The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 133 is another bonus episode: a conversation you may not have heard between Christian de la Huerta and me at the Leaders Transforming Global Consciousness Summit 2022.

In this episode, Christian and I work through how the principles of quantum physics can apply to therapy, self-esteem, education, relationships, and every aspect of your lives.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

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Transcript of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz #133

MEL: Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

CHRISTIAN: A few months ago, I was interviewed by our guest today on his show, The Possibility Podcast, and we had such an interesting, stimulating conversation that I wanted to share his work with you. So, without further ado, Mel Schwartz is a psychotherapist, two-time TEDx speaker, he’s the author most recently of The Possibility Principle, how quantum physics can improve the way you think, live, and love. He’s got a graduate degree from Columbia University, has written over 100 articles read by more than 7 million people, and is also a member of the International Society for Consciousness Studies. So, welcome Mel.

MEL: Well, thank you, Christian. I’m looking forward to getting back into the flow of consciousness with you.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, yeah, we sure did surf an interesting time together on that interview. So you write that we cannot transform what we see as out there until we come to an inner ecology of mind, which I love the way that you express yourself and the way that you capture these principles. What does that mean to you, an inner ecology of the mind?

MEL: Well, firstly, I have to give credit to the great social scientist, Gregory Bateson, for coining that phrase. At least I believe he coined it. You may have had a book by the same title, An Inner Ecology of Mind, which struck me. You know, one of the problems that pervades our world and our consciousness is this sense of separation, or what David Bohm called fragmentation. How can we expect to have environmental sensibility and a healthy ecology in what is outside of us when in fact our mind suffers from the absence of an inner ecology? So what we see, what we think we see, what consciousness is thoroughly participates in creating what we call out there. I frankly don’t believe it’s out there or in here. These are false distinctions. But for the sake of rational communication, we still make those distinctions.

MEL: So here’s an example. I believe I cite this in my book. Decades ago, the FDA in the United States decided that a particular pesticide was too toxic to allow the sale of in the United States. The pesticides were carcinogenic. However, they had no objection to shipping the product to Mexico. Now, did it occur to them that this pesticide would be sprayed on the crops in Mexico and exported back to the United States? That’s the absence of an inner ecology of mind. But more fundamentally, our minds operate from this illusion of separation, which comes from 17th century thinking. And through that illusion or delusion, it drives mind to think it’s okay to exploit, to exploit resources, to exploit one another, to compete individualistically in this random breakneck way. So out of that exploiting of the other, whether it be a people, a nation, a culture, or nature itself, we have the ecological disaster. But it begins with mind.

MEL: Now we see in indigenous peoples, historically and still presently, an ecology of mind. Famously, the Native Americans’ tradition was that whatever action they took, they would think seven generations forward as to how it might impact their lineage and their world and their environment. That’s an inner ecology of mind. It’s thinking beyond the minute and the specific, and it’s rippling out toward the whole. That’s a brief summation of what I mean by that term.

CHRISTIAN: No, that’s great, and it’s stuff that we’ve heard before from a spiritual perspective, like as above, so below, as within, so without. But what I love about your work is that you’re actually weaving in these concepts of quantum physics to help us understand and relate to these what up to now have been spiritual concepts. So say a little bit more about the 17th century worldview, because if you would have asked me when that split happened, I would have thought it was before that, that the split between the physical and the quote-unquote spiritual, from which stems this relationship to ourselves and to our bodies and to the planet where we otherize it and we have this artificial separation from each other. I thought that started, you know, before maybe the beginning of the patriarchy. So what exactly happened in the 17th century that heightened that or intensified that?

MEL: Well, you might be quite right. It may very well have begun earlier. I don’t have expertise as to that, but it makes sense to me. When I speak of 17th century thinking, I’m referring specifically to Newton and Descartes. Incredible to me that in an era where people were not reading books and there was no dissemination of information through technology, with the thinking and writing of two men, which so impact the way we think centuries later. Brief summation, Newton described reality as a giant machine, otherwise known as a machine-like reality or universe. Mechanism is a reference to that. In this machine-like reality, it’s comprised of parts. A machine has parts. The parts are separate and distinct from each other, and they only interact through force, causality, cause and effect. There’s no connection, let alone the notion of inseparability.

MEL: So the objects are separate and distinct. Now over time, it is my belief that we became the cogs in that machine. We began to see each other through difference rather than sameness, through separation, which led to a loss of empathy and compassion, which require wholeness and oneness. Furthermore, Newton provided us with the notion of determinism. If we have enough data, we might reasonably predict the future. This reliance on determinism came to have us abhor uncertainty. Uncertainty is the opposite of determinism. So with determinism, we analyze things to death. Analysis paralysis is a term people use now. The fear of making a mistake. You know, if you’re playing a chess match and you’re sitting back and calculating your moves, that makes sense. But if you’re living life that way, it doesn’t work. So I’m fond now of saying you can’t be in fear and in flow at the same time.

MEL: Now coming back to the science, determinism created this need to predict. Now quantum physics reveals that reality is thoroughly uncertain, discovered by Heisenberg in 1927 and providing us with the uncertainty principle. So I want to share with everybody that I don’t understand science, and I was not even an average science student. It is simply these principles that profoundly impacted me. You mentioned the Society for Consciousness Studies, of which I’m a member. I do not belong in this society. They’re brilliant academics and scientists, and I have no idea what they’re talking about scientifically. But they look to me for the takeaway. Perhaps I’m a social scientist.

MEL: So I came to see that our addiction to certainty and predictability are the cause of anxiety. When we ne