Duo Duels on Non-duality, the Quantum Potential, and the Nature of Consciousness

Duo Duels on Non-duality, the Quantum Potential, and the Nature of Consciousness

with Basil Hiley and Jena Axelrod

Saturday February 12, 2022
9:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT  |  18:00 CET

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Join quantum physicist Basil Hiley and Pari Center’s Jena Axelrod in a dynamic discussion on the structure of our universe, the quantum potential, the nature of consciousness, and the paradigm shift they both see as being necessary in the West.

Nondual philosophy teaches that, ‘the multiplicity of the universe is reducible to one essential reality.’ The conclusion is that reality is a dynamic process accessible and known to people through music, art, transpersonal psychology, Buddhism, physics, and many more, if not all, fields. The Western worldview favours the mechanistic, static, ridgid, and as such has lost the sense of dynamism, and interconnectedness prevalent in most indigenous cultures, Eastern philosophies, and in the science of the quantum potential.

Both Basil and Jena perceive nonduality as a core truth of our reality. Basil approaches the nature of reality, and the quantum potential, from the perspective of math and physics; Jena approaches the nature of reality, and of our unified consciousness from within, via the experiential internal explorations of a psychonaut.

How then might these two seem to converge in their shared worldview—a nondual explanation of the nature of our dynamic reality—when approaching their queries from such disparate angles? Like Bohr’s complementarity, Basil and Jena may evidence that seemingly oppositional explanations of a phenomenon might be the fullest way to describe that phenomenon.

Basil Hiley will introduce us to his latest discoveries on the structure of the universe and how they relate to the quantum potential, a central concept of the de Broglie-Bohm formulation from David Bohm’s 1952 paper, A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables, which was later expanded upon by Bohm and Hiley. Jena will interject as Basil’s mathematical points become too abstract for a lay audience, and will redirect the discussion back toward the real world practical application and meaning of these concepts!

To see the Full Dualities Program

Professor Basil Hiley, collaborator and colleague of David Bohm for over 30 years Basil J. Hiley is a British quantum physicist and professor emeritus of the University of London. He received the Majorana Prize ‘Best Person in Physics’ in 2012. A long-time co-worker of David Bohm, Hiley is known for his collaboration with Bohm on the implicate order and for his work on algebraic descriptions of quantum physics in terms of underlying symplectic and orthogonal Clifford algebras. Hiley co-authored the book The Undivided Universe with David Bohm, which is considered the main reference for Bohm’s interpretation of quantum theory.

The work of Bohm and Hiley has been characterized as primarily addressing the question ‘whether we can have an adequate conception of the reality of a quantum system, be this causal or be it stochastic or be it of any other nature’ and meeting the scientific challenge of providing a mathematical description of quantum systems that matches the idea of an implicate order.

Pari Center Associate Director Jena Axelrod is the founder of Numena Productions LLC, where she directs and produces surreal, enlightening film, television, and web content. Premiering in 2022, the documentary Absurdity of Certaintyfeatures Pari Center co-founder physicist-philosopher Dr F. David Peat.

Jena works as a comedian, best known as Jena Not Jameson on Jackie Martling’s radio show on the Howard Stern channel at SiriusXM. Jena also works as a workshop facilitator for ThriveLoud, and as a Sales Director at Ideal Prediction providing trade analytics services to banks, hedge funds, and cryptocurrency firms.