The Strange Life and Mysterious Vanishing of the Scientist and Mystic Jacobo Grinberg

Among the annals of those people who have mysteriously disappeared, there are sometimes those individuals whose remarkable or eccentric lives make their vanishing all the more compelling. Certainly qualifying as belonging to these ranks is the story of the scientist Jacobo Grinberg, who sought to merge science and mysticism, and who explored the very limits of the human understanding of consciousness and reality before stepping off the face of the earth. 

Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum, mostly known as simply Jacobo Grinberg, was born in Mexico City in 1946 to a family of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Poland who had arrived in Mexico in the early years of the 20th century. His interest in the science of the human mind began when his mother sadly died from a brain tumor when he was just 12 years old, a tragedy that would launch him on a trajectory to studying psychology and neuroscience. In 1963, Grinberg journeyed to the relatively new state of Israel, which was a trip that would leave an indelible imprint upon his life, during his year-long stay instilling within him a deep interest in various paranormal phenomena such as spirits and mediumship, as well as meditation, shamanism, and Kabbalistic thought, all of which he sought to intertwine with his academic pursuits. 

Grinberg would return to Mexico and go on to study psychology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and in 1970 he went to New York City to study psychophysiology at the Brain Research Institute, earning his Ph.D at the E. Roy John Laboratory, focused on the electrophysiological effects of geometric stimuli on the human brain. This was all very impressive, but to him, the scientific method was too limiting and was keeping him from pursuing more radical avenues of research into what most would consider to be firmly within the realm of the paranormal. In 1977 he went back to Mexico and founded his own lab at the Universidad Anáhuac, where he could focus more on what he really wanted to pursue.

At his lab he began to derail a bit from the mainstream, studying what he believed to be psychic phenomena in children. Grinberg claimed that children could communicate telepathically through means beyond language and read the words off a page without actually seeing them. His experiments also focused on children’s ability to perceive ghosts and spirits, and this was all enough to spook parents into pulling their kids from the program. This did little to deter Grinberg, who despite the raised eyebrows he was getting from the scientific community continued his studies and experiments dealing with shamanism, telepathy, extra-sensory perception, and the realms of higher consciousness. 

In 1975, Grinberg was further propelled into his pursuit of the paranormal and the fringe when he met Doña Pachita, a cabaret singer and lottery ticket seller who was known as a flamboyant eccentric who made all sorts of claims to have paranormal powers. In addition to practicing black magic rituals, she claimed that she was the niece of Moctezuma and the sister of Cuauhtémoc, the last of the Aztec emperors, that she could make objects materialize and dematerialize at will, and that she could even perform surgeries or even organ transplants using just the powers of her mind. Grinberg not only believed all of this at face value, but he came up with a theory that such people were able to display these fantastic abilities because they had access to an “informational matrix,” unperceived by typical people, which they could alter and influence, thereby altering reality as we know it. Grinberg would go on to become a disciple of María Sabina, an indigenous Mazatec shaman who performed purification rituals using mushrooms, and he became deeply fascinated by the role of shamanism and witchcraft in relation to brain activity, as well as what he called the “magic world.” 

In the late 1970s, Grinberg would set up another similar laboratory at UNAM, and in 1987 he founded the National Institute for the Study of Consciousness (INPEC), funded by UNAM and the National Council of Science and Technology, which only furthered his resources for studying such phenomena. One notable series of experiments he conducted involved telepathy, with him claiming that he had proven its existence and that there was a simultaneous reaction in the distant participants that he called the “transferred potential.” He further postulated that this showed that there was a sort of neuronal field connecting all human minds. He also came up with what he called the “Sintergy Theory,” which postulates that there is a continuous space of energy and the common human can only perceive a part of it, the result of this process being what everyone understands as “reality.” A Dr. Inés Urdaneta explains of it as follows:

“The syntergic theory is in close relation with physicist David Bohm’s implicate order theory, which conceives space as a holographic sea of infinite potential from which the phenomena we understand as physical things unfold -the order that is made explicit-. This enfolded holographic matrix conforms the “pre-space” or the Lattice, as Grinberg coins it. The brain interacts with this lattice and from this interaction, the perceptual reality as we know it appears as a final resultant of the cerebral processing; that is, objects, colors, shapes, textures, smells. Reality as we perceive it, is not the stimuli, but the result of extremely fast processes that have already taken place through the interaction. Reality is created as the final product of a brain process, and once created it has a real existence. What we are perceiving through all our senses, is the final product of a brain processing, that once this is there, acquire real existence, but it exists as consciousness, not as matter. This interaction with the brain distorts the field, and the experiencer/experience emerges. The pre-space field or lattice has no quality of experience by itself, until the interaction happens and the lattice distorts.

This pre-space information field or matrix would contain all the information of the whole in each of its parts, therefore, it is holographic in nature, and it is highly complex. The levels of interaction or coupling of the brain with the field would depend on the level of synchronization between both hemispheres of the brain. The reality we perceive would be our brain’s decoding of what is unmanifest infinite unity, the tip of the wave of the great ocean of consciousness, which we mistake as a “primary stimulus” when it is only like the whirlpool that is excited on the surface of the water — and therefore we do not realize how we are part of the same creative process of reality. Therefore, sound, light, mass, energy, and all manifested phenomena would be attributes of consciousness. Through this perspective, Grinberg introduces a notion which is controversial for occidental cultures: that all our experience, all that we can know is nothing but consciousness. 

We do not know things directly, we know them as phenomena within our consciousness, decoded by our mind. Therefore, in this case, the scientific method of an independent observer analyzing an object externally is not possible: the experimenter is part of the field of his experiment, that which he is investigating is what he is investigating with. Which is why he defines consciousness as “that which is behind every perceptual act, that which sustains the very quality of experience”. By this definition, Grinberg coincides with the oriental philosophies which have stated something similar -that reality is a construction of mind- for millennia (Vedas, Sufis, Taoism, Dzochen, and many other traditions based on esoteric knowledge and initiations).”

Regarding his ideas on this and reality as a combination of matter and empty space, Grinberg would explain:

“Space is transparency; it is that which as a container includes, in its different portions, material objects that in our perception are in different locations. A ball is solid, located in space and differentiated from it by its concrete character. The curious thing, the extraordinarily curious thing about this example, or any other that attempts to describe the difference between transparency and opacity, between the solid and the intangible, is that the content of everything material is precisely that space that we consider different, in foundation and in essence, from matter.

Space contains matter in each of its points. The proof of this is our ability to see; we see space, and that space is what contains the material. When we approach an object and perceive how it increases in size, what we do is to continue seeing space, but now with more content of the object. My retina sees space, which is where the information about the object is found, it is a small space, barely the size of the area of my retina that transforms space into nerve signals. Therefore, space is only transparent in my construction of the place that separates me from the object; in other words, I normally see the area of space that transects my retina. In this zone is the information that makes me perceive space as transparent, the information about the distance that separates me from the object, and the object itself. It is a zone that repeats itself, that is redundant, and from which I can only transform what really comes into contact with me.
Let’s see it with an example: to see a tree, the organization of the spatial information given by the tree must be adequate for the cerebral mechanism in charge of decoding it. If the complexity of this organization exceeds a limit, the image is chaotic or there is no image.
A subject blind from birth due to cataracts who, after surgery, is again able to stimulate his retinal receptors, perceives absolute chaos.

We normally learn to decode organized information and from there we construct our images. If we transpose all these considerations to space and matter, several conclusions would become clearer. On the one hand, about the transparency of space and the opacity of objects.
We said before that we are unable to perceive and decode simultaneously the whole space, that what we usually do is to handle only the portion that transects our retina, and that this portion is transformed into vision of transparent space and perception of solid objects. The difference between transparency and solidity is no more and no less than the degree of organization. Transparent space is too complex in its organization to be able to algorithmize it. What we call matter, on the other hand, is less complex and easier to reduce to an algorithm. If the ease or difficulty of algorithmic reduction is a measure of organization, then a material object, perceived as solid, and a transparent space look like this because, in the portion of space that contains information from both the former (material object) is represented by an organization that we are able to handle, and the latter (transparent space) is represented by an organization so complex that we are unable to decode it.

In other words, and already in a more general context, matter is an organization of space that the human brain and that of other animals can decode and reduce to a neural algorithm, while what we call transparency and absence of materiality is an organization of space so complex that we are unable to decode it. Already from here we can affirm, with certainty, that the difference between space and matter is a product of brain activity, since space and matter are part of a continuum that differs in organization and complexity. We see a material object when we encounter those areas of the space-matter continuum that we are able to organize. We see transparent space when we are not able to discover and decode an energetic organization that surpasses our capacity of organization.”

Whoa. It is all extremely complex, but in a nutshell, the idea is that we are all living in a holographic sort of “Matrix” projected by our own minds. It was at around the time that he was developing this theory that he flew further and further off the deep end. Grinberg would claim that he was in contact with the divine, or that he was a space traveler who wandered through galaxies using telepathic connections and surveying new alien civilizations. He also became good friends with the New Age author Carlos Castaneda and embraced many of his esoteric ideas. In addition, he began climbing the Pyramid of the Sun to enter spiritual states and worship divine entities, and he took up practicing Hasidic Jewish rituals that supposedly allowed one to communicate with nonmaterial entities, which would help them cure an assortment of human ailments. This further detachment from reality did him no favors in the mainstream scientific community, but he nevertheless would publish over 50 books on a vast range of topics. 

In 1994 Grinberg published his seminal paper The Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The transferred potential, which delved into many of his out-there theories, and he was making plans for an experiment to probe the interaction between the brain and his Matrix lattice with laser fields. In December of that same year, his family put together a birthday party to celebrate his 48th birthday and everyone was in good spirits. About a week before the party was to be held, Grinberg contacted his daughter and said he would be going to Kathmandu to participate in a series of meditations, but that he would be back in time for the party. On December 12, the party was held but Grinberg never showed up, and indeed he has never been seen again.

At first, there was nothing seen as particularly amiss. Grinberg was a known eccentric and free spirit who would embark on spontaneous travels or just kind of become a recluse for days on end but after weeks of no word his family became concerned. When investigators looked into his supposed trip to Nepal, they found no record of a ticket issued to him by any airline and no evidence that he had made the trip at all. Despite widespread searches for Grinberg, he was never found, with only a few possible sightings of him serving as leads that went nowhere. 

As far as these things go, it seems like a pretty straightforward disappearance, only odd in the complete lack of clues as to where he went. Yet considering his life’s work and his strange ideas and theories there were immediately all sorts of ideas on what had happened to him, ranging from the slightly believable to the downright bizarre. One idea was that he had run off to join some sort of New Age commune and left his old life behind, or that he had simply lost his mind and run off, possibly under the influence of the many psychedelic substances he experimented with. Another was that he had been working on strange experiments for the government and had either been silenced or sequestered away for reasons of secrecy. Another was that his wife Teresa had had a hand in his vanishing, either out of jealousy or because she had been hired to make him disappear for more nefarious reasons. Putting an ominous spin on this line of reasoning, Teresa herself would vanish off the face of the earth exactly one year after Grinberg had disappeared. Yet another was that he had been a victim of one of his bizarre experiments. More outlandish theories include that he was abducted by aliens, that he had used his mind powers to leave Earth and travel the galaxy, or that he had simply found a way to phase out of this reality and move on to another dimension. 

With no body ever found and occasional sightings to this day, there are many who believe Grinberg is still alive and for whatever reasons is hiding from society, possibly because he has found some secrets of the universe that humankind is not ready for, or because he has formed some sort of cult. Considering Grinberg’s rather odd life and his fantastical ideas on the nature of reality and consciousness, his disappearance is ripe for all manner of theories, yet none have any real evidence to support them, making it a conundrum that will likely never be solved.