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A New Alchemy of Science & Spirit

by Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.

So, can we in the modern world pass beyond the veil? I affirm we can. That armed with the ancient knowledge and the modern vision that comes from modern physics, particularly quantum physics, we can rediscover what the ancients may have known. All we need are a few basic concepts—a new way of seeing the old way. I have given a name to these new ways of seeing; I call them the new alchemy. So, perhaps we can call ourselves new alchemists.

You can certainly think of me as a new alchemist. Indeed, I find myself in complete sympathy with my ancient forebears. As I search through my memories, many recollections of this interest flood my mind. I realize I have always been interested in magic and transformation.

I remember a particular day when playing in the front hallway of my apartment building. Barely eight years old, I stood at the top of the stairwell and looked down wondering. Could I fly down the nineteen or twenty stairs reaching to the ground floor from our first floor apartment? Without thinking, I skidded down the stairwell with my feet only barely touching the leading edges of each step. I was on the ground floor in a flash, and I had not slid down the banister, nor had I placed my feet on any of the steps.

When I grew older and remembered what I had done that day, I realized it was impossible. My feet just were not long enough to go from one step edge to the next without my falling flat on my face. Was this just a dream of super powers, or had I actually skidded down those stairs?

Throughout my early years I maintained my interest in magic and fantasy. That interest carried me into thinking about the world a little differently than my fellows. It led me into quantum physics and to my eventual writing of this book.

I am certainly not alone. I want the reader to realize that today, just as thousands of years ago, many individuals are attempting—sometimes together and sometimes alone—to discover the magical, arcane solution to the enigma of the universe. They seek a hidden, abstract and higher order of reality that would include the subjective as clearly as it does the objective.

In Mind into Matter we explore how the mind enters into the body at the cellular, molecular, and neural-molecular levels and becomes ensnared almost—though not quite—believing it is the body. The reality that mind dimly senses itself as beyond the body will offer a new insight into how the mind and body work as elements in an alchemical laboratory. Like no lab you may have ever realized, the alchemical lab appears very naturally in the world of our dreams and preconscious thoughts. In this lab we learn to develop a magical but ever-movable boundary, called real/imaginal, that divides our mind-body into separate selves, selves which appear to be body images in a real world around them.