On this journey, I feel privileged to be guided by very extraordinary people.

Many of the books I've read or people I've listened to represent, to me, the vanguard of humanity; people who are attempting to cast off the kind of rational materialist thinking that has led us to the brink of catastrophe.

At the same time, they are people who by their very understanding of the nature of reality and consciousness, have cast off worn out political labels such as liberal and conservative. These labels are for those in the world you have no conception of the direction humanity is going; no idea that consciousness itself is non-dual. And since everything in the universe shares that consciousness, these artificial divisions that arise from the ignorance of this fact make us cling to our ego-based idea of reality.

I approached all of this a number of years ago from questions I kept asking myself: why is there hatred, envy, intolerance and evil in this world? And how can people make others suffer purposefully? My last post, about President Bush's veto of a bill that would deny health benefits to millions of poor children makes absolutely no sense to most people, yet his incredibly lame reasoning is being supported by many people out of an ideological imperative that has to have its basis in nothing other than deep psychological suffering. I can see no other way to explain such heinous thinking.

In an effort to try to understand this kind of thing, I turned to science. I read a great deal about brain function, evolutionary psychology, memory and psychoanalytical theory. One thing that ties all these things together is consciousness. But what is consciousness? Obviously, this is one of the most slippery concepts because of its non-material nature.

While its reality is undeniable, just what it is can't be determined. Is it energy? Perhaps. But maybe it's even beyond energy. Some believe that it is the suchness human beings have always called God: the ground of all being in the universe.

But as soon as you get close to saying the "g" word, science shrinks back and won't even approach the idea. This is reasonable to science because philosophically, it can only deal with that which can be approached either by empirical testing or by mathematical formulation.

Somewhere around a century ago, however, an idea came into play that would throw the scientific rationalist for a loop. The was the idea of the quantum; that mysterious and paradoxical set of rules that governed the very very small. And for many of those scientists who have been involved with quantum theory, there has been a concomitant expansion of their own consciousness to the extent that they were able to see the many comparisons between quantum theory and the spiritual philosophies of man.

Physicists like Erwin Schrodinger, Mani Bhaumik, Amit Goswami, Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, and others have seen the beautiful correlations between their "new" knowledge and spiritual knowledge that is thousands of years old.

But insofar as being able to present these ideas to a wider audience, no one has done so better than Fred Alan Wolf.

Dr. Wolf is a physicist who is now in his early 70's and who has spent his lifetime studying the connections between quantum physics and the occult knowledge posed by many of the spiritual practices of man. In doing so, he has not only travelled the world in his research, but has experienced first-hand some of the hidden knowledge found therein.

I recently finished listening to his book Dr. Quantum Presents: A User's Guide to Your Universe and thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, which is a summary of some of the areas he has studied including:

• How quantum physics guides us to a new way of seeing the universe
  
  
• Is there really an "out there" out there?
  
  
• Instructions for traveling through time
  
  
• The Technology of God, and how you can use it every day
  
  
• The logic of being "irrational"—how we can break out of old ways of thinking to fully interact with the universe
  
  
• The Quantum Leap: the moment when we transform possibility into reality
  
  
• Parallel realities—can we really connect to them with our minds?
  
  
• Relativity, the space-time continuum, and weaving each moment of your life into the fabric of the cosmos
  
  
• The meeting place between science and spirit—what shamans have to teach about physics
  
  
• The "New Alchemy:" the nine steps for transforming your thoughts into matter
  
  
• How the soul and self communicate at a subatomic level with the greater consciousness of the universe
  
  

Since one of the areas he spoke of in depth was his experiences in the shamanic world, I decided to next read his book, The Eagle's Quest: A Physicist's Search for Truth in the Heart of the Shamanic World. Written nearly twenty years ago, Dr. Wolf's experiences included using ayahuasca to enter the shamanic worlds. In addition, he studied Celtic shamanism, Druidism and other shamanic practices around the world.

Perhaps what I like most about Fred Alan Wolf's books is his ability to both entertain and inform. At times, sounding like a Borscht Belt comedian, he brings a rare ability to transcend the ineffable and plant the seeds of knowledge in the sometimes thin soil of the average--but interested--reader.