Sorry … it’s another long post. But it’s about something I find fascinating … concerning thoughts ... and reality.

Since the 1970’s I’ve lived with this indigestible notion that’s made its home in one of the neural slums in the back of my head, and it won’t go away, because it’s so … interesting.

Snakeman

Put simply it is the notion that our thoughts create reality – not just our perception of reality, but the actual physical stuff of it.

It’s been around for a long time … first became popular in the ‘70’s when a rash of books came out connecting Quantum physics to a new metaphysical view. And now there’s a couple of movies around, made a year or two ago, that peddle the same bike – ‘What the Bleep’ I think they’re called.

For myself, I first came across this notion in 1982 when I read a book called ‘Seth Speaks’, in which an entity called Seth, (channeled by the author, Jane Roberts), kept reiterating all through the book that thoughts create reality.

I remember finding the book largely indigestible – but this notion alone was worth the read. I’d never heard of such a thing – that I alone was responsible for the personal reality I lived in – the luck, the events, even down to the way things looked. It was both shocking and incredible - literally.

At first I rejected the notion out of hand, but the evidence seemed to pile up, as more and more authors reiterated the so-called science behind this notion.

After reading books like ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’ by Gary Zukav (1979), ‘The Tao of Physics’ by Fritjov Capra (1975), and a lesser known, but fascinating book , ‘Stalking the Wild Pendulum’, by Itzhak Bentov (1977) , in which they all laid out the science behind this lunatic theory, it began to make sense.

You see, up till then I’d always lived in the opposite view - that reality was constant and totally unmalleable – and I was subject to it – it created me and my thoughts. And this reality was created by things beyond my control – history, other people, and so on.

This is the reality most people live within - solid, historically determined and unchangeable. But everything I was reading began to open up a totally reverse view of a reality that was as changeable and responsive as our own minds.

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I suppose, for the sake of those unfamiliar with the theory I should try and explain it. I mean, I’m no scientist, so I can only give you my understanding, but I’ll try … and be as brief as I can.

Basically the theory arises from questions that have arisen from the relatively new science of Quantum Physics – questions about the nature of things, and how it all comes to be.

And what it all seems to indicate is that, when you penetrate matter beyond the sub-atomic level, you find the same thing within everything – even the space between everything - a ubiquitous electro-magnetic field which all things, both material and non-material, have in common.

In this field everything we view as ‘things’ exist as interconnected patterns of energy. And given that our thoughts are also patterns of energy in the field we know as our mind, the connection between the energetic events of our mentality are intimately interconnected with the energy events of the space/time/material reality we consciously perceive.

This is nothing new.

Sir James Hopwood Jeans, who died in 1944, observed:

‘The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter."

Many scientists call this field the ‘Mind of God’, and others call it the ‘Quantum Hologram’.

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In particular, this view is substantially supported by the theories of David Bohm, one of the world’s most innovative physicists. He described the universe as existing in a state of what he called "undivided wholeness".

To illustrate this, Bohm likened the universe to a hologram, a remarkable feature of which is that if a holographic plate is cut into fragments, it is found that each fragment contains within itself a complete scale image of the whole object it was a part of.

Bohm proposed that the universe exists as what he called a "holomovement"
- in which, like the holographic plate, any part of the universe, no matter how small, contains within itself an identical order of the whole.

In his book, ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ he said: "We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent 'elementary' parts of the universe are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is fundamental reality, and that relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within the whole."

Bohm’s proposition was supported by a remarkable experiment performed by a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect in 1982, which tested quantum interconnectedness.

The results of this experiment clearly showed that subatomic particles, the most fundamental ‘stuff’ of the physical universe, are profoundly connected to one another by an element that is intangible and immeasurable. As such, particles are able to respond to each other instantly over infinite distances, in ways that cannot be explained.

‘…two entangled particles, no matter how far they are apart, are not really separate at all. Measure one, and as its spin becomes definite this triggers the other to respond. Its indeterminate spin also becomes definite, in the opposite direction to that of its partner. What is astonishing and disturbing is that this response happens instantaneously--even if the particles are separated by huge distances. Consequently, quantum theory requires action at a distance. What happens in one part of the Universe can have instantaneous "nonlocal" consequences in other parts, no matter how far away they might be…’ (‘Why God plays Dice’, by Mark Buchanan, New Scientist Magazine, 22 August 1998)

So all things in their smallest parts are profoundly interconnected, both within themselves and with each other, by a phenomenon that is as yet totally undetectable by any measuring device we have.

And just as interconnectedness is undetectable by the instruments of science, so too it remains undetectable by our cluttered, sense specific minds.

After all, we cannot hear interconnectedness, or see it, or taste it, or smell it, nor is it is specifically a sensation. The ‘language’ of interconnectedness exists outside of our five senses, so we are usually oblivious to it.

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Of course, there are many other theories running in parallel to the ‘Quantum Hologram’ theory, which seem to support and verify it, the most notable being Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields.

Sheldrake, as one of the world’s most innovative and controversial biologists, postulates a multi-layered field of memory (electromagnetic in nature, similar to gravity) which exists as a ubiquitous essence to everything in existence – from which everything draws its form, habits and attributes.

Sheldrake says: ‘Morphic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I propose that that they are transmitted from past members of the species through a kind of non-local resonance, called morphic resonance.’

So this field of memory not only encourages the way things evolve, but it itself evolves in response to the behavior of those things it has given form to.

In his books, writings, and on his web-site, Sheldrake gives an enormous amount of evidence to verify his theories, largely because so many in the established Sciences have so vehemently tried to crush him.

Here’s one particularly compelling example that he uses:

“… Until about the 1950s, the caps on milk bottles were made of cardboard. In 1921 in Southampton, a strange phenomenon was observed. When people came out in the morning to get their milk bottles, they found little shreds of cardboard all around the bottom of the bottle, and the cream from the top of the bottle had disappeared.

Close observation revealed that this was being done by bluetits, who sat on top of the bottle, pulled off the cardboard with their beaks, and then drank the cream. Several tragic cases were found in which bluetits were discovered drowned head first in the milk!

This incident caused considerable interest; then the event turned up somewhere else in Britain, about 50 miles away, and then somewhere about 100 miles away. Whenever the bluetit phenomenon turned up, it started spreading locally, presumably by imitation.

However, bluetits are very home-loving creatures, and they don't normally travel more than four or five miles. Therefore, the dissemination of the behavior over large distances could only be accounted for in terms of an independent discovery of the habit.

The bluetit habit was mapped throughout Britain until 1947, by which time it had become more or less universal. The people who did the study came to the conclusion that it must have been "invented" independently at least 50 times.

Moreover, the rate of spread of the habit accelerated as time went on. In other parts of Europe where milk bottles are delivered to doorsteps, such as Scandinavia and Holland, the habit also cropped up during the 1930s and spread in a similar manner. Here is an example of a pattern of behavior which was spread in a way which seemed to speed up with time, and which might provide an example of morphic resonance.

But there is still stronger evidence for morphic resonance.

Because of the German occupation of Holland, milk delivery ceased during 1939-40. Milk deliveries did not resume until 1948. Since bluetits usually live only two to three years, there probably were no bluetits alive in 1948 who had been alive when milk was last delivered. Yet when milk deliveries resumed in 1948, the opening of milk bottles by bluetits sprang up rapidly in quite separate places in Holland and spread extremely rapidly until, within a year or two, it was once again universal. The behavior spread much more rapidly and cropped up independently much more frequently the second time round than the first time. This example demonstrates the evolutionary spread of a new habit which is probably not genetic but rather depends on a kind of collective memory due to morphic resonance …”

So … I’m wondering what other people think of all this, because, no matter how I try, I cannot bring myself to actually believe it – I just can’t.

I mean, I’ve had the incredibly synchronistic phone calls as I was thinking about a friend. I’ve had the psychic moments with lovers, and turned to find someone staring at me behind my back. And I’ve felt the exquisite unity of spirit of a football crowd in mid cheer, the exquisite merging of minds that happens when a roomful of people meditate. But my conditioning is too strong to make the leap to believing that we, and everything else are all aspects of the one energy field.

A cynical voice within says it’s too beautiful, too poetic, and out of whack with crusty old one dimensional space/time reality that I've been conditioned with - the Newtonian reality that is so unforgiving and in a perpetual state of dying.

I suppose in this I’m a bit like a Catholic agnostic – I want it to be true and I hope it might be, but in the end I have no faith.

So is there anybody out there who can pull me over the line?

Because I would so love to bask in that new and affectionate reality, the one where I actually feel the connection with the birds, trees, insects and soil - where I live it in every second of my life - the field of everything that shimmers with the same luminescence as my thoughts.

Let me know if you've crossed the line ... coz I'd really like to know how you got there ...

Cya

moonman