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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Quantum Mechanics

Dr. Frederico Faggin 

A materialist is suddenly plunged into a life-shattering mystical experience

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from https://besharamagazine.org/science-technology/consciousness-as-the-ground-of-being/

Federico: ... Also, in those days, I was not happy. I had achieved everything that the world says should make us happy: I had a beautiful family, we were all healthy, and I was rich and famous. What more could I want? But I was unhappy and for a long time I was unwilling to admit it to myself. Eventually I realised that in some deep recess of my being, of my psyche, I was really screaming. And so, I was unhappy without knowing why, and at the same time I was trying to understand what consciousness is. I didn’t know then that the two things were related; for one seemed to be a scientific problem and the other was a deep inner feeling.

Richard: This was the time when you had the experience of love and unity you describe in your book?

Federico: Yes. It happened during a vacation at Lake Tahoe. We had a home there and were spending the Christmas holidays skiing. I woke in the night and suddenly, to put it very briefly, I experienced myself as love. It felt like an unbelievably strong and powerful love – an energy which was both scintillating white and self-knowing – and it was coming from me. This I found extraordinary, because I didn’t know then that such love could emerge from me, or from anybody. And so I was stunned. Then this energy exploded, and I saw that everything is ‘made’ of that same love. I experienced myself as the world made of that energy observing myself, and that was mind-blowing, because I had always experienced myself as separate from the objects of my observations. But suddenly I was both the observer and the observed. It was a very short experience, but it changed my life. It gave me a taste that there is more to reality than what I knew.

Richard: So that took you into exploring consciousness?

Federico: That experience set me onto a path of deeply wanting to understand what consciousness is. But we cannot know that by reading books; we can only do it by actually experiencing it – by knowing it on a first-person basis, not by looking into a microscope. So, for the next 20 years I tried to figure it out by having all kinds of different experiences, many equally extraordinary as the first, and that gave me a sense of the shape and boundaries of consciousness. It was already clear in my original experience that consciousness must be fundamental, but as time went on it also became clear intellectually that consciousness cannot be something that happens ‘inside’ the brain. It has to be what creates brains.

And so, with that sense, I decided about 12 years ago to dedicate myself to the scientific study of consciousness. This will be my last project before I move on to the other side, I told myself. And now I am immensely happy about what I’m doing.