Let’s talk about spirituality and particle physics. Why? Well as above so below – meaning: we can understand spirituality through physics. If you know an atheist who might benefit from this bridge, please share it with them.
Part 0 – Skepticism & Science
Science is one of the most reliable tools we’ve ever developed. It lets us build airplanes, predict eclipses, and cure diseases. It obtains this powerful reliability from self-imposed boundaries. It requires that phenomena be measurable, repeatable, and observable under controlled conditions. That’s its strength – but it also means entire dimensions of human experience fall outside its net.
Consider moments of déjà vu, the sense of being stared at before you turn your head, or the uncanny timing of thinking about someone just before they call. These don’t submit easily to repeatable experiments, yet they’re common enough that most people recognize them. Science doesn’t have much to say about them – not because they’re meaningless, but because they resist the methods science depends on.
Some less common examples are people who seem to sense their own death before it happens. I recall some story from a doctor of a woman warning him that they should postpone her surgery – he gave her every assurance that it was a standard procedure for him that he’d done hundreds of times – she died on the table that day and he was never the same. It would be impossible for me to find the names involved. So I’ve found some other examples with similar stories. A woman who flatlined on the table and had an out of body experience of the operating room and procedure (Pam Reynolds Lowery). Several people who felt uneasy, or had outright premonitions, about work on the fateful day of September 11th 2001. Barrett Naylor, Eamon McEneaney, and Michael Hingson.
Skeptics often dismiss stories like these as emotional appeals. And yes, they are emotional – because life, death, and uncanny timing are charged with meaning. But sometimes dismissal itself is driven by fear: the fear of being deceived, the fear of appearing gullible, or even the deeper fear of admitting that such forces might touch their own lives. A true skeptic, though, is not one who only doubts what challenges their worldview, but one who doubts their own certainty as well. As Sherlock Holmes reminds us, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” If you can’t truly verify that something is impossible, then dismissing it tells you more about your comfort than about reality. The honest position is therefore to keep doubt alive on both sides – toward belief, and toward disbelief. Something I’m sure John von Neumann, who warned that “you don’t understand mathematics, you just get used to it,” would recognize. I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with how he looked at entropy, and apply that theory to your beliefs. Even the most rigorous frameworks demand humility, because certainty is rarely as absolute as it feels.
The spirit of this post isn’t strictly scientific, it’s an exploration of potential found without scientific theories, frameworks, and concepts.
Part 1 – Electromagnetic Fields
Living systems produce electromagnetic fields, because electricity and magnetism are inseparable. This is why electromagnetic locks are a thing. Veritasium made a wonderful video that provides a decent understanding of fields created by electric currents. But.. to over simplify things… electricity is about charges, those charges create fields, and those fields are limited by the speed of light along with the strength of the charges of course.
The heart generates the strongest EM field in the body. A couple magntitudes stronger than the brain’s field. Sensitive instruments like a magnetocardiography machine can detect it several feet away. Beyond pumping blood, the heart communicates with the nervous system: through the vagus nerve (carrying signals directly to the brain), through hormones it releases into circulation, and quite possibly through its rhythmic EM field. Studies of “heart coherence”, where the heart rate settles into a smooth rhythmic pattern, show that the brain’s activity often synchronizes with this rhythm. Going a bit higher into this, the signals carried from the brain such as BP & HRV have direct influences on emotions/cognition/attention. This is partly why breathing deeply and slowly, which both stimulates the vagus nerve and slows the heart rate allows us to relieve stress and calm our emotional states – the other part of course being focused attention on breath, which of course doesn’t in of itself negate negative thoughts and emotions.
The brain is usually the first thing that comes to mind when we think about electricity in the body. Neurons fire by shifting ions across their membranes, and that constant movement of charge means the brain is steeped in electromagnetic activity. Because neurons are sensitive to fields as well as direct wiring, some have suggested the heart’s much stronger field could nudge brain rhythms into sync through resonance or entrainment – not just through the vagus nerve or chemical messengers. In simple terms, the brain is a storm of electrical impulses, billions of little sparks flowing across its networks every second. We often describe it like a computer, an information processor made of circuits. But there’s a difference worth noting: computers weren’t built to pick up or use external fields, while the brain wasn’t built by us at all. It may well be that its architecture has always been tuned, in part, to the fields around it. And we know from experiments that the brain does in fact respond to external fields. Strong, pulsed magnetic fields in techniques like TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) can trigger movements or flashes of light in the mind’s eye, and even weaker fields – such as those used in tDCS (Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation) – can shift how likely neurons are to fire. On a smaller scale, studies show that neurons can influence each other through their own local fields, a process called ephaptic coupling. This means even subtle, almost invisible electromagnetic events can nudge the timing and synchrony of brain activity in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
Part 2 – Fields, Minds, and Connection
Once we accept that the heart and brain produce EM fields a next step is to revisit concepts such as telepathy. Physics tells us that fields weaken rapidly with distance (often by the inverse square law). Yet, resonance can make even faint signals meaningful, like a radio tuning into a distant station not because the signal is strong, but because of how perfectly aligned the receiver is. Perhaps most interestingly this idea has parallels in ancient spiritual teachings. In Buddhist doctrine, one of the six higher knowledges (abhijñā) is ceto-pariya-ñāṇa, often translated as “mind-penetrating knowledge” – or effectively.. telepathy – attained by advanced meditation practices. Similarly, the Vedas and later yogic traditions speak of siddhis, including clairvoyance and mind-reading, as achievable through deep sādhanā (spiritual discipline). These aren’t likely metaphorical flourishes, but explicit acknowledgments that the human mind, under certain conditions, can bypass sensory channels. If we combine that with modern neuroscience—knowing that neurons are subtly responsive to even weak electromagnetic biases—the possibility that one mind could “tune into” another doesn’t sound entirely far-fetched.
A quick tangent note: growing up surrounded by the miracles of science and the magical stories of the world we tend to think about the magical in terms of science. I can speak only for myself here, but as a child hearing about stories about telepathy and psychics and dead spirits and all this… I thought: if these are true stories then it is only a matter of time before science proves or disproves them. Yet, this is a fundamentally flawed conclusion as mentioned at the very beginning. Why I wanted to bring this up right now is that our expectation is that if there are spiritual practitioners who have achieved these siddhis, then they would want to use those powers in ways that help the world. Or at the very least they would likely seek to prove their existence. But that expectation assumes the goals of spiritual practice align with the goals of science, public demonstration, or altruism. In many traditions, siddhis are seen not as trophies to be displayed, but as distractions — even dangers — on the path to deeper realization. The Vedas, the Buddhist texts, and later yogic commentaries often warn that chasing powers for their own sake leads to ego, not liberation.
Most strikingly modern studies of meditation and contemplative practice give this old wisdom a measurable edge. Researchers have recorded states of unusually deep heart-brain coherence in experienced practitioners of yoga and Buddhism, where the rhythms of the heart and the oscillations of the brain fall into striking synchrony. These aren’t just metaphors of “mind and heart aligning” — they are physiological patterns visible on instruments, showing that practices described in the Vedas and early Buddhist texts do in fact cultivate highly ordered states of internal resonance.
As for evidence of these phenomena, the first problem we run into is fraud. There are plenty of grifters who make a living reading subtle cues – microexpressions, changes in tone, body language – and passing it off as psychic insight. They muddy the waters so thoroughly that even the genuine cases, if they exist, get dismissed out of hand. But we shouldn’t let the existence of fakes blind us to patterns that resist easy explanation.
There are a few places we can look to for evidence though. The first place worth looking at is a segment of the autism community known collectively as non-speakers. The second place we can look, is actually the rest of us – albeit more anecdotally. As it turns out some autistic folks known as non-speakers have telepathic abilities which is supported with strong compelling evidence. Ky Dickens released a podcast (roughly 1 year ago as of writing this post on 9/9/2024), as preparation for a full documentary on the phenomenon and to simply start spreading the word, known as The Telepathy Tapes. Anecdotally, this was released a month before my spiritual awakening.. and I am ASD-1 though I am not consciously telepathic – more like consciously telepathetic. I’m not going to try to convince you of something the podcast does a better job of over the course of 10 episodes – so go give the first episode a listen if you haven’t already. I’d humbly request that you suspend your disbelief for the duration of your listening experience, maybe write down your skeptic thoughts, so you can revisit them after, if that helps you keep your mind clear and open.
I said the second place we can look is actually the rest of us. So now, let’s cover that. Let’s start with the anecdotal: when you think of someone and receive a call or text message from them. Or how about the other day when I was discussing Road House with a roommate and I was talking about how I didn’t think I’d really like the original too much cause I was never a fan of *oh shit what’s his name.. from baywatch*. My roommate proceeded to dig out their phone and look up the movie. Read his name in his mind, and suddenly the name came to me. Importantly I intuited what he was doing and was still actively trying to think of the name, but I had just about given up after 20-30 seconds. Then as soon as he silently looked at Hasselhoff’s name the name came into my mind. I immediately said it much to his minor annoyance – “I was literally just about to say it”. While some may be capable of consciously using telepathy, it would seem most of us are unconsciously using telepathy. Controlled laboratory settings, like the Ganzfeld experiments, have consistently found small but significant effects suggesting that people can transmit impressions beyond the reach of normal senses. Individually, the results might be easy to explain away, but when hundreds of trials are pooled together, the data rise above statistical noise. It’s not proof, but it’s a signal – faint, persistent, and worth investigating. Between the testimonies of non-speakers and the controlled findings in parapsychology, we’re left with the same uncomfortable conclusion: while much can be faked, not everything has been.
Part 3 – Physics & Theories
There is more to the electromagnetic spectrum than just fields, there is of course radiation. The traveling waves and photons that fields generate when they oscillate – i.e. electromagnetic radiation aka light (radio, xrays, visible light, etc.). And beyond fields, the body also emits light; both expressions of the electromagnetic spectrum both tied directly to the speed of light.
Science has shown cells emit flashes of light called biophotons. Which were first seriously studied by Russian biophysicist Alexander Gurwitsch. These biophoton emissions are extremely faint, only a few photons per square centimeter per second. They mostly come from metabolic reactions inside the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell! lol). What makes them remarkable is their structure. Biophotons don’t behave like random thermal noise. Studies have shown that they display temporal coherence (regular timing) and spectral coherence (narrow wavelength ranges), both qualities that make them capable of carrying information. German biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp argued that this coherence could allow cells to use light for communication. Potentially regulating growth, repairing DNA, or coordinating activity across tissues. While his theories remain controversial, later experiments have shown that biophoton emissions rise during stress, cell division, and even during apoptosis (programmed cell death), suggesting they are not mere metabolic byproducts but functional signals.
And we shouldn’t forget that ordinary heat emissions are also light – specifically infrared radiation. Each of our bodies’ glow in this part of the spectrum. Invisible to our eyes but obvious to a thermal camera. To sum this up, our bodies radiate across the electromagnetic spectrum. From infrared heat to ultraweak visible photons.
I promised spirituality and science, and so far the spirituality has been a bit lite. So then, if we are generating all this electromagnetic spectrum stuff:tm: why does that matter? Well physics tells us why that matters. When a static field (e.g. rare earth magnet), or near field (i.e. quasi-static; e.g. heart/neurons/circuit) moves the disturbance propagates outward at the speed of light. In other words, fields move at the speed of light – I just wanted to be precise to not offend any physicists. Of course something else that moves at the speed of light, is fucking light. So we’ve got two extensions of our bodies, of our being, of our existence which are moving at the speed of light.
Now for the interesting part: things moving at the speed of light don’t experience the passage of time. When a photon is emitted, say 14BY ago, it travels with a speed. Speed we consider to be distance divided by time, so obviously we can expect there to be an experience of time. But physics tells us there’s a twist – from the photon’s own perspective, there is no “time” between emission and absorption. The math says that for something moving at the speed of light, time dilates completely. In relativity terms, its proper time is zero. So whether a photon left the surface of a distant star fourteen billion years ago or just bounced off your skin a second ago, in its own frame it never aged, it never waited. Its entire journey happened in one instantaneous moment. Remember that the next time someone tells you they’ll only need a moment to get ready.
So this is where physics quietly rhymes with spirituality. Our bodies don’t just make fields, they radiate. Every flicker of biophotons, every pulse of infrared heat, every oscillation of the heart or brain is, at least in part, tied to processes that exist outside the ordinary passage of time. To us they appear as rhythms – heartbeats, brainwaves, breaths. To light itself, there is no rhythm, no before or after, just a single unbroken existence.
If light never experiences time, then maybe the deeper clue lies not in photons themselves but in the structure they move through. Einstein’s theory of relativity didn’t just give us E = mc²; it rewrote our entire picture of time. It tells us that space and time are not separate – they are fused into spacetime, a single fabric where events are defined relative to the observer. This isn’t abstract math; it’s been proven repeatedly. GPS satellites need relativistic corrections to work, atomic clocks flown on planes tick at different rates than those on the ground, and high-energy particles called muons survive longer than they should because their “clocks” run slow at near-light speeds.
Here’s the key: in relativity, simultaneity isn’t absolute. Two observers moving differently can disagree about what counts as “now.” That means “the present” can’t be a universal feature of reality. Instead, past, present, and future must all coexist in spacetime. This leads to the Block Universe model: reality as a fixed landscape, where every moment is equally real. What we call “the present” is simply the slice of the block we’re currently moving through.
The Andromeda Paradox, introduced by Roger Penrose, makes this concrete. Imagine two people passing each other on a London street. Their tiny difference in motion shifts their definition of “now” by several hours, or even days, for events in the Andromeda galaxy. For one, an alien invasion decision has already been made. For the other, it hasn’t yet. Both views are valid according to relativity, which means those events must already exist in spacetime. The future is as real as the past – it just hasn’t yet come into our personal slice of “now.”
Not everyone accepts the full block view. Some philosophers argue for the Growing Block Universe, where the past and present exist but the future is still being written, one moment at a time. Others defend presentism, where only the present is real. What all these models share, though, is the recognition that our everyday intuition of time as a single, flowing stream is incomplete. Physics shows us that reality is more structured – whether it’s already complete, growing, or sliced into an eternal present.
And here quantum theory adds one more wrinkle. Entanglement shows us that particles can remain linked across space and time in ways that defy classical separation. Photons – the very quanta our bodies constantly produce – are especially prone to this. While entanglement isn’t fully understood, it suggests that influence and information may not always be limited by local fields or ordinary time. If our lives are built of fields, photons, and consciousness tied to them, then entanglement may be another thread of spirituality.
Part 4 – Death
Death is the moment when the body’s coherence unravels. The heart stops, its powerful field collapses, and the brain’s oscillations flatten. Medical monitors read this as silence. Yet research suggests the transition isn’t simply a fade to black. In both animal studies and rare human recordings, scientists have observed sharp bursts of high-frequency gamma waves around the time of death — the very rhythms normally associated with awareness and integration. On the cellular level, dying tissues release sudden spikes of biophoton emission as membranes rupture. The body’s last act seems to be a flash of light and order, a final transmission before quiet.
If we think about the folks who want to upload their brains into digital environments, the question quickly becomes: what exactly are they hoping to move? If materialism is true and the brain is all there is, then the answer is simple – you don’t need to upload. Just wait for death, and you’re gone. Any “upload” would only be a clever duplication, a copy of your pathways and memories running on silicon. It wouldn’t be you. It would be a simulation with your face.
But if materialism isn’t the whole picture – which seems likely given everything from ancient scriptures to modern accounts of telepathy, and even the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy – then the challenge is different. Consciousness may not be reducible to structure alone; it may be bound up with the activity itself, with the flows of electrical impulses, the oscillating fields, the very patterns of light and energy coursing through neurons. If that’s true, then true transposition of consciousness would mean finding a way to move not just the static blueprint of the brain, but the dynamic fields that animate it. Not copying – moving. Not duplicating – transposing.
Here is where death reenters the story. One way to think about death is as a kind of transposition: the collapse of the body’s electrical and electromagnetic patterns in one medium, and their dispersal into another. Physics already shows us that when order in one system unravels, its energy doesn’t vanish – it redistributes into new forms. Whether that redistribution is purely thermal noise, or whether something more structured is preserved, remains an open question. From a scientific perspective, we can at least say that consciousness as we experience it ends when neural patterns collapse. From a more speculative lens, however, it’s possible to see death not as an annihilation but as a shift of context – whether into timeless spacetime, a higher dimension, or simply the already written pages of the block universe. The idea doesn’t claim proof, but it does suggest a way to reconcile spiritual intuitions with what physics tells us: that endings are also transformations.
This is also where we need to define and clarify an existing loaded term: the higher self. In spirituality this is seen as a higher-dimensional version of you which guides you in life in unseen ways. In these terms it could be thought of as the Holy Spirit, the bridge between you and God. However I like science, so I’m gonna use scientific theories here. So, from the perspective of the Block Universe a higher self could be understood as the entanglement of your consciousness in the present to your consciousness in the future – possibly others and your environment as well since entanglement doesn’t care about what its pair is part of – i.e. it doesn’t care if the entanglement of particles is with the environment or with a part of your body. {and if you have a hard time with the idea of you being entangled with, say an airplane or blade of grass, consider the light particles which are interacting with both bodies of particles} The same would be true of the Growing Block Universe (as the Block Universe) due to retro-causality implications of the quantum eraser double slit experiment. The main difference being in the growing block the future is unwritten because freewill is assumed. So in this perspective we might expect a multiverse, or multiple timelines to spread out from the present according to freewill choices made. Which of course would imply every soul is piloting an individual course through the multiverse (effectively, because what is a timeline in this perspective if not a distinct universe branched into by an individual). Now those freewill choices represent divergence points, and in this view those moments would also represent entanglements connecting two timelines.
From these perspectives death can be seen not only as the collapse of the body but also a transcendence of consciousness. Consciousness may perhaps step outside of the experience of the passage of time. Instead able to experience all of time at once, or at least the moments of time you are entangled with in some way. Recording a video of yourself may serve this very function – granting your consciousness, in death, the ability to perceive beyond the bounds of your life. Similarly would be the case for interactions with friends, and family. Offspring would serve as one of the strongest entanglements imaginable. In diverging timelines, each path piloted through freewill and circumstance would share what it has learned through consciousness, through entangled moments of divergence back to the alternative timelines. Consciousness distributed through timelines, to put it simply.
It is here that the language of spirituality and science begin to rhyme. Traditions speak of a guiding presence – the Holy Spirit, a guardian angel, a divine spark whispering through intuition. Science, meanwhile, gives us entanglement, resonance, and retrocausality – frameworks that suggest influence is not bound by distance or even by time. Perhaps what we experience as “divine guidance” is simply the felt presence of that entanglement: information and meaning flowing across timelines, nudging us toward coherence, toward choices that align with something larger than ourselves. Or even just towards what would provide us the greatest fulfillment perhaps.
This ties directly back to what I explored in HSCO100: Intro to Human Spirit Communications. Signs, synchronicities, and subtle inner promptings may be more than coincidence. They could be the echoes of our own higher self – or the collective resonance of consciousness at large – guiding us in ways that appear divine because they come from outside the narrow view of the present moment. In life, that guidance can feel like intuition. At death, it may reveal itself more fully: the completion of a circuit, the return of the part to diverging moments, to the whole.
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