Rant

Every woo-woo snake charmer with two chakras to rub together has greeted the development of quantum mechanics with the same naked greed as that of a couple of starved Siberian tigers greeting the unexpected arrival, out on the frozen tundra, of a Craft Services truck. They all latch onto the same thing: quantum entanglement and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The concept that subatomic particles are, among other things, "connected" through higher dimensions, so that one electron instantly "knows" what's been done to its twin, even though they're billions of lightyears apart, causes them unbridled ecstasy. "Consciousness is the key!" they bray. "The universe is me and I am it!"

These are the same people who believe that unicorns fart rainbows and that nice friendly spacemen dressed in the worst styles of the 70's would happily give us cosmic secrets if the nasty ol' government would just stop getting in their way. They believe that the universe is a happy, shiny and loving place that cares about us and tucks us in at night. They believe this with exactly the same fervor and intensity that led them to clap their hands as hard as they could when they were children to bring Tinkerbelle back to life, and with exactly the same dewy-eyed confidence that tells them that God answers prayers and that Jesus is real because he reincarnates periodically in a bit of cheese toast.

Well, good luck with that worldview. No doubt the dinosaurs that were swept up in the ejecta hurled skyward by the asteroid that nearly punched a hole through the world thought it was really cool to be the first sauroid saints lifted up to Heaven -- except  that they probably had a hard time thinking anything at all, considering how thoroughly and completely dead they were.

My belief is that the only brittle, hard-nosed realists in all this are most likely the con artists like Chopra, who know the real score and are going Ommmm ... all the way to the bank.

Having trouble following my logic? Then riddle me this:  Approximately 30 billion people have lived on this planet, and (presumably) died on it. Most of them inconsequential, to be sure, but some of them were bona fide geniuses. Think about that. Archimedes, Paracelsus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein --the one thing they have in common is death -- and, if the legends are true, revival on the other side.

So do you really believe that, with such an unbelievable brain trust working on the  biggest question that has bedeviled humanity since Homo ergaster was a pup, the best communications device they've been able to put together so far is the Ouija Board?