For 99.99 percent of its existence a star burns hydrogen, fusing the atoms into helium and radiating the energy released as light. Eventually the hydrogen runs out. For a star the size of our Sun this happens after about 10 billion years – it is currently about half way through its life. Larger stars burn up more quickly, smaller ones can last as long as a 100 billion years.

When all the hydrogen has been consumed, a star can, if it is sufficiently massive, switch to burning the helium it has created, transforming it into carbon. This keeps the star going for another million years or so. When the helium is used up the star can survive for another thousand years by fusing the carbon into neon. And when the carbon runs out the star burns the neon to form silicon. But the neon is exhausted within a year. Then, in a process that lasts only a few days, the silicon fuses into iron.

That is as far as a star can go along this particular path. Fusing iron does not release energy; it requires additional energy. The star’ s fire begins to die, and with it the energy that until now has supported the weight of its outer layers. Very quickly it begins to collapse.

As its matter becomes increasingly compressed, its gravitational field increases. Within minutes it becomes so intense that even atoms cannot withstand the pressure. Electrons are stripped away and atomic nuclei pack in upon each other, reaching densities of more than a million tons per cubic inch. This disintegration releases enormous amounts of energy, blowing off the star’ s outer layers in what is known as a “supernova.” This is one of the Universe’s more spectacular shows, more energy being released during these few seconds than over the rest of the star’ s entire life.

Left behind is a neutron star – a solid mass of neutrons a mere fifteen or so miles across. For a sufficiently massive star (one about three times the mass of the Sun) the gravitational field has now become so strong that matter itself breaks down. The star is said to have reached a singularity: a point at which the laws of physics no longer work. Mathematical equations become filled with zeros and infinities and cease to make any sense. There is a hole in space.

So intense is the gravitational field nothing can escape it. Even light is pulled back down. If no light can escape, then nothing can be seen of the star. It becomes a “black hole.”

The Gravity of Love
The parallels between the evolution of a star and the pattern we have traced in the evolution of humanity are intriguing. Not only do both show an accelerating pattern of development; the factors behind this acceleration are analogous.

Whereas a star’ s matter is pulled together by the force of gravity, a species such as ourselves is pulled forward by our search for a more satisfying inner state. Our minds gravitate towards inner peace. We may not at first see this to be our goal. Caught up in our material desires we may believe it is comfort, security, or some other worldly satisfaction that we want. But the closer we draw to our own center, the clearer it becomes that, beneath everything, we are seeking inner peace and love. And the more we recognize our true goal, the faster we are able to move towards it.

In this regard gravity and love are not that different. Gravity is the attraction of mass for itself. It is a force that pulls the physical Universe back towards its original unity. Similarly, love can be considered as the attraction of life for itself — the desire for conscious union with another. Its ultimate expression is reunion with our own source, with the essence of our consciousness. It is this that is pulling us faster and faster along our evolutionary curve towards a singularity in time. Buckminster Fuller summed it up poetically in his revised Lord’ s Prayer: “Love,” he wrote, “is metaphysical gravity.”

The Time Horizon
Another similarity between stellar evolution and our own conscious evolution concerns the “event horizon” that surrounds a black hole. The event horizon is the boundary around the star within which the gravitational force is so strong that not even light can escape. Since nothing can travel faster than light there is no way that any information can get out across this boundary. The result is that you can see nothing of events taking place on the other side of the event horizon.

A parallel horizon could well exist for humanity – except that this time it would be a horizon in time rather than one in space. A thousand years ago change was much slower, and the future a hundred years on would not have been markedly different. By the time of the Industrial Revolution the pace of life had increased dramatically making it much more difficult to foretell the future a hundred years ahead. But it would still have been possible to predict a decade or two into the future with reasonable certainty.

Today it is not possible to see even that far ahead. Unforeseen developments mean that we can no longer predict the future of the world more than a few years ahead. So closely are our affairs now interwoven that unexpected events can have reverberations around the world, changing the future for all concerned. And when economies crash without warning, the best-laid plans of machines and men can vanish overnight.

There is in effect an information horizon ahead of us – albeit a somewhat fuzzy one. Beyond this horizon the future will probably be nothing like we anticipate. And the faster change comes, the closer this horizon approaches.

As the predictable future shrinks from decades to years to months and less, there may well come a time when it is difficult to make any forecasts at all. History will have become chaotic — not chaotic in the sense of disorganized, but in the mathematical sense of unpredictable. However much progress we may have made in our inner evolution, we will not be able to be sure what is coming next. Completely unexpected developments could always be just around the corner.

Facing Uncertainty
Having to face increasing uncertainty could play an important role in our inner liberation. As long as we are looking to the future for our fulfillment, uncertainty spells insecurity — and insecurity is something most of us find hard to manage. If we insist on holding on to our fixed views, the changes we will encounter will probably drive us crazy. They will incline us more towards setback than breakthrough.

Only through letting go of our need for certainty, and our concern for how things might or might not be, will we find the inner stability to see us through such changeful times. In this regard ever-accelerating change may be just the trigger we need to shake us to our senses.

Again one might draw a parallel with the later stages of stellar evolution. In a collapsing star the ultra-intense gravitational field breaks down the very structure of matter, returning it to its fundamental constituents. With our own inner evolution it may take ultra-intense rates of change to bring about the breakdown of our materialist mindsets, and our attachment to the physical world. Increasing time compression could be another factor forcing us to return to the present moment.

The End of Evolution
So, where might evolution take us as we head towards this singularity in time?

The great mystical traditions are unanimous in maintaining that liberation of the mind from its attachments, enlightening as it may be, is only the first of many steps of inner awakening. Beyond it are more universal experiences of mind, deeper understandings and richer perspectives of reality leading on to higher states of consciousness.

Is there a highest state of consciousness? Mahayana Buddhism talks of “sahaj samadhi” — the recognition that all phenomena are merely consciousness in its various manifestations. Zen Buddhists speak of total non-duality. Hindu texts refer to the highest state of consciousness as unity with Brahman — a state in which one knows the source of all creation and all its levels of manifestation. And Christian mystics talk of “oneness with God.”

Whether or not these descriptions are referring to exactly the same state of consciousness is a question I shall leave to those more qualified than me. Nevertheless they would all seem to be pointing in the same direction — towards a personal evolutionary zenith.

What would happen if this were to become a collective experience rather than a blessing bestowed upon one in a hundred million? Would our collective evolution then come to an end? Could it be that, in much the same way as the destiny of matter in a sufficiently massive star is to become a black hole in space, the destiny of a self-conscious species — should it be sufficiently intelligent — is a “spiritual supernova.” Is this what we are accelerating towards? A moment when the light of inner awakening radiates throughout the world? A white hole in time?

Omega Point
One person who believed this was indeed our destiny was the French priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Exploring the evolutionary trends towards greater complexity, connectivity, and consciousness, he argued that humanity was moving towards an “Omega Point” – the full descent of spirit into matter, the fulfillment of our evolution. In the concluding words of his essay My Universe he writes:

Like a vast tide, Being will have engulfed the shifting sands of being. Within a now tranquil ocean, each drop of which, nevertheless, will be conscious of remaining itself, the astonishing adventure of the world will have ended. The dream of every mystic, the eternal pantheist ideal, will have found its full and legitimate satisfaction.

He described the Omega Point as a time when light would blaze across the planet – not physical light but the light of consciousness. Like a mirror polished to give a perfect reflection of the Sun, all those apparently separate rays of consciousness would know themselves to be the same eternal light.

Where Teilhard de Chardin’ s picture differs from that presented here is in the time-scales involved. He saw this peak of human evolution to be a long way off – millions of years in the future. But, like many others before and after, he did not take the implications of an ever-accelerating pace of development into full account. However, shortly before he died, he commented on the impact that radio and television was having on the integration humanity Technologies like these, he said, were bringing the Omega Point much closer. Had he lived to see the impact of computers and the Internet, he would probably have seen the Omega Point coming even sooner. .

The End of Time
At the Omega Point, our evolution’ s ever-accelerating trend would at last come to an end. But this would not, it must be emphasized, signify an end to the world – at least not in the sense that we normally mean it. It would certainly mean an end to our attachment to the world. An end to our dysfunctional attitudes and behavior. An end to the world as we know it now.

Time itself would not end. Our bodies would live on. And so would the species. We would be free, at last, to truly enjoy our world. And we might continue that way for a very long while.

Or, who knows, we might find ourselves in a totally different reality. We might, for example, find ourselves stepping beyond the realm of space and time. Many mystics have claimed to experience that consciousness itself is not bound by space and time. And modern physics, too, has shown that time and space are not as absolute as everyday experience would have us believe.

One of the conclusions of Einstein’ s Special Theory of Relativity is that light is in some ways more fundamental than either space or time. Could it be that when the light of pure consciousness radiates through humanity these deeper truths will manifest in some way? Such a radically different mode of consciousness may be totally beyond our everyday experience, and seem pure science fiction, but that does not make it impossible.

Whatever may happen, there is a another sense in which this full awakening might be an end – an end in the sense of a purpose or goal. Could there be an evolutionary summit towards which evolution has been building since time began? Could there be a hidden purpose to Creation?

Surprisingly – or perhaps not – this is a question that physics has now begun to ponder.

About the author:
As one of the more revolutionary futurists Peter Russell has been a keynote speaker at many international conferences, in Europe, Japan and the USA. His multi-image shows and videos, “The Global Brain” and “The White Hole in Time” have won praise and prizes from around the world. In 1993 the environmental magazine Buzzworm voted Peter Russell “Eco-Philosopher Extraordinaire” of the year.

For more information visit: Peter Russell

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A useful analogy is the image from a video projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience-what I call the “contents of consciousness.”

The light itself, without no images would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness.

We know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different experiences, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself. Yet without this faculty there would be no experience of any kind.

The faculty of consciousness is one thing we all share, but what goes on in our consciousness, the content of our consciousness, varies widely. This is our personal reality, the reality we each know and experience. Most of the time, however, we forget that this is just our personal reality and think we are experiencing physical reality directly.

We see the ground beneath our feet; we can pick up a rock, and throw it through the air; we feel the heat from a fire, and smell its burning wood. It feels as if we are in direct contact with the world “out there.” But this is not so. The colors, textures, smells, and sounds we experience are not really “out there”; they are all images of reality constructed in the mind.

It was this aspect of perception that most caught my attention during my studies of experimental psychology (and amplified by my readings of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant). At that time, scientists were beginning to discover the ways in which the brain pieces together its perception of the world, and I was fascinated by the implications of these discoveries for the way we construct our picture of reality. It was clear that what we perceive and what is actually out there are two different things.

This, I know, runs counter to common sense. Right now you are aware of the pages in front of you, various objects around you, sensations in your own body, and sounds in the air. Even though you may understand that all of this is just your reconstruction of reality, it still seems as if you are having a direct perception of the physical world. And I am not suggesting you should try to see it otherwise. What is important for now is the understanding that all our experience is an image of reality constructed in the mind.

Unknowable Reality
Because our perception of the world is so different from the actual physical reality, some people have claimed that our experience is an illusion. But that is misleading. It may all be a creation of my own mind, but it is very, very real-the only reality we ever know.

The illusion comes when we confuse our experience of the world with the physical reality, the thing-in-itself. The Vedantic philosophers of ancient India spoke of this as “maya.” Often translated as illusion (a false perception of the world), the word is more accurately translated as delusion (a false belief about the world). I suffer a delusion when I believe that the manifestations in my mind are the external world. I deceive myself when I think that the tree I see is the tree itself.

If all that we ever know are the images that appear in our minds, how can we be sure there is a physical reality behind our perceptions? Is it not just an assumption? My answer to that is: Yes, it is an assumption; nevertheless, it seems a most plausible assumption.

For a start, there are definite constraints on my experience. I cannot, for example, walk through walls. If I try to, there are predictable consequences. Nor can I, when awake, float through the air, or walk upon water. Second, my experience generally follows well-defined laws and principles. Balls thrown through the air follow |precisely defined paths. Cups of coffee cool at similar rates.

The sun rises on time. Furthermore, this predictability is not peculiar to my personal reality. You, whom I assume to exist, report similar patterns in your own experience. The simplest way, by far, of accounting for these constraints and for their consistency is to assume that there is indeed a physical reality. We may not know it directly, and its nature may be nothing like our experience of it, but it is there.

To reveal the nature of this underlying reality has been the goal of the physical sciences, and over the years they have elucidated many of the laws and principles that govern its behavior. Yet curiously the more deeply they have delved into its true nature, the more it appears that physical reality is nothing like we imagined it to be. Actually, this should not be too surprising. All we can imagine are the forms and qualities that appear in consciousness. These are unlikely to be very appropriate models for describing the underlying physical reality, which is of a very different nature.

Take, for example, our ideas as to the nature of matter. For two thousand years it was believed that atoms were tiny balls of solid matter-a model clearly drawn from everyday experience. Then, as physicists discovered that atoms were composed of more elementary, subatomic, |particles (electrons, protons, neutrons, and suchlike), the model shifted to one of a central nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons-again a model based on experience.

An atom may be small, a mere billionth of an inch across, but these subatomic particles are a hundred-thousand times smaller still. Imagine the nucleus of an atom magnified to the size of a grain of rice. The whole atom would then be the size of a football stadium, and the electrons would be other grains of rice flying round the stands. As the early twentieth-century British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, “matter is mostly ghostly empty space”-99.9999999 percent empty space, to be a little more precise.

With the advent of quantum theory, it was found that even these minute subatomic particles were themselves far from solid. In fact, they are not much like matter at all-at least nothing like matter as we know it. They can’t be pinned down and measured precisely. They are more like fuzzy clouds of potential existence, with no definite location. Much of the time they seem more like waves than particles. Whatever matter is, it has little, if any, substance to it.

Somewhat ironically, science, having set out to know the ultimate nature of reality, is discovering that not only is this world beyond any direct experience, it may also be inherently unknowable.

Excerpt from the book by Peter Russell: From Science to God

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Our Sense of Time
The human brain is the most amazing data-processing system yet discovered. In comparison, the most powerful computers yet built are simpler than the simplest single-celled biological organism.
Digital computers encode signal inputs and outputs as bits (strings of 0s and 1s) and process information by electronic on/off switches that manipulate the bits.

In addition, computers have a built-in clock that synchronizes their data-processing operations. While this approach is a working basis of many of our technologies, it is utterly inadequate for carrying out the sort of complex mental tasks that our brains process and that we take for granted. For example, our visual recognition of a face in a crowd is a task we can accomplish without a moment’s hesitation, but computers find it incredibly difficult.

The reason is that our brains comprise a dynamic matrix of some one hundred billion neurons—nerve cells that, like computers, operate electrically. But instead of just acting digitally on or off, they behave in a so-called analog way and are able to respond to inputs and produce output voltages across a range of signal strengths.

Also, we have seen that, unlike computers, there is no inner clock in our brains. Our perceptions of events are accumulated from an ongoing variety of sense-based inputs from our environment. These arrive in a time frame of a few milliseconds; and it is only when they cumulatively pass an energy threshold that a given neuron sends an output signal, whose firing correlates with our becoming aware of the event. Again unlike computers, which are constructed with fixed hardware and programmed software, our neurons are highly plastic.

Neural channels—the connections between neurons—are constantly changing and adapting through interactions with what is perceived as reality. And although for many years neuroscientists believed that when neurons die through aging, disease, or trauma they’re not replaced, as we have noted, this has been shown not to be the case. Through a process called neurogenesis, new neurons are created throughout our lifetime and especially as a result of intensely felt experiences.

The energetic imprints of our experiences encode not only their physical attributes but how we think and feel about them. In fact, it’s our thoughts and emotions about the events of our lives that are their most vivid and long-lasting aspects. Even when we no longer consciously remember a specific event, its related emotions may continue to reside in our subconscious memory. Contributing to our patterns of habitual response, the hopes, fears, anger, regret, and myriad other feelings are aspects of the shadowy terrain from which our “sunlit” waking awareness emerges.

Our brains are continually processing a vast amount of environmental impressions that we initially respond to unconsciously. An enormous majority of these remain unconscious, for only when they are energetically strong enough do they cross the threshold of our conscious awareness. The apparent continuity of our conscious impressions is illusory, because without an inner “clock” our perceptions lag behind the multitude of stimuli, which we are continually bathed in and interact with.

The neural processes that respond to such impressions take around a quarter of a second to accumulate and form into a conscious experience—this is due to different attributes of stimuli, such as their color, shape, and texture. Although they occur simultaneously, they are registered by our brains at different times.

In our everyday awareness, this overlapping of impressions becomes a coherent whole, and we experience our waking consciousness as a unified flow. This is how our sense of the flow of time is formed. The emotional and mental contents that enrich our experiences manipulate our sense of time, ratcheting it up to “fast-forward” or reducing it to slow motion. Traumatic events appear to slow down or even stop time, whereas when we are enjoying ourselves, “time flies.”

Mind over Matter
Such different perceptions of the same reality are an everyday occurrence. But we are rarely aware of just how much our believing or disbelieving affects what we actually “see.” Generally, our ego-selves are culturally conditioned. As a consequence, we not only act in accordance with our prevailing worldview and beliefs, but our identification is so powerful that we are literally unable to see what we cannot imagine.

When we’re able to imagine something, we create an image of it that we can relate to. Without such relationship, there is no resonance, and so we have no energetic and informational means of attuning ourselves to a new phenomenon. When we can imagine a phenomenon and believe in its reality, we can actually experience that reality.

For millennia, the meditative techniques of spiritual traditions have taught their initiates how to embody greater well-being by attuning their minds and emotions more harmoniously. Additionally, they have shown how the attuned power of our mind can overcome physical pain. Tibetan monks, for example, have long been tutored in visualization exercises that enable them to slow or increase their heart rates and alter their body temperatures at will.

Such exercises, over many years, allow them to focus their mind so coherently that there are well-documented cases of overnight snowbound vigils held by monks who melted the snow around them through their body heat alone. Although we may not have their fortitude or training, our beliefs, too, are not only capable of altering our biology but do so all the time.

What is the process that enables our thoughts and feelings to have such power over our bodies? In the last chapter, we introduced biologist Bruce Lipton’s model of cellular membranes as organic information processors that are dynamically linked to the environment. The receptor molecules that are embedded within the membranes resonate and interrelate with specific environmental stimuli, both physical and informational. Their responses are the triggers that organize the behavior and the internal condition of the cell.

But, as Lipton points out, the stimuli that trigger cell activity may be distorted; thus, they rather represent our beliefs about reality. And so environmental signals such as our feelings and thoughts—even, and often especially, when they are subconscious—affect the behavior and thus the health of the cell whether or not they reflect a “real” view of the world.

As biochemist David Hamilton shows in his book It’s the Thought That Counts, the attunement of our conscious and subliminal thoughts and emotions—both of which express our beliefs about ourselves and the wider world—powerfully affect the health of our bodies and our overall well-being at the level of every cell of our body.

The Placebo Effect
One significant way our beliefs and expectations affect our biology is in the so-called placebo effect.
This was first discovered during pharmaceutical drug trials in the 1950s in which the effect of a new drug was tested by comparing its performance against a dummy medication, or placebo, administered to patients suffering from a given condition.

Over many studies, it has been found that on average about a third of patients who are given the placebo feel better. In fact, a number of studies have shown that individuals suffering from mild depression respond to placebos as well as they do to antidepressant drugs—and without any adverse side effects.

For a long time, doctors tended to assume that the mechanism of placebo response is psychological. Researchers at the University of Michigan tested this assumption by scanning the brain activity of healthy volunteers whose jaws had been injected with salt water, causing painful pressure. The volunteers were then told they would receive a new pain-relieving drug when in fact they were given a placebo. The scans showed that their brains responded to their belief in the placebo by releasing endorphins—natural painkilling chemicals that block the pain signals between nerve cells—and as these coursed through their bodies, the volunteers felt better.

The scale of the placebo effect may in fact be increasing. In 1999, in an article for Science magazine, Martin Enserink reported that tests for drugs to alleviate obsessive-compulsive disorder disclosed that for over 15 years, the proportion of placebo responses had grown from virtually nil to where some trials failed—in all likelihood, due to the high level of placebo response. The year before, in a meta-analysis of 19 antidepressant drug trials, psychologists Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein showed that the proposed drugs relied on the placebo effect for three-quarters of their effectiveness.

The power and potential for intentional healing of the placebo effect is finally being recognized – although unsurprisingly, not by drug companies. What it appears to depend on is a person wanting to be healed and his or her expectancy that the treatment will be effective.

One of the pioneering researchers of the intimate connections between our minds, emotions, and bodies is psychopharmacologist Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion. In the early 1970s, biologists were trying to understand how mind- and mood-altering opiates such as morphine worked. Theorizing that such drugs interact with the brain’s cellular receptors, Pert, with her colleague Sol Snyder, discovered the existence of such a receptor.

The discovery opened the door to the realization that if our bodies have such receptors, then we must also have a natural feel-good opiate within us. Subsequently identified by neuroscientists John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz in 1975, this turned out to be a molecule called endorphin that was found to be released in large quantities through physical exercise, among other things—and also by eating chocolate!

Endorphins are one type of so-called neuropeptides that are produced by emotions and in turn produce them through our continuous flow of experience. Involved in an enormous range of bodily functions from the management of pain to the release of hormones, neuropeptides and the cellular receptors they interact with form a psychosomatic and dynamic matrix operating through our thoughts, emotions, and bodies.

Heart and Mind
For most of us for most of the time, our thoughts and emotions relate to our ego-based, personal, sense of self. The innate separation from others that such a sense of separate self engenders is the basis for the word selfish. When we are unable to go beyond its inherent limitations, we feel lonely and cut off, as indeed we are when seeing the world solely from its narrow perspective.

When our egos are too dominant or, conversely, too fragile, such apparent separation is often accompanied by difficulty in empathizing with the wider world. It is this deep sense of separation, loss, and loneliness that many psychologists feel is at the root of an exponential increase in depression in the last few years. And it’s the negative emotions that are generated by the separations and fears of our ego-mind that lie at the root of so many of the schisms that have divided people from each other. Conversely, the positive feelings of pleasure, joy, and love arise not in the mind but are generated by our heart. These feelings have the capacity to connect us at ever-expanding levels of awareness with the whole-world.

We have seen how our entire body is a coherent energy-information system. This also comes to the forefront in the findings that intelligence and attention are not mediated through the brain. For, as research shows, the heart is able to perceive and has inherent intelligence.

In the 1970s, physiologists John and Beatrice Lacey found that not only are signals sent from our brain to our heart, which the heart considers but does not necessarily follow, but that our heart also sends signals to our brain, which the latter does obey. Subsequently, it has been discovered that the heart has its own nervous system comprising at least 40,000 nerve cells (neurons)—as many as are found in various subcortical centers of the brain. Leading on from this, a two-way biocommunication system of thoughts and feelings is now recognized to operate between the heart and the brain.

Since 1991, stress researcher Doc Childre and his colleagues at the HeartMath Institute in California have undertaken research to demonstrate how negative emotions such as insecurity, anger, and fear throw the body’s nervous system out of balance and engender heart rhythms that are jagged and disordered. Conversely, they have found that positive emotions of love, compassion, and gratitude create coherent energy signals that increase order, reduce stress, and bring balance throughout the nervous system. They are reflected in harmonious rhythms of the heart.

Our hearts generate the strongest electromagnetic field produced by our body—a field that, as the HeartMath team has demonstrated, is measurable a number of feet away by magnetic and electrostatic detectors.

The Power of Positive Emotions
One of the challenges facing researchers studying human behavior outside the laboratory in “real life” situations is to reduce the number of variables that are needed to be taken into consideration to come up with evidence in a particular case. A project to see whether positive emotions are conducive to living longer was able to do this when it investigated the longevity of a group of 180 nuns living the same ordered life away from the distractions and stresses of the world outside the convent walls.

Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychiatry in 2001, the analysis of the positive words used throughout their diaries revealed that the nuns with the most positive outlook, and who felt more positive emotionally, were not only happier than their sisters but lived significantly longer lives. It does make a difference both to our state of well-being and how long we will live to enjoy our lives.

French golfer Jean Van de Velde was leading the 1999 field at the Carnoustie, Scotland, Open Championship when he hit a critical shot into the water during the play-off and went from leader to runner-up. When asked in 2007 when the Open returned to Carnoustie how he had felt, Van de Velde replied, “I see the world as a glass half full, preferably of wine. And all the better when I’ve already drunk the first half.” Well said!

Emotional IQ
In 1996, psychologist Daniel Goleman reviewed the significance of the heart in the way that we perceive and interact with the world. He noted that the measurement of human IQ, which reflects the quotient of intellectual and cognitive abilities, does not change significantly from childhood onward regardless of our educational opportunities and attainment.

Goleman found that success in life, as reflected in measures of perceived well-being, appears to depend significantly less on IQ and more on our ability to manage and develop our emotional intelligence. He termed the relevant measure EQ: emotional intelligence quotient. EQ relates to self-awareness and our ability to perceive the interrelationship between our thoughts, emotions, and actions and their consequences on others. Unlike our IQ, our EQ can continue to be educated and indeed reeducated throughout our life.

Fear is often seen as a negative emotion. It’s healthy, however, when it enables us to be aware of the danger of an imminent threat and allows us to take appropriate action. The problem arises when we make a habit out of being fearful, for when we feel fear, our bodies literally contract. Biologically, we shut down all nonessential processes in order to focus on the archaic evolutionary choice of fight or flight.

When the danger is past, we relax and our bodies return to a balanced state. But when our fears become chronic, that biological rebalancing cannot occur; instead, our continuing level of fearful thoughts and emotions hold us tightly in the grip of fight-or-flight stress. This inevitably limits our behavior, for as Candace Pert has written: “You can’t grasp new information in a state of fear . . . punishment and threats actually inhibit the learning process.”

Chronic fears often arise in childhood. And by the time we are adults, they have become part of our worldview. When we’re able to be aware of such fears—to acknowledge their limitations and, if needed, seek the help of others to overcome them—our lives can be transformed. When we exchange the resentment, frustration, anger, and pain of such fears for compassion, joy, and gratitude, we literally become another person. This transformation is not only possible but can be experienced by everyone who is willing to try.

Sometimes words are inadequate to express what we really mean or feel, but the English language is remarkable in its inclusion of simple words that can themselves hold a deeper meaning. For example, each of us may have a different definition of the word evil. But when we realize that it is the word live spelled backward, we can perhaps see a meaning that hasn’t occurred to us before: Evil is the opposite of live. To undertake an evil act is then an act of death. And the word love, itself carrying so much association, is only a single letter different from the word live. As evil is death, so love is life.

The stress and depression that accompanies emotional and mental trauma are reinforced and worsened if we continue to solely focus on our ego-based perceptions of ourselves. The age-old adage to “live, love, and laugh” is probably the simplest and most profound self-help advice there is. No matter how it is wrapped up in sophisticated language, leading-edge science and consciousness studies agree that:

to live physically, mentally, and emotionally active lives, to love—in action through service to others – and to laugh – preferably at yourself – is the most effective, and yet sometimes the most challenging, way to wholeness and health.

It’s important for us to appreciate that our emotions and thoughts are energetic patterns that embody awareness, and their reorganization can inhibit or restore health. Our feelings and beliefs about ourselves and the world are crucial. Their limitations are our limitations; their possibilities are our possibilities.

We can no longer separate our thoughts and emotions from our physical well-being.

This excerpt is taken from the book CosMos: A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World by Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan. It is published by Hay House (August 2008) and is available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com.

Available also at amazon: CosMos: A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World

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This insight – that we are cousins to everything that exists in a living, continuously regenerated universe – represents a new way of looking at and relating to the world, and overcomes the profound separation that has marked our lives. From the combined wisdom of science and spirituality is emerging an understanding that could provide the perceptual foundation for the diverse people of the world to come together in the shared enterprise of building a sustainable and meaningful future.

Fundamental shifts in perception happen slowly, are subtle, and often seem inconsequential or even go unnoticed by the majority of people living through them. Yet such shifts amount to nothing less than revolutions in our sense of ourselves, our relationships with others, and our view of the universe. Only three times in human experience has our view of reality been so thoroughly transformed.

The first transformation occurred when humanity “awakened” roughly 35,000 years ago. The archeological record shows that the beginnings of a reflective consciousness emerged decisively at this time as numerous developments were occurring in stone tools, burial sites, cave art, and migration patterns. Because we were just awakening to our capacity for “knowing that we know,” we were surrounded by mystery at every turn. Nonetheless, human culture was born in these first glimmerings of personal and shared awareness.

The second time our view of reality and human identity changed dramatically was roughly 10,000 years ago when our ancestors shifted from a nomadic life to a more settled existence in villages and farms.

Mid-way during the agrarian period, roughly 5,000 years ago, we see the rise of city-states and the beginnings of civilization. The third time that our perceptual paradigm transformed was roughly 300 years ago, following the scientific revolution, when the stability of agrarian society gave way to the radical dynamism and materialism of the industrial era. Each time that humanity’s prevailing paradigm has changed, all aspects of life have changed with it, including the work that people do, the ways they live together, how they relate to one another, and how they see their role in society and place in the universe.

We are now living at a time when humanity’s perceptual paradigm is again undergoing one of its rare shifts, and that shift has the potential to dramatically transform life for each of us. A paradigm shift is much more than a change in ideas and how we think. It is a change in our view of reality, identity, social relationships, and human purpose.

A paradigm shift can be felt in the body, mind, and soul. At the heart of the new paradigm is a remarkable idea: Our cosmos is not a fragmented and lifeless machine (as we have believed for centuries) but is instead a unified and living organism. Although it is new for our times, the idea that the universe is alive is an ancient one. More than 2,000 years ago, Plato described the universe as “one Whole of wholes” and “a single Living Creature that encompasses all of the living creatures that are within it.” What is unprecedented is how this notion is being informed today by both modern science and the world’s diverse spiritual traditions (see Note: “The Mother Universe”).

Scientific Evidence of a Living Universe
Less than a hundred years ago, when Einstein was developing his theory of relativity, he considered the universe a static, unchanging system no larger than the cloud of stars we now know to be our galaxy.

Today, we know that the universe is expanding rapidly and contains at least a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, or more. Our cosmos embodies an exquisitely precise design. Researchers have calculated that if the universe had expanded ever so slightly faster or slower than it did (even by as little as a trillionth of a percent), the matter in our cosmos would have either quickly collapsed back into a black hole or spread out so rapidly that it would have evaporated.

It is reasonable to assume that if our cosmos is alive it would exhibit specific properties characteristic of all life – unity, regeneration, freedom, sentience, and a capacity for self-reproduction. These in fact are among the properties of our universe emerging from the frontiers of modern science. The cosmos is a unified system. Physicists once viewed our universe as composed of separate fragments.

Today, however, despite its unimaginably vast size, the universe is increasingly regarded as a single functioning system. Because other galaxies are millions of light years away, they appear so remote in space and time as to be separate from our own. Yet experiments show that things that seem to be separate are actually connected in fundamental ways that transcend the limitations of ordinary space and time. Described as “nonlocality,” this is one of the most stunning insights from quantum physics.

Although scientists working in this domain hold divergent views about the implications of quantum mechanics for our everyday lives, physicist David Bohm says that ultimately we have to understand the entire universe as “a single undivided whole.” Instead of separating the universe into living and nonliving things, Bohm sees animate and inanimate matter as inseparably interwoven with the life-force that is present throughout the universe, and that includes not only matter, but also energy and seemingly empty space. For Bohm, then, even a rock has its unique form of aliveness. Life is dynamically flowing through the fabric of the entire universe.

Our home galaxy – the Milky Way – is a swirling, disk-shaped cloud containing a hundred billion or so stars. It is part of a local group of nineteen galaxies (each with a hundred billion stars), which in turn is part of a larger local supercluster of thousands of galaxies. This supercluster resembles a giant many-petaled flower. Beyond this, astronomers estimate that there are perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Scientists and spiritual seekers alike ask the question: If this is a unified system, then could all this be but a single cell within a much greater organism?

The cosmos is continuously regenerated. For decades, the dominant cosmology in contemporary physics has held that creation ended with the Big Bang some fourteen billion years ago and that, since then, nothing more has happened than a rearranging of the cosmic furniture.

Because traditional physicists think of creation as a one-time miracle from “nothing,” they regard the contents of the universe – such as trees, rocks, and people – as being constituted from ancient matter. In sum, the dead-universe theory assumes creation occurred billions of years ago, when a massive explosion spewed out lifeless material debris into equally lifeless space and has, by random processes, organized itself into life forms on the remote planet-island called Earth.

In striking contrast, the living-universe theory proposes that the cosmos is completely recreated at each moment, and is maintained, moment by moment, by an unbroken flow-through of energy. Imagine the cosmos as the vortex of a tornado or a whirlpool, as a completely dynamic structure. David Bohm calls the universe an “undivided wholeness in flowing movement.” In this view, our universe has no freestanding material existence of its own. The entire cosmos is being regenerated at each instant in a single symphony of expression that unfolds from the most minute aspects of the subatomic realm to the vast reaches of thousands of billions of galactic systems.

It overwhelms the imagination to consider the size and complexity of our cosmos with its billions of galaxies and trillions of planetary systems, all partaking in a continuous flow of creation. How can it be so vast, so subtle, so precise, and so powerful? “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves; whirlpools of water in an ever-flowing river,” states the mathematician Norbert Wiener.

Physicist Max Born, adds: “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.” Physicist Brian Swimme tells us, “The universe emerges out of an all-nourishing abyss not only twelve billion years ago but in every moment.”

The foundation of the cosmos is freedom. Traditional physicists have seen the cosmos as being like a clockwork mechanism locked into predetermined patterns of development. By contrast, the new physics maintains that the cosmos has the freedom and spontaneity to grow in unexpected ways. Uncertainty is so fundamental that quantum physics describes reality in terms of probabilities, not certainties. No one part of the cosmos determines the functioning of the whole; rather, everything seems to be connected with everything else, weaving the cosmos into one vast interacting system.

Everything that exists contributes to the cosmic web of life at each moment, whether it is conscious of its contribution or not. In turn, it is the consistency of interrelations of all the parts of the universe that determines the condition of the whole. We therefore have great freedom to act within the limits established by the larger web of life within which we are immersed.

A living universe is a learning system in which we are free to make mistakes and to change our minds. “Through us, the universe questions itself and tries out various answers on itself in an effort – parallel to our own – to decipher its own being,” writes the philosopher Renee Weber.

Consciousness Is Present Throughout
Consciousness, a capacity for feeling or knowing, is basic to life. If the universe is alive, we should therefore find evidence of some form of consciousness operating at every level. Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson writes about consciousness at the quantum level: “Matter in quantum mechanics is not an inert substance but an active agent, constantly making choices between alternative possibilities … appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron.” This does not mean that an atom has the same consciousness as a human being, but rather that an atom has a reflective capacity appropriate to its form and function.

Dyson thinks it is reasonable to believe in the existence of a “mental component of the universe,” and that, if so, “then we can say that we are small pieces of God’s mental apparatus.” While it is stunning to consider that every level of the cosmos has some degree of consciousness, that seems no more extraordinary than the widely accepted view among scientists that the cosmos emerged as a pinpoint some twelve billion years ago as a “vacuum fluctuation” – where nothing pushed on nothing to create everything.

The cosmos is able to reproduce itself. A remarkable finding from the new physics is that our cosmos may very well be able to reproduce itself through the functioning of black holes. In his book, In the Beginning: The Birth of the Living Universe, astrophysicist John Gribbin proposes that the bursting out of our universe in the Big Bang may be the time-reversed mirror image of the collapse of a massive object into a black hole.

Many of the black holes that form in our universe, he reasons, may thus represent the seeds of new universes: “Instead of a black hole representing a one-way journey to nowhere, many researchers now believe that it is a one-way journey to somewhere – to a new expanding universe in its own set of dimensions.”

Gribbin’ s dramatic conclusion, reflecting the work of many physicists and cosmologists, is that “our own Universe may have been born in this way out of a black hole in another universe.” He explains it in this way: If one universe exists, then it seems that there must be many – very many, perhaps even an infinite number of universes. Our universe has to be seen as just one component of a vast array of universes, a selfreproducing system connected only by the “tunnels” through spacetime (perhaps better regarded as cosmic umbilical cords) that join a “baby” universe to its “parent.” Gribbin suggests not only that universes are alive, but also that they evolve as other living systems do: “Universes that are ‘successful’ are the ones that leave the most offspring.”

The idea of many universes evolving through time is not new. David Hume noted in 1779 that many prior universes “might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity ere this system.” In the light of recent scientific findings, our universe is revealing itself to be a profoundly unified system in which the interrelations of all the parts, moment-by-moment, determine the condition of the whole.

Our universe is infused with an immense amount of energy, and is being continuously regenerated in its entirety, while making use of a capacity or consciousness throughout. As an evolving, growing, and learning system, it is natural that freedom exists at the quantum foundations of the universe. It even appears that the universe has the ability to reproduce itself through the mechanism of black holes. When we put all of these properties together, it suggests an even more spacious view of our cosmic system.

Our universe is a living system of elegant design that was born from and is continuously regenerated within an even larger universe. We are living within a “daughter universe” that, for twelve billion years, has been living and growing within the spaciousness of a Mother universe. The Mother Universe may have existed forever, holding countless daughter universes in its grand embrace while they grow and mature through an eternity of time.

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Quantum physics looks at the universe differently. In recent years, scientists have developed the technology that has made it possible to document the strange and sometimes miraculous behavior of the quantum energy that forms the essence of the universe and our bodies.

For example:

• Quantum energy can exist in two very different forms: as visible particles or invisible waves. The energy is still there either way, just making itself known in different forms.
• A quantum particle can be in one place only, two places at once, or even many places simultaneously. The interesting thing, however, is that no matter how far apart these locations appear to be physically, the particle acts as if it’s still connected.
• Quantum particles can communicate with themselves at different points in time. They’re not limited by the concepts of past, present, and future. To a quantum particle, then is now and there is here.

These things are important because we’re made of the same quantum particles that can behave miraculously when given the right conditions. The question is this: If quantum particles are not limited by the “laws” of science – at least as we know them today – and we’re made of the same particles, then can we do miraculous things as well? In other words, is the behavior that physicists call “anomalous” demonstrating our scientific limits, or is it really showing us something else? Could the freedom in time and space that these particles show us be revealing to us the freedom that is possible in our lives?

Following all of the research, documentation, and direct experience of those who have transcended the limits of their own beliefs, without reservation I believe that the answer is a solid yes.

If the particles that we’re made of can be in instantaneous communication with one another, be in two places at once, and even change the past through choices made in the present, then we can as well.

The only difference between those isolated particles and us is that we’re made of lots of them, linked through the mysterious stuff that fills the places we used to think of as “empty space” – a form of energy that we’re only beginning to understand. It’s the recent acknowledgment of this strange form of energy in mainstream science that has catapulted us into a new and almost holistic way of seeing ourselves in the universe.

In 1944, Max Planck, the man many consider to be the father of quantum theory, shocked the world by saying that there is a “matrix” of energy that provides the blueprint for our physical world.5 In this
place of pure energy, everything begins, from the birth of stars and DNA to our deepest relationships, peace between nations, and personal healing. The willingness to embrace the matrix’s existence in mainstream science is still so new that scientists have yet to agree upon a single name for it.

Some simply call it the “field.” Others have referred to it with terms that range from the technical- sounding “quantum hologram” to almost spiritual-seeming names, such as the “mind of God” and “nature’s mind.” In my 2007 book describing the history and proof of the field, I echoed the bridging effect that it has had between science and spirituality, referring to it as the Divine Matrix. The experimental proof that Planck’s matrix is real now provides the missing link that bridges our spiritual experiences of belief, imagination, and prayer with the miracles that we see in the world around us.

The reason why Planck’s words are so powerful is because they forever changed the way we think of our bodies, our world, and our role in the universe. They imply that we’re much more than simply the “observers” that scientists have described, passing through a brief moment of time in a creation that already exists. Through the connection that joins all things, the experiments have now shown that we directly affect the waves and particles of the universe. In short, the universe responds to our beliefs. It is the difference of thinking of us as powerful creators rather than passive observers that has become the crux of some of the greatest controversy among some of the greatest minds in recent history. The implications are absolutely staggering.

In a quote from his autobiographical notes, for example, Albert Einstein shared his belief that we have little effect on the universe as a whole and are lucky if we can understand even a small part of it. We live in a world, he said, “which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.”

In contrast to Einstein’s perspective, which is still widely held by many scientists today, John Wheeler, an honored Princeton physicist and colleague of Einstein, offers a radically different view of our role in creation. Wheeler’s studies have led him to believe that we may live in a universe where consciousness is not only important, but also actually creative – in other words, a “participatory universe.”

Clarifying his belief, Wheeler says, “We could not even imagine a universe that did not somewhere and for some stretch of time contain observers because the very building materials of the universe are these acts of observer‑ participancy.”

What a shift!
In a completely revolutionary interpretation of our relationship to the world around us, Wheeler is stating that it’s impossible for us simply to watch the world happen around us. We can never be observers, because when we observe, we create and modify what is created. Sometimes the effect of our observation is nearly undetectable; and, as we’ll discover in later chapters, sometimes it’s not. Either way, the discoveries of the last century suggest that our act of observing the world is an act of creation unto itself. And it’s consciousness that’s doing the creating!

These findings seem to support Wheeler’s proposition that we can no longer think of ourselves merely as onlookers who have no effect on the world that we’re observing. When we view “life” – our spiritual and material abundance, our relationships and careers, our deepest loves and greatest achievements, as well as our fears and the lack of all of these things – we may also be looking squarely at the mirror of our truest and sometimes most unconscious beliefs.

This excerpt is taken from the book The Spontaneous Healing of Belief, by Gregg Braden. It is published by Hay House (April 1, 2008) and available at all bookstores.

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Dualism seems to be the biggest concept in history ever. Quantum Physics may lead us to a new paradigm shift in consciousness.

Our consciousness is programmed with the basic concept of dualism. Either it is this way or it is the other way, either it is good or it is bad. If you think about this you may find hundreds of other examples in your daily life. Wherever you look, look closely and you will find the concept of dualism.

The belief in matter is another big concept science has come up with. In the last century Newton, Kepler and some other persons made sure this concept made it into every school book in the western world.

Both concepts, dualism and matter are living on such a big scale that most people don’t even realize that they are concepts.

Is there a Hidden Purpose Behind the Concept of Dualism?
This is more a philosophical question and it may lead to other concepts and not to the truth. So what is the truth? The truth is that every concept leads to an experience and by experiencing it we may fulfill it’s purpose.

If you build a house you start with a floor plan – a concept. If you start your car in the morning than thousands of concepts were necessary to achieve the outcome of a running engine.

There was a time, where science was holding a space of the spirit as it was in Astronomy and Astrology. But spirit never fit into a formula and even Einstein needed to leave out the spirit to come up with its famous formula E=MC2.

However, as more scientist are exploring the realm of Quantum Physics they are finding out, that without the spirit and consciousness they are not really getting along with their exploration. One of their biggest discovery is the state of an electron in a superposition.

You may know that in computers the information is saved in memory chips. A single computer memory can hold either the information 0 or 1 – not both. Either electricity flows or it doesn’t . Either the lamp is on or it is off. But in quantum physics you find that in certain circumstances the light is on and off at the same time! From our understanding of ‘reality’ this is not possible at all. And this has to do with another concept that we have adapted – time.

If you take the time factor into the equation you find out that with time the light can be on and off, just not at the same time. A good example is an old radio. When you tune into a station you have to calibrate to a certain frequency. You can tune into another station but you cannot hear both stations at the same time. But you know that both radio stations are sending their program at the same time. Our consciousness state is most of the time limited to receive signals in sequence rather than parallel.

Flipping the Coin – A Quantum Experiment
Let me give you another example, in which things get even more strange. Let’s assume you want to flip a coin to decide weather you go to the movies or not. You take a coin and you know already that there are 2 possible outcomes. Either you end up with head or with tale.

Now you start flipping the coin…

What you just did is creating the possibilities of two new time lines, if you like you could also say the possibilities of two new futures. In one future you are going to the movies and in the other you don’t. Remember the movie “Back to the Future’?

The coin lands in your hand…

Now let us further assume that you won’t look at your hand, where you are holding the coin. The future is already created as the result of the flipped coin in your hand. But, by not looking at it you are still in the twilight zone and both outcomes are still unknown. So obviously it doesn’t matter on what side the coin falls as long as you don’t have the information of it.

Now open your eyes and look at the coin…

Either it is on tales or on heads and it this moment ‘you’ made your choice. And by making your choice you decided to go on this time line. What about the other time line? It still exists in a parallel universe and you are in there as well. You just focused your attention on one of the universes by making a decision. Well, we are back at the duality where we have to decide for one possible outcome.

What happens if we don’t decide? It’s a rather difficult task for the mind and it needs some training, but you are able not to decide and to have your attention in a consciousness superposition where both worlds are present at the same time. Does this mean you are going to the movie and the same time you are not? Obviously our mind cannot grasp this idea.

Time Does not Exist in a Quantum Superposition
Have you ever experienced that you looked at a watch with a second tale and it seemed to freeze? If you have, you were in a consciousness state of a Quantum superposition. But what mostly happens is that as soon as you realize it is not moving – it starts moving. In the moment you realize this strange state you are out of it. Your attention cannot be in the superposition. However with a little training you are able to expand in this state as ‘long’ as you wish.

Where does this all lead us? It has a lot to do with being in a creative state of mind and connected to higher form of consciousness. It’s like a radio program that you can suddenly hear, that covers a complete new topic which you could not hear before.

A creative response to live is faster than any decision you can make up. Decisions are based on experiences from the past. It’s like running a computer analysis and wait until the result shows up. But the result is always based on the past and never on the experience of the moment. Therefore always limited.

Sometimes in our life we are at moments where it seems to us that we have to decide which way to go. I am talking about one of life’s major decisions.

Next time this happens you may allow yourself to have a creative response to it instead of looking up data from the past. Meaning to allow your consciousness to be in a superposition instead of looking up data from the past to process a decision.

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Watch the video here
(Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.)

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true – what is it about my brother’s brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common, shared reality, so they instead become delusions?

So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared to the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar disorder?

So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain, which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then with what quantities of those chemicals. So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this kind of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But on the morning of December 10 1996 I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body.

If you’ve ever seen a human brain, it’s obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. So, this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of the brain with a spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it’s obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor.

While our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each hemisphere thinks about different things, they care about different things, and dare I say, they have very different personalities. [Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy.]

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.

I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it’s all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we’ve ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language.

It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It’s that little voice that says to me, “Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home, and eat ‘em in the morning.” It’s that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it’s that little voice that says to me, “I am. I am.” And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me “I am,” I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you.

And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain, that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me and then it released me. Then it just gripped me and then released me. And it was very unusual for me to experience any kind of pain, so I thought OK, I’ll just start my normal routine.

So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body exercise machine. And I’m jamming away on this thing, and I’m realizing that my hands looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. I thought “that’s very peculiar” and I looked down at my body and I thought, “whoa, I’m a weird-looking thing.” And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I’m the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I’m witnessing myself having this experience.

And it was all every peculiar and my headache was just getting worse, so I get off the machine, and I’m walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There’s no fluidity to my pace, and there’s this constriction in my area of perceptions so I’m just focused on internal systems. And I’m standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower and I could actually hear the dialog inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, “OK, you muscles, you gotta contract, you muscles you relax.”

And I lost my balance and I’m propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy. Energy. And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me, what is going on?” And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and – total silence.

And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, “Hey! we got a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help.” So it’s like, OK, OK, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.

So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria. Euphoria was beautiful — and then my left hemisphere comes online and it says “Hey! you’ve got to pay attention, we’ve got to get help,” and I’m thinking, “I got to get help, I gotta focus.” So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I’m walking around my apartment, and I’m thinking, “I gotta get to work, I gotta get to work, can I drive? can I drive?”

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?”

And then it crosses my mind: “But I’m a very busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke!” So I’m like, “OK, I can’t stop the stroke from happening so I’ll do this for a week or two, and then I’ll get back to my routine, OK.”

So I gotta call help, I gotta call work. I couldn’t remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go in my business room, I pull out a 3-inch stack of business cards. And I’m looking at the card on top, and even though I could see clearly in my mind’s eye what my business card looked like, I couldn’t tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn’t tell. And I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell, that’s not the card, that’s not the card, that’s not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards.

In the meantime, for 45 minutes the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it’s the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here, I’d take the business card, I’d put it right here, and I’m matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I come back if I’d already dialed those numbers.

So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump, and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality I’d be able to tell, yes, I’ve already dialed that number. Eventually the whole number gets dialed, and I’m listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, “Whoo woo wooo woo woo.” [laughter] And I think to myself, “Oh my gosh, he sounds like a golden retriever!” And so I say to him, clear in my mind I say to him. “This is Jill! I need help!” And what comes out of my voice is, “Whoo woo wooo woo woo.” I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, I sound like a golden retriever.” So I couldn’t know, I didn’t know that I couldn’t speak or understand language until I tried.

So he recognizes that I need help, and he gets me help. And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to Mass General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air just, just right out of the balloon I felt my energy lift and I felt my spirit surrender. And in that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life or this was perhaps my moment of transition.

When I awoke later that afternoon I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life, and my mind is now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expensive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But I realized “But I’m still alive! I’m still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana.” I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated my to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who’s a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are — I am — the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the “we” inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

For more information visit: TED – Ideas Worth Spreading

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Now consider something even more intriguing. Imagine for a moment the entire history of the universe. According to all the data scientists have been able to gather, it exploded into existence some fifteen billion years ago, setting the stage for a cosmic dance of energy and light that continues to this day. Now imagine the history of planet Earth. An amorphous cloud of dust emerging out of that primordial fireball, it slowly coalesced into a solid orb, found its way into gravitational orbit around the sun, and through a complex interaction of light and gases over billions of years, generated an atmosphere and a biosphere capable of not only giving birth to, but sustaining and proliferating, life.

Now imagine that none of the above ever happened. Consider instead the possibility that the entire story only existed as an abstract potential – a cosmic dream among countless other cosmic dreams – until, in that dream, life somehow evolved to the point that a conscious, sentient being came into existence. At that moment, solely because of the conscious observation of that individual, the entire universe, including all of the history leading up to that point, suddenly came into being. Until that moment, nothing had actually ever happened. In that moment, fifteen billion years happened. If this sounds like nothing more than a complicated backdrop for a science fiction story or a secular version of one of the world’s great creation myths, hold on to your hat. According to physicist Amit Goswami, the above description is a scientifically viable explanation of how the universe came into being.

Goswami is convinced, along with a number of others who subscribe to the same view, that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it. Without an observer, he claims, it only exists as a possibility. And as they say in the world of science, Goswami has done his math. Marshalling evidence from recent research in cognitive psychology, biology, parapsychology and quantum physics, and leaning heavily on the ancient mystical traditions of the world, Goswami is building a case for a new paradigm that he calls “monistic idealism,” the view that consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of everything that is.

A professor of physics at the University of Oregon and a member of its Institute of Theoretical Science, Dr. Goswami is part of a growing body of renegade scientists who in recent years have ventured into the domain of the spiritual in an attempt both to interpret the seemingly inexplicable findings of their experiments and to validate their intuitions about the existence of a spiritual dimension of life. The culmination of Goswami’s own work is his book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. Rooted in an interpretation of the experimental data of quantum physics (the physics of elementary particles), the book weaves together a myriad of findings and theories in fields from artificial intelligence to astronomy to Hindu mysticism in an attempt to show that the discoveries of modern science are in perfect accord with the deepest mystical truths.

Quantum physics, as well as a number of other modern sciences, he feels, is demonstrating that the essential unity underlying all of reality is a fact which can be experimentally verified. Because of the enormous implications he sees in this scientific confirmation of the spiritual, Goswami is ardently devoted to explaining his theory to as many people as possible in order to help bring about what he feels is a much needed paradigm shift. He feels that because science is now capable of validating mysticism, much that before required a leap of faith can now be empirically proven and, hence, the materialist paradigm which has dominated scientific and philosophical thought for over two hundred years can finally be called into question.

Interviewing Amit Goswami was a mind-bending and concept-challenging experience. Listening to him explain many ideas with which he seemed perfectly at home, required, for me, such a suspension of disbelief that I at times found myself having to stretch far beyond anything I had previously considered. (Goswami is also a great fan of science fiction whose first book, The Cosmic Dancers, was a look at science fiction through the eyes of a physicist.)

But whether or not one ultimately accepts some of his more esoteric theories, one has to respect the creativity and passion with which he is willing to inquire. Goswami is clearly willing to take risks with his ideas and is fervently dedicated to sharing his investigation with audiences around the world. He speaks widely at conferences and other forums about the exciting discoveries of the new science and their significance, not only for the way science is done, but for society as a whole. In India, the country of his birth, he is actively involved in a growing organized movement to bridge the gap between science and spirituality, through which he is helping to pioneer a graduate institute in “consciousness studies” based on the premise that consciousness is the ground of all being.

Goswami is considered by some to be a pioneer in his field. By attempting to bring material realism to its knees and to integrate all fields of knowledge in a single unified paradigm, he hopes to pave the way for a new holistic worldview in which spirit is put first. In fact, as far as we know, he is the only new paradigm scientist who is taking a clear stand against the relativism so popular among new age thinkers. At a time when the decay of human values and the erosion of any sense of meaning has reached epidemic scale, it is hard to imagine what could be more important than this.

And yet, for all the important and valuable work he seems to be doing, in the end we are left with serious reservations as to whether Goswami’s approach will ultimately lead to the kind of transformation he hopes for. Thinkers such as Huston Smith and E. F. Schumacher have pointed to what they feel is an arrogance, or at least, a kind of naiveté, on the part of scientists who believe they can expand the reach of their discipline to somehow include or explain the spiritual dimension of life. Such critics suggest that the very attempt to scientifically validate the spiritual is itself a product of the same materialistic impulses it intends to uproot and, because of this, is ultimately only capable of reducing spirit, God and the transcendent to mere objects of scientific fascination.

Is science capable of proving the reality of the transcendent dimension of life? Or would science better serve the spiritual potential of the human race by acknowledging the inherent limits of its domain? The following interview confronts us with these questions.

First published by Enlightenment Magazine. Continue to read the interview with Amit Goswami.

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The new sciences of epigenetics and quantum mechanics recognize the important role of the invisible fields in controlling life, which includes the thoughts and energies that contribute to our reality. This new awareness changes our old worldview. We now know that we control our genes. We control our lives. Our thoughts are real and tangible. They influence our physiology. Physicists are now beginning to recognize that the universe is a mental construct.

Knowing these things we become empowered. The programs in our subconscious minds are downloaded as the life we are experiencing. What we have to do is review our lives and identify the things we want to change. The things that we strive for and don’t work generally reflect a subconscious program that sabotages our efforts to get there. We do not have to go back and find out how we acquired that program; that would be tantamount to killing the �messenger� over the �message� (the resulting acquired subconscious program).

Though we can rewrite subconscious programs using a variety of methods, until we do, we are actually victims of our subconscious minds. Not victims of the world, victims of our own belief systems. When we clear these pathways we become empowered. Then and only then will we likely experience what Jesus said: “You could do all these miracles even better than I once you believe you can.”

You must recognize something that I also had to recognize. It is not just acquiring the awareness in my conscious mind; it is actually applying that awareness into my life that makes the change. While the mind can lead us there, we actually have to do something to manifest the magic in our lives. We are in a desperate race to change who we are and what we are so that we can bring our environment and our planet back into harmony, to bring back the opportunity for our survival. We are all cells in a larger organism called humanity. When we have that belief we will start supporting each other instead of killing each other. Our future lies in recognizing that we are far greater as a whole than as individuals.

Think about it this way: underneath your skin are fifty trillion cells living in harmony in a very closed environment. These cells are very intelligent. We have always looked down at everything less than human as not being intelligent. That is our hubris and it is going to cost us a lot. If you can look inside the body and see those trillions of cells living in harmony, recognize this: every cell is a sentient being just like every one of us. Every cell lives in a community and has a job to support that community. There are rules and regulations. Cells get services. There is health care by the immune system. The garbage is taken out by the excretory system. The digestive system delivers the food. There is a society consisting of trillions of individuals inside our bodies that can thrive when we are in good health, yet the few billion people on the entire surface of the planet are so out of balance that we are destroying our environment.

This understanding returns us to the age of mystical belief that offered, “The answers lie within.� If we want to understand how to structure a human population of a few billion people on our planet, the answer lies under our skin. Humans are evolving. Humanity will complete itself as a multi-human community and at that time we will recognize that when we fight others, we are fighting ourselves. Humanity is a single body containing cells and each one of us is a cell in that structure.

When we understand that, we should stop harming each other and start organizing ourselves into the social structures that reflect what is going on in the human body. When we arrive at that point, the Earth will complete its evolution as a single living cell. What is our role in that living Earth cell? We are the equivalents of the proteins in the Earth�s cell membrane. We are the �receptor� proteins on the surface of the earth that receive the signals from the environment and the �effector� proteins that engage in the behaviors that control the expression of the planet!

We have [lost??] our original mission statement. The aboriginals that are still here remind us that we are the gardeners and what we have done to this point is devastate that Garden. But as we evolve we will start to recognize the power of our consciousness. We must organize our lives now to plan for the future. We can create a whole different experience on this planet. When the planet completes its evolution it will be an individual living cell.

Evolutionary history reveals that every time a level of development completes itself, it joins other similar entities to create a more powerful social structure. Therefore, I anticipate at that time that we will begin to interact with other earths, other cells out in space, and start to create a large matrix of living cells as planets that constitute the universe. We have great hope and possibility before us. We are living in a very supportive garden, a garden that should support all of us, where we can enjoy life and peace, prosperity and happiness.

This article is part three of a three-part presentation derived from The Wisdom of Your Cells, How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology, � 2006 by Sounds True as an Audio Listening Course on eight CD’s.

� 2007 by Bruce H. Lipton, a cellular biologist whose breakthrough research on the cell membrane made him a pioneer in the new biology. He is the author of The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles.

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There are many stories throughout history that reveal the power of our thoughts. The placebo effect is really the �perception effect.� If you believe that something is going to help you, that belief itself can lead to the healing process. Among the biggest selling drugs on the market are the SSRI drugs – things like Prozac and Zoloft�and it has been revealed by the drug companies themselves through the Freedom of Information Act that these drugs turn out to work no better than placebos. The placebo effect is something that we have not really taken advantage of, the idea that beliefs can control our biology and physiology. In fact, it is now established that one third of all medical healings, including surgery, are the result of the placebo effect.

But what is most important and what has been left out of the picture is the equal and opposite effect called the “nocebo effect.” This is when a negative thought or belief is used to shape our biology. For example, if a professional person, a medical doctor or specialist, says you are going to die in three months and you believe him, then you may set this date into your perceptual clock, start to disentangle yourself from your life and actually die in three months. Basically the placebo and nocebo effects are two sides of the same coin and simply represent the perception effect.

But here comes a problem: the conscious mind can process about forty bits of data per second but the subconscious mind can process forty million bits of data in the same second. The relevance is simple. The subconscious mind is one million times more powerful as an information processor than the conscious mind. We all believe that we run our lives with a conscious mind. This is what I want from life. I want to do all these wonderful things. Yet our life doesn’t match our intentions; as a result there is a tendency to say, “I can’t get the things that I want, the world is not providing them to me.” We take on the role of victim. New insights have completely revolutionized this idea. We now recognize that ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of our cognitive activity comes from the subconscious mind; less than five percent is influenced or controlled by the conscious mind.

When we are doing affirmations or positive thinking, we are using the tiny processor that has less than five percent influence, which means that we have to depend on willpower to overpower the subconscious mind. That is a nearly impossible job because the moment we take our eye off the ball, we automatically go back to the preset programs that are in our subconscious mind. Positive thinking is a good idea, much better than negative thinking, but while you are engaged in positive thoughts using the conscious mind, the subconscious mind with its limiting and self-sabotaging programs is running the show! Consequently, positive thinking does not improve the situation for most people.

It is not that the conscious mind is not powerful, for it can run anything in the human body. We used to think it could only run the voluntary system�the skeletal muscles, arms and legs. But yogis have revealed that the conscious mind can change body temperature, blood pressure and heartbeat. The conscious mind, if it focuses on any part of the body or any function, can control it. But the conscious mind, being a small (40 bit/sec) processor, doesn’t have the capability of controlling as many things at the same time as the subconscious mind can, operating at 40 million bits/sec.

Most people hardly use the conscious mind. They run their day-to-day existence from programs stored in their subconscious mind. What programs will that subconscious mind run? The answer is the exact programs that were downloaded into it. No variations on a theme. What it has learned it will play for its entire life unless we go into the subconscious mind and rewrite the program. The conscious mind is frequently oblivious of the programs running from the subconscious mind because the conscious and subconscious minds operate in tandem: one does not observe the other. So if the things in my life are not what I’m looking for, is it because the universe isn’t offering me the opportunity or is it because I’m sabotaging myself? Almost inevitably we are sabotaging ourselves with limiting programs stored in our subconscious mind.

Must we go back and identify how the subconscious programming occurred? Absolutely not. The subconscious mind does not have a future or a past. It is handling the present moment all the time. A signal from the environment comes up, pushes the receptor that engages the effector that then coordinates the response. That is the subconscious mind. There is nobody in there. There is nobody to talk with or negotiate with in the subconscious mind. We must find other ways of influencing and impacting the subconscious mind�s programming.

One approach is what Buddhists call mindfulness – to be fully conscious all the time and make decisions with your creative mind, not from your habitual subconscious mind. The Yoga paths all provide various such practices. Other approaches include clinical hypnotherapy and a new field of diverse modalities that are collectively called �energy psychology,� ways of identifying and rewriting belief programs in our subconscious minds.

This article is part two of a three-part presentation derived from The Wisdom of Your Cells, How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology, � 2006 by Sounds True as an Audio Listening Course on eight CD’s.

� 2007 by Bruce H. Lipton, a cellular biologist whose breakthrough research on the cell membrane made him a pioneer in the new biology. He is the author of The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles.

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The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
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