Know Thyself
E145 - Dr. Theresa Bullard: Physicist Explores The Missing Link Between Alchemy & Quantum Mechanics
Tue, 06 May 2025
Dr. Theresa Bullard delves into the history of the split between physics and metaphysics, exploring its implications for our understanding of reality. She examines the laws of science that limit our perceptions and discusses her transformative shift from classical to quantum physics. She explains the mathematics of the universe, the 7 steps of the alchemical process, and how to embrace a quantum mindset. Try MUDWTR & Get Up to 43% off + a free frother:https://mudwtr.com/knowthyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro2:07 History of the Split between Physics & Metaphysics 7:32 Laws of Science that Limit Us10:54 Her Shift from Classical to Quantum Physics 17:00 The Implicate Order (New Science)27:00 Mathematics of the Universe31:41 (Mindset) Transcend Limitation, Embrace Quantum Possibility38:35 Embracing the Uncertainty of Life44:27 Ad: Mudwtr Save 43%46:05 How New Age Spirituality Mis-uses Quantum Terms56:53 The Science of Alchemy1:01:56 7 Steps of Alchemy (Personal Transformation) 1:17:28 Honoring Your Past While Moving Forward1:23:08 Our Inner Alchemical Process1:26:16 The Transformations that Shaped Her Life1:29:17 How Our DNA Evolves as we Awaken1:36:33 Science of Extra Sensory Perceptions1:46:36 Creating Coherence in Body, Mind & Soul1:51:29 Entrainment: Take Your Future Into Your Hands1:58:39 Practices to Becoming an Alchemist 2:05:12 Activate Your Divine Potential2:12:00 Conclusion ___________Episode Resources: https://theresabullard.comhttps://modernmysteryschoolint.com www.quantumlearningacademy.co https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyself.oneListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX
Chapter 1: What is the history of the split between physics and metaphysics?
When I know what the stages of the alchemical process are and I know where I am in that process, then I can know what's next. The universe is trying to help you grow and transform so that you can really achieve your greater purpose in life. The negative of that is it's not comfortable. The positive of that is that transformation is happening.
It's going to lead to something better if you participate with it rather than resist it. have so much more potential in you than you've ever been taught. Believe in yourself.
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. Our guest today holds a PhD in physics from the University of Washington.
She is a teacher, writer, author, speaker, leader, synthesizer of really science and spirit in so many ways and taking what seems so oftentimes metaphysical, esoteric on the spiritual side and grounding it and also brings what can often be dense scientific material to parse through into science. understandable language as well. So Dr. Teresa, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Andre. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Chapter 2: How do the laws of science limit our perception?
Pleasure is mine. I love to dive in off the bat. Let's dive in. And this area of exploration and the type of conversation that we're going to have today is one of my favorite because it's such a unifying area of exploration where the mass consciousness is pretty fragmented in exploring these different categories of life. And I love how you bring things together. And so when you look at
life from the spiritual and the physics and the scientific lens. Going back in time, what do you feel like was the predominant divorce between seeing physics and metaphysics as two separate things?
That's a great question. Actually, that's a big part of what, as I started my search to try and figure out how can science and spirit rejoin, you know, how can they complement each other? It set me on a search that ultimately led me into studying alchemy again. And
Chapter 3: What was Dr. Bullard's shift from classical to quantum physics?
you know, as I was going through grad school and undergrad, you know, the history that we would get in science is that the alchemists were a bunch of pseudoscientists who were just trying to turn lead into gold. And we know that can't be possible. So they were just, it was waved away as a sort of an embarrassment, if you will. But so my mindset was that, but it kept coming up synchronistically.
It kept coming up and the alchemist. So when I finally opened up my mind, because it's synchronicity, just kept saying, look at this, look at this. As I looked at it, I realized, oh, that alchemy isn't what we were taught at all. This is actually a goldmine worth of wisdom. And it was the origin point of where science even came from. The alchemists were the original scientists.
But when it was alchemy, science and spirit were interwoven, like you couldn't separate the two of them. And, and it was very practical. You know, so, so, so many of our forefathers of modern science were alchemists. Isaac Newton was a great example. You know, Bohm. I mean, there's so many. And we separated at that time after, you know, the scientific revolution really came in, I would say.
And it could have been before, you know, it was a long, many hundreds of years worth of like trying to find the math and the, but I think there was a political reason ultimately why science and spirit separated because the church was the authority of all things spiritual in the European world anyway.
And the alchemist wanted to be able to research and study and understand nature and the physical laws. but it was going against church dogma. So there was a reason why they had to sort of separate. They just said like, look, let's leave anything spiritual to the authority of the church and let us just research the physical world and how this works so that we can understand.
Ultimately, their goal was to understand God's creation. But down the line later, it became more and more and more secularized and more and more removed from anything spiritual. But it wasn't because there was a fundamental difference. or conflict between spirit and physical or physics. It was more political.
It's interesting to see how that's rippled out into the mass consciousness and especially the Western mind. But what kind of world do you feel like we'd be living in if... the emphasis wasn't solely mostly on sort of Newton's mechanical, mechanistic models of reality, but maybe explore some of his theological and metaphysical and alchemical works.
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Chapter 4: What is the implicate order in new science?
Yeah, I mean, Isaac Newton, he wrote Principia, and that was like the big thing that all the laws of motion came off of. And it was one paper. But meanwhile, he had hundreds and hundreds of journals that were all about alchemy. And he even warned, you know, the scientists and his fellow alchemists, like, don't take the divine out of the picture, right? And don't make the world a great machine.
Don't make the universe a great machine. But that is exactly what they ended up doing. So I think that if we hadn't gone in that direction, if we had gone in the direction that Newton originally intended, you know, we would probably be very much ahead.
And, you know, in a way, I see that there was an alchemy within science itself, you know, because the alchemical formula is to separate, purify and recombine. And so it's almost like science had to go through its own phase of separation to to really hone its craft and purify the way it operates.
But now we're coming into this age where we need to recombine again and bring the spirit back to the physics. So for me, when I was in physics, it was like, Okay, our knowledge is advancing, our technology is advancing, and it's going to start... We're now in this exponential curve of rapid advancement that's happening.
Within just five years from now, the world's going to be completely different than it is today, just based on science and technology. But unfortunately, our wisdom wasn't keeping pace with the advancement of the science and the knowledge, and therefore...
the way in which humanity is choosing to apply the knowledge and the power and the tools that we have available to us isn't necessarily towards the greatest good. And so I felt like it was more important for humanity to tap back into wisdom
in order to bring the two together so that the wisdom could guide the scientific applications, that we can take these tools and technologies and this knowledge and power and apply it towards a greater good versus just the good of a few. Mm-hmm.
For those that aren't familiar with the fundamental principles that were extracted in hindsight about Newton's Principia Mathematica and how that informed a lot of the direction we continue to explore from determinism to separability, could you kind of illuminate what those four tenets were?
Sure. So the first one is determinism. It basically says that if we were given an initial set of conditions, we should be able to predetermine, based on the laws of science, all future evolution or all future progression of that initial state, right? So it's deterministic. Therefore, we can predict it. We can control it. We should be able to know what's going to happen next.
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Chapter 5: How does mathematics reveal the universe's structure?
So if I take a whole thing and then I can break it down into its components and its different parts, and if I understand how each part works on its own, then I should just be able to sum them up and know how the whole works.
But the problem with separation is it ignores all the interaction of things and the emergent phenomenon that comes out of those interactions and those relationships and the synergy and And so forth. And then the fourth real principle that came out of the Newtonian science is realism.
And realism kind of goes hand in hand with materialism, where it's saying that there is a real, physical, tangible, objective world that is the only thing, you know, taken to an extreme, it says it's the only thing that's real is the material. And it would say then, therefore, that even consciousness and who we are is all just an epiphenomenon of physical processes.
So those are the four major tenets of the Newtonian science. that goes back like 340 years. And then we kind of add, you know, in terms of today's mindset, we added on to that Darwinian evolution, which was that sort of competition, survival of the fittest. And then you add on to that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is also that you have to take care of survival first.
Then you can start pursuing, you know, more like education and Purpose and self-realization and so forth. So those are like the major principles that got extracted from various scientific mindsets that have come to dominate our world, especially since the Industrial Revolution last, you know, 100 years or so.
That notion of materialism being fundamental creates the inherent separation of subject and object and views world. And again, like you said, scarce sort of mentality. And I know that in your educational studies at university, there was sort of the shift as you were having your own spiritual development alongside the shift from classical to the quantum view.
And I would just be curious for you to share a little bit about your own personal journey during that time of like what shifted when you started exploring quantum physics and how that was much more exciting as opposed to the classical view.
Okay. So I would say that actually started when I was in undergrad. I, you know, were educated in the classical first, right? So classical mechanics, physics. electromagnetism, you know, just basic statistical mechanics. You know, these are the classical things first. And how does the macroscopic physical world work? And what are those rules that govern that?
And to me, it was actually like a grind. It was a bit like, it didn't inspire me. Let's just say that. And I kind of often wonder, like, why do I need to know this? And what am I going to do with this information? And it was just like, it really didn't click for me. I actually struggled with the classical mindset.
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Chapter 6: What are the 7 steps of alchemy for personal transformation?
External manifestations.
External manifestations, the 3D physical reality that we can observe and experience with our senses and so forth. The implicate order is a deeper reality that is underneath all of that. And he used an example of like, let's say you have a big vat of some, you know, substance, you know, fluid, like, or a clay of some kind, and you can observe, you know, with a, with a
camera let's say you can observe what's happening on the surface but you don't necessarily see what's going on underneath it especially if it's opaque and you might put a drop of some dye you know but there's this movement that's happening throughout and underneath it and you might see a little trail of what it's doing on the surface but you have no clue what's happening underneath
And that's one analogy that he used for the implicate order is that deeper reality, the more whole picture versus the explicate being just what's on the surface and what's observable. And so he kind of compared...
the quantum reality to this implicate order, this whole movement where there's a deeper reality to things, whereas the kind of Newtonian way of looking at things is more what we just see on the surface. Another way of looking at that is if you have a higher dimensional object,
let's say, you know, just for the sake of understanding it, let's say we have a cylinder, right, a three-dimensional cylinder. And then you shine a light on that cylinder and it casts a shadow on a screen and you might see a circle. But if you shine a light on that cylinder and it casts a light on another screen, you're going to see a square or a rectangle.
And, you know, then you have the scientists arguing which one's correct. Is it the square or the rectangle or is it the circle? But you have to kind of shift to this higher dimensional view to see that, oh, it's a cylinder. It's both, right? And so the quantum view is very much this is both. And there's so many more possibilities here.
Whereas in our sort of explicate order way of looking at things, we only see this or that. And we think they're We think they're contradictory to each other. We think they're separate from each other, but they're not. And in order to see that they're one whole thing, we have to shift to a higher dimensional perspective and reality to see what the whole is.
It's kind of like the six scientists who are blindfolded are trying to identify what's an elephant. One has the trunk and one has the tail and one has a leg and they're all kind of experiencing different things, but none of them are seeing the whole elephant.
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Chapter 7: How do we honor our past while moving forward?
And that until you have an observer that actually observes the result of something, it's still in a superposition of infinite possibilities. And so they really brought the consciousness into the equation. But it was so radical at the time that scientists weren't really ready to accept it.
And it's really taken 100 years for scientists to just keep testing the various predictions that quantum physics makes to see, like, is this entanglement thing really real? Can we really, like, separate particles, you know, by... you know, hundreds of thousands of miles and then still have instantaneous transfer of information? Is time really like, does that not matter in the quantum world?
You know, because it definitely matters in our experience of reality, but in the quantum, it's like, no, time doesn't really matter. It's non-temporal, non-local. And, you know, so it's only like they've continued to devise experiments to test, is this true? Because it was so radical. And it was like Alice going down the Wonderland and, you know, and everything getting kind of turned upside down.
And only, I would say, in the last... five to 10, five years especially, have I start beyond just sort of the science and consciousness kind of community. I've started to hear more and more public conversation, more and more acceptance of quantum as a way of viewing things.
And so there's been a shift in the last five years that's like, oh, people are more ready now for this conversation than they might've been 10 or 15 years ago, and let alone a hundred years ago, you know, so-
And I think it can, and I'm looking forward to getting your perspective on how it can go a little bit too far in terms of taking things out of their technical context. But when you study emergent complex systems and you see kind of how there's both in the explicate order and the macro side of things, there is reflection of what's happening.
And there's like clues, hints, breadcrumbs of what's happening at a deeper sense. And so you study order, symmetry, beauty, like cues within nature, and you start to see this correlation between the micro and the macro. I don't know if you saw that. I'm sure you did that. Those entangled photons that look like the yin and yang symbol that was in a recent study. I don't know if you saw that.
I haven't seen that.
OK, cool. But like seeing those entangled photons and how they showed up and look like that, we'll put it on screen. It's just it's it's interesting to see the deeper the study goes, the relationship between those those two.
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Chapter 8: What practices can help us become an alchemist?
And once you've like really come to a place of embodying that concept and living it in your life and not just talking a good talk, but walking the talk, if you will, then you really know. And then you can be somebody who can share that with others. But if you just have a concept and you try to be somebody who shares it with others, you don't know what you're talking about.
You're just trying to sound fancy. And so we do have this, unfortunately, in the world today. There's a lot of people who claim to have the knowledge and the answers, but they're just using the buzzword. But there are also really genuine teachers out there who have the understanding But I find that to really come to a place of understanding, you have to do the work.
And a lot of people don't really want to do the work. And that's really where you start to figure out if somebody is just going to stay kind of fluffy about things or if they're really going to make progress in their life. And to me, with people I work with, I want to work with people who really want to make progress.
They actually want to take these tools into application and live it and embody it and really come to understand it versus just know about it.
Yeah, Meister Eckhart, I remember saying something like scientists may disagree to infinitum, but, you know, mystics of the world speak the same language because reality can actually only be experienced intrinsically. Like we can, of course, know aspects of it through reality.
the rational logical mind but through the embodied experience of such concepts does one actually begin to even know something the rest of it actually isn't knowledge it's it's it's not really a gnosis as a better better word there and so to make this fruitful for anybody who's listening because i'm sure we've all fallen in traps of you know doing this um and anytime we critique something i would love to kind of help replace the bad habit what's an example of
Like language that's used out of its context that you would love to see a little bit more refinement with that you kind of tend to see often. Could you and yeah, how would how would you remedy that?
OK, so one example that I hear is, you know, when people say it's all energy, therefore it's all quantum. Have you heard that before?
Yeah.
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