The Quantum Gravitational Field IS the Universe, and Consciousness is perhaps it’s Flowering

Nick 71, from South London - lives in California. Partial to an axe! 

How are you? 

I’m fantastic. It took a really long time. I have no complaints. I think I'm in pretty good shape. I arrived in America in 1974. I have a long relationship to everything here. I live in a bird reserve. I sit and watch the birds in the mornings. It’s one gigantic seashore where I live. At the moment we are all living out of suitcases because of fire alerts. We live in wooden cabins and you only get 10 minutes to get out. The fires have been terrible. 

I’m on a hilarious regime of painkillers and various other drugs. So I sleep at odd hours. A good nap in the afternoon helps. I might wake at one o'clock in the morning, write a fairy story, go back to sleep, then wake again at 4.30. I walk the dog on Stinson beach every day. It's full of wealthy old people and digital nouveau riche. 

How do you see yourself? 

It changes, but many years ago I would have described myself as a drug crazed, brain damaged, cabin hippy. But I'm a much nicer person now as in, recovered! I don’t work either - which helps. I live alone in a cabin but very close to another recluse, who's 78. We are wizened, sage like hermits, in our minds. 

How do you think other people see you? 

I have two children by two different mothers. One would say I was sometimes an arsehole, and sometimes wonderful. The other (with whom none of us are in contact, not even her son) would say, ‘pretty much the same’. Our relationships were awash with toxic masculinity. Do you like you? I do now. Since I was 68, I ceased to be depressed. How did that happen? In 2007 my life was a disaster. I’d run my train off the tracks. As the saying goes, I was fucked. My business relationship with my son was a disaster. Then in a deep depression I lost a lot of money in the 2008 financial disaster. A very good friend of mine said to me - I think you are suicidal. She had a point. 

I’m a long-term meditator in the Buddhist tradition but something wasn’t working so I started working with a therapist. I worked with her for a long period. After we got through the initial, don’t kill yourself it turned into a very long Jungian analyst situation. She works with ‘family constellations’, which is very odd, but very effective. We worked on my family issues that lead to my long-term depression. Then a series of events happened. I was on my way back from seeing her and stopped off at a very nice Austrian coffee shop in Camden. I sat at the table with my coffee and I went off into a very odd mental space. It’s hard to explain but everything rearranged itself. Massive pieces of architecture were moving around. I was ‘gone’, it felt as though I'd been away for very long time, but my coffee was still warm when I ‘came back’. I went home and I felt completely better. I knew I’d never be depressed again and I haven’t been. Depression never crosses my mind. It felt as though everything was realigned. All the tensions between old memories and experiences came together and settled. I've been practicing Dzogchen (traditional Tibetan teachings) for many years, this might also have had something to do with it. 

What do you think about marriage? 

I got married in 1979. I was so emotionally immature given where I’d grown up and the parents I had. Did I have any actual long term understanding of the implications of being married to somebody? No! I was living in Sunset Boulevard with five gay men and an outrageous routine that would probably kill me now. And there was this pregnant Texan girl, so we got married. Not a lot of deep thought went into it. We were married for nine years. The other person I had a child with was a much more synthetic arrangement - which didn't go well. For some people I’m sure it’s a very good arrangement. I'm not sure it's been a boon to me. 

A great many people get married based on their own psychological trauma, rather than any good sense. People represent a long term thread, their relationships, and the relationships between their ancestors. All these stories come together so we end up meeting people who fill in some kind of niche. It's a pretty tenuous construct. Have you ever been in love? Oh all the time! 

What do you think about children? 

I have two boys. One is 40, the other 30. I’ve got 3 grandchildren too. I was happily sailing around the world when my granddaughter popped into it. I came back to the US and my son said I should stay in order to have a relationship with her. So I did and she's the apple of my eye. I write nonsense verse and fairy stories for her. We get along very well. 

My children are very very different. One is a software consultant, highly eccentric. Lives in Seattle with his partner and child. The other is a gigantic Viking with a 50 inch chest who lives in Wisconsin with his wife. He’s a terrifying looking individual but a sweet guy. He operates a crane truck and makes a great deal of money. He just bought a house with four bedrooms. They have two children.We share a tremendous interest in knives and axes. 

My favourite axe is called a Freya! It’s designed by an ex special forces operator. Made from hickory, it’s razor sharp and a beautiful piece of work. I have axes custom made in french carbon steel. It's completely normal for a man to have several axes. My tool shed is like a secret salon. My tools have spa days. They’re well looked after. For the last year I've been doing up my girlfriend’s loft in Berkeley. I’ve built several cabins, Japanese fences and of course I like working on boats. 

Where does all your energy go? 

For five decades I’ve been rebuilding the world all the goddamn time. Physically, as well as emotionally. 

What's your most memorable experience? 

Recently a heart attack, but 4 years ago …I was on a snow hike in the Brecon Beacons in January about four years ago by myself. I fell because it was icy. I had a backpack on. I was in a lot of pain. I laid there in this complete white out. It was very cold. I knew I'd broken something. I thought it was my leg. My thoughts were - I’ll be dead in 15 minutes. I’m going to die here, on a Welsh mountain. I did some further investigations and realised it was my forearm that was broken. It took some days to get off the mountains, being snowy and all. That was a good memory because I walked down the mountain holding my arm to an Abbey and a wonderful little pub. I proceeded to to get raucously drunk with 5 French men I met. There’s no doubt about it, if I’d have broken my hip rather than my arm, I would've been dead. 

Who or what inspires you? 

Almost all physicists; Dirac, Feynman, Bohr, I just got Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics from the library. Physics is going to change a great deal in this century..

How do you feel about the weather? 

It’s my fascination. I have entire copies of books about clouds. If you’re a sailor and you don’t understand about clouds then you’re either very young or dead! 

What do you think about life? 

Scientists have spent a lot of time and money figuring out and looking for a force called gravity and now I think we've done it. It's a remarkable story about imagination because it turns out that gravity isn't in the universe, the Quantum Gravitational Field IS the entire fabric of the universe and Consciousness is perhaps it’s fowering. This is a great win for the quantum gravity people and a pretty serious lose for the string theory people. Thankfully I’m a gravity person! But it looks like they may be related so hold that thought.

The big question in science has always been, why is consciousness necessary? It's called the hard question. 

What do you think about death? 

Part of the problem we have with death is the hallucination that you’re an individual that lives in the universe. You’re distinct - like a lego brick but none of it is true. You need a ‘self’ or an ego in order to get things done but it’s not actually anything more than a convenience, like an operating system. I pretty much leave ‘me’ behind. I check he’s got a good heartbeat and off I go. This individuality business is highly overrated. The Tibetans have a saying for it - We are Lords of Infinite Space. You didn't exist in the first place. None of it was yours. You existed in time. You were a process in this space and time that we loosely call a projection of the quantum foam. So the idea that you individually die like in some sort of terrible Shakespearian tragedy and your cousins are waiting for the good silver, is sort of silly. 

Are you scared of death yourself? I die regularly. The number of times I've been doing something or other and have been knocked unconscious. I’m dead in that moment. At 14, I was in a bike race and went over the handlebars and there was a tree in the way. Knocked unconscious with a broken nose, I had a fracture here and a fracture there. The more you hang on to who you think you are, the worse it is.

What do you think about faith? 

The french quantum physicist Bernard d’Espagnat made this case that you have two choices. You can be a materialist, everything’s just molecules, or you can deal with the quantum but you can't do both because in materialist term, the quantum makes no sense. I feel the same way. I've had this fight with physicists for a long time. Our ideas about consciousness, relatively speaking, are primitive at this point in time and that's one of the things that going to have to change in physics in the 21st century. I practise Dzogchen daily. The point of the practice is understanding of consciousness. The removal of all the paraphernalia of religion. In the same way as storms, rain, clouds and sunsets pass across the sky, emotions pass across the mind, but the mind, like the sky itself is completely untouched by any of this. These moments pass through. So most people confuse their mind with the momentary mental weather. Emotions are moments. You just have to stop doing and watch it. Clearly a lot of people are desperately miserable. God knows I was. I had money. I was successful. I had sex with attractive women. I was well educated but I was depressed all the time. Logic is great if you want to work things out but it isn’t going to tell you any of the other stuff because it can't. This guy a physicist at Berkeley University said about certain kinds of mathematics, it's like a very specialised funnel and not everything fits. 

I used to write really serious stuff for films and science, none of which I particularly enjoyed but it kept me moderately employed. I now write for my own pleasure, from an entirely different part of the my consciousness. And here’s the funny part - I don’t write them, because it's impossible to think about it. They just arrive, hilariously. I write them down and send them to my granddaughter or my therapist. 

How would you like to leave the world? 

Quietly as possible. I should get a kayak and go for one last paddle towards the North Pole. Drinking, and just capsize. 

What do you think about doing this project?

I could talk to you all day!