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Sunday, January 11, 2009
Chapter 9: Evolving the Christian Mythology
My own journey out of fundamentalism and into a new understanding of God and what it means to be “Christian” has been going on for nearly ten years now. Like any journey, there have been stages along the way where sadness, anger, exhilaration, euphoria and a myriad of other feelings have appeared in varying degrees, coloring the emotional backdrop of the process. Early on, there was sadness, as related in the first chapter of the book. As I began to see the psychological toll that some elements of the fundamentalist myth had taken on my psyche, anger punctuated the intoxicating sense of freedom that emerged. As I continued to study, learn, and deconstruct the old mythology, a sense of transcendent peace began to settle over the process. At this point, I began to consider abandoning religion altogether. It was during this time that I had the following dream.
The Bible college where I received my undergraduate training is on a wooded plot of land on the outskirts of a Midwest town. Just down the road less than a half mile is a park, and the entrance to a small zoo. As a student, I would sometimes walk down to the park and zoo with friends for a Saturday outing. In the dream, I was at the college again, and was taking a walk down to the zoo.
As I approached the park, I saw there was quite a commotion going on. There were flashing lights and police cars, and it appeared that there had been some sort of an automobile accident. On the bank of the ditch in front of the park I saw a sheet, and by the contours of the sheet I could tell that there were two bodies underneath. I walked over and pulled back the sheet. There was a man and a woman lying on the ground, both in their mid-twenties. Neither one looked like me, but I had the sense that somehow, they were me.
I walked on by, leaving the chaos and commotion behind me. I was on the loop of the road that ran in front of the zoo. Everything had become very peaceful and calm now; I heard a bird chirping, and I felt a gentle breeze on my face. I felt at one with nature. The beauty of the moment was interrupted by what I saw next.
The zoo was gone; instead, on the green grass of the empty ground, there were huge piles of bones. The bones, I could tell, had once been part of a living being, because there were pieces of red flesh still clinging to the bones. I observed that it was quite an odd juxtaposition; the piles of dismembered life against the backdrop of such peace and beauty. I had the sense that somehow, it had been left to me to put the bodies back together again.
That was the dream. Upon awaking, I was a bit confused as to what it all meant. I wasn’t disturbed by the images of the dream; I didn’t feel fear, or loss; instead, the strongest emotion that lingered was the sense of peace and calm that I had experienced as I walked along the loop. As I thought again about the piles of bones, I remembered a scripture passage from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel:
1The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, 2And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. 3And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. (KJV).
I firmly believe that dreams are an avenue by which our higher wisdom communicates with us. Drawing from the images with which we are familiar and which carry personal as well as archetypal meanings, our higher consciousness speaks to us in symbols that, as we reflect upon them, help us to clarify our perspectives; that help us see the bigger picture behind our lives and our experiences.
I recognized immediately the symbolism of the male and female who were about the same age as me. In archetypal imagery, the union of a couple is often a symbol of unity within the self. The fact that it was a couple who were dead suggested to me the “death” of some unifying principle within me.
A “myth” is just such unifying principle. Myths are important because they create a grand story of the meaning behind all things. The fundamentalist Christian mythology, as flawed as it might be, had provided a structure that unified the events and challenges of my life under one coherent system of meaning. By leaving fundamentalism behind, I had lost the unifying “myth” that had given my life coherence. Yet, the death had not been a bad thing. I knew that the pervading sense of peace and union with nature I felt after leaving the chaos of death behind symbolized the new clarity of vision I had found. I was experiencing directly the great mystery; and it was an experience of heightened consciousness and awareness.
I have come to believe that what we talk about as consciousness -- the transcendent sense of knowing, the apprehension of the unity of all things – that quality that generates compassion, wisdom, and peace in the great souls and that, when missing in mindless living leads to fear, confusion, negative emotions and a feeling of isolation – we are talking about that force that we personalize in Christianity as “God.” Our consciousness is the God-image within us, and like God, is infinite and divine. But while we can experience God through heightened consciousness, describing or talking about God is not quite so easy. As I said earlier, the brain acts as the interface between the non-material consciousness and the material world; our consciousness is infinite, but our bodies and our brains are not. Thought is putting experience into form; and that form, based on finite processes, can never fully contain an infinite experience. That is why our talk about God and our intellectual understanding of God is always in the form of a myth; a metaphor that points to something bigger. In the dream, although I could experience God, the “body” by which I had understood him had been shattered. The myth was dead; and a living, breathing container had become a pile of disorganized and incoherent bones.
This understanding of what the bones symbolized had never been clear to me. I had speculated over the years as to what the symbol of the bones “meant,” but had never found an interpretation that felt right. It was only as I contemplated writing this book that the dream came back to me, and the meaning of the bones became clear. The body had to be rebuilt.
There are those I know who have come out of fundamentalism, but have walked away from religion all together. These people, for the most part, always seem a bit angry to me, as if they have never gotten past the loss of meaning. They spend a lot of energy denying the existence of God, thinking that because the myth is not scientifically true, then neither is the infinite mystery behind it.
Fundamentalism makes the serious, but common mistake of taking the symbols within the Christian mythology as factual and literal. But Joseph Campbell (1972) tells us that
"Today such claims can no longer be taken seriously by anyone with even a
kindergarten education. And in this there is serious danger. For not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been – and still are, in fact – the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers. With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold onto, no moral law, nothing firm" (pg. 9).
We are divine, infinite consciousness incarnated in human, material forms; and
our grand task on earth is to take the truth available to us in higher consciousness (the highest being “God”) and incarnate that wisdom in material things, in thoughts, actions, in flesh and blood. To the extent that we can do that, we are able to communicate these truths to others. We need a language, a set of symbols, a “myth” that we all share. Without that, we either become an island of mystical consciousness and in a sense, abandon our physical existence, or we live in the world “cut off” from our true nature. That is why Campbell goes on to assert that
Whereas it must, of course, be the task of the historian, archaeologist, and
prehistorian to show that the myths are as facts untrue – that there is no one Chosen People of God in this multiracial world, no Found Truth to which all must bow, no One and Only true Church – it will be more and more, and with increasing urgency, the task of the psychologist and comparative mythologist not only to identify, analyze, and interpret the symbolized “facts of the mind,” but also to evolve techniques for retaining these in health and, as the old traditions of the fading past dissolve, assist mankind to a knowledge and appreciation of our own inward, as well as the world’s outward, orders of fact (pg. 10-11).
I have other friends who have left fundamentalism, and have simply jumped the tracks from Christianity into a different mythology. Buddhism is a popular destination for disillusioned Christians these days; but not having grown up in that culture, it takes years of study and practice to feel at home within or fully understand the Buddhist story. Most often these transplants end up Christianizing Buddhist concepts, because it is very hard to free ourselves from the meaning structures that have been built over a lifetime. Others Christian exiles, discouraged by the learning curve, may turn their eyes elsewhere. These people just keep jumping, from one myth to another, never really “getting” that the point is not the myth, but the truth to which it points, that leads to enlightenment.
Christianity is the grand myth that has permeated my life since the day I was born. It is true that parts of the story (as in the case of fundamentalism) have become so encrusted with literal notions and cultural meanings that the truth behind the story is barely recognizable; but the answer is not to abandon the myth altogether, nor is it to “jump ship” into a whole new mythology fraught with problems of its own. Instead, we must be constantly rebuilding the myth in every generation; stripping it of its dead language, rearranging the bones and covering it with the flesh of an evolving understanding.
In doing this, we have to grapple with language. Words are the building blocks we use to construct a picture of the reality we experience; and how we talk about things really does matter. Words like “sin,” “atonement,” “repentance,” “intercession,” “anointing,” and a myriad of others that we use in the Christian myth are cultural artifacts from a different time that, in this day and age, obscure the truth behind them rather than illuminate. These words have become so loaded with meaning in the past two hundred years that it is almost impossible to see beyond them. They are associated with primitive ways of viewing relationships, and they keep our understanding of these relationships in the shadows of a darker time.
Growth and evolution change the way we understand God and our world; and as our understanding of God and the world changes, our language must change to reflect that new understanding. Even Paul understands this. He explains that “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things (1 Corinthians 13:11). It is time to put away the words and metaphors that no longer serve us.
The first step in developing a new “story” of Christianity is to ask ourselves the question, what is the purpose of religion? What is the goal of faith? At the basic level, I believe that the first goal of mystic religion is to know God. The second goal is that, believing that we are made in the “image of God,” we strive to actualize that God nature to its fullest in the world around us.
Knowing God
Who, or what, is God? The old metaphor of God as a “superhuman” that lives somewhere out in the cosmos in a place called “heaven” is no longer intelligible to us. This idea is more descriptive of the Greek pantheon than it is of a transcendent power that is not limited to time or space. Rabbi David Nelson (2005) finds the imagery of God to be present in the scientific notion of the “big bang:”
"I am proposing a metaphorical identity between the Big Band and God, whereby we speak and think of God as the Big Bang, just as, in earlier eras, we spoke and thought of God as father or shepherd. . . According to the standard description furnished by modern cosmology, “the beginning” was characterized by a very high energy level. . . that contained all space that would ever exist. In that first instant, there was no matter; no physical stuff had yet been formed. But that distinction is no longer the serious concern it would have been a century or more ago, for Einstein taught us that matter and energy are simply different forms of the same thing and can be transformed from one into the other and back again. . . So everything that is—and that ever was or ever will be—was there at the Big Bang".
One problem with this characterization, Nelson admits, is that it seems to take away the personal aspect of God. But this need not be; for Nelson, like Braden and others, believes that the unity of consciousness is yet another way to think about God. Because consciousness it the quality that allows us to recognize ourselves and to recognize the essence of others, conciousness is the basis of all personal relationship. Thus one of the great paradoxes of describing the divine: unified consciousness is both impersonal (without individual qualities) and yet the basis for recognition of the personal.
In Christian theology, God is considered to be omniscient (all knowing) and omnipresent (existing everywhere). The concept of a unified and transcendent consciousness that is in everyone, present within the fabric of the universe, and existing as a singularity, could accurately be described as an omnipotent, omnipresent force.
When theorists talk about the universe as a holograph, they are describing, in scientific terms, this very idea of an omniscient and omnipresent consciousness. This same holographic quality is said to characterize our human consciousness, which could account for the phenomena of entanglement. This is consistent with the religious idea of mankind being made in the image of God. God as unified consciousness suggests that we as individuals are human manifestations, bound by time, space, and material limitations, of the unlimited unified consciousness.
Working from this metaphor, we can only “know God” through our consciousness; so the path to knowing God more fully and achieving the second goal of religion, actualizing our God nature in the world, would be in developing our conscious awareness; becoming more conscious in every moment of our lives. This is not a “new” idea, especially not in mystical religion. Lazlo (2004) tells us that
"Different levels of human consciousness, with progression from lowest to highest,
were invisaged by almost all the great spiritual traditions. For example, some native American cultures hold that we are presently living under the fifth sun of consciousness and are on the verge of the sixth sun. The sixth sun will bring a new consciousness and with it a fundamental transformation of our world" (pg. 155).
There are many cultures who envision that we as a race are approaching a time of “change,” when the old ways of operating will give way to a new way of being. This idea of an “evolutionary leap’ may also be the mystical truth towards which the eschatological teachings of Christianity point. Perhaps the “judgment” idea in the Gospels is less about punishment and reward, and more about being prepared to make the evolutionary leap of consciousness towards which our world is moving. In order to do this, we must understand the processes by which the consciousness can be expanded.
Understanding the principles of Spiritual Growth
The path towards more fully manifesting our God nature is often called the path of enlightenment. To become more conscious is to see things in a more holistic, transcendent way. To become enlightened is to see in a radical new way. This sounds a lot like the true meaning of the word “repentance” that we have used in traditional Christian understandings. Unfortunately, the word “repentance” has become so loaded with negative emotions of guilt and shame that it may obscure the positive implications associated with it. The word “enlightenment,” as well, has accumulated cultural baggage as it has come to be associated in the mind of most with Eastern religion. In Christianity, we see Jesus as the enlightened one, so perhaps we should talk about this process of spiritual growth as developing the Christ consciousness within us. How is this done?
In Chapter 7 we saw that in the visionary teachings of Jesus, he moved the locus of morality from the realm of behavior to the realm of thought. In the Sermon on the mount, Jesus talks of a spirituality that transcends the old order because we become responsible for our thoughts, the realm from which all actions flow. For Example, in Matthew 5:27 he tells his audience that
You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'[e] 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart (KJV).
While I’m not proposing that Jesus studied quantum physics, it does appear that he understood a principle of the universe that quantum physics is revealing to us today. Our thoughts create energy fields that seem to interact with the world around us. Interpretations of the wave function of matter, and the work done by Dr. Bruce Lipton (2005) suggests that our health, our actions, and even our very reality, begin in the realm of our thoughts. Citing the work of Dr. Hans Jenny who studied the relationship between vibration and form, Braden (2000) concludes that our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are vibrating energy – energy that creates a “disturbance in the stuff they are projected into.” (pg. 188). This is supported with the work of Dr Hawkins (2002) who found that positive emotions such as love, compassion, courage, peace, and others vibrate at higher levels than negative emotions such as anger, fear, apathy, and guilt.
This conclusion confirms the value of the admonition of Paul to the early Church as recorded in Phillipians 4:8:
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things"(KJV).
How do we raise the vibrational level of our thoughts and achieve heightened consciousness? The key seems to be disciplining the mind through meditation, and maintaining a positive mental state through focused intention.
How does this translate into Christian teaching? At the heart of traditional spiritual discipline is the idea of prayer. Unfortunately, this is another concept that has become laden with a lot of cultural baggage. Most people who hear the word “prayer” today think of supplication; or asking God for help. Engaging in supplication involves laying out before God all the negative situations in our lives and asking him to help us. The problem with this kind of “prayer” is that the focus is centered on the problems in our lives; the pain, negativity, and insufficient resources . We visualize our problems and our fears in this kind of prayer, and is so doing, we not only lower our vibrations but contribute to replicating those mental “holograms” in our environment.
Meditation, on the other hand, is about quieting and disciplining the mind, and seems to provide a positive avenue for expanding our consciousness. The problem is that whenever most people in traditional Christianity hear the word “meditation,” they think of a Buddhist monk or a pot-smoking hippy sitting cross-legged on the floor, lost in a mystic haze. But meditation is not necessarily about Eastern beliefs or checking out of reality. Meditation is about cultivating mindfulness; learning to be fully present in this world at every moment. One author describes it this way:
"I believe meditation is best explained in a word: “being.” When you learn how to live only in the moment; when nothing distracts you; when you are not tied to the past or anxious about the future; when your mind and emotions are your servants rather than your master, your consciousness (your awareness) is in the most perfect state possible. This state is simply “being.” Meditation is about “being”; not about “doing.” (Wilson, 1999)
Austin(1999) tells us that when the brain is constantly flooded with stimuli from the world outside, it responds by turning down the responsiveness level. As a result, we go through life not really hearing or seeing or feeling what is happening around us. This is what we refer to as mindlessness; and in this state, our actions and thoughts are programmed by unconscious scripts that we’ve developed from past experience. This is De javu living, and it is not the path of enlightenment. This is “walking in darkness,” living from the “unregenerate, worldly mind” to use the language of traditional Christian understandings.
But when we discipline the mind through meditation, we become more aware and are able to live in the moment and make conscious choices about our thoughts and actions. We are “awake,” living in the light of conscious awareness. Austin (1999) cites evidence that experienced meditators exhibit increased sensitivity to perceptual stimuli (and thus improved ability to focus), improved alpha wave activity (brain waves associated with thinking and focused attention), and improved theta wave activity (wave activity common during altered states of consciousness and often associated with flashes of insight, inspiration, and receptivity to information from the sub-conscious ).
Not only does meditation seem to aid in helping us achieve altered states of consciousness, McTaggart (2007) reports research that suggests that meditation practice actually helps us to maintain more positive emotional states. She recounts the work of Richard Davidson (2003), neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience. Dr. Davidson was recently invited to India by the Dalai Lama, who wanted to know more about the effects of meditation. During his time in India, he conducted a number of studies on the brains of the Buddhist monks. What he found was the highest production of Gamma rays ever recorded in sane people (McTaggart, 2007):
“Gamma band, the highest rate of brainwave frequencies, is employed by the brain when it is working its hardest: at a state of rapt attention, when sifting through working memory, during deep levels of learning, In the midst of great flashes of insight. . . In their results they noticed an association between level of experience [in meditation] and ability to sustain this extraordinarily high brain activity; those monks who had been performing meditation the longest recorded the highest levels of gamma activity. The heightened state also produced permanent emotional improvement—by activating the left anterior portion of the brain — the portion most associated with joy. The monks had conditioned their brains to tune into happiness most of the time. In later research, Davidson (2003) demonstrated that meditation alters brain-wave patterns, even among new practitioners. Neophytes who had practiced mindfulness meditation for only eight weeks showed increased activation of the "happy-thoughts" part of the brain and enhanced Immune function." (McTaggart, 2007, 70-71).
Through the practice of prayer in the form of meditation, we can create more positive emotion in our lives and elevate our vibratory levels. We can also improve our ability to focus and hold positive intentions in our mind, which is what traditional Christianity refers to as faith – the kind of faith that allows us to move mountains.
In Hebrews 11: 1 we are told that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. The chapter goes on to cite the faith of great men and women who all had one thing in common; they had the ability to envision something that was not evidenced in the material world, and live from that vision.
Long before science discovered the wave function of matter or the holographic nature of the mind and the universe, spiritual visionaries from both the Christian tradition and other traditions as well were teaching the power of intention and the role we play in the creation of the world. The realities that we are able to envision, and then hold in our minds through the power of intention, are the realities that we create in the world around us. What we believe is what we create. This is a truth that we find in the teachings of Jesus. Many times he attributed the healings he performed to the faith of those who were healed; and many other times he chastised those around him for their lack of faith. A lack of faith is a blindness to the power of the Christ-consciousness within us. Living from a place of faith is living in the power of a higher consciousness and focused attention. “for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matt. 17:20).
Besides prayer, another central theme of the Christian myth is “confession,” a term most often associated with the activity of owning up to our immoral actions and behavior. As a result, the word is often associated with emotions of guilt and shame, the most damaging emotions one can experience according to the work of Hawkins (2002). The idea of confession has another meaning in scripture; it is an admonition to recognize and harness the power of the intentionally spoken word.
In the Beginning was the Word
From enlightened thoughts flow enlightened words. This is the truth behind Jesus’ teaching that what corrupts us in not what goes into our mouths, but what comes out. The words we speak not only reveal our thoughts, but carry with them the same high or low energetic signatures, and can positively or negatively affect our environment and others around us. A fascinating study by Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto (2004) seems to illustrate this principle.
Dr. Emoto wondered if words themselves carried the energy of the thought patterns they suggested. In his experiment to explore this idea, he collected water from one of the natural springs in the mountains of Japan. This water was frozen, and then the frozen water crystals were observed with a microscope. In their natural state, the crystals formed a symmetrical hexagon. He then took a series of containers with attached labels, and filled them with the water from the spring. On the label of each container, he wrote a word or a phrase that was considered to be either negatively or positively charged. Some words/phrases he used were “love and appreciation,” “you make me sick, I will kill you,” “Thank you,” and “Adolf Hitler.” He froze these labeled samples and then observed the water crystals formed within each sample under the microscope.
What he found was that crystal structure in the marked samples had changed. The crystals in the water containers marked with the phrases “thank you” and “love and appreciation” had developed into elaborate and beautiful crystals with intricate detail and graceful spires. The water in the vials marked “I hate you, I will kill you” and “Adolf Hitler” had lost their organized crystal structure altogether, and looked like randomly shaped smears. It seemed that either the words themselves or the thoughts that the words were related to had a direct affect on the molecular structure of the water.
One sobering implication becomes apparent when one considers that the human body is at least 60 percent water, and the brain is made up of no less than 70 percent water. (United States Geological Survey, 2006). If words written on paper and taped to containers of water could actually change the structure of the water, what is the effect of the words we speak on those around us? Words are thought forms, and they carry with them the vibrational signatures of the thoughts they embody.
The Biblical scripture tells us that the tongue is a “world of iniquity” that carries “deadly poison” ( James 3: 6-8). “For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile” (1Peter 3:10). While these passages stress the negative power of words, Jesus lived his life in a way that illustrated the positive, creative power of words.
In Chapter 7 we saw that one of the defining characteristics of Jesus’ life was that he was widely hailed as a healer, and that his method of healing was, along with touch, the spoken word. Our words, depending on the energetic signature that they carry, have the potential to actually affect the molecular structure of the things, and even the people, with whom we come into contact.
The healing power of words and sounds has been understood in some Eastern religious approaches for centuries; and recently, science is stumbling on to this idea as well. A newly emerged field of exploration is the field of Bioacoustics, the study of how sounds are related to health. Sharry Edwards is one of the pioneers in this field, and has found that sickness – mental as well as physical – can be traced to weakened frequencies in the sound signature of the body. By determining what frequencies have been weakened and restoring them with sound therapy, Sharry has been able to effect astounding physical healings.
In the work of Tiller (2001) and others, we encountered the idea that physical bodies or states can be altered through the power of focused intention. Emoto (2004) found that written words can change the molecular structure of water. Sharry Edwards suggests that the human voice, tuned to the correct vibrational frequency, can reorder biological functions and restore health. Jesus not only talked about the power of words and thoughts, but he appears to have demonstrated this power in his acts of healing.
The old Christian story tells us that Jesus, being the only begotten son of God, was endowed with miraculous powers that enabled him to do things that mere humans could not. In the new story, Jesus was a man who had somehow achieved such a high level of consciousness that he was often in a mystical state of “union with God.” In that state, he could see the world from a new perspective. This wisdom and insight (enlightenment), along with the emotional states of compassion, love, and peace that flow from enlightenment, resulted in an energy signature that vibrated at a much higher level than those around him. Because of this, his focused intention, his words, and his mere presence had an “ordering affect” on his environment and on those around him. Jesus “miracles” were just a demonstration of the effects that the Christ-consciousness produces in the person, and in the world around the person, who manifests it.
The Church Reconsidered
So far, we have seen how the way forward in this path of spiritual evolution requires that we continually recast our myth in every generation. Shedding the language that reflects the understandings of a past culture, we return to the ineffable essence of the teachings, and craft new symbols to convey those meanings to a new generation.
This is no easy task, since it is the myth, passed down through the ages, that gives us a sense of order, meaning, and connection to others. The Church, after all, is a community built around a myth, and the shared meanings within the myth. To recast the myth is to shake the foundations of the community, to challenge the meaning that holds us together. But it is a necessary and cleansing shaking. It is a shaking that throws off the barnacles of dead symbolism and literalism that inevitably gather on the hull of truth. Those who have not looked deeply beneath the barnacles fear such a shaking, apprehensive about what, if anything, will exist when the barnacles fall away.
In the fundamentalist mythology, the Church exists to spread the “good news” of the Gospel; the news that there is forgiveness for sin and a way to be brought back into fellowship with God and avoid eternal damnation. Because fundamentalists suppose that every soul is destined to spend eternity in a fiery hell unless they profess the name of Jesus, the mandate for the church is clear and urgent. But what happens if, I have preposed, we let go of, or at least recast, that part of the story? Without the “blood mythology” and the promise of hell, what becomes of the mandate of the church? In the scheme of the new mythology, the story of the church must arise from a different mandate.
The apostle Paul often spoke of the church as being the “body” of Christ. This metaphor is rich symbolism, and suggests the essence of what the church should be.
Accepting that consciousness is the ultimate reality, the body is the vehicle by which that consciousness acts upon and within the material world. The human body is the interface between Non-material consciousness and the material world; it is through the body that consciousness manifests itself. In the same sense, the church should be the interface between Christ-consciousness and the physical world. It is within the body of the church that Christ consciousness is materialized into a warm, pulsating, visible community. This community is where the ineffable essence of the divine appears with both form and function.
The Form of the Church
In the material world, the wave function of possibilities must collapse into a distinct shape, color, and texture. While, in moments of expanded consciousness, categories of either/or disappear and we intuit the unity of all things, it is separateness and distinctiveness that characterizes the material world. The church must look like something; it cannot look like everything. This is why the same ineffable truth can manifest in so many very different ways. Buddhism, Judaism, Sufiism – there are many physical bodies through which the ineffable divine takes form on earth. While no one form can contain the manifest the complete essence of divine consciousness, each one emphasizes various aspects of the grand hologram. But this book is about Christianity; and that manifestation must necessarily have a unique shape and texture.
The primary distinctive feature of Christianity is that the shape of God is revealed by the template of Jesus, the anointed one, or Jesus Christ. Jesus as the Son of God is a model and a guide for understanding what God looks like in material form. Is it possible to let go of the post-Easter mythology of Jesus as the virgin-born God man, and still retain him as the template for God in the world? I believe that it is.
As we saw in chapter 7, Jesus does not need to be seen as virgin-born son of God, exclusive savior of the world to be seen as the “Christ,” or the anointed one. Aside from the post-Easter mythology, the historical Jesus is still a man who, by all indications, manifested a level of consciousness that was far and above the spiritual level of the day. Jesus is the template of spiritual enlightenment in Western understanding; and certainly a worthy one. Christianity must continue to take its form from Jesus the Christ; not as the complete and singular manifestation of God, but as a template for what enlightened consciousness should look like in the world. The story that we tell is a story of spiritual evolution, of humanity coming more and more into conformity with the image of God through divine impetus. We watch that evolution occur in microcosm through the old Testament – and we see what enlightenment looked like 2000 years ago in the Judean countryside in the person of Jesus Christ. This is the model and guide for us as we seek to realize our own God-consciousness, and discover what enlightenment looks like in 21st century America. This is the mythological form of the Church; but the church must also have an energy form and a physical structure.
Enlightenment, according to Dr. David Hawkins, has the highest vibrational frequency of any human emotional state. Just below enlightenment on the scale is love, peace, and Joy. Certainly in the life and teachings of Jesus and later biblical writers, these are presented as the energy signatures of God-consciousness. On the other hand, Dr. Hawkins tells us that guilt, shame, apathy and fear have the lowest vibrational frequencies of any human emotional states, and are destructive forces. This, too, is consistent with the life and teachings of Christ. Therefore, the energy form of the church should be one of positive emotion, operating at the highest vibrational levels of love, joy, and peace. Any church in which guilt, shame and fear seem to operate as tools for conformity and control is not a place that encourages spiritual evolution, and actually generates destructive energy. The “negative energy” forms are not based on true Christian principles and must be rejected.
As we have seen in the work of Dr. Tiller and others, physical spaces where focused energy is expressed on a regular basis can actually take on the signature of that energy, and become charged spaces. Based on this research, we can understand how “sacred spaces” seem to be marked with unusual power and energy. Because positive energy is a hallmark of God consciousness, the physical space of the church should reflect this positive energy. I’ve often run across people who, like me, have left the Christian fundamentalism in which they were raised. When I ask them the reason why, they seldom state their reasons in terms of doctrinal issues. Often they don’t know exactly how to explain themselves, except to say something like “I just couldn’t stand the hypocrisy,” or “it was just too judgmental.” I think what many of these people are saying is that, intuitively, they knew that the energy signature was all wrong. Negative energy is palpable, and it is easily recognized by the true spiritual seeker. Christian churches should be sacred spaces where the very texture of the atmosphere is thick with positive, healing charge.
More and more, we are learning just how much every physical property carries with it an energy signature. We know that color and sound both exist as wave frequencies, and can affect the energy environment. In creating the physical facility of the church, these should be considered when seeking to create physical spaces that look, feel, and sound positive and uplifting.
The Function of the Church
We have determined that the church is, at its essence, to be the manifestation of God-consciousness in the world. But how is this philosophical distinction operationalized in the world? In order to answer this question, we start by looking back to our template. Who was Jesus in his world, and how do we translate these principles of action into 21st century America?
As we saw in Chapter 7, the details of “who Jesus was” is a matter of faith and opinion more often than it is a matter of historical fact. Therefore, we would expect that the Church that bears his name might express itself in somewhat different ways in different times and places. Whether Jesus is seen as primarily a mystic, a political visionary, or a religious reformer will determine what activities in the world are given priority. It has been my conclusion that Jesus was a passionate visionary and a compassionate mystic.
Beyond all the disagreements about what Jesus said or didn’t say, everyone agrees that he was a man of power. This power was certainly not any kind of economic or political power, but a power that came from somewhere deeper – and higher—than any arbitrary social system or cultural construct. Jesus power came from direct access to the transcendent divine; and those who came into contact with him recognized this power and were transformed by it. Jesus was able to direct energy in ways that amazed people and drew large crowds wherever he went. He was a healer; and although we can’t be sure how or to what extent he played this role, most scholars agree that it probably happened.
Jesus not only had a deep compassion for the people around him, but was also passionate in his rejection of the social system that oppressed them. With an authority that emanated from within, he modeled the change he longed for; honoring the outcasts and, with the power of his words, laying bare the spiritual bankruptcy of those who had been elevated in society.
And so we ask again; what is the function of the Church in the world? If Jesus truly is our template, then the church is a place where people care about people – all people—especially the socially disenfranchised. Now, this is a somewhat different concept than just caring about their needs. Jesus main concern wasn’t providing resources. Jesus didn’t start any social programs to hand out grocery vouchers or used clothing. In fact, his response to the material needs of the people was to suggest that these were not the point; the kingdom of God was the point. Jesus didn’t give “stuff” to the poor; he gave them his respect. . . he gave them himself. He ate with them, he chose to socialize with them instead of currying favor with the rich and powerful. Jesus went beyond the material needs and met them on a spiritual level, manipulating energies in such a way that, coupled with their faith, restored broken bodies and opened blind eyes.
And so I propose that the church must be able to meet people at an energy level. Clothing drives and food pantries are helpful, but they are not the point. It is in the realm of the non-material, the realm of consciousness and energy management, that our salvation lies. The church should be a place where energy healing techniques are studied and practiced by those who have disciplined their minds and raised their own vibrational levels through meditation and mental discipline.
We should heal; but like Jesus, we should also teach others how to heal themselves. For all who wish to listen, we should point them towards the path of enlightenment, the path of higher consciousness, the kingdom of God. The church should be a place of activity, abuzz with classes on healing techniques, energy systems, meditation practices, wisdom teaching, and anything that helps people move forward on the path to enlightenment. As well as providing ample opportunities for learning and exploring, there should be time set aside as well for corporate practice of these principles.
There is much being done in the area of bioacoustics today. We have learned that, since we are all made up of vibrating energy instead of matter, sound vibrations interact with our own vibrations in amazing ways, and can even be used to correct energy blocks or raise vibrational levels.
According to a number of sound healers, one can learn to use his/her own voice to affect self- healing and restore vibrational harmony to the mind. Many such healers encourage a practice called “intoning,” in which the rational mind is disengaged and the intuition is allowed to take over and create the sounds that the body needs. This comes out as seemingly random, spontaneous humming and singing with no words, no melody.
Interestingly, this is one truth that fundamental Christianity, especially Pentecostal fundamentalism, has known intuitively and practiced with gusto in corporate services. In fact, that is what I miss most about the Pentecostal worship services of my past; the wonderful song services. Sometimes we’d sing fast, joyous choruses, other times slow, melodic, calming tunes. It wasn’t planned, but the “worship leader” would “follow the leading of the Spirit,” responding, perhaps, to the subtle energies that she/he picked up on intuitively. Often, we’d move into what was called “singing in the spirit,” which involved random and spontaneous intoning, making it up as we went along in a mood of corporate prayer. In those services, we were practicing intoning, an approach that is now being promoted as a revolutionary healing technique. Despite the flaws, there are many deep and abiding truths preserved in the fabric of our spiritual heritage.
But Jesus was more than an energy healer and a contemplative mystic. He envisioned a more advanced, enlightened society, and he lived it out; but he also spoke out against the abuses and oppression that was occurring in the present society, and against the destructive energy patterns in that society that held it in darkness. The church is the God—consciousness in the world; and the light of that consciousness must be shone in every dark corner we encounter. This is not done by employing the very tools of the social domination system – politics, material resources, and social status – it is done with the sheer power of our enlightened words. We boldly confront negative energy systems with our energies and our words.
Here is where we start. But this is not where we end. The stark difference between the church of fundamental Christianity and the church of the new mythology is that the former is a closed system. In fundamental Christianity, the words and works of Jesus is where it starts, and where it ends. There is no more spiritual evolution. Because Jesus is God fully manifested, then he becomes God for all practical purposes. Trading the ineffable divine for Jesus, the book is closed and final word has been written.
In the Church of the new mythology, God, the ineffable divine, is still center stage. Jesus is the template for moving forward on the path to know God; but God is ahead of us, above us, around us, in us, and still speaking. We understand that as we move forward on the path and as humanity moves forward as a whole, it is our responsibility to reinterpret the Christ-consciousness in each new generation. We are to build on the original template; expand, inform, and embellish this understanding of God and what it means to be God in the world. Time gives us new metaphors, new insight, and new understandings that were impossible to access two thousand years ago.
And so there is always that missing piece as we reconstruct Osiris in each generation. The god-pieces gathered from the past can give us a body; but without the missing piece, it is a lifeless body without regenerative powers. What is this piece? This is the piece that we must fashion with our own hands. This piece is something new, reinterpreted; but it is the most important piece. This is the piece that breathes life back into the body; and, if the myth of Isis and Osiris speaks truth, this is the golden phallus that will produce a new generation of Christians.
The Bible college where I received my undergraduate training is on a wooded plot of land on the outskirts of a Midwest town. Just down the road less than a half mile is a park, and the entrance to a small zoo. As a student, I would sometimes walk down to the park and zoo with friends for a Saturday outing. In the dream, I was at the college again, and was taking a walk down to the zoo.
As I approached the park, I saw there was quite a commotion going on. There were flashing lights and police cars, and it appeared that there had been some sort of an automobile accident. On the bank of the ditch in front of the park I saw a sheet, and by the contours of the sheet I could tell that there were two bodies underneath. I walked over and pulled back the sheet. There was a man and a woman lying on the ground, both in their mid-twenties. Neither one looked like me, but I had the sense that somehow, they were me.
I walked on by, leaving the chaos and commotion behind me. I was on the loop of the road that ran in front of the zoo. Everything had become very peaceful and calm now; I heard a bird chirping, and I felt a gentle breeze on my face. I felt at one with nature. The beauty of the moment was interrupted by what I saw next.
The zoo was gone; instead, on the green grass of the empty ground, there were huge piles of bones. The bones, I could tell, had once been part of a living being, because there were pieces of red flesh still clinging to the bones. I observed that it was quite an odd juxtaposition; the piles of dismembered life against the backdrop of such peace and beauty. I had the sense that somehow, it had been left to me to put the bodies back together again.
That was the dream. Upon awaking, I was a bit confused as to what it all meant. I wasn’t disturbed by the images of the dream; I didn’t feel fear, or loss; instead, the strongest emotion that lingered was the sense of peace and calm that I had experienced as I walked along the loop. As I thought again about the piles of bones, I remembered a scripture passage from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel:
1The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, 2And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. 3And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. (KJV).
I firmly believe that dreams are an avenue by which our higher wisdom communicates with us. Drawing from the images with which we are familiar and which carry personal as well as archetypal meanings, our higher consciousness speaks to us in symbols that, as we reflect upon them, help us to clarify our perspectives; that help us see the bigger picture behind our lives and our experiences.
I recognized immediately the symbolism of the male and female who were about the same age as me. In archetypal imagery, the union of a couple is often a symbol of unity within the self. The fact that it was a couple who were dead suggested to me the “death” of some unifying principle within me.
A “myth” is just such unifying principle. Myths are important because they create a grand story of the meaning behind all things. The fundamentalist Christian mythology, as flawed as it might be, had provided a structure that unified the events and challenges of my life under one coherent system of meaning. By leaving fundamentalism behind, I had lost the unifying “myth” that had given my life coherence. Yet, the death had not been a bad thing. I knew that the pervading sense of peace and union with nature I felt after leaving the chaos of death behind symbolized the new clarity of vision I had found. I was experiencing directly the great mystery; and it was an experience of heightened consciousness and awareness.
I have come to believe that what we talk about as consciousness -- the transcendent sense of knowing, the apprehension of the unity of all things – that quality that generates compassion, wisdom, and peace in the great souls and that, when missing in mindless living leads to fear, confusion, negative emotions and a feeling of isolation – we are talking about that force that we personalize in Christianity as “God.” Our consciousness is the God-image within us, and like God, is infinite and divine. But while we can experience God through heightened consciousness, describing or talking about God is not quite so easy. As I said earlier, the brain acts as the interface between the non-material consciousness and the material world; our consciousness is infinite, but our bodies and our brains are not. Thought is putting experience into form; and that form, based on finite processes, can never fully contain an infinite experience. That is why our talk about God and our intellectual understanding of God is always in the form of a myth; a metaphor that points to something bigger. In the dream, although I could experience God, the “body” by which I had understood him had been shattered. The myth was dead; and a living, breathing container had become a pile of disorganized and incoherent bones.
This understanding of what the bones symbolized had never been clear to me. I had speculated over the years as to what the symbol of the bones “meant,” but had never found an interpretation that felt right. It was only as I contemplated writing this book that the dream came back to me, and the meaning of the bones became clear. The body had to be rebuilt.
There are those I know who have come out of fundamentalism, but have walked away from religion all together. These people, for the most part, always seem a bit angry to me, as if they have never gotten past the loss of meaning. They spend a lot of energy denying the existence of God, thinking that because the myth is not scientifically true, then neither is the infinite mystery behind it.
Fundamentalism makes the serious, but common mistake of taking the symbols within the Christian mythology as factual and literal. But Joseph Campbell (1972) tells us that
"Today such claims can no longer be taken seriously by anyone with even a
kindergarten education. And in this there is serious danger. For not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been – and still are, in fact – the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers. With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold onto, no moral law, nothing firm" (pg. 9).
We are divine, infinite consciousness incarnated in human, material forms; and
our grand task on earth is to take the truth available to us in higher consciousness (the highest being “God”) and incarnate that wisdom in material things, in thoughts, actions, in flesh and blood. To the extent that we can do that, we are able to communicate these truths to others. We need a language, a set of symbols, a “myth” that we all share. Without that, we either become an island of mystical consciousness and in a sense, abandon our physical existence, or we live in the world “cut off” from our true nature. That is why Campbell goes on to assert that
Whereas it must, of course, be the task of the historian, archaeologist, and
prehistorian to show that the myths are as facts untrue – that there is no one Chosen People of God in this multiracial world, no Found Truth to which all must bow, no One and Only true Church – it will be more and more, and with increasing urgency, the task of the psychologist and comparative mythologist not only to identify, analyze, and interpret the symbolized “facts of the mind,” but also to evolve techniques for retaining these in health and, as the old traditions of the fading past dissolve, assist mankind to a knowledge and appreciation of our own inward, as well as the world’s outward, orders of fact (pg. 10-11).
I have other friends who have left fundamentalism, and have simply jumped the tracks from Christianity into a different mythology. Buddhism is a popular destination for disillusioned Christians these days; but not having grown up in that culture, it takes years of study and practice to feel at home within or fully understand the Buddhist story. Most often these transplants end up Christianizing Buddhist concepts, because it is very hard to free ourselves from the meaning structures that have been built over a lifetime. Others Christian exiles, discouraged by the learning curve, may turn their eyes elsewhere. These people just keep jumping, from one myth to another, never really “getting” that the point is not the myth, but the truth to which it points, that leads to enlightenment.
Christianity is the grand myth that has permeated my life since the day I was born. It is true that parts of the story (as in the case of fundamentalism) have become so encrusted with literal notions and cultural meanings that the truth behind the story is barely recognizable; but the answer is not to abandon the myth altogether, nor is it to “jump ship” into a whole new mythology fraught with problems of its own. Instead, we must be constantly rebuilding the myth in every generation; stripping it of its dead language, rearranging the bones and covering it with the flesh of an evolving understanding.
In doing this, we have to grapple with language. Words are the building blocks we use to construct a picture of the reality we experience; and how we talk about things really does matter. Words like “sin,” “atonement,” “repentance,” “intercession,” “anointing,” and a myriad of others that we use in the Christian myth are cultural artifacts from a different time that, in this day and age, obscure the truth behind them rather than illuminate. These words have become so loaded with meaning in the past two hundred years that it is almost impossible to see beyond them. They are associated with primitive ways of viewing relationships, and they keep our understanding of these relationships in the shadows of a darker time.
Growth and evolution change the way we understand God and our world; and as our understanding of God and the world changes, our language must change to reflect that new understanding. Even Paul understands this. He explains that “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things (1 Corinthians 13:11). It is time to put away the words and metaphors that no longer serve us.
The first step in developing a new “story” of Christianity is to ask ourselves the question, what is the purpose of religion? What is the goal of faith? At the basic level, I believe that the first goal of mystic religion is to know God. The second goal is that, believing that we are made in the “image of God,” we strive to actualize that God nature to its fullest in the world around us.
Knowing God
Who, or what, is God? The old metaphor of God as a “superhuman” that lives somewhere out in the cosmos in a place called “heaven” is no longer intelligible to us. This idea is more descriptive of the Greek pantheon than it is of a transcendent power that is not limited to time or space. Rabbi David Nelson (2005) finds the imagery of God to be present in the scientific notion of the “big bang:”
"I am proposing a metaphorical identity between the Big Band and God, whereby we speak and think of God as the Big Bang, just as, in earlier eras, we spoke and thought of God as father or shepherd. . . According to the standard description furnished by modern cosmology, “the beginning” was characterized by a very high energy level. . . that contained all space that would ever exist. In that first instant, there was no matter; no physical stuff had yet been formed. But that distinction is no longer the serious concern it would have been a century or more ago, for Einstein taught us that matter and energy are simply different forms of the same thing and can be transformed from one into the other and back again. . . So everything that is—and that ever was or ever will be—was there at the Big Bang".
One problem with this characterization, Nelson admits, is that it seems to take away the personal aspect of God. But this need not be; for Nelson, like Braden and others, believes that the unity of consciousness is yet another way to think about God. Because consciousness it the quality that allows us to recognize ourselves and to recognize the essence of others, conciousness is the basis of all personal relationship. Thus one of the great paradoxes of describing the divine: unified consciousness is both impersonal (without individual qualities) and yet the basis for recognition of the personal.
In Christian theology, God is considered to be omniscient (all knowing) and omnipresent (existing everywhere). The concept of a unified and transcendent consciousness that is in everyone, present within the fabric of the universe, and existing as a singularity, could accurately be described as an omnipotent, omnipresent force.
When theorists talk about the universe as a holograph, they are describing, in scientific terms, this very idea of an omniscient and omnipresent consciousness. This same holographic quality is said to characterize our human consciousness, which could account for the phenomena of entanglement. This is consistent with the religious idea of mankind being made in the image of God. God as unified consciousness suggests that we as individuals are human manifestations, bound by time, space, and material limitations, of the unlimited unified consciousness.
Working from this metaphor, we can only “know God” through our consciousness; so the path to knowing God more fully and achieving the second goal of religion, actualizing our God nature in the world, would be in developing our conscious awareness; becoming more conscious in every moment of our lives. This is not a “new” idea, especially not in mystical religion. Lazlo (2004) tells us that
"Different levels of human consciousness, with progression from lowest to highest,
were invisaged by almost all the great spiritual traditions. For example, some native American cultures hold that we are presently living under the fifth sun of consciousness and are on the verge of the sixth sun. The sixth sun will bring a new consciousness and with it a fundamental transformation of our world" (pg. 155).
There are many cultures who envision that we as a race are approaching a time of “change,” when the old ways of operating will give way to a new way of being. This idea of an “evolutionary leap’ may also be the mystical truth towards which the eschatological teachings of Christianity point. Perhaps the “judgment” idea in the Gospels is less about punishment and reward, and more about being prepared to make the evolutionary leap of consciousness towards which our world is moving. In order to do this, we must understand the processes by which the consciousness can be expanded.
Understanding the principles of Spiritual Growth
The path towards more fully manifesting our God nature is often called the path of enlightenment. To become more conscious is to see things in a more holistic, transcendent way. To become enlightened is to see in a radical new way. This sounds a lot like the true meaning of the word “repentance” that we have used in traditional Christian understandings. Unfortunately, the word “repentance” has become so loaded with negative emotions of guilt and shame that it may obscure the positive implications associated with it. The word “enlightenment,” as well, has accumulated cultural baggage as it has come to be associated in the mind of most with Eastern religion. In Christianity, we see Jesus as the enlightened one, so perhaps we should talk about this process of spiritual growth as developing the Christ consciousness within us. How is this done?
In Chapter 7 we saw that in the visionary teachings of Jesus, he moved the locus of morality from the realm of behavior to the realm of thought. In the Sermon on the mount, Jesus talks of a spirituality that transcends the old order because we become responsible for our thoughts, the realm from which all actions flow. For Example, in Matthew 5:27 he tells his audience that
You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'[e] 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart (KJV).
While I’m not proposing that Jesus studied quantum physics, it does appear that he understood a principle of the universe that quantum physics is revealing to us today. Our thoughts create energy fields that seem to interact with the world around us. Interpretations of the wave function of matter, and the work done by Dr. Bruce Lipton (2005) suggests that our health, our actions, and even our very reality, begin in the realm of our thoughts. Citing the work of Dr. Hans Jenny who studied the relationship between vibration and form, Braden (2000) concludes that our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are vibrating energy – energy that creates a “disturbance in the stuff they are projected into.” (pg. 188). This is supported with the work of Dr Hawkins (2002) who found that positive emotions such as love, compassion, courage, peace, and others vibrate at higher levels than negative emotions such as anger, fear, apathy, and guilt.
This conclusion confirms the value of the admonition of Paul to the early Church as recorded in Phillipians 4:8:
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things"(KJV).
How do we raise the vibrational level of our thoughts and achieve heightened consciousness? The key seems to be disciplining the mind through meditation, and maintaining a positive mental state through focused intention.
How does this translate into Christian teaching? At the heart of traditional spiritual discipline is the idea of prayer. Unfortunately, this is another concept that has become laden with a lot of cultural baggage. Most people who hear the word “prayer” today think of supplication; or asking God for help. Engaging in supplication involves laying out before God all the negative situations in our lives and asking him to help us. The problem with this kind of “prayer” is that the focus is centered on the problems in our lives; the pain, negativity, and insufficient resources . We visualize our problems and our fears in this kind of prayer, and is so doing, we not only lower our vibrations but contribute to replicating those mental “holograms” in our environment.
Meditation, on the other hand, is about quieting and disciplining the mind, and seems to provide a positive avenue for expanding our consciousness. The problem is that whenever most people in traditional Christianity hear the word “meditation,” they think of a Buddhist monk or a pot-smoking hippy sitting cross-legged on the floor, lost in a mystic haze. But meditation is not necessarily about Eastern beliefs or checking out of reality. Meditation is about cultivating mindfulness; learning to be fully present in this world at every moment. One author describes it this way:
"I believe meditation is best explained in a word: “being.” When you learn how to live only in the moment; when nothing distracts you; when you are not tied to the past or anxious about the future; when your mind and emotions are your servants rather than your master, your consciousness (your awareness) is in the most perfect state possible. This state is simply “being.” Meditation is about “being”; not about “doing.” (Wilson, 1999)
Austin(1999) tells us that when the brain is constantly flooded with stimuli from the world outside, it responds by turning down the responsiveness level. As a result, we go through life not really hearing or seeing or feeling what is happening around us. This is what we refer to as mindlessness; and in this state, our actions and thoughts are programmed by unconscious scripts that we’ve developed from past experience. This is De javu living, and it is not the path of enlightenment. This is “walking in darkness,” living from the “unregenerate, worldly mind” to use the language of traditional Christian understandings.
But when we discipline the mind through meditation, we become more aware and are able to live in the moment and make conscious choices about our thoughts and actions. We are “awake,” living in the light of conscious awareness. Austin (1999) cites evidence that experienced meditators exhibit increased sensitivity to perceptual stimuli (and thus improved ability to focus), improved alpha wave activity (brain waves associated with thinking and focused attention), and improved theta wave activity (wave activity common during altered states of consciousness and often associated with flashes of insight, inspiration, and receptivity to information from the sub-conscious ).
Not only does meditation seem to aid in helping us achieve altered states of consciousness, McTaggart (2007) reports research that suggests that meditation practice actually helps us to maintain more positive emotional states. She recounts the work of Richard Davidson (2003), neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience. Dr. Davidson was recently invited to India by the Dalai Lama, who wanted to know more about the effects of meditation. During his time in India, he conducted a number of studies on the brains of the Buddhist monks. What he found was the highest production of Gamma rays ever recorded in sane people (McTaggart, 2007):
“Gamma band, the highest rate of brainwave frequencies, is employed by the brain when it is working its hardest: at a state of rapt attention, when sifting through working memory, during deep levels of learning, In the midst of great flashes of insight. . . In their results they noticed an association between level of experience [in meditation] and ability to sustain this extraordinarily high brain activity; those monks who had been performing meditation the longest recorded the highest levels of gamma activity. The heightened state also produced permanent emotional improvement—by activating the left anterior portion of the brain — the portion most associated with joy. The monks had conditioned their brains to tune into happiness most of the time. In later research, Davidson (2003) demonstrated that meditation alters brain-wave patterns, even among new practitioners. Neophytes who had practiced mindfulness meditation for only eight weeks showed increased activation of the "happy-thoughts" part of the brain and enhanced Immune function." (McTaggart, 2007, 70-71).
Through the practice of prayer in the form of meditation, we can create more positive emotion in our lives and elevate our vibratory levels. We can also improve our ability to focus and hold positive intentions in our mind, which is what traditional Christianity refers to as faith – the kind of faith that allows us to move mountains.
In Hebrews 11: 1 we are told that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. The chapter goes on to cite the faith of great men and women who all had one thing in common; they had the ability to envision something that was not evidenced in the material world, and live from that vision.
Long before science discovered the wave function of matter or the holographic nature of the mind and the universe, spiritual visionaries from both the Christian tradition and other traditions as well were teaching the power of intention and the role we play in the creation of the world. The realities that we are able to envision, and then hold in our minds through the power of intention, are the realities that we create in the world around us. What we believe is what we create. This is a truth that we find in the teachings of Jesus. Many times he attributed the healings he performed to the faith of those who were healed; and many other times he chastised those around him for their lack of faith. A lack of faith is a blindness to the power of the Christ-consciousness within us. Living from a place of faith is living in the power of a higher consciousness and focused attention. “for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matt. 17:20).
Besides prayer, another central theme of the Christian myth is “confession,” a term most often associated with the activity of owning up to our immoral actions and behavior. As a result, the word is often associated with emotions of guilt and shame, the most damaging emotions one can experience according to the work of Hawkins (2002). The idea of confession has another meaning in scripture; it is an admonition to recognize and harness the power of the intentionally spoken word.
In the Beginning was the Word
From enlightened thoughts flow enlightened words. This is the truth behind Jesus’ teaching that what corrupts us in not what goes into our mouths, but what comes out. The words we speak not only reveal our thoughts, but carry with them the same high or low energetic signatures, and can positively or negatively affect our environment and others around us. A fascinating study by Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto (2004) seems to illustrate this principle.
Dr. Emoto wondered if words themselves carried the energy of the thought patterns they suggested. In his experiment to explore this idea, he collected water from one of the natural springs in the mountains of Japan. This water was frozen, and then the frozen water crystals were observed with a microscope. In their natural state, the crystals formed a symmetrical hexagon. He then took a series of containers with attached labels, and filled them with the water from the spring. On the label of each container, he wrote a word or a phrase that was considered to be either negatively or positively charged. Some words/phrases he used were “love and appreciation,” “you make me sick, I will kill you,” “Thank you,” and “Adolf Hitler.” He froze these labeled samples and then observed the water crystals formed within each sample under the microscope.
What he found was that crystal structure in the marked samples had changed. The crystals in the water containers marked with the phrases “thank you” and “love and appreciation” had developed into elaborate and beautiful crystals with intricate detail and graceful spires. The water in the vials marked “I hate you, I will kill you” and “Adolf Hitler” had lost their organized crystal structure altogether, and looked like randomly shaped smears. It seemed that either the words themselves or the thoughts that the words were related to had a direct affect on the molecular structure of the water.
One sobering implication becomes apparent when one considers that the human body is at least 60 percent water, and the brain is made up of no less than 70 percent water. (United States Geological Survey, 2006). If words written on paper and taped to containers of water could actually change the structure of the water, what is the effect of the words we speak on those around us? Words are thought forms, and they carry with them the vibrational signatures of the thoughts they embody.
The Biblical scripture tells us that the tongue is a “world of iniquity” that carries “deadly poison” ( James 3: 6-8). “For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile” (1Peter 3:10). While these passages stress the negative power of words, Jesus lived his life in a way that illustrated the positive, creative power of words.
In Chapter 7 we saw that one of the defining characteristics of Jesus’ life was that he was widely hailed as a healer, and that his method of healing was, along with touch, the spoken word. Our words, depending on the energetic signature that they carry, have the potential to actually affect the molecular structure of the things, and even the people, with whom we come into contact.
The healing power of words and sounds has been understood in some Eastern religious approaches for centuries; and recently, science is stumbling on to this idea as well. A newly emerged field of exploration is the field of Bioacoustics, the study of how sounds are related to health. Sharry Edwards is one of the pioneers in this field, and has found that sickness – mental as well as physical – can be traced to weakened frequencies in the sound signature of the body. By determining what frequencies have been weakened and restoring them with sound therapy, Sharry has been able to effect astounding physical healings.
In the work of Tiller (2001) and others, we encountered the idea that physical bodies or states can be altered through the power of focused intention. Emoto (2004) found that written words can change the molecular structure of water. Sharry Edwards suggests that the human voice, tuned to the correct vibrational frequency, can reorder biological functions and restore health. Jesus not only talked about the power of words and thoughts, but he appears to have demonstrated this power in his acts of healing.
The old Christian story tells us that Jesus, being the only begotten son of God, was endowed with miraculous powers that enabled him to do things that mere humans could not. In the new story, Jesus was a man who had somehow achieved such a high level of consciousness that he was often in a mystical state of “union with God.” In that state, he could see the world from a new perspective. This wisdom and insight (enlightenment), along with the emotional states of compassion, love, and peace that flow from enlightenment, resulted in an energy signature that vibrated at a much higher level than those around him. Because of this, his focused intention, his words, and his mere presence had an “ordering affect” on his environment and on those around him. Jesus “miracles” were just a demonstration of the effects that the Christ-consciousness produces in the person, and in the world around the person, who manifests it.
The Church Reconsidered
So far, we have seen how the way forward in this path of spiritual evolution requires that we continually recast our myth in every generation. Shedding the language that reflects the understandings of a past culture, we return to the ineffable essence of the teachings, and craft new symbols to convey those meanings to a new generation.
This is no easy task, since it is the myth, passed down through the ages, that gives us a sense of order, meaning, and connection to others. The Church, after all, is a community built around a myth, and the shared meanings within the myth. To recast the myth is to shake the foundations of the community, to challenge the meaning that holds us together. But it is a necessary and cleansing shaking. It is a shaking that throws off the barnacles of dead symbolism and literalism that inevitably gather on the hull of truth. Those who have not looked deeply beneath the barnacles fear such a shaking, apprehensive about what, if anything, will exist when the barnacles fall away.
In the fundamentalist mythology, the Church exists to spread the “good news” of the Gospel; the news that there is forgiveness for sin and a way to be brought back into fellowship with God and avoid eternal damnation. Because fundamentalists suppose that every soul is destined to spend eternity in a fiery hell unless they profess the name of Jesus, the mandate for the church is clear and urgent. But what happens if, I have preposed, we let go of, or at least recast, that part of the story? Without the “blood mythology” and the promise of hell, what becomes of the mandate of the church? In the scheme of the new mythology, the story of the church must arise from a different mandate.
The apostle Paul often spoke of the church as being the “body” of Christ. This metaphor is rich symbolism, and suggests the essence of what the church should be.
Accepting that consciousness is the ultimate reality, the body is the vehicle by which that consciousness acts upon and within the material world. The human body is the interface between Non-material consciousness and the material world; it is through the body that consciousness manifests itself. In the same sense, the church should be the interface between Christ-consciousness and the physical world. It is within the body of the church that Christ consciousness is materialized into a warm, pulsating, visible community. This community is where the ineffable essence of the divine appears with both form and function.
The Form of the Church
In the material world, the wave function of possibilities must collapse into a distinct shape, color, and texture. While, in moments of expanded consciousness, categories of either/or disappear and we intuit the unity of all things, it is separateness and distinctiveness that characterizes the material world. The church must look like something; it cannot look like everything. This is why the same ineffable truth can manifest in so many very different ways. Buddhism, Judaism, Sufiism – there are many physical bodies through which the ineffable divine takes form on earth. While no one form can contain the manifest the complete essence of divine consciousness, each one emphasizes various aspects of the grand hologram. But this book is about Christianity; and that manifestation must necessarily have a unique shape and texture.
The primary distinctive feature of Christianity is that the shape of God is revealed by the template of Jesus, the anointed one, or Jesus Christ. Jesus as the Son of God is a model and a guide for understanding what God looks like in material form. Is it possible to let go of the post-Easter mythology of Jesus as the virgin-born God man, and still retain him as the template for God in the world? I believe that it is.
As we saw in chapter 7, Jesus does not need to be seen as virgin-born son of God, exclusive savior of the world to be seen as the “Christ,” or the anointed one. Aside from the post-Easter mythology, the historical Jesus is still a man who, by all indications, manifested a level of consciousness that was far and above the spiritual level of the day. Jesus is the template of spiritual enlightenment in Western understanding; and certainly a worthy one. Christianity must continue to take its form from Jesus the Christ; not as the complete and singular manifestation of God, but as a template for what enlightened consciousness should look like in the world. The story that we tell is a story of spiritual evolution, of humanity coming more and more into conformity with the image of God through divine impetus. We watch that evolution occur in microcosm through the old Testament – and we see what enlightenment looked like 2000 years ago in the Judean countryside in the person of Jesus Christ. This is the model and guide for us as we seek to realize our own God-consciousness, and discover what enlightenment looks like in 21st century America. This is the mythological form of the Church; but the church must also have an energy form and a physical structure.
Enlightenment, according to Dr. David Hawkins, has the highest vibrational frequency of any human emotional state. Just below enlightenment on the scale is love, peace, and Joy. Certainly in the life and teachings of Jesus and later biblical writers, these are presented as the energy signatures of God-consciousness. On the other hand, Dr. Hawkins tells us that guilt, shame, apathy and fear have the lowest vibrational frequencies of any human emotional states, and are destructive forces. This, too, is consistent with the life and teachings of Christ. Therefore, the energy form of the church should be one of positive emotion, operating at the highest vibrational levels of love, joy, and peace. Any church in which guilt, shame and fear seem to operate as tools for conformity and control is not a place that encourages spiritual evolution, and actually generates destructive energy. The “negative energy” forms are not based on true Christian principles and must be rejected.
As we have seen in the work of Dr. Tiller and others, physical spaces where focused energy is expressed on a regular basis can actually take on the signature of that energy, and become charged spaces. Based on this research, we can understand how “sacred spaces” seem to be marked with unusual power and energy. Because positive energy is a hallmark of God consciousness, the physical space of the church should reflect this positive energy. I’ve often run across people who, like me, have left the Christian fundamentalism in which they were raised. When I ask them the reason why, they seldom state their reasons in terms of doctrinal issues. Often they don’t know exactly how to explain themselves, except to say something like “I just couldn’t stand the hypocrisy,” or “it was just too judgmental.” I think what many of these people are saying is that, intuitively, they knew that the energy signature was all wrong. Negative energy is palpable, and it is easily recognized by the true spiritual seeker. Christian churches should be sacred spaces where the very texture of the atmosphere is thick with positive, healing charge.
More and more, we are learning just how much every physical property carries with it an energy signature. We know that color and sound both exist as wave frequencies, and can affect the energy environment. In creating the physical facility of the church, these should be considered when seeking to create physical spaces that look, feel, and sound positive and uplifting.
The Function of the Church
We have determined that the church is, at its essence, to be the manifestation of God-consciousness in the world. But how is this philosophical distinction operationalized in the world? In order to answer this question, we start by looking back to our template. Who was Jesus in his world, and how do we translate these principles of action into 21st century America?
As we saw in Chapter 7, the details of “who Jesus was” is a matter of faith and opinion more often than it is a matter of historical fact. Therefore, we would expect that the Church that bears his name might express itself in somewhat different ways in different times and places. Whether Jesus is seen as primarily a mystic, a political visionary, or a religious reformer will determine what activities in the world are given priority. It has been my conclusion that Jesus was a passionate visionary and a compassionate mystic.
Beyond all the disagreements about what Jesus said or didn’t say, everyone agrees that he was a man of power. This power was certainly not any kind of economic or political power, but a power that came from somewhere deeper – and higher—than any arbitrary social system or cultural construct. Jesus power came from direct access to the transcendent divine; and those who came into contact with him recognized this power and were transformed by it. Jesus was able to direct energy in ways that amazed people and drew large crowds wherever he went. He was a healer; and although we can’t be sure how or to what extent he played this role, most scholars agree that it probably happened.
Jesus not only had a deep compassion for the people around him, but was also passionate in his rejection of the social system that oppressed them. With an authority that emanated from within, he modeled the change he longed for; honoring the outcasts and, with the power of his words, laying bare the spiritual bankruptcy of those who had been elevated in society.
And so we ask again; what is the function of the Church in the world? If Jesus truly is our template, then the church is a place where people care about people – all people—especially the socially disenfranchised. Now, this is a somewhat different concept than just caring about their needs. Jesus main concern wasn’t providing resources. Jesus didn’t start any social programs to hand out grocery vouchers or used clothing. In fact, his response to the material needs of the people was to suggest that these were not the point; the kingdom of God was the point. Jesus didn’t give “stuff” to the poor; he gave them his respect. . . he gave them himself. He ate with them, he chose to socialize with them instead of currying favor with the rich and powerful. Jesus went beyond the material needs and met them on a spiritual level, manipulating energies in such a way that, coupled with their faith, restored broken bodies and opened blind eyes.
And so I propose that the church must be able to meet people at an energy level. Clothing drives and food pantries are helpful, but they are not the point. It is in the realm of the non-material, the realm of consciousness and energy management, that our salvation lies. The church should be a place where energy healing techniques are studied and practiced by those who have disciplined their minds and raised their own vibrational levels through meditation and mental discipline.
We should heal; but like Jesus, we should also teach others how to heal themselves. For all who wish to listen, we should point them towards the path of enlightenment, the path of higher consciousness, the kingdom of God. The church should be a place of activity, abuzz with classes on healing techniques, energy systems, meditation practices, wisdom teaching, and anything that helps people move forward on the path to enlightenment. As well as providing ample opportunities for learning and exploring, there should be time set aside as well for corporate practice of these principles.
There is much being done in the area of bioacoustics today. We have learned that, since we are all made up of vibrating energy instead of matter, sound vibrations interact with our own vibrations in amazing ways, and can even be used to correct energy blocks or raise vibrational levels.
According to a number of sound healers, one can learn to use his/her own voice to affect self- healing and restore vibrational harmony to the mind. Many such healers encourage a practice called “intoning,” in which the rational mind is disengaged and the intuition is allowed to take over and create the sounds that the body needs. This comes out as seemingly random, spontaneous humming and singing with no words, no melody.
Interestingly, this is one truth that fundamental Christianity, especially Pentecostal fundamentalism, has known intuitively and practiced with gusto in corporate services. In fact, that is what I miss most about the Pentecostal worship services of my past; the wonderful song services. Sometimes we’d sing fast, joyous choruses, other times slow, melodic, calming tunes. It wasn’t planned, but the “worship leader” would “follow the leading of the Spirit,” responding, perhaps, to the subtle energies that she/he picked up on intuitively. Often, we’d move into what was called “singing in the spirit,” which involved random and spontaneous intoning, making it up as we went along in a mood of corporate prayer. In those services, we were practicing intoning, an approach that is now being promoted as a revolutionary healing technique. Despite the flaws, there are many deep and abiding truths preserved in the fabric of our spiritual heritage.
But Jesus was more than an energy healer and a contemplative mystic. He envisioned a more advanced, enlightened society, and he lived it out; but he also spoke out against the abuses and oppression that was occurring in the present society, and against the destructive energy patterns in that society that held it in darkness. The church is the God—consciousness in the world; and the light of that consciousness must be shone in every dark corner we encounter. This is not done by employing the very tools of the social domination system – politics, material resources, and social status – it is done with the sheer power of our enlightened words. We boldly confront negative energy systems with our energies and our words.
Here is where we start. But this is not where we end. The stark difference between the church of fundamental Christianity and the church of the new mythology is that the former is a closed system. In fundamental Christianity, the words and works of Jesus is where it starts, and where it ends. There is no more spiritual evolution. Because Jesus is God fully manifested, then he becomes God for all practical purposes. Trading the ineffable divine for Jesus, the book is closed and final word has been written.
In the Church of the new mythology, God, the ineffable divine, is still center stage. Jesus is the template for moving forward on the path to know God; but God is ahead of us, above us, around us, in us, and still speaking. We understand that as we move forward on the path and as humanity moves forward as a whole, it is our responsibility to reinterpret the Christ-consciousness in each new generation. We are to build on the original template; expand, inform, and embellish this understanding of God and what it means to be God in the world. Time gives us new metaphors, new insight, and new understandings that were impossible to access two thousand years ago.
And so there is always that missing piece as we reconstruct Osiris in each generation. The god-pieces gathered from the past can give us a body; but without the missing piece, it is a lifeless body without regenerative powers. What is this piece? This is the piece that we must fashion with our own hands. This piece is something new, reinterpreted; but it is the most important piece. This is the piece that breathes life back into the body; and, if the myth of Isis and Osiris speaks truth, this is the golden phallus that will produce a new generation of Christians.
Chapter 8: Towards an Integration of Faith and Science
In Part one, we traced the spiritual evolution of humanity through the stages of faith developed by James Fowler. Fundamentalism was seen to have emerged during the turbulent time of stage four faith. According to Fowler, the essential features of this stage include distancing oneself from one’s previous assumptions, and the emergence of an executive ego. These two features were, in fact, features that shaped the character of the enlightenment. In the west, we began to distance ourselves from the assumptions of a religious world view and put those views under the microscope. Our culture dared to challenge the authority of God, and in fact we put God under the microscope. While it was the advent of the scientific world view that provided this impetus to evolve, the scientific worldview also became the new external source of authority on which we transferred our hopes. In the scientific worldview, matter, not God, was the only reality and the ground of all being. Where once the culture was based on a singular religious world view, the culture in stage 4 separated fact from faith, matter from spirit, and saw the spirit aspect as irrelevant. Fundamentalism was a knee jerk reaction to this development, a retreat into the tower of dogma and literalism. But the world that they abandoned for the halls of religion has changed in profound ways. The world of science is a different place today than it was then, and it is continuing to change mind boggling ways.
By the 20th century, science had made incredible strides. Technology had developed to the point that we were able to peer into the natural world in ways that had never been done before. For the first time ever, we were able to examine “matter” at the sub-atomic level. The things that we saw, and continue to see, have changed the scientific worldview in unimaginable ways. Discoveries in the realm of quantum physics during the 20th century have shown us that things aren’t as we thought they were; that at the sub-atomic level at least, matter seems to disappear and something more akin to mind or spirit emerges as the ground of reality. With the advent of quantum physics, we could no longer talk about the dichotomy of “matter” and “mind” or “matter” and “spirit”. In a world that has peered into the mysteries of quantum physics, a move into stage five faith seems not only possible, but inevitable.
According to Fowler, Stage 5, as a way of seeing, of knowing, of committing, moves beyond the dichotomizing logic of stage 4’s “either/or.” It sees both (or the many) sides of an issue simultaneously. Conjunctive faith suspects things are organically related to each other; it attends to the pattern of interrelatedness in things, trying to avoid force fitting to its own prior mindset.
The language of stage 5 faith is the very language of quantum physics. In the discovery of the wave function of matter, the first great pillar of quantum physics, we see categories of either/or disappearing. In the concept of entanglement, the second great pillar of quantum physics, we realize that all things are intricately connected. And in unified field theory, we see that every movement in the universe touches, moves, and shapes everything else.
The Wave function of matter and the end of a material universe
Life was good when we thought that the atom was the smallest unit of matter. It was a time when Newtonian physics ruled the world of science. Everything was composed of matter, and matter was composed of atoms. Atoms were discreet, observable, and inert until some force acted upon them. An apple hangs from a tree until gravity pulls it to the earth; and there it lies until someone or something exerts a force upon it. When the apple is moved by a force, the movement can be charted and predicted by determining the mass and the velocity of the force acting upon it. Things behaved as they should; life was predictable. But technology opened Pandora’s box. When scientists discovered that they could actually study the particles that were the building blocks of atoms by crashing atoms into gold foils and into each other, they found things they never expected to find.
For starters, they found that the atom was not like a big “plum pudding” — a batch of corpuscles swimming in a soup of positive charge. In fact, they eventually discovered that the atom was full of. . . very little of anything, except space. The atomic model posited by Niels Bohr in the early 1900’s looks more like an empty solar system than a plum pudding, a lone small nucleus being orbited by a few neutrons at the outer fringe of its vast, empty universe.
In 1961, the world of classic physics felt the first tremors of the impending quake (or should I say “quark?”) when the results of the famous double-slit experiment hit the literature. In this experiment, the paths of single neutrons were observed by shooting them through a single slit in a mask and onto a plate behind the mask, and then shooting them, one at a time, through a mask with two separate slits. The outcome of the experiment is described in elegant simplicity by Gregg Braden (2007):
"Scientists have found that when an electron, for example, passes through the barrier with only one opening available, it behaves in just the way we'd expect it to: It begins and ends its Journey as a particle. In doing so, there are no surprises. In contrast, when two slits are used, the same electron does something that sounds impossible. Although it definitely begins its journey as a particle, a mysterious event happens along the way: the electron passes through both slits at the same time, as only a wave of energy can do, forming the kind of pattern on the target that only an energy wave can make" (Braden, 72).
No one expected the result. It appeared that when the neutron was being watched going through the single slit, it behaved like a particle of discreet matter; but when the researchers provided two slits, and therefore were not “watching” which slit the neutron went through, it seemed to behave like a wave of energy instead of a particle of matter, going through both slits and yet, going through neither. The double-slit experiment suggested that things in the world were not as “concrete” as we might like to think. In an effort to make sense of this curious phenomena, a number of explanations have been offered. One of the most widely accepted explanations was put forth by Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1927, an explanation known as the Copenhagen interpretation.
For an eloquent overview of the Copenhagen interpretation, we turn again to Braden:
"According to Bohr and Heisenberg, the universe exists as an infinite number of overlapping possibilities. They’re all there in a kind of quantum soup with no precise location or state of being until something happens to lock one of the possibilities into place. That "something" is a person's awareness-the simple act of observation. As the experiment proves, when we look at something such as an electron moving through a slit in the barrier, the very act of observation is what appears to turn one of the quantum possibilities into reality" (Braden, pg. 74).
According the Bohr and Heisenberg, what is “out there” in the world around us is nothing but endless possibilities. Until we observe the neutron, it isn’t there; it exists only as a wave of potentiality. Once we attempt to measure it (observe it) this function of potentiality collapses and the neutron appears in one certain place.
Granted, in the macro world, things seem to remain physically present even when we’re not there to observe. The larger world seems to play by the well-behaved rules of classic physics. But at the quantum level, when we’re dealing with extraordinarily small particles, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that there’s nothing out there; just possibilities waiting to appear when we turn our focus upon them.
No longer is it possible to see ourselves as a pawn in a closed universe; a victim of circumstances and conditions beyond our control. We can no longer see ourselves as the helpless and hopeless worm in need of some power from “out there” to rescue us from the realities of the world. We are, in some sense, co-creators of those realities; co-creators of the world. Talbot (1991) tells us that William Tiller, one of the scientific pioneers in the new science whom we will meet later, sees the universe as “a kind of holodeck created by the integration of all living things.” (p. 158).
Those of us who came of age during the second incarnation of Star Trek remember the fascination we held for the holodeck on the starship Enterprise. Captain Picard would go to the holodeck, punch in the instructions, and immediately he was on a green, grassy golf course, a blue sky above and the summer sounds of the birds and wind in the trees all around him. I remember thinking how wonderful it would be if something like the holodeck really existed. Who could have guessed that we were living on the most elaborate holodeck ever created? Talbot carries this analogy further, and asserts that
"Indeed if the universe is a holodeck, all things that appear stable and eternal, from the laws of physics to the substance of galaxies, would have to be viewed as reality fields, will-o-wisps no more or less real than the props in a giant, mutally shared dream. All permanence would have to be looked at as illusory, and only consciousness would be eternal , the consciousness of the living universe" (p. 159).
But how can this be? How can the universe be both material and non-material?
How can the world around me be here and not here at the same time? If the matter doesn’t exist as we thought it did, then what is the nature of the world around us?
In the years since the double-slit experiment and the Copenhagen interpretation, a number of scientists have come to the conclusion that the world around us, in fact, we ourselves, are made up of energy. Quantum physics tells us that what we perceive as matter is made up of ridiculously tiny packets of energy called “quanta.” These quanta, when not being observed by consciousness, are in a “superimposed” state. In this state, They are nowhere and everywhere at the same time, with no measurable properties. Quantum physics has taken us to the end of the world of Either/or.
How is it then, that these indiscriminate packets of energy take various and different forms? One current theory in science is that the form taken by that energy and the density of that form depend on the vibrational signature of the energy; and everything in the universe has its own vibrational signature. In 2002, Dr. David Hawkins published his work with vibrational fields in a book called “Power vs. Force.” The Grand overview of Dr. Hawkins theory is that everything in the universe is created from a conceptual field of data. From each field of data emerges an identifiable pattern, or an attractor. Every attractor exists as an energy field with a definite level of strength or weakness. Evolution occurs as strong energy patterns eventually exert dominance over weak energy patterns. According to Dr. Hawkins, everything – as well as every emotion, attitude, and even cultural environment – carries a vibrational signature. Dr. Hawkins has collected over a million measurements involving many different kinds of stimuli. This data has been analyzed and organized, and from it Hawkins has created a classification of the energy levels of many different emotions and cultural artifacts. According to Hawkins, energy levels below 200 are destructive to human life, while energy levels above 200 are constructive to human life. According to Dr. Hawkins, shame, guilt, and apathy are the most destructive emotions, with levels of 20, 30, and 50 respectively. On the other hand, love resonates at a level of 500, Joy at 540, peace at 600, and enlightenment at levels of 700 and above.
Dr. Lipton’s work (2006) illustrates the importance of the vibrational signatures of various types of energy in relation to personal health and well-being. According to Lipton, our thought energy actually controls our biology, activating or inhibiting our cell’s function.
In Dr. Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief, he explains how the cells in the body behave exactly like little computers. Just like computers, cells are programmable. They “download” the programs they run from the environment; and that environment is created by the emotions we experience. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, self-loathing, etc. . develop when we feel threatened. In an environment of threat, our cells move into a protection response and cease to create growth proteins. In such a state of mind, energy is channelled to the fight or flight response and our bodies are flooded with adrenaline. You may recognize that as the stress-response substance that wreaks havoc on our bodies.
On the other hand, when we create an emotional environment characterized by love, peace, joy, and other higher vibrational frequencies, our cells are programmed to go into growth mode, creating the protiens used by our brains and vital organs. As Dr. Lipton explains,
"You can live a life of fear and or live a life of love. You have the Choice! But I can tell you that if you choose a world full of love, your body will respond by growing in health. If you chose to believe that you live in a dark world full of fear, your body’s health will be compromised as you physiologically close yourself down in a protection response "( pg. 144).
The Wave Function of Matter and the “Many Worlds” interpretation
Another interpretation that has been offered for the double-slit experiment is the
theory known as the many-worlds interpretation. This theory, first proposed by Dr. Hugh Everett from the University of Princeton, suggests that when presented with a choice (or 2 different slits, in terms of the experiment), each possibility actually exists in a different space, or universe. The reason that we perceive only a single outcome for each situation is that our consciousness fixes itself on only a singular possibility. According to this idea, the reality we perceive is the one that we choose to focus on. While this idea is a bit hard to grasp, it does offer an explanation for phenomena such as the placebo effect.
The concept of the “placebo” has undergone a subtle transformation over the last 200 years. In the early 19th century the term placebo (a latin word meaning “to please”) was used in a somewhat derogatory sense to refer to the products of quack doctors and snake oil salesmen which were supposed to have no medical benefit, but appealed to the hopes and beliefs of the customers who bought them.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, a few research studies began to appear which found that, in tests done to measure the effectiveness of new drugs being produced, placebo medicated subjects (subjects given a “sugar pill” with no active ingredient, but led to believe that they might, in fact, be receiving the active ingredient) saw significant effects when compared to control subjects (subjects given no treatment at all.) Since that time, hundreds of researched studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, have been published that makes the same claim: belief in a treatment’s ability to heal can be just as effective as the treatment itself. In fact, in a 1955 analysis of 26 studies, researcher H.K. Beecher found that 32 percent of the patients responded to the placebo treatment (Nordenberg, 2000). More recently, Karren, Hafen, and others suggest that placebos work from 25-50% of the time (2005).
Could it be that, by truly believing that they were being treated, the patients were able to focus their attention on a different reality? Can it be that the sheer power of our deeply felt beliefs can allow us to make a quantum leap into a different universe?
Dr. Lipton suggests that our attitudes and beliefs play an even larger role in the creation of health/illness than does our genetic structure. According to Dr. Lipton, the theory that our biology is determined by our genes has never been proven. Noting that only 5% of cancer and heart patients can account for their disease by heredity, he explains that “there are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease. . . the human body, comprised of over fifty trillion cells, contains only 1,500 more genes than the lowly, spineless, thousand-celled microscopic worm” (p. 63-64).
Dr. Lipton is not the first to suggest that the role of genetics as the sole determinant of biology has been overstated. In 1981, Rupert Sheldrake proposed the idea of “morphogenic fields” in his book, “A new Science of Life”. According to Sheldrake, the regularities that we observe in nature are more like habits than laws. According to this theory, each species develops a “collective memory” that imposes reoccurring patterns on genetic structures. These collective memories are known as morphogenic fields and develop and evolve over time, as each member of the species both draws from and adds to the field. Other scientists, including Karl Pribram (1970) and Michael Talbot (1992), have suggested a similar theory of energetic resonance by positing that the brain is a hologram; suggesting that memories are not located in brain neurons, but in energetic patterns of nerve impulses that form a field in the brain. These theories point to the idea that thoughts exist as fields of energy rather than physical or chemical properties. Building upon his earlier work going back to the 1960’s, Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles also concludes that, although the mind acts upon the brain, it originates in a different level or reality. The Mind, according to Eccles, is non-material and composed of a fine grade of energy-substance (1995).
This “field” within which is generated our perceptions, reckonings, feelings and attitudes is at its base a field of energy; and yet, it is an energy field that is somewhat different from other types of energy. This “fine-grade energy substance” is beyond our understanding, and is a part of the biggest mystery of all, the mystery of human consciousness.
In both of these interpretations of the wave function of matter, The Copenhagen interpretation as well as the many worlds interpretation, consciousness plays a major role. What is this thing we call consciousness? While no one can explain exactly what it is, a good place to start would be to describe it as the ability we have not only to experience the material world, but to recognize our experiences. For example, take the recognition of color. Our eyes, through physical processes, detect waves in the color spectrum and transmit those into visual images. That may account for the different images of color we experience, such as red and yellow, but it doesn’t account for the experience itself. We don’t just see yellow, we experience yellow. We recognize it as something more than waves; we interpret yellow, assign meaning to yellow, and even experience emotion in response to yellow. This process of recognizing our experiences is what we call consciousness, and we cannot explain this as a function of physical processes alone.
Consciousness studies are now on the leading edge of science and scientific debate. We have recognized that there is, in fact, a “ghost in the machine,” a transcendent reality behind all the formulas and observations, but science is at a loss to describe what it is and where it comes from. It is because of this great mystery that, according to Ken Wilber, many of the great physicists of the last century have come to be mystics of a sort. “The great difference between old and new physics is both much simpler and much more profound: Both the old and the new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact – forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality” (pg. 7). But while physics can acknowledge the existence of some reality behind the physical world, science can never hope to explain it. Wilber, quoting the well known physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, tells us that
"We should suspect an intention to reduce God to a system of differential equations. That fiaso at any rate [must be] avoided. However much the ramifications of [physics] may be extended by further scientific discovery, they cannot from their very nature trench on the background in which they have their being . . . We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but of a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for pentrating" (pg. 6).
Accepting the limitation of scientific research to fully apprehend the nature of consciousness, recent research at least seems to be describing it’s scope. Lazlo (2004) tells us that this research seems to be suggesting that conciousness is not a quality of individuals, but is a single quality shared by a society, and perhaps even by the whole of humanity (p. 91). This concept of the grand unity of all consciousness has been a truth recognized by mystical religion for thousands of years; now, with the discovery of entanglement, the second great pillar of quantum physics, science is recognizing it as well.
Entanglement and the Illusion of separation
Science, like everything else, is resistant to change. Early discoveries in the area of quantum physics brought with them implications that few wanted to consider. If these discoveries were valid, then the entire Newtonian paradigm of physics was invalid, at least at the quantum level. Few scientists were willing to accept that.
One way to discount this weird, new physics, in the mind of some scientists, was to apply the reductio ad absurdum method: reduce the implications of the new physics to their absurd conclusions and thus show that they were untenable. This is the approach taken by Einstein and others in 1935. Einstein and his colleagues created a mind experiment to show that if some of the ideas proposed by quantum physics were correct, then theoretically, non-local effects were possible; in other words, by simply interfering with one particle in your proximity, you could instantaneously interfere with another particle far away without any medium of communication. This “spooky action” was nonsense, according to Einstein. But the revered scientist had thrown down the gauntlet; and years later, Bell would pick it up.
In 1935 Bell published the results of his study where he was able to prove that the reduction ad absurdum mind experiment created by Einstein could actually be replicated, with the results predicted by Einstein. Bell has proven that an interference with a single particle could instantaneously effect an interference with another particle a great distance away if the particles had at one time been in close proximity. Since that paradigm shattering experiment, the reality of “entanglement” (a term first used by Schrodinger to describe Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”) has been demonstrated to be a quantum reality over and over again. The principle of entanglement suggests that when two particles (or charges, as we have now come to understand the nature of sub-atomic particles) which have been connected in some way are separated, they retain the connection in the form of the ability to “communicate” without a physical medium, regardless of the span that separates them. This type of communication is referred to as “non-local” communication.
An impressive body of research continues to grow as scientist verify and harness this phenomenon of non-locality. Radin (2006) reports a study published by Leanna Standish and others at Bastyr University. By using advanced brain scanning equipment, the scientists demonstrated that, by stimulating the visual cortex of one partner’s brain, they could produce a flash of light in the brain of the other partner who was located at a great distance away (18).
An even more dramatic effect was achieved by Army scientists in the early 1990s (Braden, 2007). While it has been proven that emotions effect the body, it has been assumed that this effect occurs only while the body is intact. Braden reports that:
"In a 1993 study reported in the journal Advances, the Army performed experi- ments to determine precisely whether the emotion/DNA connection continues following a separation, and if so, at what distances? The researchers started by collecting a swab of tissue and DNA from the inside of a volunteer's mouth. This sample was isolated and taken to another room in the same building, where they began to investigate a phenomenon that modern science says shouldn't exist. In a specially designed chamber, the DNA was measured electrically to see if it responded to the emotions of the person it came from, the donor who was in another room several hundred feet away. In this room, the subject was shown a series of video images designed to create genuine states of emotion inside of his body. This material ranged from graphic wartime footage to erotic images to comedy. The idea was for the donor to experience a spectrum of real emotions within a brief period of time. While he was doing so, in another room his DNA was measured for its response. When the donor experienced emotional "peaks" and "dips," his DNA showed a powerful electrical response at the same instant in time. Although distances measured in hundreds of feet separated the donor and the samples, the DNA acted as if it was still physically connected to his body" (pg. 47).
Braden goes on to report that he later met the architect of those Army studies, who shared with him that although the Army has stopped the studies at distances within a single building, he had carried out further studies on his own. This man, Dr. Cleve Backster, told Braden that The effect continued to be observed even at distances of as much as 350 miles. (Braden, 2007)
In “The God Effect” (2006), author Brian Clegg describes entanglement as “an indubitably well documented effect” and as the science behind a “collection of major breakthroughs” (pg. 220), one of which is the quest to develop a quantum computer based on non-local communication.
The science of entanglement begs the question, where does our body stop? We leave DNA every place we go throughout the day; does that mean that our emotions are being registered everywhere we’ve been? Is the joy I feel today being echoed in the classroom where I sat yesterday? Are the emotions of those who have visited my home still registering there?
The implications of entanglement do not stop there. Not only does this phenomena suggest the possibility that our emotions and energies can be picked up by the minds of others, but that our thoughts can also affect the physical bodies of other people. In “Science and the Akashic Field: An integral theory of everything,” Lazlo (2004) presents a number of research studies that demonstrate just this phenomena of “telesomatic” effects. In the now famous work of Dr. William Tiller ( 2001), he demonstrates how people who have achieved an advanced level of controlled focus through meditation are able to affect the life span of fruit flies at a distance, just by storing focused attention is an electrical “black box” and sending the device to a separate location where the fruitflies are located. Tiller also discusses the “charged space” phenomena that he and others have documented in their work. While we will look at these studies more closely later, the short version is that it seems that the physical spaces in which this healing intention is routinely focused in time takes on the “charge” of the intention and maintains a healing effect even after the meditators have left the building.
These are just a couple of the many studies that have shown that we really are connected across space, and that our thoughts can affect others and other spaces removed from us by great distances. No longer can I assume that what goes on inside my head affects only me. Somehow, my thoughts extend out into the world and touch others in very real ways that we don’t fully understand at the present moment. Yet, once again, we find that the key to such phenomena lies within the consciousness. Not everyone, it seems, can harness this power of entanglement in order to effect others in specific ways. In the research on telepathy and telesomatic effects, one thing seems to be clear; it is most successfully performed by those who exhibit high levels of consciousness, or are able to achieve, through focused attention, states of altered consciousness. Once again, consciousness is the “ghost in the machine” that seems to allow us to transcend the ordinary state of isolation and separation. In fact Lazlo ( 2004) tells us that, as evidenced in the work of Dr. Stanislav Grof, “in deeply altered states of consciousness, many people experience a kind of consciousness that appears to be that of the universe itself” (pg 155).
Is the universe itself conscious? If it is, does this universal consciousness represent the mind of God himself? These are questions that arise in our minds when we consider unified field theory.
Unified Field Theory: The fabric of the universe
Does a fish understand the concept of water?
Now I know this is in some sense a ridiculous question, since “understanding” is a characteristic of conscious beings. But imagine for a moment what you’re conception of reality would be if you were born into a world where water filled every single part of your environment. Since it is the filter through which you see everything, you wouldn’t be able to “see” the water itself. Would you only be able to percieve things that had a density and appearance that was different from the water? Having never experienced a state of not-water, would you perceive only emptiness where there was nothing but water?
The discoveries of modern day physics suggest that our world may be more like that aquarium than we could have ever imagined. We know that the universe around us is reverberating with waves of all kinds. Our ability to see and to hear is made possible by some of these waves. According to Talbot (1991), "When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can possess, they find that every cubic centimeter of empty space contains more energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known universe" (pg. 51).
Apparently, what we percieve to be “empty space” is hardly empty. Many scientists today believe that living in our universe is a lot like living in a big aquarium; but instead of swimming in water, we swim in a pervasive, all encompassing field of energy that connects all things and is the medium of instantaneous communication between all things. Still others tell us that there are no “things” in the field, but only various and momentary images that appear in the fabric of the field in response to our conscious perceptions.
Like so many other young boys in the 1990’s, my son was fascinated by Pokemon. “Pokemon,” or “pocket monsters” in English, was a Japanese world of creatures that hatched from eggs and evolved through a series of forms over time. There were all kinds of different creatures, some cute and some fierce; but my son and I knew the names, and the evolutionary stages, of all of them. He had Pokemon action figures and games, but his favorite activity was collecting the Pokemon trading cards. These came in packages of ten, and each package contained at least one prized “rare” card. I can still remember my son tearing open the foil package in excitement and quickly shuffling through the cards, searching to see if perhaps he had hit the jackpot by acquiring a rare and highly coveted “holographic” card. A holographic Pokemon card was a special foil card that contained images of all three evolutionary stages of that particular creature on the same space. By slightly moving the card, you could watch a Pokemon “grow up” right before your eyes. Even today, these holographic transformations still delight my son and I.
Holographs are amazing things. Somehow, through a process of bouncing and reflecting lazer light, images are enfolded into the foil. . . and I say enfolded as opposed to imbedded, because a holographic image is more than just an image printed on the foil. A holographic image is “in” the foil; the complete image existing in the very fabric of the foil. People who understand how holograms work tell me that, if I were to cut a small corner off of the holographic Pokemon card and shine a light through it in just the right way, I would see that all three images of the Pokemon in various evolutionary stages still remained, entire and intact. No matter How small of a piece I examined, the complete images would remain.
Talbot (1991) and others believe that our universe is much like a giant hologram. In this model, the “field” in which we exist is a field of information. Infolded in the field is the information about every energy form that has ever existed. When consciousness interacts with the field, “quarks” pop into being and information “materializes” into images. A change in perception is like a slight movement of the holographic Pokemon card, and a new image materializes out of the field. In this model, our brain does not “contain” our thoughts, it simply acts as an interface between consciousness and the “field” that surrounds us. Our brain picks up the frequency of mind and imposes that upon the field to create the material images we see. Everything we could ever imagine is out there in the field, in the form of information; the reason we don’t see it all is because our brain “edits” our visual reality of the energy field (Talbot, 1991). According to Lazlo (2004),
At every moment throughout our life we read what we think, feel, and perceive
into the A field, a holographic field that preserves the experiences of our entire lifetime. . . The conclusion is evident. We as individuals are not immortal, but our experience is. The traces of everything we have experienced persist, and they can be forever recalled (pg. 161).
Crazy stuff, this quantum physics. The wave function of matter, entanglement, unified field theory. . . it sounds more like an Isaac Asimov novel than a science lesson. What all this seems to suggest is that we are not in a closed system. We are not helpless, or hopeless “worms” at the mercy of an angry God. Rather, we are co-creators with God, or consciousness, or whatever name you give to the transcendent force. We live in a “participatory universe” ; and although we may not be able to manipulate the material world at will, we certainly have a say in how it takes shape around us (Braden, 2007).
The question becomes, then, How does one “participate” in this dance of creation? How do we learn to harness this power of the mind to edit our reality in a conscious way? The answer seems to be summed up in a single word: intention.
Co-creating our world through intention
Another interesting characteristic of the holographic universe model is that, since material images are generated in the thought domain, “the mind/body untimately cannot distinguish the difference between the neural holograms the brain uses to experience reality and the ones it conjures up while imagining reality (Talbot, 117). In other words, an image that I imagine in great clarity and detail is just as real to my brain as an image I percieve in the field around me, a field we call “reality.”
This is not a new insight. Performance athletes at the highest levels understand this concept; they know that winning is “all in your head.” While physical practice is key to improving one’s athletic performance, mental practice is also important. Studies as well as experience has shown that by visualizing, step by step and in great detail, the correct execution of a skill, one can improve one’s performance of that skill. When I visualize myself executing a skill successfully, that experience is just as real to my brain as if I had actually performed the skill. By the same token, If I constantly imagine failure or let my fears of failure play out in my mind, those images are just as real to my brain as if they had actually happened; and the images I hold in my mind are the images I will produce in reality. Our future reality begins in our present mental practice. This is the power of Intention.
According to Webster, “intention” is defined as “an act or instance of determining mentally upon some action or result.” An intention then is a mental decision we make, or a conscious choice. Unfortunately, most of us go through our days very unintentionally. We get up in the morning and fall into a mindless routine, doing the things we have always done just as we have always done them. This is the essence of living in the De javu mode, because our unintentional actions are driven by the scripts of the past. If in the past I have learned that people can’t be trusted and that the world is a dangerous place, then that is the mindset that will guide my interaction with the world around men when I’m not living from my intention. I’m unconsciously choosing to see the world through the eyes of a victim, and that is the reality I will create for myself from the myriad of possibilities available to me throughout the day. Luckily, since we only participate in creation, the door is left open for other forces to interfere with my dreary outlook; but for my part, my negative filters are stacking the deck in a negative way.
The alternative to mindless living is living from a place of co-creation, from a place of intention. I can get up in the morning and before stepping into the flow of the universe, I can take time to consciously imagine how my day will go. I imagine myself being happy and productive. I imagine interactions with co-workers being positive and supportive. I imagine myself stepping in front of my class, excited and inspired, and lights coming on in their eyes as wisdom and understanding pours from my lips. The level to which I am able to hold this intention in my mind throughout the day will depend on how much work I have done to discipline my mind; but at any rate, a day started like this is likely to go much better than a day that is guided by my unconscious habits of the past.
Intention, when focused by a disciplined mind, seems to create more than just mental images. McTaggart (2007) tells us that research studies done with energy and faith healers have shown that healing intention creates waves of light that flow out through their hands. Intention, Dr. McTaggart tells us, can even be used to override the physical systems in our bodies. In “The Power of Intention”, she shares this amazing story:
"In a drafty monastery high in the Himalayas in northern India, during the winter of 1985, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks were seated quietly deep in meditation. Although scantily clad, they appeared oblivious to the chilly indoor air tem perature, which approached freezing. A fellow monk passed between them, draping each, in turn, in sheets drenched with cold water. Such extreme conditions would ordinarily shock the body and send the core temperature plummeting. If body temperature falls by only 12 degrees Fahrenheit, within minutes a person will lose consciousness and all vital signs. Instead of shivering, the monks began to sweat. Steam rose from the wet sheets; within an hour, they were thoroughly dry. The attendant replaced the dry sheets with new ones, also drenched in ice-cold water. By this time, the monks' bodies had become the equivalent of a furnace. Those sheets were efficiently dried, as was a third batch" (McTaggart, 2007, pg.65).
Affecting physical reality in dramatic ways is not just some quantum “pie in the sky.” All over the world, in laboratories, monasteries, and in the lives of everyday people, focused intention is proving what quantum physics has been suggesting.
Some of the most widely publicized and intriguing intention experiments are known as the “black box” experiments, referred to earlier in this chapter. These were conducted by Dr. William Tiller, a physicist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, and others in 1997. Using small black boxes that had been developed to store information from incoming electromagnetic waves, Dr. Tiller set out to discover if intention could actually be “stored” and used to affect the objects of intention. Gathering together four people well experienced in meditation, he asked them to focus a specific intention towards the box. In one experiment, the intention was to extend the life of fruit flies; in a second experiment it was to raise the PH level of water. After a specific time of focused attention, the box was wrapped in foil and placed in a Faraday cage ( a device to prevent interference from any outside electromagnetic waves.) The boxes were sent to a second lab far away. There, the technicians exposed the treated boxes to the fruit flies and the water. In the first case, the fruit flies lived longer than those exposed to the untreated box; in the second case, the PH level of the water exposed to the black box was significantly higher than the PH level of the water exposed to the untreated black box.
The results of Dr. Tiller’s experiments were astonishing; The meditators were able to affect changes, even removed from the object of intent by space and time; but that wasn’t all. As Dr. Tiller continued to work with the experiments, he made another discovery. The room in which the meditators were treating the water soon became “conditioned” by the intention — and other boxes charged in the space would charge more quickly and produce stronger results. After much observation and testing, Dr. Tiller discovered that the actually space had become electrically charged; conditioned by the focused intention going on within (Tiller et. al., 2001).
This “charged space” phenomena is not unique to Dr. Tiller’s experiments. Taggart (2007) recounts another example of this phenomena, this time witnessed in a research project intended to test the healing power of the focused intention of psychics. People known for psychic ability were asked to focus healing intent upon anesthetized mice in an effort to rouse them from the anesthesia more quickly than would normally occur. While the intention of the psychics produced significant positive results, the researchers were more astounded by a second effect they observed:
"The Watkinses repeated their experiment seven times. They discovered that the healing had a “lingering effect”: if a mouse was simply placed on the spot on a table where another mouse had received a psychic’s intentions, the second one would also revive more quickly than usual. The space appeared to have developed a healing “charge,” affecting anything that happened to occupy space " (McTaggart, 2007, pg 121).
I once saw a faith healer on television offering to send out “prayer cloths” to folks who would send a donation. He had prayed over these cloths, and promised that they were saturated with “healing power.” All one had to do was place the cloth on the part of the body in need of healing. At the time, I wondered how anyone could believe such a preposterous claim. Perhaps now, I might be tempted to order one.
Quantum physics has changed the story of our universe, which is what a new mythology does. But more importantly, as we interpret the findings of quantum physics, we are rewriting the story of ourselves. Quantum physics is giving us a new language, a new way to talk about the world and our place within it; and this language sounds, at times, more like the language of the mystic than the language of the scientist.
By the 20th century, science had made incredible strides. Technology had developed to the point that we were able to peer into the natural world in ways that had never been done before. For the first time ever, we were able to examine “matter” at the sub-atomic level. The things that we saw, and continue to see, have changed the scientific worldview in unimaginable ways. Discoveries in the realm of quantum physics during the 20th century have shown us that things aren’t as we thought they were; that at the sub-atomic level at least, matter seems to disappear and something more akin to mind or spirit emerges as the ground of reality. With the advent of quantum physics, we could no longer talk about the dichotomy of “matter” and “mind” or “matter” and “spirit”. In a world that has peered into the mysteries of quantum physics, a move into stage five faith seems not only possible, but inevitable.
According to Fowler, Stage 5, as a way of seeing, of knowing, of committing, moves beyond the dichotomizing logic of stage 4’s “either/or.” It sees both (or the many) sides of an issue simultaneously. Conjunctive faith suspects things are organically related to each other; it attends to the pattern of interrelatedness in things, trying to avoid force fitting to its own prior mindset.
The language of stage 5 faith is the very language of quantum physics. In the discovery of the wave function of matter, the first great pillar of quantum physics, we see categories of either/or disappearing. In the concept of entanglement, the second great pillar of quantum physics, we realize that all things are intricately connected. And in unified field theory, we see that every movement in the universe touches, moves, and shapes everything else.
The Wave function of matter and the end of a material universe
Life was good when we thought that the atom was the smallest unit of matter. It was a time when Newtonian physics ruled the world of science. Everything was composed of matter, and matter was composed of atoms. Atoms were discreet, observable, and inert until some force acted upon them. An apple hangs from a tree until gravity pulls it to the earth; and there it lies until someone or something exerts a force upon it. When the apple is moved by a force, the movement can be charted and predicted by determining the mass and the velocity of the force acting upon it. Things behaved as they should; life was predictable. But technology opened Pandora’s box. When scientists discovered that they could actually study the particles that were the building blocks of atoms by crashing atoms into gold foils and into each other, they found things they never expected to find.
For starters, they found that the atom was not like a big “plum pudding” — a batch of corpuscles swimming in a soup of positive charge. In fact, they eventually discovered that the atom was full of. . . very little of anything, except space. The atomic model posited by Niels Bohr in the early 1900’s looks more like an empty solar system than a plum pudding, a lone small nucleus being orbited by a few neutrons at the outer fringe of its vast, empty universe.
In 1961, the world of classic physics felt the first tremors of the impending quake (or should I say “quark?”) when the results of the famous double-slit experiment hit the literature. In this experiment, the paths of single neutrons were observed by shooting them through a single slit in a mask and onto a plate behind the mask, and then shooting them, one at a time, through a mask with two separate slits. The outcome of the experiment is described in elegant simplicity by Gregg Braden (2007):
"Scientists have found that when an electron, for example, passes through the barrier with only one opening available, it behaves in just the way we'd expect it to: It begins and ends its Journey as a particle. In doing so, there are no surprises. In contrast, when two slits are used, the same electron does something that sounds impossible. Although it definitely begins its journey as a particle, a mysterious event happens along the way: the electron passes through both slits at the same time, as only a wave of energy can do, forming the kind of pattern on the target that only an energy wave can make" (Braden, 72).
No one expected the result. It appeared that when the neutron was being watched going through the single slit, it behaved like a particle of discreet matter; but when the researchers provided two slits, and therefore were not “watching” which slit the neutron went through, it seemed to behave like a wave of energy instead of a particle of matter, going through both slits and yet, going through neither. The double-slit experiment suggested that things in the world were not as “concrete” as we might like to think. In an effort to make sense of this curious phenomena, a number of explanations have been offered. One of the most widely accepted explanations was put forth by Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1927, an explanation known as the Copenhagen interpretation.
For an eloquent overview of the Copenhagen interpretation, we turn again to Braden:
"According to Bohr and Heisenberg, the universe exists as an infinite number of overlapping possibilities. They’re all there in a kind of quantum soup with no precise location or state of being until something happens to lock one of the possibilities into place. That "something" is a person's awareness-the simple act of observation. As the experiment proves, when we look at something such as an electron moving through a slit in the barrier, the very act of observation is what appears to turn one of the quantum possibilities into reality" (Braden, pg. 74).
According the Bohr and Heisenberg, what is “out there” in the world around us is nothing but endless possibilities. Until we observe the neutron, it isn’t there; it exists only as a wave of potentiality. Once we attempt to measure it (observe it) this function of potentiality collapses and the neutron appears in one certain place.
Granted, in the macro world, things seem to remain physically present even when we’re not there to observe. The larger world seems to play by the well-behaved rules of classic physics. But at the quantum level, when we’re dealing with extraordinarily small particles, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that there’s nothing out there; just possibilities waiting to appear when we turn our focus upon them.
No longer is it possible to see ourselves as a pawn in a closed universe; a victim of circumstances and conditions beyond our control. We can no longer see ourselves as the helpless and hopeless worm in need of some power from “out there” to rescue us from the realities of the world. We are, in some sense, co-creators of those realities; co-creators of the world. Talbot (1991) tells us that William Tiller, one of the scientific pioneers in the new science whom we will meet later, sees the universe as “a kind of holodeck created by the integration of all living things.” (p. 158).
Those of us who came of age during the second incarnation of Star Trek remember the fascination we held for the holodeck on the starship Enterprise. Captain Picard would go to the holodeck, punch in the instructions, and immediately he was on a green, grassy golf course, a blue sky above and the summer sounds of the birds and wind in the trees all around him. I remember thinking how wonderful it would be if something like the holodeck really existed. Who could have guessed that we were living on the most elaborate holodeck ever created? Talbot carries this analogy further, and asserts that
"Indeed if the universe is a holodeck, all things that appear stable and eternal, from the laws of physics to the substance of galaxies, would have to be viewed as reality fields, will-o-wisps no more or less real than the props in a giant, mutally shared dream. All permanence would have to be looked at as illusory, and only consciousness would be eternal , the consciousness of the living universe" (p. 159).
But how can this be? How can the universe be both material and non-material?
How can the world around me be here and not here at the same time? If the matter doesn’t exist as we thought it did, then what is the nature of the world around us?
In the years since the double-slit experiment and the Copenhagen interpretation, a number of scientists have come to the conclusion that the world around us, in fact, we ourselves, are made up of energy. Quantum physics tells us that what we perceive as matter is made up of ridiculously tiny packets of energy called “quanta.” These quanta, when not being observed by consciousness, are in a “superimposed” state. In this state, They are nowhere and everywhere at the same time, with no measurable properties. Quantum physics has taken us to the end of the world of Either/or.
How is it then, that these indiscriminate packets of energy take various and different forms? One current theory in science is that the form taken by that energy and the density of that form depend on the vibrational signature of the energy; and everything in the universe has its own vibrational signature. In 2002, Dr. David Hawkins published his work with vibrational fields in a book called “Power vs. Force.” The Grand overview of Dr. Hawkins theory is that everything in the universe is created from a conceptual field of data. From each field of data emerges an identifiable pattern, or an attractor. Every attractor exists as an energy field with a definite level of strength or weakness. Evolution occurs as strong energy patterns eventually exert dominance over weak energy patterns. According to Dr. Hawkins, everything – as well as every emotion, attitude, and even cultural environment – carries a vibrational signature. Dr. Hawkins has collected over a million measurements involving many different kinds of stimuli. This data has been analyzed and organized, and from it Hawkins has created a classification of the energy levels of many different emotions and cultural artifacts. According to Hawkins, energy levels below 200 are destructive to human life, while energy levels above 200 are constructive to human life. According to Dr. Hawkins, shame, guilt, and apathy are the most destructive emotions, with levels of 20, 30, and 50 respectively. On the other hand, love resonates at a level of 500, Joy at 540, peace at 600, and enlightenment at levels of 700 and above.
Dr. Lipton’s work (2006) illustrates the importance of the vibrational signatures of various types of energy in relation to personal health and well-being. According to Lipton, our thought energy actually controls our biology, activating or inhibiting our cell’s function.
In Dr. Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief, he explains how the cells in the body behave exactly like little computers. Just like computers, cells are programmable. They “download” the programs they run from the environment; and that environment is created by the emotions we experience. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, self-loathing, etc. . develop when we feel threatened. In an environment of threat, our cells move into a protection response and cease to create growth proteins. In such a state of mind, energy is channelled to the fight or flight response and our bodies are flooded with adrenaline. You may recognize that as the stress-response substance that wreaks havoc on our bodies.
On the other hand, when we create an emotional environment characterized by love, peace, joy, and other higher vibrational frequencies, our cells are programmed to go into growth mode, creating the protiens used by our brains and vital organs. As Dr. Lipton explains,
"You can live a life of fear and or live a life of love. You have the Choice! But I can tell you that if you choose a world full of love, your body will respond by growing in health. If you chose to believe that you live in a dark world full of fear, your body’s health will be compromised as you physiologically close yourself down in a protection response "( pg. 144).
The Wave Function of Matter and the “Many Worlds” interpretation
Another interpretation that has been offered for the double-slit experiment is the
theory known as the many-worlds interpretation. This theory, first proposed by Dr. Hugh Everett from the University of Princeton, suggests that when presented with a choice (or 2 different slits, in terms of the experiment), each possibility actually exists in a different space, or universe. The reason that we perceive only a single outcome for each situation is that our consciousness fixes itself on only a singular possibility. According to this idea, the reality we perceive is the one that we choose to focus on. While this idea is a bit hard to grasp, it does offer an explanation for phenomena such as the placebo effect.
The concept of the “placebo” has undergone a subtle transformation over the last 200 years. In the early 19th century the term placebo (a latin word meaning “to please”) was used in a somewhat derogatory sense to refer to the products of quack doctors and snake oil salesmen which were supposed to have no medical benefit, but appealed to the hopes and beliefs of the customers who bought them.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, a few research studies began to appear which found that, in tests done to measure the effectiveness of new drugs being produced, placebo medicated subjects (subjects given a “sugar pill” with no active ingredient, but led to believe that they might, in fact, be receiving the active ingredient) saw significant effects when compared to control subjects (subjects given no treatment at all.) Since that time, hundreds of researched studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, have been published that makes the same claim: belief in a treatment’s ability to heal can be just as effective as the treatment itself. In fact, in a 1955 analysis of 26 studies, researcher H.K. Beecher found that 32 percent of the patients responded to the placebo treatment (Nordenberg, 2000). More recently, Karren, Hafen, and others suggest that placebos work from 25-50% of the time (2005).
Could it be that, by truly believing that they were being treated, the patients were able to focus their attention on a different reality? Can it be that the sheer power of our deeply felt beliefs can allow us to make a quantum leap into a different universe?
Dr. Lipton suggests that our attitudes and beliefs play an even larger role in the creation of health/illness than does our genetic structure. According to Dr. Lipton, the theory that our biology is determined by our genes has never been proven. Noting that only 5% of cancer and heart patients can account for their disease by heredity, he explains that “there are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease. . . the human body, comprised of over fifty trillion cells, contains only 1,500 more genes than the lowly, spineless, thousand-celled microscopic worm” (p. 63-64).
Dr. Lipton is not the first to suggest that the role of genetics as the sole determinant of biology has been overstated. In 1981, Rupert Sheldrake proposed the idea of “morphogenic fields” in his book, “A new Science of Life”. According to Sheldrake, the regularities that we observe in nature are more like habits than laws. According to this theory, each species develops a “collective memory” that imposes reoccurring patterns on genetic structures. These collective memories are known as morphogenic fields and develop and evolve over time, as each member of the species both draws from and adds to the field. Other scientists, including Karl Pribram (1970) and Michael Talbot (1992), have suggested a similar theory of energetic resonance by positing that the brain is a hologram; suggesting that memories are not located in brain neurons, but in energetic patterns of nerve impulses that form a field in the brain. These theories point to the idea that thoughts exist as fields of energy rather than physical or chemical properties. Building upon his earlier work going back to the 1960’s, Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles also concludes that, although the mind acts upon the brain, it originates in a different level or reality. The Mind, according to Eccles, is non-material and composed of a fine grade of energy-substance (1995).
This “field” within which is generated our perceptions, reckonings, feelings and attitudes is at its base a field of energy; and yet, it is an energy field that is somewhat different from other types of energy. This “fine-grade energy substance” is beyond our understanding, and is a part of the biggest mystery of all, the mystery of human consciousness.
In both of these interpretations of the wave function of matter, The Copenhagen interpretation as well as the many worlds interpretation, consciousness plays a major role. What is this thing we call consciousness? While no one can explain exactly what it is, a good place to start would be to describe it as the ability we have not only to experience the material world, but to recognize our experiences. For example, take the recognition of color. Our eyes, through physical processes, detect waves in the color spectrum and transmit those into visual images. That may account for the different images of color we experience, such as red and yellow, but it doesn’t account for the experience itself. We don’t just see yellow, we experience yellow. We recognize it as something more than waves; we interpret yellow, assign meaning to yellow, and even experience emotion in response to yellow. This process of recognizing our experiences is what we call consciousness, and we cannot explain this as a function of physical processes alone.
Consciousness studies are now on the leading edge of science and scientific debate. We have recognized that there is, in fact, a “ghost in the machine,” a transcendent reality behind all the formulas and observations, but science is at a loss to describe what it is and where it comes from. It is because of this great mystery that, according to Ken Wilber, many of the great physicists of the last century have come to be mystics of a sort. “The great difference between old and new physics is both much simpler and much more profound: Both the old and the new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact – forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality” (pg. 7). But while physics can acknowledge the existence of some reality behind the physical world, science can never hope to explain it. Wilber, quoting the well known physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, tells us that
"We should suspect an intention to reduce God to a system of differential equations. That fiaso at any rate [must be] avoided. However much the ramifications of [physics] may be extended by further scientific discovery, they cannot from their very nature trench on the background in which they have their being . . . We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but of a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for pentrating" (pg. 6).
Accepting the limitation of scientific research to fully apprehend the nature of consciousness, recent research at least seems to be describing it’s scope. Lazlo (2004) tells us that this research seems to be suggesting that conciousness is not a quality of individuals, but is a single quality shared by a society, and perhaps even by the whole of humanity (p. 91). This concept of the grand unity of all consciousness has been a truth recognized by mystical religion for thousands of years; now, with the discovery of entanglement, the second great pillar of quantum physics, science is recognizing it as well.
Entanglement and the Illusion of separation
Science, like everything else, is resistant to change. Early discoveries in the area of quantum physics brought with them implications that few wanted to consider. If these discoveries were valid, then the entire Newtonian paradigm of physics was invalid, at least at the quantum level. Few scientists were willing to accept that.
One way to discount this weird, new physics, in the mind of some scientists, was to apply the reductio ad absurdum method: reduce the implications of the new physics to their absurd conclusions and thus show that they were untenable. This is the approach taken by Einstein and others in 1935. Einstein and his colleagues created a mind experiment to show that if some of the ideas proposed by quantum physics were correct, then theoretically, non-local effects were possible; in other words, by simply interfering with one particle in your proximity, you could instantaneously interfere with another particle far away without any medium of communication. This “spooky action” was nonsense, according to Einstein. But the revered scientist had thrown down the gauntlet; and years later, Bell would pick it up.
In 1935 Bell published the results of his study where he was able to prove that the reduction ad absurdum mind experiment created by Einstein could actually be replicated, with the results predicted by Einstein. Bell has proven that an interference with a single particle could instantaneously effect an interference with another particle a great distance away if the particles had at one time been in close proximity. Since that paradigm shattering experiment, the reality of “entanglement” (a term first used by Schrodinger to describe Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”) has been demonstrated to be a quantum reality over and over again. The principle of entanglement suggests that when two particles (or charges, as we have now come to understand the nature of sub-atomic particles) which have been connected in some way are separated, they retain the connection in the form of the ability to “communicate” without a physical medium, regardless of the span that separates them. This type of communication is referred to as “non-local” communication.
An impressive body of research continues to grow as scientist verify and harness this phenomenon of non-locality. Radin (2006) reports a study published by Leanna Standish and others at Bastyr University. By using advanced brain scanning equipment, the scientists demonstrated that, by stimulating the visual cortex of one partner’s brain, they could produce a flash of light in the brain of the other partner who was located at a great distance away (18).
An even more dramatic effect was achieved by Army scientists in the early 1990s (Braden, 2007). While it has been proven that emotions effect the body, it has been assumed that this effect occurs only while the body is intact. Braden reports that:
"In a 1993 study reported in the journal Advances, the Army performed experi- ments to determine precisely whether the emotion/DNA connection continues following a separation, and if so, at what distances? The researchers started by collecting a swab of tissue and DNA from the inside of a volunteer's mouth. This sample was isolated and taken to another room in the same building, where they began to investigate a phenomenon that modern science says shouldn't exist. In a specially designed chamber, the DNA was measured electrically to see if it responded to the emotions of the person it came from, the donor who was in another room several hundred feet away. In this room, the subject was shown a series of video images designed to create genuine states of emotion inside of his body. This material ranged from graphic wartime footage to erotic images to comedy. The idea was for the donor to experience a spectrum of real emotions within a brief period of time. While he was doing so, in another room his DNA was measured for its response. When the donor experienced emotional "peaks" and "dips," his DNA showed a powerful electrical response at the same instant in time. Although distances measured in hundreds of feet separated the donor and the samples, the DNA acted as if it was still physically connected to his body" (pg. 47).
Braden goes on to report that he later met the architect of those Army studies, who shared with him that although the Army has stopped the studies at distances within a single building, he had carried out further studies on his own. This man, Dr. Cleve Backster, told Braden that The effect continued to be observed even at distances of as much as 350 miles. (Braden, 2007)
In “The God Effect” (2006), author Brian Clegg describes entanglement as “an indubitably well documented effect” and as the science behind a “collection of major breakthroughs” (pg. 220), one of which is the quest to develop a quantum computer based on non-local communication.
The science of entanglement begs the question, where does our body stop? We leave DNA every place we go throughout the day; does that mean that our emotions are being registered everywhere we’ve been? Is the joy I feel today being echoed in the classroom where I sat yesterday? Are the emotions of those who have visited my home still registering there?
The implications of entanglement do not stop there. Not only does this phenomena suggest the possibility that our emotions and energies can be picked up by the minds of others, but that our thoughts can also affect the physical bodies of other people. In “Science and the Akashic Field: An integral theory of everything,” Lazlo (2004) presents a number of research studies that demonstrate just this phenomena of “telesomatic” effects. In the now famous work of Dr. William Tiller ( 2001), he demonstrates how people who have achieved an advanced level of controlled focus through meditation are able to affect the life span of fruit flies at a distance, just by storing focused attention is an electrical “black box” and sending the device to a separate location where the fruitflies are located. Tiller also discusses the “charged space” phenomena that he and others have documented in their work. While we will look at these studies more closely later, the short version is that it seems that the physical spaces in which this healing intention is routinely focused in time takes on the “charge” of the intention and maintains a healing effect even after the meditators have left the building.
These are just a couple of the many studies that have shown that we really are connected across space, and that our thoughts can affect others and other spaces removed from us by great distances. No longer can I assume that what goes on inside my head affects only me. Somehow, my thoughts extend out into the world and touch others in very real ways that we don’t fully understand at the present moment. Yet, once again, we find that the key to such phenomena lies within the consciousness. Not everyone, it seems, can harness this power of entanglement in order to effect others in specific ways. In the research on telepathy and telesomatic effects, one thing seems to be clear; it is most successfully performed by those who exhibit high levels of consciousness, or are able to achieve, through focused attention, states of altered consciousness. Once again, consciousness is the “ghost in the machine” that seems to allow us to transcend the ordinary state of isolation and separation. In fact Lazlo ( 2004) tells us that, as evidenced in the work of Dr. Stanislav Grof, “in deeply altered states of consciousness, many people experience a kind of consciousness that appears to be that of the universe itself” (pg 155).
Is the universe itself conscious? If it is, does this universal consciousness represent the mind of God himself? These are questions that arise in our minds when we consider unified field theory.
Unified Field Theory: The fabric of the universe
Does a fish understand the concept of water?
Now I know this is in some sense a ridiculous question, since “understanding” is a characteristic of conscious beings. But imagine for a moment what you’re conception of reality would be if you were born into a world where water filled every single part of your environment. Since it is the filter through which you see everything, you wouldn’t be able to “see” the water itself. Would you only be able to percieve things that had a density and appearance that was different from the water? Having never experienced a state of not-water, would you perceive only emptiness where there was nothing but water?
The discoveries of modern day physics suggest that our world may be more like that aquarium than we could have ever imagined. We know that the universe around us is reverberating with waves of all kinds. Our ability to see and to hear is made possible by some of these waves. According to Talbot (1991), "When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can possess, they find that every cubic centimeter of empty space contains more energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known universe" (pg. 51).
Apparently, what we percieve to be “empty space” is hardly empty. Many scientists today believe that living in our universe is a lot like living in a big aquarium; but instead of swimming in water, we swim in a pervasive, all encompassing field of energy that connects all things and is the medium of instantaneous communication between all things. Still others tell us that there are no “things” in the field, but only various and momentary images that appear in the fabric of the field in response to our conscious perceptions.
Like so many other young boys in the 1990’s, my son was fascinated by Pokemon. “Pokemon,” or “pocket monsters” in English, was a Japanese world of creatures that hatched from eggs and evolved through a series of forms over time. There were all kinds of different creatures, some cute and some fierce; but my son and I knew the names, and the evolutionary stages, of all of them. He had Pokemon action figures and games, but his favorite activity was collecting the Pokemon trading cards. These came in packages of ten, and each package contained at least one prized “rare” card. I can still remember my son tearing open the foil package in excitement and quickly shuffling through the cards, searching to see if perhaps he had hit the jackpot by acquiring a rare and highly coveted “holographic” card. A holographic Pokemon card was a special foil card that contained images of all three evolutionary stages of that particular creature on the same space. By slightly moving the card, you could watch a Pokemon “grow up” right before your eyes. Even today, these holographic transformations still delight my son and I.
Holographs are amazing things. Somehow, through a process of bouncing and reflecting lazer light, images are enfolded into the foil. . . and I say enfolded as opposed to imbedded, because a holographic image is more than just an image printed on the foil. A holographic image is “in” the foil; the complete image existing in the very fabric of the foil. People who understand how holograms work tell me that, if I were to cut a small corner off of the holographic Pokemon card and shine a light through it in just the right way, I would see that all three images of the Pokemon in various evolutionary stages still remained, entire and intact. No matter How small of a piece I examined, the complete images would remain.
Talbot (1991) and others believe that our universe is much like a giant hologram. In this model, the “field” in which we exist is a field of information. Infolded in the field is the information about every energy form that has ever existed. When consciousness interacts with the field, “quarks” pop into being and information “materializes” into images. A change in perception is like a slight movement of the holographic Pokemon card, and a new image materializes out of the field. In this model, our brain does not “contain” our thoughts, it simply acts as an interface between consciousness and the “field” that surrounds us. Our brain picks up the frequency of mind and imposes that upon the field to create the material images we see. Everything we could ever imagine is out there in the field, in the form of information; the reason we don’t see it all is because our brain “edits” our visual reality of the energy field (Talbot, 1991). According to Lazlo (2004),
At every moment throughout our life we read what we think, feel, and perceive
into the A field, a holographic field that preserves the experiences of our entire lifetime. . . The conclusion is evident. We as individuals are not immortal, but our experience is. The traces of everything we have experienced persist, and they can be forever recalled (pg. 161).
Crazy stuff, this quantum physics. The wave function of matter, entanglement, unified field theory. . . it sounds more like an Isaac Asimov novel than a science lesson. What all this seems to suggest is that we are not in a closed system. We are not helpless, or hopeless “worms” at the mercy of an angry God. Rather, we are co-creators with God, or consciousness, or whatever name you give to the transcendent force. We live in a “participatory universe” ; and although we may not be able to manipulate the material world at will, we certainly have a say in how it takes shape around us (Braden, 2007).
The question becomes, then, How does one “participate” in this dance of creation? How do we learn to harness this power of the mind to edit our reality in a conscious way? The answer seems to be summed up in a single word: intention.
Co-creating our world through intention
Another interesting characteristic of the holographic universe model is that, since material images are generated in the thought domain, “the mind/body untimately cannot distinguish the difference between the neural holograms the brain uses to experience reality and the ones it conjures up while imagining reality (Talbot, 117). In other words, an image that I imagine in great clarity and detail is just as real to my brain as an image I percieve in the field around me, a field we call “reality.”
This is not a new insight. Performance athletes at the highest levels understand this concept; they know that winning is “all in your head.” While physical practice is key to improving one’s athletic performance, mental practice is also important. Studies as well as experience has shown that by visualizing, step by step and in great detail, the correct execution of a skill, one can improve one’s performance of that skill. When I visualize myself executing a skill successfully, that experience is just as real to my brain as if I had actually performed the skill. By the same token, If I constantly imagine failure or let my fears of failure play out in my mind, those images are just as real to my brain as if they had actually happened; and the images I hold in my mind are the images I will produce in reality. Our future reality begins in our present mental practice. This is the power of Intention.
According to Webster, “intention” is defined as “an act or instance of determining mentally upon some action or result.” An intention then is a mental decision we make, or a conscious choice. Unfortunately, most of us go through our days very unintentionally. We get up in the morning and fall into a mindless routine, doing the things we have always done just as we have always done them. This is the essence of living in the De javu mode, because our unintentional actions are driven by the scripts of the past. If in the past I have learned that people can’t be trusted and that the world is a dangerous place, then that is the mindset that will guide my interaction with the world around men when I’m not living from my intention. I’m unconsciously choosing to see the world through the eyes of a victim, and that is the reality I will create for myself from the myriad of possibilities available to me throughout the day. Luckily, since we only participate in creation, the door is left open for other forces to interfere with my dreary outlook; but for my part, my negative filters are stacking the deck in a negative way.
The alternative to mindless living is living from a place of co-creation, from a place of intention. I can get up in the morning and before stepping into the flow of the universe, I can take time to consciously imagine how my day will go. I imagine myself being happy and productive. I imagine interactions with co-workers being positive and supportive. I imagine myself stepping in front of my class, excited and inspired, and lights coming on in their eyes as wisdom and understanding pours from my lips. The level to which I am able to hold this intention in my mind throughout the day will depend on how much work I have done to discipline my mind; but at any rate, a day started like this is likely to go much better than a day that is guided by my unconscious habits of the past.
Intention, when focused by a disciplined mind, seems to create more than just mental images. McTaggart (2007) tells us that research studies done with energy and faith healers have shown that healing intention creates waves of light that flow out through their hands. Intention, Dr. McTaggart tells us, can even be used to override the physical systems in our bodies. In “The Power of Intention”, she shares this amazing story:
"In a drafty monastery high in the Himalayas in northern India, during the winter of 1985, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks were seated quietly deep in meditation. Although scantily clad, they appeared oblivious to the chilly indoor air tem perature, which approached freezing. A fellow monk passed between them, draping each, in turn, in sheets drenched with cold water. Such extreme conditions would ordinarily shock the body and send the core temperature plummeting. If body temperature falls by only 12 degrees Fahrenheit, within minutes a person will lose consciousness and all vital signs. Instead of shivering, the monks began to sweat. Steam rose from the wet sheets; within an hour, they were thoroughly dry. The attendant replaced the dry sheets with new ones, also drenched in ice-cold water. By this time, the monks' bodies had become the equivalent of a furnace. Those sheets were efficiently dried, as was a third batch" (McTaggart, 2007, pg.65).
Affecting physical reality in dramatic ways is not just some quantum “pie in the sky.” All over the world, in laboratories, monasteries, and in the lives of everyday people, focused intention is proving what quantum physics has been suggesting.
Some of the most widely publicized and intriguing intention experiments are known as the “black box” experiments, referred to earlier in this chapter. These were conducted by Dr. William Tiller, a physicist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, and others in 1997. Using small black boxes that had been developed to store information from incoming electromagnetic waves, Dr. Tiller set out to discover if intention could actually be “stored” and used to affect the objects of intention. Gathering together four people well experienced in meditation, he asked them to focus a specific intention towards the box. In one experiment, the intention was to extend the life of fruit flies; in a second experiment it was to raise the PH level of water. After a specific time of focused attention, the box was wrapped in foil and placed in a Faraday cage ( a device to prevent interference from any outside electromagnetic waves.) The boxes were sent to a second lab far away. There, the technicians exposed the treated boxes to the fruit flies and the water. In the first case, the fruit flies lived longer than those exposed to the untreated box; in the second case, the PH level of the water exposed to the black box was significantly higher than the PH level of the water exposed to the untreated black box.
The results of Dr. Tiller’s experiments were astonishing; The meditators were able to affect changes, even removed from the object of intent by space and time; but that wasn’t all. As Dr. Tiller continued to work with the experiments, he made another discovery. The room in which the meditators were treating the water soon became “conditioned” by the intention — and other boxes charged in the space would charge more quickly and produce stronger results. After much observation and testing, Dr. Tiller discovered that the actually space had become electrically charged; conditioned by the focused intention going on within (Tiller et. al., 2001).
This “charged space” phenomena is not unique to Dr. Tiller’s experiments. Taggart (2007) recounts another example of this phenomena, this time witnessed in a research project intended to test the healing power of the focused intention of psychics. People known for psychic ability were asked to focus healing intent upon anesthetized mice in an effort to rouse them from the anesthesia more quickly than would normally occur. While the intention of the psychics produced significant positive results, the researchers were more astounded by a second effect they observed:
"The Watkinses repeated their experiment seven times. They discovered that the healing had a “lingering effect”: if a mouse was simply placed on the spot on a table where another mouse had received a psychic’s intentions, the second one would also revive more quickly than usual. The space appeared to have developed a healing “charge,” affecting anything that happened to occupy space " (McTaggart, 2007, pg 121).
I once saw a faith healer on television offering to send out “prayer cloths” to folks who would send a donation. He had prayed over these cloths, and promised that they were saturated with “healing power.” All one had to do was place the cloth on the part of the body in need of healing. At the time, I wondered how anyone could believe such a preposterous claim. Perhaps now, I might be tempted to order one.
Quantum physics has changed the story of our universe, which is what a new mythology does. But more importantly, as we interpret the findings of quantum physics, we are rewriting the story of ourselves. Quantum physics is giving us a new language, a new way to talk about the world and our place within it; and this language sounds, at times, more like the language of the mystic than the language of the scientist.
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