Top 52 Quotes & Sayings by Fred Alan Wolf

Alchemy and Kabbalah are later developments in my thinking. I think the primary interest has been the relationship of magic and mystery to logic and understanding. Those are the primary driving forces of my life. I have this ability, for some reason, to be able to hold both the Magical MysteryTour we're on in conjunction with the logical rigor of understanding theoretical physics, which makes me kind of a rare bird, because usually you're one or the other.

When you start to try to understand everything in terms of words, the understanding of the words becomes the experience, and the experience gets lost.

The most common way people could do time-travel would be a form of meditation in which you don't get caught up in your thoughts and don't make patterns of logical consequences follow as a result of your thinking process. It's very hard for most of us to do that if we think about it. But if you start to watch the process by which things come into being, and you begin to witness from the point of view of watching the words form, then you're beginning to move into the non-temporal mindset, or that which is free of time.

The kinds of mystical experiences that I have had definitely convinced me that I was able to get out of time. I have had experiences, or brief glimpses, of being able to see the future and then come back into time, and then go into extraordinary realms of the past.

Medicine could have pretty far-reaching effects once we begin to look at the kinds of things that people can do to induce transformation in their thinking, their sensing, their intuiting and their feelings - and whether there's some power there that can be unleashed that would cause blockages that were primarily put in place through thought to be let go of.

We need all three senses of time - a sense of the future, a sense of the present, and a sense of the past - at all times to understand or experience what's happening right now. It's constantly unfolding that way.

I think a lot of psychological healing tends to work on that basis. We go into the unconscious to find what's holding you back, so to speak, and I think there is an unconscious body image that may be responsible for the unhealing that's taking place.

The self is fundamentally an illusion arising as a reflection of the soul in matter, much as a clear lake at midnight reflects the moon.

Reality includes both the past and the future, but existence includes only the present and is totally dependent on the reality of past and future universes. Without them there is no existence now.

Chemistry comes about through the transformation of earth, air, fire and water. All chemistry is just movement within those things, and so we experience the joys and the sorrows of hot and cold, and dry and moist, because of these chemical transformations. In a similar way, we create and experience a world of time, space, motion and energy, through our intuitions, our thoughts, our sensing and our feeling.

Reality gets created through acts of observation

When I worked with various healers of one kind or another, very often what came up was that there was an "inner" person who was controlling what was going on in the life of the "outer" person, who thinks he's in control of his life. That inner person has a vested interest in keeping the person from getting well, so the healing doesn't take place.

Asking yourself deeper questions opens up new ways of being in the world. It brings in a breath of fresh air. It makes life more joyful. The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.

I'm not talking to you from the point of view of wishful thinking or imaginary craziness. i'm talking to you from a deeper, basic understanding.

I believe, or sense, that the universe has not been constructed from a purely mechanical, logical, rational point of view, but there is a magic afoot in the universe, that God can be looked at as a kind of a magician in which we get to perform tricks ourselves, without knowing that we're doing so.

Dreams - Language in a dream is unspoken but understood. Words get in the way.

Illness is something out of balance, rather than something within balance. It's been something that is created and it's been created for a purpose and a reason, and that purpose or reason may not be obvious to the person that has the disease. Nevertheless, there is something going on and it's not always easy to find that out.

People who are creative often will spend hours doing something and come out of their period of creation and not even notice that hours have passed. In that sense, they're able to time travel.

Oh, scientific mind. You get all your data from us, the senses, but without us you would be nothing.

Consciousness is the creative element in the universe. Without it, nothing would appear.

That's sort of the idea that if we, in attempting to explain away that which is experienced, the experience itself is diminished.

When I speak or when I offer ideas and explain how the universe seems to work from the point of view that I've understood, it seems to give people a lift - an unshackling or freeing.

What I thought was unreal now, for me, seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now to be unreal

In very subtle ways, how we regard ourselves and others continually changes us into something new.

It's very frustrating if you've never had an experience and somebody comes up to you and says, "I've just been on a flying saucer." Your tendency is to think, "Oh, this guy must be wacko, nuts, having an hallucination. None of that can be true because none of that has ever happened to me."

You had to be able to lift yourself outside of the time stream - and that essentially became what is called the yoga of time travel.

I describe the variety of different kinds of experiences I had, from seeing into the future to being inside the body of a bird and feeling the bird consciousness, to being in a plane of existence with beings that do not exist on this planet at all. And I described my experiences to shamans who started to laugh, saying, "Oh, we know those guys."

All we know is that you are, if you will, the acme of perfection.

The place where...knowledge occurs is the present. That which recognizes the present is mind.

What is the relationship of the obvious things that we see around us to the things that we believe we understand within ourselves? This is the ancient alchemical formula: "as above, so below, as within, so without."

The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people, if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry. Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people, smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted to be richer.

The quantum is that embarrassing little piece of thread that always hangs from the sweater of space-time. Pull it and the whole thing unravels.

Certainly in terms of technology, it's made a tremendous impact, but medicine is still within the realm of what we might call "objective" science. It's still part of the objective way of looking at the world.

A lot of things occurred to me with shamans in Peru.There were a number of different kinds of experiences that you learn from doing ritual and taking ayahuasca [a common tropical forest hallucinogen] is the key to understanding the native consciousness and perception of the world with the Peruvian shamans that you wouldn't get unless you had been with them, but every shamanic tradition, including the Native American tradition of medicine and cleansing ritual, like the Sun Dance or the sweat lodge.

I want to explain the new alchemy [in the "From Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to a New Vision of Mind and Time"], which has to do with understanding what I call the subjective and objective qualities of existence.

Quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery. It says that you can't have a Universe without mind entering into it, and that the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.

It came to my mind that in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in Indian spiritual literature, and in the Bhagavad Gita, and when I started reading about outstanding yogis and people of exceeding spiritual power such as Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, they all had the ability to do what we would call - I don't know what you would even call it - psychic phenomenon, magic, transform objects, be able to perceive the future, the past and the present simultaneously.

We find that alchemy has to do with magicians or magic and may even have roots in the Chaldean people who lived in the land that we now call Iraq.Abraham emerged and took a flock of people with him into Egypt. They were later called the Hebrews because of the valleys that they came out of. The alchemy that they saw was a transformative power within the individuals to affect the "out there" reality - and that, of course, is the basis of shamanism and is the basis for most magical and so-called Third World belief systems.

I am not talking to you from the point of view of just wishful thinking, or imaginary craziness. I'm talking to you from a deeper basic understanding - quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery, it says that you can't have a universe without mind entering into it, the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.

Most people who've never experienced non-ordinary states of consciousness and only hear them described tend to try to describe them in terms of the logical, rational way of looking at things, the so-called scientific explanation, which often leaves a lot lacking and doesn't really fulfill understanding the experience at all.

To understand that, we have to begin to imagine what a universe would be like if there wasn't anything in it called Mind. If that was the case, according to quantum physics now, then every possibility would also come into existence as every other possibility.

The real alchemy is transforming the base self into gold or into spiritual awareness. That's really what new alchemy's all about.

In the new alchemy, we have a similar kind of way of thinking. Our internal space includes our intuitions, our thoughts, our senses and our feelings, and from these we construct or build a picture of the outside world. From intuition and thought, we construct time. We also construct space from thought and our sensations. From our senses and our feelings, we experience energy, and from our intuitions and our feelings, we experience motion.

We have a sense of continuity, which gives us what we call a sense of time. Through our ability to have remembrances of both what's coming and what's happening and what has happened, we begin to piece together a logical picture of the world.

There is an ability to move and transform things. I think each human being has that power, and it's often one that we are willing to relinquish to others.

Every book I write is filled with ideas to open people's minds. And many of my books are intended for the lay mind, for people who have no idea about what's going on in quantum physics. They are meant to get big ideas across in the simplest way so young people can start to wrestle with these ideas.

The shamanic realm is to get you out of the word set. For skeptics, that's impossible, and they just can't see that and it just makes no sense.

In the Greek way of dealing with alchemy, which was earth, air, fire and water, these were the objective qualities. Within the objective qualities - things of earth, air, fire and water - are our subjective experiences of hot, cold, dry, and moist.

I read that Buddha was able to see all of his past lives, and I realized the only way any of these people could do that is by being outside of time.

You can't blame the person for creating that illness for themselves, because it was a creation. If you could find out how you created it, you might be able to find out a way to let go.

We all get out, maybe for longer than we wish, because we all pass this mortal coil more or less and so we certainly get a chance to experience it again, and we've experienced it before we were born. So it's more or less our natural place of being, unless you believe that the only time you're conscious is when you're alive.

Learning to see love and to express that love is the purpose of living this life. What's real has love at its heart; the universe is constructed from love, and that love is very much tied to our power of attention and imagination.