ten years ago. The quantum mind is that aspect of our psychology that corresponds to basic aspects of quantum physics. The quantum aspect of our awareness notices the tiniest, easily overlooked "nano" tendencies and self-reflects upon these subliminal experiences. However, the quantum mind is not just a supersensitive self-reflecting awareness; it also is a kind of "pilot wave" or guiding pattern. In Quantum Mind, I suggested that the math (Schrödinger's wave equation) and rules of quantum physics mirror our ability to self-reflect and to create everyday reality. Physicists speak of the wave function "collapsing" to create reality. I speak about how our self-reflection uses and then marginalizes, rather than "collapses," our dreaming nature. For example, after reflecting on a dream, you might think, "Ah ha! Now I will do this or that"; then you put the dreamworld aside temporarily while you take action in order to create a new reality.

Besides the ability we share with other parts of our universe to sense possibilities, self-reflect, and move from dreaming to everyday reality, we may have the ability to be in two places or two states at the same time, just as quantum physics suggests that material particles can behave. For example, in a dream you may be at once dead and alive—even though upon awakening, you come out of this unitive experience and soon begin reflecting, identifying with one or another of the dream images. Thus, we can characterize our quantum nature as nonlocal or "bilocal" as well as highly sensitive and self-reflective.

The processmind expands upon these characteristics of the quantum mind by adding one more crucial quality: Our deepest self, our...