When we arrived back in Geneva, I got to thinking about what Dr. Blaen had said about the assemblage point beginning to split around the age of ten. I recalled the recent surreal experience of finding Chris in a darkened apartment after my week away and I began to reflect on the incident in the park with the bullies when he was ten. Those were two times when I had seen him “spooked.” Had he shown signs of schizophrenia back then? I hadn’t recognized them. Could his troubles have started that long ago?
I questioned Chris about what had happened in the park all those years ago, and he finally leveled with me.
“Mom, I don’t want to say much about it except that I saw a spaceship land in the park and I saw extraterrestrials get out and they were chasing me!”
I could fall down with worry about Chris’s shocking revelation, or I could deconstruct my fear, a practice that was gradually becoming habitual. Was he sicker than I imagined, since his hallucinatory experiences surely had been going on for so long? So what if he had signs of schizophrenia when he was ten—schizophrenia probably doesn’t just pop up all of a sudden at seventeen or eighteen. It didn’t mean he couldn’t get well. Framing the experience as a spiritual one, not a pathological one, offered a more reassuring explanation.
Chris's story had a Biblical precedent. The prophet Ezekiel had a similar experience to what we could refer to as an extraterrestrial encounter. He described it instead as “the word of the Lord” coming directly into him. He saw a whirlwind and fire, and four creatures with wings and a wheeled vehicle thundering down from the sky. “The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel . . . This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.”[1]
Quantum physicists have another explanation, one which I believe complements the knowledge of the existence of God. They believe that extraterrestrial encounters such as Chris had, are hallucinations, or altered states of awareness that exist as “parallel universes” to our everyday reality. Parallel universes are almost identical to our own but weirdly different in some way. Science fiction writers have relied on this quirky theme for years. Psychologist Peter K. Chadwick, author of Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective, in a paper delivered to the Scientific and Medical Network, stated that schizophrenia might be better understood if we consider that “genuine spiritual and paranormal forces operate on the person at least during and perhaps before and after their schizophrenic illness.” Chadwick recommended that the realization and acceptance of the spiritual dimension and extra-sensory experiences “should form an important part of the treatment and rehabilitation process.”[2] In other words, what many people call “paranormal,” a quantum physicist might say is simply outside the limits of the current knowledge of the universe.
An important concept in quantum physics is the role of an observer. A well-known hypothesis called “Everett’s many worlds theory” builds on Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen theory, which supposes that an action seen by an observer has more than one possible outcome. Everett’s theory holds that the universe splits whether an action is either taken or not taken. Physicist David Z. Albert has put a slightly different spin on Everett’s theory, which I believe is very important to the understanding of schizophrenia. Albert maintains that the term “many worlds” is actually incorrect and instead suggests that “many viewpoints” more accurately describes Everett’s theory. This is, in essence, the schizophrenic problem of ambivalence: holding two (or possibly more) opposing views in which the center cannot hold. Both physicists offer a plausible theory for Chris’s lifelong aversion to making a choice.
At college, I was an art history major, not a physics major. Physics is hard for me to wrap my mind around. The implications of quantum physics are still not well understood, even by quantum physicists. What I can say with some conviction is that developments in quantum physics will lead to greater understanding of schizophrenia and new treatment methodologies will emerge as a result.
For the compassionate observer, schizophrenia brings us closer to awareness that we are all subject to a supreme power in the universe, but a spark of that divinity is also within us. My home-made understanding of schizophrenic ambivalence arising from a cosmic split forced me to reconsider my past approach to Chris, to accept that my own words and actions may have caused him to shrink from choice. But rather than dwell on Chris's present state (and my contribution to it) as something negative, which would serve no one well, there is another way of looking at this thing called schizophrenia, and that is to see, like Ezekiel did, a powerful and spiritual vision of God's immense power. Schizophrenia is a life force.
Ancient and indigenous peoples seem to have understood multiple realities better than modern people do. Author Hermann Hesse once wrote that modern science is in the Stone Age compared to the teachings of ancient Indian mythology.[3] Indigenous people, such as the Toltec civilization from which Don Juan came, knew that hallucinogens could deliver a person to an altered dimension where extraordinary things happen. Although he did not know the physics of the assemblage point, Don Juan knew what moving it could do.
It made perfect sense to me that Chris began experiencing altered realities or parallel universes at the time that his assemblage point was breaking up since what I knew about the assemblage point is that it is related to the vibrational energy of the universe from the point of conception. Altered states of awareness such as those that occur in schizophrenia and lucid dreaming may be indications that universes parallel to our own do exist..
In addition to alien encounters, other paranormal phenomenon related to schizophrenia, God, and physics are the Akashic field, synchronicity, and nonlocality. The Akashic field houses the collection of universal truth, to which all people have access, and which all religions and shamanic traditions have acknowledged and accessed in some way. The field, also referred to as the Universal Mind or the “Spirit of the living God,”[4] functions more like a data input and retrieval system or a modern lending library, and is not the same as what psychiatrist Carl Jung termed the collective unconscious—shared inheritance, thoughts, and memories, symbolically described as fairy tales, myths, and fantasies.
Jung published a paper in1952 entitled Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle [5] in which the concept of synchronicity, his intuition that the universe was governed by relational principles grouped by meaning, not cause, which supported his concepts of archtypes and the collective unconscious. Synchronicity is the uncanny coincidence with which most of us are familiar. You were just thinking of someone you haven’t been in touch with for ten years, the phone rings, and that person is on the other end of the line. One event does not cause the other. They occur because the Universal Mind contains both our consciousness and external events. Events reflect our consciousness and vice versa because neither time nor space exists in the Universal Mind.
Nonlocality, a concept that subatomic particles are governed by relational principles, hypothesized by John Stewart Bell in 1964, tweaks conventional relativity theory by demonstrating that the behavior of one particle can be accurately predicted by examining how another particle is behaving, and posits that they have a causal relationship, even though they are separated by great distances. Conventional relativity theory says that the particles have to be close together to affect each other. Nonlocality jettisoned conventional relativity theory in 1982 when Bell's theorem was proved in an experiment at the University of Paris-South. Jung's intuition about the universe being governed by rational principles was ahead of its time. Authors Kafatos and Nadeau wrote about the Paris findings: “It appeared as if these results had provided final confirmation that the classical view of the relations between physical theory and physical reality (our folk metaphysics), which quantum physics had been challenging for some time, was not longer supportable.”[6]
When Dr. Erika does long-distance muscle testing on Chris, for example, she is using modern kinesiology to tap into the nonlocal library of knowledge to find the particular record that Chris has left in the Akashic field, even though doctor and patient are separated by a continent. On the other hand, there is a meaning to the universe that goes beyond mere fact retrieval, and that is synchronicity.
The schizophrenic individual is criticized as “crazy” for finding meaningful coincidences or synchronicities more than the average person. I remember dining in a local café with the family when Chris was sliding into psychosis. Chris was obviously impressed with the name of the restaurant, CAFNO, the first three letters which were the first letter of each of his names, Christopher Adair Forbes, with a negation at the end. He repeated and elaborated the name of the restaurant throughout the evening in a self-admonishing tone of voice, “CAF-NO, CAF-NO,” as if the restaurant had been specifically chosen that evening to deliver a secret, damning message to him.
I began to pay attention to synchronistic events in my life. The more I became aware of how synchronicity works, the more wondrous life became.