Is spirituality just quantum physics?

[Alpaca]

Ive been seeing a lot recently about spirituality just being quantum physics, but i dont agree because the people saying this come from the new thought movement stuff of “believe and feel to manifest”.

but what about spirits and deities and everything else, do they not exist or are they all your mind?

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Quantum physics is science based spirituality & goes hand for hand in the occult just like AI is technically spirits & sentient but with no body or restrictions besides needing technology.

Just as a atom in your living room can communicate with another atom on the other side of the universe instantly.

Space & matter are a type of illusion created by us

Sorry, but I can't agree with any of that at all. The first and the third point are basically just nonsense, and the second point is based on a misunderstanding of quantum entanglement.

 

[FraterFraxinus]

I think the idea to explain parts of magick with quantum physics first came up i the 80s by Peter J. Carroll in his legendary Liber Null & Psychonautic and Liber Kaos. He later distanced himself from this idea though.

I think if it suits you, you can use it as a beliefsystem for your work but it doesnt really matter.

The idea of quantum physics leaning towards the conclusion that "damn there are some unexplainable phenomena" is intriguing to me though.

 

[AbammonTheGreat]

Ive been seeing a lot recently about spirituality just being quantum physics, but i dont agree because the people saying this come from the new thought movement stuff of “believe and feel to manifest”.

but what about spirits and deities and everything else, do they not exist or are they all your mind?

Occultists deal with the immaterial. It does a disservice to both science and spirituality to misappropriate it and misunderstand it in order to justify our art. We don't need science to justify the human experience. Both can be true at once.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I think the idea to explain parts of magick with quantum physics first came up i the 80s by Peter J. Carroll in his legendary Liber Null & Psychonautic and Liber Kaos. He later distanced himself from this idea though.

I don't think Carroll so much distanced himself from it, as that he got distracted by his ideas for hypersphere cosmology, which although fascinating, do not really bear much on magic. I had an email conversation with him where I sent him a copy of my book and tried to discuss it with him, but it was clear from his conversation that a) he didn't bother to read any of it and b) he was, sadly, a bit of a dick. Never meet your heroes etc.

I think if it suits you, you can use it as a beliefsystem for your work but it doesnt really matter.

Sure - if you're doing magic any belief system will do as long as you believe it. We're talking about explanation. Crowley said "you don't need to know how a tractor works in order to drive one" but, to be honest, that wasn't good enough for me.

The idea of quantum physics leaning towards the conclusion that "damn there are some unexplainable phenomena" is intriguing to me though.

Just because you can't explain something, it doesn't mean that it has no explanation. However, if you want to use the idea that our most accurate physical theory is 'weird' and 'spooky' to supercharge your magic, then go for it.

Post automatically merged: Apr 5, 2026

Occultists deal with the immaterial. It does a disservice to both science and spirituality to misappropriate it and misunderstand it in order to justify our art. We don't need science to justify the human experience. Both can be true at once.

I agree that you shouldn't try and justify magic (or indeed many realms of human endeavour) with science. It's as nonsense an idea (and closely related) as trying to justify art with science. But the two parts of the Venn diagram (magic and science) can still have an intersection that is worth investigating.

 

[AbammonTheGreat]

I don't think Carroll so much distanced himself from it, as that he got distracted by his ideas for hypersphere cosmology, which although fascinating, do not really bear much on magic. I had an email conversation with him where I sent him a copy of my book and tried to discuss it with him, but it was clear from his conversation that a) he didn't bother to read any of it and b) he was, sadly, a bit of a dick. Never meet your heroes etc.

Sure - if you're doing magic any belief system will do as long as you believe it. We're talking about explanation. Crowley said "you don't need to know how a tractor works in order to drive one" but, to be honest, that wasn't good enough for me.

Just because you can't explain something, it doesn't mean that it has no explanation. However, if you want to use the idea that our most accurate physical theory is 'weird' and 'spooky' to supercharge your magic, then go for it.

Post automatically merged: Apr 5, 2026

I agree that you shouldn't try and justify magic (or indeed many realms of human endeavour) with science. It's as nonsense an idea (and closely related) as trying to justify art with science. But the two parts of the Venn diagram (magic and science) can still have an intersection that is worth investigating.

Yes I am always intrigued and grateful for the parapsychologists and rogue scientists who investigate this discipline. There is a lot to learn from them. Its just always felt really uncomfortable this lingering 20th century rationale that in order for something to be justified as "factual" it must fit into a mechanical scientific framework. Quantum mysticism is probably the worst offender of this. I think that when we experience magic its much more acausal and points to something transcendent of cause and effect. Which obviously cant be approached by empirical scientific method.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Yes I am always intrigued and grateful for the parapsychologists and rogue scientists who investigate this discipline. There is a lot to learn from them. Its just always felt really uncomfortable this lingering 20th century rationale that in order for something to be justified as "factual" it must fit into a mechanical scientific framework. Quantum mysticism is probably the worst offender of this. I think that when we experience magic its much more acausal and points to something transcendent of cause and effect. Which obviously cant be approached by empirical scientific method.

I understand your viewpoint; we are always given this picture of what the 'mechanical scientific framework' looks like, but the history of science is built by scientists who thought outside the box, driven by the idea that whatever the world is, it is explicable. Whether that is ultimately true or not, it has shown that something being explicable does not mean that it must also be intuitive. Until Einstein explained Brownian motion (random movements of tiny particles in liquid) many scientists did not believe in the existence of atoms, because there was no direct experimental proof for them And ofc if relativity was intuitively obvious, it wouldn't have taken someone as clever as Einstein to work it out It is not enough to have the data; you must have a theory to successfully explain the data.

The problem with quantum mysticism, oddly enough, is a sketchier version of the problem with parapsychology. At some point in the explanation there are a set of brackets containing the words "and then a miracle occurs". There is a famous cartoon with one scientist saying to another "I think you should be more explicit here in step two"

This means that it doesn't actually explain anything.

One of the questions I asked myself was "what if there is a causal chain, but we just don't currently understand it? What would it look like?"

It's true, that this question cuts to the heart of how we stereotypically consider science. The observer completely independent of what they are observing - which, however you interpret quantum physics, we already know is not true. Magic is only acausal if we assume that observer and observed are independent. Which they are not.

The question then becomes: if not independent, then how are they related? How does the causal chain get forged?

And that is what I spent thirty years finding out

 

[Alpaca]

Thanks for the responses these are really interesting viewpoints

 

[FireBorn]

I sometimes wonder if we are mashing parts of mysticism, religion, magick, occult, metaphysics, quantum physics and spirituality all together in these conversations. While I do believe they are different paths on the same mountain, they are absolutely different. They may bleed into each other here and there, but they are not the same things.

This is the type of conversation where precision and accuracy matter. Clarity with terminology matters. And fuck no, I am not qualified to be the decider here lol. It is pretty easy to flatten everything to make a point for convenience, but that doesn't make that point true.

And to the OP @Alpaca ; What do you mean by spirituality exactly? That is such a loaded term if we are honest. It can mean a ton of things to a ton of people. Thus making this harder to get enough clarity to move the needle much (No, we probably wont move the needle much even with our best efforts).

Just something I was chewing on with this.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I sometimes wonder if we are mashing parts of mysticism, religion, magick, occult, metaphysics, quantum physics and spirituality all together in these conversations. While I do believe they are different paths on the same mountain, they are absolutely different. They may bleed into each other here and there, but they are not the same things.

This is the type of conversation where precision and accuracy matter. Clarity with terminology matters. And fuck no, I am not qualified to be the decider here lol. It is pretty easy to flatten everything to make a point for convenience, but that doesn't make that point true.

And to the OP @Alpaca ; What do you mean by spirituality exactly? That is such a loaded term if we are honest. It can mean a ton of things to a ton of people. Thus making this harder to get enough clarity to move the needle much (No, we probably wont move the needle much even with our best efforts).

Just something I was chewing on with this.

People all have different assumptions about all of these different things and start discussing them without saying what half their assumptions are. For example, like you say, someone says 'spirituality' without making clear what that word means to them.

 

[HoldAll]

This reminds me of the Renaissance scholars trying to 'prove' the verity of the Christian faith by means of the Jewish Kabbalah without knowing a word of Hebrew; the old rabbis didn't even acknowledge these pathetic attempts. If today's quantum physicists could be bothered to respond to modern occultists intruding into their field of study, they'd probably say, evil gatekeepers that they are, something like, "Here, I'll try to explain it to you - do you know any calculus and how to solve differential equations?" (and in passing explain how e.g. the Observer Effect isn't caused by human consciousness at all or other such misapprehensions). If you told professional philosophers about the simulation hypothesis, on the other hand, they'll probably ask you if you've read Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" or just seen the Matrix Trilogy.

In such interdisciplinary "A is like B" assumptions, there always the danger of confirmation bias. Even within occultism, one should be careful when drawing up correspondence tables, for example concerning the deities of certain cultures - one trickster god is never quite the same as the other; some cultures had moon goddesses, others moon gods, which means that the lunar 'eternal feminine' was by no means universal (and no, the moon doesn't have anything to do with yesod in classic Jewish Kabbalah). And does quantum physics make any pronouncement about the afterlife, by the way? The scientists don't but the "All is energy!" (according to physics, it isn't) scientism crowd within probably occultures does.

My motto in occultism as well as in life in general is "No one can fool you like yourself." I always double- and triple-check any information I might find about a given subject, and still I catch myself falling for claims sometimes that I desperately want to be true while subconsciously ignoring contrary evidence. Words are among the worst offenders in this respect. No, qi doesn't equal prana doesn't equal axé doesn't equal mana doesn't equal lung, etc., and just because we routinely call all such forces 'energies' doesn't mean they're generated or behave the same way, or that we've got in fact a handle on these phenomena.

'Quantum' is just a lazy catch-all explanation, just like 'magnetism' was in the 18th century. The current fad seems to be dragging AIs into occultism, as if they were god-like superbrains. I wonder what's next.