The Madness of GeorgeW. Bush:
A Reflection of OurCollective Psychosis – by Paul Levy
FOREWORD
ByMark Comings
This book that youhold in your hands by Paul Levy is a landmark contribution to an emergingintegral psychology. It illuminates the deeper nature of our world crisisthrough a novel perspective that synthesizes psychology with recent discoveriesin physics, doing so in a deeply spiritual context. Paul uses the current Bushadministration as a compelling case study which revealsthe character and structure of a collective psycho-spiritualmalady.
The reason that ascientist like myself is writing a foreword to a book called The Madness ofGeorge W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis is that in this uniquework, Paul is drawing upon recent discoveries in physics, as well as many otherdisciplines, to shed light on the underlying psychological roots of our collectivedilemma. The severity of the planetary crisis currently engulfing us is sogreat that we need to call forth and integrate the best maps of realityavailable to us in all fields and use this evolving synthesis to wisely addressthe problems facing us. Paul’s book is a significant contribution in thisdirection, and is an example of the kind of integrated approach that isurgently needed at this time.
The two generaldomains of knowledge from which we can gain useful guidance in navigating ourway through the turbulence of our times are the spiritual and the scientific.We are witnessing a profound convergence and synthesis of these two realms thathave been divided and kept separate in western culture for many centuries. Thisspiritual-scientific synthesis is of great interest and concern to me, as itrepresents the healing of a deep epistemological rift that has shattered ourintegral wholeness in ways enormously crippling to us as a species. The processof creating bridges between new science and spiritual/psychologicalperspectives represents the process of repairing this split in our collectiveconsciousness, thereby moving us toward the healing of our species.
Paul is drawing anew and powerful picture for us. There is much talk in physics about theparticipatory universe. But very rarely is this connected to the deteriorationand failure of civil society and our opportunity to translate the understandingof reality coming out of the new physics into social responsibility andpolitical activism.
This bookrepresents a breakthrough in the understanding of how the collective humanpsyche operates as a non-local field of energy, information and sentience (thequality of having awareness). This perspective is distinctly differentfrom that of present-day mainstream psychology, which views the psyche inpurely local terms, i.e., each person's psyche is located and confined, more orless, within the locus of their physical body. The non-local quantum field ofinformation revealed by modern physics is, as Paul illustrates, related toCarl Jung’s concept of the atemporal, field-like aspect of the psyche that hecalled the “collective unconscious.” This non-local dimension of thepsyche is specifically left out of all standard, mainstream psychological mapsor models. By exploring and unpacking the implications of the idea thatneither the human psyche, nor consciousness itself, are bound by space andtime, Paul accesses a rich set of empowering insights, tools that help us cometo grips with what is actually occurring in our world today.
Paul's work notonly articulates an innovative field-based perspective on the human mind butalso calls for a radical revisioning of the very nature of psychology itself.His diagnosis of our non-local collective mental illness is an importantachievement in the evolving psychology of planetary consciousness. What Paul isbringing to light requires us to rethink the very nature and definition ofpsychiatric disorders in terms of the non-local field of consciousness whichunites all minds in a singular and inherently inseparable unified quantumfield. This recontextualization of the way we think about illness has the powerto bring forth new possibilities for the healing and transformation of ourcollective malady.
Don't let its titlefool you into thinking that this is a book about George W. Bush. This would beto miss the entire point of what Paul is saying. Bush is simply an acute andprominent example serving to illuminate the deep and insidious nature of thecollective mental disorder afflicting our species. This is not your typicalBush-bashing book. Though it seems to be about Bush, it is really aboutourselves.
Paul identifiesand elucidates the structure and dynamics of the collective trance from whichhumanity needs to wake up from so that we may stop dreaming up nightmares forourselves. We, as a species, have been suffering from a pervasive form ofmis-knowledge about the nature of the universe, and ourselves as well. We keeptrying solutions that are premised on a view of reality that is false, whichensure that our attempts at resolution will never succeed.
One of theimplicit and generally unrecognized problems underlying our world crisis isthat we tend to be entranced by fixating our attention on a superficial level ofexplicate (outer manifest forms) and seemingly separate patterns that make upour world. By having our awareness constricted and focused in such a limitedway, we are not seeing, attending to or feeling the deeper, undivided,invisible, and indivisible field and its non-local dynamics which areresponsible for shaping world events in a fundamental way.
Paul is taking astand and saying that the way we have been perceiving and understanding“reality” (or the world) is fundamentally flawed and ignorant of a deeper levelof radical interconnectedness that is primarily responsible for organizing,regulating, and patterning events in the so-called “objective” physical world.These non-local forces are the formative agents of the patterns of outer eventsand are only to be discovered in one place within our own subjectiveexperience, that is, within our minds.
There has been acritically important breakthrough in physics in the last few decades that hasradically changed our understanding of the nature of Nature. What hasbeen discovered is that an underlying assumption—known as "theprinciple of locality"—implicit in our scientific understanding ofthe physical world for centuries, is categorically wrong at the deepest levelof nature. In a brilliant series of experiments conducted in the 1970s and‘80s, and which have been continually refined and made more rigorous throughoutthe ‘90s and on into the 21st century, “locality” (being bound and limited byspace and time) has been shown to not apply at the most fundamental andessential levels of matter, energy, and information.
Locality refersto a tacit or unconscious assumption about the nature of physical reality. Itis the view, arising from our day to day experiencing of the macroscopicphysical world, that the world is comprised of apparently separate things ormechanistically interacting parts. In a local universe, light is the fastestcarrier of information. Thus, no information or influences of any kind can getaround the material universe faster than the speed of light. Another way ofsaying this is that all information and influences in the universe are thoughtto necessarily propagate through space, i.e., over distance, at the speed oflight or less. This assumption has been soundly proven to be wrong. In essence,what physics has discovered is that everything is radically interconnected inways that are subtler and much deeper than can be explained or understood on apurely mechanical or macroscopic physical basis.
In a non-localuniverse, at the most primary level, there is a way in which information isgetting around faster than the speed of light. So much faster, in fact, that itactually takes no time at all. The inherent non-locality of nature provides forinstantaneous information distribution throughout all of space. Light is thevery substance and foundation of being, but as we know, according to Einstein’stheory of relativity, time stops at the speed of light. For light, there is notime. Thus, light itself is essentially timeless by its very nature. Light istherefore a non-temporal standing wave pattern of energy/information. Beingnon-temporal or synchronic, the information encoded in light is availableeverywhere at the same time, and is thus non-local.
Due to thisintrinsic atemporality of the fabric of reality, information and informinginfluences can get around the universe in ways that are instantaneous,unmitigated and immediate. The universe is thus able to choreograph itsmovements by being informed and thus orchestrated and co-ordinated byinformation from the whole in-forming every part. In other words, allapparently separate things, e.g., people, etc., are actually indissolublyunited as one singular invisible and indivisible being or field. There is onlyone already-unified Singularity of Existence that will not ultimately admitseparations. This is Being itself and all that it contains. Physics has thusproven that separation is an illusion at the most fundamental and essentiallevel of the unified field. We may appear to be separate beings and on theconventional order of reality it makes sense and is useful to treat each otheras discrete, encapsulated and separate entities, but when it comes down todealing with the fundamental nature of reality, none of us are truly separablefrom each other.
The psychologicalimplications of embracing the reality of a non-local universe are enormous andvastly transformative of the entire field of Psychology, and by extension,every other form of collective human activity. Certain functions of the humanpsyche must now be understood to operate as a non-local quantum field in whichwe all participate in an interconnected and interdependent mind-field. Thus,any problem arising in the sphere of the human family can ultimately be seen ashaving something to do with each and every one of us. We are co-participants inall that occurs in the entire human world. This knowledge brings with it greatresponsibility—universal responsibility, in fact. In taking this totalresponsibility for our lives and our inescapable impact upon the entire humanworld and beyond, literally upon all that lives for generations to come, webecome aware that we have greater power than we have previously understood andbecome self-empowered to act as conscious agents of change, healing, andtransformation.
Paul's bookinaugurates and calls for a whole new non-local or field psychology in whichthe prime object of focus is not the mind or psyche of one individual taken inisolation, but rather the entire continuum or field that is the energeticmedium underlying and interconnecting all of physical and non-physical reality.Through this medium or field, all minds are thereby united as constituents ofone universal mind. Physical reality, which on the surface appears to be madeup of a rich and complex array of discrete and separate "things" thatwe call the universe, is actually an utterly seamless, perfectly contiguousunified field of sentient beingness. This field which is called the “quantumvacuum” in physics, is in fact a “plenum” (an absolute fullness) and isknown to be saturated with nearly infinite energy and immeasurable luminosity.
The standardpsychological approach is to treat psychological disorders on a case by case individualbasis. This definitely has its merits, similar to how classical mechanisticphysics has great value and utility for dealing with the everyday world ofmacroscopic objects and their mechanical interactions. But when it comes tounderstanding the deepest roots of the nature of mind and psyche, it is toocrude of a generalization to treat our minds as separate and encapsulated fromeach other. This standard psychological and psychiatric perspective lacks theability to perceive and discern the mysterious interconnectedness of ourcollective psychology that gives rise to mass events. Mainstream psychologicalunderstanding does not have enough resolution to grasp the subtle and profoundways that all minds are linked together and co-operate as integrated parts in acollective, non-local field of consciousness. Herein lies the value of whatPaul is articulating, for it extends the scope of modern psychology into newdomains that have been heretofore either ignored or poorly understood. Theability to map, model, discuss and thus more deeply understand the non-localand non-temporal dimensions of the psyche and the role that these dimensionsplay in informing and shaping the psychology of individuals, groups and ourentire species is a great contribution that cannot be underestimated.
Paul’s view ofthe universe as a mass shared dream is congruent with the moment to moment“collapse of the wave function” model of quantum physics. This rigorous,mathematical description of how events unfold indicates that in each momentthere are an array of possibilities and that in each moment, only one of thosemyriad possibilities occurs. The possibility that becomes an actuality isselected in the moment of observation by the act of observation. Quantumphysics thus shows us that the unfolding of a physical event is profoundlyconnected to and impacted by how consciousness, through the act ofobservation itself, brings that potential event into manifestation. Thecollapse of the wave function of quantum physics is mediated or determined bythe observing consciousness in a similar way that the witnessing consciousnesswithin a dream affects the unfolding of the dream. This reveals the profoundparallels between the process by which material events are understood to unfoldin physics and the process by which consciousness is involved in creating andshaping how a dream manifests. The dynamics of material process appears to havea deep similarity to the dynamics of dreaming. Thus quantum physics providesstrong supportive evidence for the dream-like nature of the universe.
By the word"dreaming," Paul is evoking a radical shift or recontextualization ofthe nature of our experience. By "dreaming" Paul does not intend toevoke the common notion that if something is a "dream" it is somehowless real or "imaginary" in the pejorative sense. Paul means exactlythe opposite when he refers to the dream-like nature of our human experience.When Paul refers to our experience being "a dream," or being"dream-like," he is making a very profound phenomenologicalassertion, one that is common to many of the world’s most time-honoredspiritual wisdom traditions and philosophical systems of thought. Thisassertion essentially points to the fact that our so-called outer or"objective" experience of the world is actually not separate from,but is in fact an instantaneous reflex of the structures of consciousness thatwe are operating out of in any given moment. This point is both subtle andimmensely profound—it is the essence of the great spiritual wisdomtraditions. Just like in dreaming, we are the source of meaning for everymoment of our experience. We are each creatively responsible for evoking, or inPaul's words, "dreaming up," our world.
Physics gives usa rigorous basis for understanding and gaining insight into the way that we areall co-participating in the evocation or "dreaming up" of our worldmoment to moment. An essential truth that has emerged out of quantum physics isthat when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.This is an exact articulation of the dynamics of dreaming. This book isbeginning to describe the basic outlines of what could be called “the physicsof the universal dream.”
Paul is sayingthat in order to effectively deal with the present planetary crisis we mustawaken to a new level of consciousness, which is available to us in this verymoment. Just as we can learn to become lucid in our night dreams, it isimperative that we, as a species, learn to become lucid in our so-called wakingstate. The crises of our time requires a new form of collective lucid wakingconsciousness for their resolution.
Paul is sayingthat our ordinary mundane so-called waking-state consciousness is in a veryreal sense asleep to the way that it is involved in shaping and evoking thepatterns of “outer” events. This key insight can change our lives profoundly.When fully understood, it can enable us to discover entirely new ranges ofoptions and possibilities to which we were previously asleep or blind, havingfallen under the spell of a limiting belief system. This essential insight,when properly engaged, can be the tipping point within our consciousness thatsnaps us out of the spell that perpetuates our sense of helplessness andimpotence. This insight can awaken us to the fact that we have a vast array ofpreviously unrecognized creative options at our disposal that we can use rightnow to make positive change in the world, no matter who we are or what oursituation may be.
While we holdBush and Co. accountable as a political, legal matter, it is imperative forpurposes of human spiritual evolution to see that the roots of that samemadness that we see them so clearly embodying are in us. This is one of themost salient points in Paul's book. The outer madness we see acting itself outin the world is inescapably connected to and, in fact, a reflection of aprocess going on deep within ourselves, both individually and collectively. Aspecific example of this is how our environmental crisis is actually an outerreflection of a crisis in the inner mental and spiritual landscape ofhumanity.
If our leadersare behaving in mad ways, it reflects a deeper spiritual and cultural madnesspervading the field and affecting us non-locally. How could we as a collectiveaccept and even actively support mad leaders if we weren't mad ourselves? Inour madness, we believe our leaders to be sane, which means like us. Our madleaders are thus an inseparable reflection and product of a mad populace. Whenwe see how we are connected and are unconsciously helping to support and feedthe madness pervading the field, we gain power to change the overall madness bychanging ourselves.
Paul’s uniquesynthesis of diverse areas of knowledge is a creative and daring attempt topoint out and articulate “something” that has remained hidden in the field ofhumanity's experience for millennia. This “something” has caused indescribableand nightmarish damage and destruction to human life throughout the entirecycle of recorded history. This "something" has been eluding andtormenting humankind for ages. It is hard to see because it hides in theshadows of human consciousness. It secretly influences perception in ways thatprevent it from being discovered. This "something" has traditionally beencalled “evil.”
Paul's work is anearnest and creative effort to shed new light on the nature of evil. As hepoints out, the very process of shining light on evil dynamically transformsthe nature of evil itself. He articulates how evil can function as a catalyticagent in the awakening of consciousness within humanity. Despite the horrors ofevil, it has an important transformative function to play in the evolution ofour species. This very perspective on evil helps us to relate to it in new andempowered ways. It provides us with powerful and creative tools for tracking,studying, and dealing with evil. Armed with these insights, Paul is able todraw a more accurate map of the roots of the psychic malaise afflicting all ofus which is the cause of untold amounts of human suffering.
Paul synthesizesthe wisdom of the pioneering psychologist Carl Jung with the transcendentalinsight of Buddhism and the revealed wisdom stemming from a deeply feltunderstanding of the implications of the latest discoveries in quantum physics.Paul's perspective is the product of a unique initiation that was the hard-wonresult of his own ordeal of freeing himself from the limitations of mainstreampsychological understanding. Paul’s personal experience, combined with his additionaleducation in psychology, spirituality, and consciousness enables him to bridgethe worlds of inner experience and outer appearance. Paul's innovative way ofutilizing the recent discoveries from physics to elucidate and map newpsychological territory is trailblazing, and I applaud him for his boldsynthesis.
To see theintegration of physics and psychology that Paul is forging is deeply satisfyingto me as a scientist who has always striven to integrate the scientific and thespiritual. It is my hope that Paul’s work will stimulate and awaken therealization of the dream-like nature of reality. Joining our lucidity together,we can help each other to understand and stabilize the recognition that we arecollaboratively dreaming up our universe into materialization in this verymoment. This spreading realization in our species can create a shared contextin human consciousness that will allow previously undreamed of approaches andsolutions to emerge. This may well be the secret to the reconciliationand healing of our world crisis.
Please see the firstchapter of the upcoming book by Paul Levy "The Madness of George W. Bush:A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis," at
© 2005 Paul Levy