Incunabula 2.5
Joseph Matheny
Advances in Skin Science: Quantum Tantra
An Interview with Nick Herbert
by Joseph Matheny
"It's always gooiest before it solidifies"-_Beverly's Ovation_
Beverly Rubik Ph.d
"Quantum Tantra is not just another way to get high using common objects you
can
find around the house...Caution:Practising Q.T. before you understand Bell's
Theorem of interconnectveness is like walking into the Amazon jungle without
a
map."- _Alternate Dimensions_. Jabir ibn Hayyan
Journal entry:
October 13,1992
I finally get a line on INCUNABULA.Following a lead from a culture-jamming
club
in San Francisco (MediaKaos 415-437-8741), I arrive in the small New Jersey
town
of Ong's Hat. The address that I have for INCUNABULA is a P.O. Box. The
local
postmaster/general store operator was very helpful. Alomost too helpful! He
told
me that Cranston and INCUNABULA books had fled the area one night about a
month
ago. I gained acess to Cranston's P.O. Box key while the owner had his back
turned and returned later to examine the contents. All I found inside were
overdraft notices from his bank and some solicitations from a church og
geniuses
in Dallas, Texas or some such nonesense. Another dead end.
October 14, 1992
I arrive in New York City, get a room, restock supplies and think. I call
New
Jersey information to get the phone number for the Ong's Hat general store
and
post office so I can ask the postmaster a few more questions. I am told by
the
inbred boob on the other end of the line that there is no such town listed
in
New Jersey, and after a long and heated debate, we terminate the phone call
by
mutaually insulting eah other's gene pool. God, I hate the phone company.
October 16, 1992
Two days (and two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label) later, I finally get
lead on one of the most intriguing authors listed in the INCUNABULA
catalogue,
Nick Herbert, author of
_Quantum_Reality_,_Faster_Than_Light:_Superluminal_Loopholes_in_Physics, and
of
course, the legendary_Alternate_Dimensions_.
Herbert was a former SDI scientist turned renegade researcher. His past
areas of
renegade research involved pleasure dome technologies, Quantum Tantra (the
Egg
Yoke method), Time and Dimensional travel theories, and gelatinous
substances.
I'll give you a little background on Alternate Dimensions (A.D.). It was
written
in 1989 by Herbert, but was suppressed by the publisher, Harper & Row, for
unexplained reasons in 1990 (see INCUNABULA & INCUNABULA 3). INCUNABULA was
offering bound, uncorrected galley copies for $100.00 each, or at least they
were, until Cranston dissapeared with the whole kit-n-kaboodle. In A.D., it
seems that Herbert gave away the inner secrets of a Tantric-dimensional
travel
cult based in northern California. Using techniques that combined Herbert's
own
theory of Quantum Tantra, and hardware technology, consisting of an egg-
shaped
craft of some sort, members of the cult were able to penetrate into other
dimensions. There were also intense visualization techniques,and
Tantric-Egg-Yoke postures involved, but the Xerox copy I had purchased from
MediaKaos seemed to be missing some of the key technical portions.
Herbert was now hiding out in the backwater town of Boulder Creek, CA,
deep in
the heart of the Santa Cruz mountains. I hopped aboard a plane to San Jose,
and
drove a rental car up to Boulder Creek. About a mile away from Herbert's
farm
house, I called him on my celluar phone.Surprisingly enough, Herbert was
very
cordial, and agreed to meet me in town for lunch and conversation. He
suggested
Adelita's Mexican Cantina, gave me directions, and promised to meet me there
in
an hour. I drove into town and went over my notes while I waited.
About an hour later, Dr.Herbert appeared in the parking lot driving a
electric
Stutz Bearcat kit car. I recognized him instantly from his jacket photos,
even
with the recently aqquired beard. Was he attempting to change his
appearance?
Was he preparing to flee, like Cranston had 30 days ago? I casually reached
into
my jacket and activated my pocket recorder. I waved him over to my table,
and
after shaking hands we settled down to a lunch of Dos Equis and Gorditas.
"Okay" I said, after some pleasantries about the weather, "let's start with
the
obvious question: What is Quantum Tantra?"
"Well, psychology has used a lot of classic metaphors to explain the mind,
like
the hydraulic metaphor of urges bulding up, an even when repressed, they'll
find
some way to spurt out to the surface. We're told that releasing your
repressions
will relieve the pressure, and you'll become healthy.That's a very classical
metaphor. Now we have this marvelous new way of thinking called quantum
mechanics, and it seems right to use these metaphors to explain human
behavior.
So, what's the most interesting human behavior of all? Sexual, of course.
That's
the idea, to use quantum mechanical metaphors to explore sexuality, to look
at
it through the lens of quantum physics. I would consider Q.T. successful if
we
could find new things to do that never would have been thought, of using the
old
metaphors. I mean, of course, pleasant things. (laughter).
The core idea of Q.T. stems from Heisenberg's statement that "atoms are not
things." So, Q.T. naturally extrapolated that statement into "well than
people
are not things, either." People are not things in the same way that atoms
are
not things."
"What are things?" I asked
"Things are entities that have attributes, whether you look at them or not.
They're big, they're solid and such. You can list their attributes. Non-
things,
or Quantum objects, like atoms or molecules, don't have attributes. They are
basically clusters of oscillating possibilities, the possibilities not even
being well-defined. It might reward us to look that way at people, as
oscillating possibilities."
He took a long draw off his Dos Equis, and signaled the waiter for another.
"So,
try and think of what the essence of quantum theory is," he continued,
"Three
adjectives:Randomness, thinglessness, and interconectiveness. Randomness I
associate with the spontaneity that is within people. Uncertainty is the
very
essence of romance. It's what you don't know that intrigues you."
"Now, thinglessness is even more renunciatory'" he went on. "The notion of
treating people like possibilities rather than fixed structures is a healthy
one, I think."
"Interconnectiveness is the most fantastic feature of Q.T. Things are
connected
in the quantum world in such a way that only did we not think of it before
the
discovery of quantum mechanics, but I don't think we could have thought this
way
at all. It's so strange. The terrestrial belief system that comes the
closest to
quantum connectiveness is VooDoo."
"Sympathetic magick?" I queried. This was getting good.
"Yes, sympathetic magick," he replied. "Of course, the VooDoo conception is
naive in comparision to Q.T.'s connectiveness. In VooDoo, you do something
like
burn someone's hair to give them a headache. The Quantum connection isn't
that
crude. It has more to do with timing. In the Quantum world, you burn
someone's
hair, and maybe they miss an appointment. The Newtonian worl view emphasized
control over the world, whereas, the Quantum world view doesn't emphasize
control so much as timing. You could say that the Newtonian view emaphasized
force, where the Quantum world emphasizes finesse."
"One analogy is ordinary, steerable dish radar versus phased array antennae.
Steerable dish physically moves the whole antenna structure. In the phased
array
antennae, you have a whole array that are all fixed. None of them move, but
by
changing the timing on these antennae, you get a virtual antenna that's
pointed
in any direction. That's an example of finesse, rather than force. Quantum
connection is like that. It is set up like VooDoo by having something that
the
other person has interacted with, some sympathetic object."
"But what does this have to o with sex?" I asked. Herbert was quick to
answer.
"I'm getting to that. In Q.T., the tantra part has to do with sex as well as
religion. Every religion has their symbol. The Christians have the cross,
Islam
has the crescent and star, the Pagans have the pentagram, the wheel for
Buddhism, and so forth. Q.T. has it's symbols, also. One of them is this
fork."
He picked up a salsa-encrusted fork, and stared at it rapturously. "It
reminds
us to see the world as possibilities," he continued, "In the Newtonian
world,
starting from now, only one thing could happen.Q.T. sees the future as open
possibilities, like the tines of this fork. Actually, if this fork were
fuzzy,
like Man Ray's fuzzy cup and spoon..."
I was beginning to understand. That or the Dos Equis was kicking in. I felt
lightheaded. "So the borders would not quite be defined..." I replied.
"Yes," he said, eyes twinkling in the candlelight. "The possibilities are
defined only by your intentions, by how you construe the moment. Quantum
possibilities are not quite as defined as dice possibilities, even. With a
die,
only one of six numbers will come up, whereas with Quantum possibilities, it
depends on how you look at the moment, and that again, is part of
thinglessness.
All of these elements have resonances in popular literature. Like the talk
of
the inexplicable chemistry that occurs between two people, or this notion of
'it's bigger than both of us'. The type of connectivity that's possible in
quantum theory allows two connected entities to be in indefinite states ,
but
allows the couple itself to be in a definite state! The mathematics on this
are
clear. As Heisenberg said, 'quantum theory has changed our way of thinking
completely,' and it's changed in such a way that it didn't dissolve into
some
unclear, fuzzy fog, but into this absolute clarity of a new mathematics. Now
the
mathematics describe the fog in a very precise way. So, it's this kind of
very
precise unclarity."
"You're talking like a lot of mystics I know!" I scoffed. He replied
laughing,
"Except, this is found in ordinary physics! This is stuff that was
discovered 75
years ago, it's not new stuff at all. It's only now beginning to permeate
popularculture. So, we have this system where each member of the pair, say,
a
man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or whatever,
are
defined. They've gotten themselves into a state where their individualities
are
not as clear, but the couple itself as an entity, is better defined than the
individual members of the set. We use symbols, like the fork, to remind
ourselves of these things, because the human mund is not yet used to
thinking in
parallels."
"Our data rat is miniscule, compared to say, television data rates
equivalent to
megabits per second, or telephones, which are equivalent to thousands of
kilobits per second. Morse code is about 10 bits per second, and that's
pretty
close to our attention rate! I mean, when we're not on robot, when we do
come to
attention, we don't bring much to this moment in terms of quantity. It's
been
estimated at about 16 bits a second. So, people need simple graphic symbols,
like the fork, or the cross, or the crescent, to remind thenselves that
they're
Moslems, or whatever. So, one symbol I've invented to epitomize Randomness,
Thinglessness and Interconnectiveness is the trinity of White, Hot and
Sticky.
White corresponds to Thinglessness, Hot to Randomness, and Sticky to
Interconnectiveness. By white, I mean like white light, all the colors
together,
all human sexual potentials. Thinglessness is wrought with possibilities. As
David Finklestein, the inventor of quantum logic said, ' We are all white
light,
in the sense that we are all possibilities.' Hot has to do with newness,
spontaneity that we can bring to the moment to remind us that the moment can
be
ever new. That's a hard thing to live up to, sexually, and otherwise.
Sticky, of
course, typifies the new kind connectiveness. A metaphor for achieving
stickieness, are objects that you break in two, and each partner keeps one
half.
The fracture is unique, that I will only match one other person in the whole
world! Quantum objects help to enhance this two- person white, hot, sticky
state. And music is the connection in this technology."
"Why music?" I asked.
"Because, these possibilities are vibratory." he answered. 'In the physical
world, every atom, or possibility is vibrating at at certain frequency. The
higher the energy level, the higher the frequency or pitch of the
vibrations. We
can't hear, smell, see, or taste any of these vibrations except indirectly.
I'm
doing more research with solid state technology, sound sequences."
"Ok, now what about _Alternate_Dimensions_, the egg craft, the travel cults,
Tantric-Yoke techniques, I mean, what about all this stuff!" I finally
blurted,
unable to hold back any longer.
"Young man, I have no idea what you're talking about. All I can say is there
are
some questions that you should not ask directly, and some answers that may
come
as a result of finese over force. This interview is now concluded."
(See INCUNABULA 3, for what followed)
More info on INCUNABULA available from gopher.well.com
INCUNABULA
INCUNABULA 2
INCUNABULA 3
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M E D I A K A O S
Joseph Matheny med...@well.sf.ca.us Welcome! I mean
Cultural Provocateur (415)241-1568 that as a friend!