Quantum Coherence for a New Time
“Quantum jazz describes the quantum coherent organism in which every single molecular player is spontaneous and free, yet perfectly in step and in tune with the whole. This remarkable state of being depends on the liquid crystalline water matrix that enables each molecule to intercommunicate with every other, creating the most exquisite light and sound displays that span 70 octaves in all the colors of the rainbow.
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The Negev desert appears to be barren and dry. The surface of its sands is paved, though not with asphalt or cement. This pavement is created by bacteria and cyanobacteria whose secretions of long-chain sugars weld the soil and sand together to create a protective black crust that preserves the moisture beneath. As a result, water absorption is negligible and the Negev’s scant rain flows along the surface like water on human-made asphalt.
Unlike the water that spills from our roads, the water that rushes along the Negev’s particular pavement is not wasted. Desert porcupines and beetles create divots and pocks that collect the runoff into small pools. Wind brings seeds that germinate to create oases overflowing with grasses, insects, reptiles, and small mammals. These oases also serve as way-stations for the 500 million migrating birds that fly over Israel/Palestine every year in their long-distance journeys each spring and fall. These sorts of oases are common to all the world’s deserts: some are formed by pooling dynamics like those of the Negev; in others, underground water makes its way to the surface through fissures and springs.
Together, microbes, water and wind are considered ‘ecosystem engineers’ whose efforts are vital beyond their own survival because they benefit countless organisms other than themselves. The benevolence of these creatures and the generosity of their interactions have as great an impact - or greater, than better-known keystone species such as apex predators.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Negev discovery was first introduced, it upended conventional thinking about who and what shapes natural systems. This was an important evolutionary step in human thinking, or, rather, in the human capacity to perceive relational complexity. It changed our understanding of the interactions among species in a shared biome.
And, like the microbes that were the subject of the Negev discovery, this comparatively small research effort yielded large insights about cause and effect, about perception and about the might of collective effort in the Natural World that at first appears to be so tiny as to seem inconsequential. Yet, water’s role per se - its consciousness and its agency, were left unexplored.
What else besides healthy water is as essential to our highest functioning? Water is dynamic: alive when it’s flowing, dying or dead when stagnant. Water’s molecular structure is asymmetrical and always in motion: its hydrogen bonds come together and pull apart millions of times each second. These interactions are not silent: they comprise that quantum hum, the music of the spheres.
The too-silent, too-noisy world of today is losing the sounds by which it knows itself, what sound recordist Bernie Krause calls The Great Animal Orchestra. The sounds of living beings and living processes are, indeed, an orchestra of harmonic conversation.
The voices of trees are important members of the chorus. Dense forests beckon rain. As the sun warms the canopy, the air beneath remains dank and cool. The trees draw water up from their roots and release it through their leaves, creating a current of convection that sucks in moist air from the sea, even if the forest is far inland. Scientists call this the Biotic Pump. That’s what turns the water wheel that delivers the Negev’s annual inch of rain (and up to four inches in some places). Global deforestation is the death knell of rain: at one time, Earth was about 75% forested. By 1900, about 35%. Now, it’s closer to 20%. (Alick Bartholomew, The Spiritual Life of Water: Its Power and Purpose).
Like all water, the rain in the recent atmospheric rivers that deluged California is sentient. It’s Earth taking care of Her Self. But droughts and floods are teachings about more than global warming, about more than the idiocy of building the wrong way in the wrong places and the consequences of ignorant, selfish expedience: they are teachings about the path of repair.
Water that has lost its natural coherence takes on negative energy that precipitates moral, mental and spiritual deterioration in the human being. (Viktor Schauberger). When water moves as it was designed to do - in pulsing spirals and vortices, water is self-protecting, self-purifying and self-healing.
When Dr. Mae-Wan Ho speaks of the quantum coherent organism in which every single molecular player is spontaneous and free, yet perfectly in step and in tune with the whole, she echoes the wisdom of Indigenous cultures. Her description sounds a bit like the idealized democracy that is now unrecognizable in the U.S. and Israel, along with the rest of the world’s so-called democracies.
Neither political nor social restoration can occur in a degraded Natural World, and there’s the key. Biodiversity can be restored to ravaged places; the harshest corners of Earth can sustain countless forms of life. It all starts with water. By contributing to the wellbeing of Everything, everything thrives.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? We’re wasting our time searching for answers outside the natural systems that sustain us. Mechanical fixes are worse than ineffective: they’re costly, wasteful, destructive and irrelevant. A better use of our instruments would be to play a little quantum coherent jazz.
Can these principles help us to restore our ravaged hearts? Yes, if we apprentice ourselves to water.
