CHAPTER EIGHT

A Creative Cosmos:

Re-Aligning with a Living Universe

What stood out for me in the early stages was the interconnectedness of everything to form a seamless whole. The entire universe is an undivided, totally unified, organic phenomenon. I saw various breakthroughs … as but the early phases of the scientific discovery of this wholeness. I knew that these discoveries would continue to mount until it would become impossible for us not to recognize the universe for what it was – a unified organism of extraordinary design reflecting a massive Creative Intelligence.

Christopher Bache

The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science.

Sir James Frazer

Humans have their duties as do the plants, the stones, and the darkness.

Rose von Thater-Braan

There is an old fable about a young fish which, upon hearing of the wise old sage fish that lives upriver, decided one day to swim upriver to seek out this wise one. After much hard swimming against the current, and after what seemed like such a long time for the young fish, he eventually arrives at the cleft in the rock where he sees the wise fish. Exhausted, panting, yet eager to converse, the young fish approaches the wise one expectantly. ‘Yes,’ says the wise one, ‘what is the question that you have so desperately come here to ask?’ ‘Well,’ begins the young fish, ‘I’ve had this burning question on my mind for so long. I really need to know … what’s this thing that is called “water”?’

We are all of us surrounded each moment with the mystery, the energies, the tools for our own future living, just as the young fish in the above tale. We are already, and always have been, immersed in the ‘waters’ of our existence, so to speak. And this existence is not a solitary, isolated life on a stony rock hurtling through a chemically active yet ‘dead’ universe, as our science would perhaps lead us to believe. As was discussed in Chapter Six, it is very likely that we have entered what has been termed as the rising arc of the Dwapara Yuga, the Bronze Age; and in this cycle of development humanity retains a comprehension of some of the finer forces and more subtle energies of the cosmos. This includes a progressive understanding of the various forces of attraction and repulsion, leading to recognition that all matter, all atomic form, is nothing other than the manifestation of energy and vibratory forces.

In fact, we have in some ways already arrived at this stage with the latest discoveries of quantum mechanics, string theory and the model of a holographic universe. Despite arriving here in ‘theory’, and despite many of our scientists having utilized these findings in some of their latest investigations, this recognition has not yet seeped into mass public consciousness. It is a relatively few people on this planet who genuinely understand and accept (or ‘get it’) that all physical life is a secondary manifestation from a primary source of energy. Since thought-waves and consciousness are themselves forms of energy, then it can be logically deducted (if not intuitively sensed) that consciousness is a primary source of all life. This shift – or leap – from a material basis of life to a universal foundation of energies and consciousness may itself represent this ongoing transition of understanding towards the ‘finer energies’ that Yukteswar referred to as part of the Dwapara Yuga cycle. If this is indeed the case, as I believe it is and for which this book argues, then humanity is on the cusp of a paradigm shift from a dead to a living, creative universe.

Entangled within a Creative Cosmos

It is high time that humanity’s dominant belief systems, and scientific dogma, moved away from its dreadfully reductionist and anthropocentric view of the universe. From this stance the general consensus is that we have been lucky to have found ourselves in a ‘just-right’ universe that was accidentally created by chance. Yet according to the calculations of mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, the probability of coming across such a universe, fine-tuned to life, by random selection is 1 in 10¹⁰¹²³. There would be more certainty that a living universal intelligence existed than this! Physicist Bernard Haisch asks, in response to this extreme probability, whether it would be so strange after all to consider the existence of a transcendental agency or intelligence at work? Yet, as Haisch himself admits, whilst the calculations certainly suggest this alternative such a hypothesis is outside of empirical study.

So how did we humans, or rather our universe, arrive at such luck? Well, the scientific rationalists have come up with the ‘infinite universe’ theory which suggests that instead of just one, there must be an infinite number of other universes, in other dimensions, so that by the law of probability one has to be just right, purely by chance! The corollary is that there is an infinite number of dead universes out there (somewhere) so why shouldn’t one of them just randomly happen to have the exact fine-tuned gaseous mix required for what we have come to regard as ‘life’? Thus, human self-consciousness is a fluke that just happened to occur because our trillion-plus starry universe ended up supporting the complex growth of neurochemical evolution – now isn’t that a radical idea!¹ According to evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris:

We stand at a critical time in human history where the ‘self-evident’ axiomatic ‘truth’ of a depressingly meaningless mechanical universe running down by entropy, magically giving rise to biological creatures doomed to endless competitive struggle to get what they can while they can, is no longer defensible.²

Whilst a mechanical universe may no longer be feasible, in Sahtouris’s words, it still remains the dominant worldview. At least the scientific community is shifting to see a bigger picture beyond the ‘solitary universe’ thinking; and some are now even framing universes in terms of birthing organisms. Science writer John Gribbin sees the universe as just one component within a huge array of other universes; what he views as a self-reproducing system connected by space ‘tunnels’ that join a ‘baby’ universe to its ‘parent’. In this anthropomorphic view Gribbin explains that those universes that leave the most ‘offspring’ are the successful ones. Still, the dead universe theory – as opposed to the living universe one – assumes that all life was organized by random processes thanks to a spewing out of chemical debris from a massive explosion several billion years ago. Well, if that’s the meaning of life, it doesn’t leave us much to go on.

But what’s so wrong with the ‘living universe’ theory? It puts forward the notion that the universe, our cosmos, is a continuous flow-through of energy. Within a living universe the whole underlying energetic order is recreated and sustained at each moment, rather than being a lifeless, random mass. Such a shift in perception of the meaning of our cosmos would have profound implications for our understanding of the significance of human life. As social scientist Duane Elgin remarks:

In a dead universe, consumerism makes sense; in a living universe, simplicity makes sense. If the universe is unconscious and dead at its foundations, then each of us is the product of blind chance among materialistic forces. It is only fitting that we the living exploit on our own behalf that which is not alive. If the universe is lifeless, it has no larger purpose or meaning, and neither does human existence … However, if we consider the universe to be alive, then we have an inherent connection to a deep, fundamental and penetrating intelligence. Every action in a living universe carries meaning, responsibility, and consequences. It shifts our way of perceiving the significance of life. We are then imbued with an evolutionary purpose.³

Surely, then, we need to consider ourselves as more than accidents of physics and chemistry? As humanity advances not only in its scientific discoveries of ‘finer energies’, but also as our species develops its innate capacities and organs of intuition, empathy and new patterns of thinking, the realization may finally dawn on us that there is no inconsistency in viewing our cosmos as a living, energetic environment. And in this way our species, in stepping further along its evolutionary journey, will see that the cosmos not only continuously sustains us but that we are all intimately related to everything that exists. After nearly 4 billion years of evolution upon Earth, humans may finally regard themselves as agents of co-creation within an active creative cosmos.

It is interesting to note on this discussion of a living universe that Nobel Prize scientist Francis Crick, who co-discovered the DNA sequence, could not understand how even a single assembled protein could have emerged by chance. Crick calculated the odds of this happening as just 1 chance in 10²⁶⁰: this is an immeasurable sum when we consider that all the atoms in the entire visible universe have been calculated to amount ‘only’ to 10⁸⁰. Both Francis Crick and astronomer Fred Hoyle believed that life was already too complex when it first appeared on Earth and thus must have originated elsewhere first. Hoyle is now infamous for stating, somewhat controversially amongst his peers, that for complex life to have originated by chance is statistically the same odds as a hurricane blowing through a scrap yard and producing a Boeing 747. He promoted a general Panspermia hypothesis which says that life exists throughout the universe and is distributed by bacteria being present on passing/crashing meteoroids, asteroids and planetoids.

Similarly, Crick in his book Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature put forward the hypothesis that since it was highly unlikely that complex bacteria on Earth arose by random chance it was therefore more likely to have arrived at Earth by what is known as ‘Directed Panspermia’. That is, the seeds of life, the early bacterial forms of DNA, may have been purposely spread by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization; either because this civilization was facing extinction, or as a means for terraforming planets perhaps for later colonization. Crick concludes this hypothesis by stating that DNA is ‘not of this Earth’. It may be interesting to note also at this point that there have been allegations that Crick used LSD to help decipher/visualize the patterned structure of DNA. According to a newspaper article in 2004 an associate, who had met Francis Crick at Cambridge, was told by him that ‘some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas’.⁴ Crick then went on to tell him that he had perceived the double-helix shape whilst on LSD. As an addendum to this, researchers from Boston University and Harvard Medical School in the mid 1990s examined 37 DNA sequences to see if they contained a patterned form of organized language that would comply to known laws (specifically Zipf’s Law or Shannon’s Information Theory). Whilst they discovered that the coded sequences of DNA did not follow any of these patterns, the 97 per cent un-coded sequences, or ‘junk DNA’, did indeed plot ‘communicable patterns’ as if they could carry coded messages.⁵

There is indeed still much to learn in terms of the ‘hidden languages’ of our creative environment; it is a positive foreshadowing that many disciplines – psychology, philosophy, theology etc. – are now gradually beginning to shift in perspective, in terms of viewing ourselves as part of a dynamic, living universe. This is surely an indication of the changing times, of the recognition that humanity’s evolution requires more than an endless struggle within a dead universe. The notion of having existence within a mechanical blind universe, which neither acknowledges nor cares about the role and function of life, may once have been a useful paradigm, yet now must surely be cast aside as an outworn dogma. It no longer makes sense to perpetuate this separatist, isolationist perspective in an era where our very significance and survival implores us to adopt an integral and ecological view of physical and conscious life. We need to recognize that looking to the future means that we, collectively, have to shift away from the limitations of our assumptions.

It may be that at present our individual imaginations are constrained by the boundaries of our collective psyche; however, this collective psyche is now changing and evolving. As it once dawned on the early sea-faring explorers that the world could not be flat, so now is the realization beginning to grow within people’s minds that the universe of which we are a part is not in fact dead, but full of vibrant life and conscious energy. Our latest scientific terms are now starting to reflect this realization, as words such as quantum vacuum, zero-point energy, creative energy and quantum consciousness are now beginning to infiltrate our literature, media and speech. The possibility of life existing within an energetic universe appears more probable with each new discovery and tweak in our paradigms of human thought. The fact that our blueprint – DNA – could have potentially arrived from elsewhere in the universe is another pause for thought.

If we pursue this line of enquiry then we must, sooner rather than later, come to the question of whether there exists conscious intelligence within such a living universe. Further, can transpersonal states of consciousness form a connection, or bridge, with such other conscious realms? Whilst to some people this may sound too far-fetched, I would offer the suggestion that the transpersonal dimension of consciousness has been known for millennia amongst various traditions, regardless of the fact that it has been largely denied and dismissed by our rational sciences.

The Primacy of Consciousness

The rational view that we are an isolated sentient species, even perhaps alone in the vastness of a chemically gaseous universe, is a relatively recent worldview and dominant paradigm. When the idea of communing with other ‘intelligences’ is brought up, many people automatically think of shamans and tribal rituals that the modern world has labelled as ‘primitive’. Yet despite our very recent modern criticisms, and against rational logic, elements of almost every society that has existed since the appearance of modern humans has exhibited some form of belief in the existence of beings and intelligences in other realms. And despite the seeming differences in outward forms the central uniting factor is a funda mental connection to inherent ‘irrational beliefs’ in the supernatural; that is, in the non-material forces that penetrate the veil into our everyday realities. As historical researcher Graham Hancock notes:

Belief in the supernatural – whether manifested through spiritual beings thought to have been born in human form, or through revelations to particular humans – has been responsible for social, political, economic and cultural developments ‘of monumental significance in the history of mankind’.⁶

This relationship to supernatural forces goes back even as far as the rock paintings of therianthropes (shape-shifters from human to animal form) that date back 35,000 years, and are speculated to be the early origins of human religious traditions. The symbolic paintings and drawings on cave walls and traces of ancient rituals which appear throughout the Palaeolithic era display a ‘primitive’ people in touch with the unseen realm, with a creative world beyond that of the human, and a transcendental space which modern humans, in effect, have never stopped attempting to access. In recognition of this, noted anthropologist David Lewis-Williams has built a theory, after extensive investigations, which explains how the people of the Upper Palaeolithic era harnessed altered states of consciousness to fashion their society, and also used such imagery as a means of establishing and defining social relationships.⁷

Notably, anthropologist Weston La Barre has stated that:

All our knowledge of the supernatural derives de facto from the statements made by religious visionaries and ecstatics, i.e. prophets and shamans … Priests only administrate the ecclesia established on this supernatural basis …⁸

In spite of the tens of thousands of years that separate modern humanity from its ancestral cave-dwellers, the notion of entering into a more dynamic and creative union with the larger cosmos has been, it appears, a hard-wired aspect of our deeper selves. Throughout the millennia those persons more able to access this capacity, such as shamans, mystics and prophets, have often done so for the benefit of their communities, and to bring knowledge and aid to the human family (whether local or on a wider global scale). To many who negotiate these realms, and maintain these capacities, the notion that the wider cosmos is a living, intelligent realm is second nature. It is also fair to say that virtually all human beings have the capacity to access these latent abilities; many people are already doing so without actually realizing it, or casting it off as coincidence, fluke, good luck, or weird anomaly. However, in this modern age of radical seeking (see previous chapter), there has been a great increase in the number of people reaching the understanding that the universe can be connected to, and aligned with human intentions. Again referring to Hancock he notes that:

Once we have entered a state of consciousness that has been altered deeply enough – itself a universal neurological capacity of the human race – it seems that everyone, everywhere, experiences visions containing very much the same combinations of patterns and shapes.⁹

What this seems to suggest is that the human brain (our neurological capacity) may function as an antenna into the finer realms that form a part of the larger creative cosmos. Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, best known as the first person to synthesize LSD and to learn of its psychedelic effects, wrote in his autobiography LSD: My Problem Child:

Since the endless variety and diversity of the universe correspond to infinitely many different wavelengths, depending on the adjustment of the receiver, many different realities … can become conscious … to shift the wavelength setting of the receiving ‘self’, and thereby to evoke alterations in reality consciousness.¹⁰

In a previous book, The Struggle for Your Mind, I noted how the human nervous system operated on a synchronous quantum field level and thus could operate as a receiver of finer energies. In a similar manner it has been suggested by many thinkers that the brain is also likely to function as a biochemical and bioelectric receiver that, directly or indirectly, may be ‘tuned into’ a variety of wavelengths not normally accessible to our consciousness. This could be one of the primary reasons for the great emphasis in wisdom traditions on fostering an altered state of consciousness through such practices as fasting, deprivation and meditation (as practised by the early ascetics); sweat lodges; exhaustive ritual dancing/spinning in circles; and prolonged chanting and prostration, etc. Humanity has been experimenting with countless methods to induce an alternate state of consciousness for millennia, as if inherent within the deeper self there is a remnant, a trace, of an ability to transcend to a finer state of being that has now become lost to us.

Yet modern rational science has remained blind to this, or considers it a fringe, esoteric irrational belief system. Naturally, such a course of investigation does not lend itself to ‘rational’, scientific proof. To take Rupert Sheldrake’s metaphor, it is like taking apart a television set to investigate each part, such as the transistor, the tube etc., yet not being able to understand how the programmes are received or where they come from. In other words, it is the elephant in the dark scenario whereby the individual parts are investigated, pulled apart and scrutinized, yet the overall integral significance and functioning is completely lost.

This integral vision has thus, so far, often been the domain of the few, and the bridge to integrate the spiritual/non-physical with the everyday world has been tenuous in many cases. Often this connecting bridge has been manifested through direct personal revelation, which in past cases such as the Gnostics, Cathars, mystics and seers etc., was vehemently stamped out by religious authorities (as in the infamous Inquisition). Yet as our world gradually moves into an era of finer, subtler energies we are likely to find that the future stage will be based more on consciousness: the sciences of consciousness, the vision, creativity and evolution of consciousness, and the notion that consciousness is primary. Consciousness researcher Dr Strassman has noted that:

By revolutionizing our understanding of spirit realms, hopefully our understanding of the physical/material realms would evolve – into more ethical, co-operative and beneficent practices.¹¹

Dr Strassman views consciousness as an inherent part of the universe such that any theory or science which does not recognize this will never be a complete description of humanity’s place in the larger cosmic picture. Further, Dr Strassman contends that a creative and dynamic communion with transpersonal realms of experience may help humanity to recognize and understand the situation we are currently facing here on Earth:

Establishing – with a sober, altruistic intent – reliable and generally available means of contact with these different levels of existence may help us alleviate some of the pressing issues we are facing on this planet in this time-space continuum. It even may be that the information and resources we gather in these noncorporeal realms are more important to our survival – and ultimately our evolution – than that which we obtain via strictly physical means.¹²

We have seen in the previous chapter that the radical seeking and experimentation of the 1960s, with altered states of consciousness especially, have helped to prepare the way for a generation more in tune with transpersonal concepts and values. It may well be that ‘the actual experience that extra-sensory states exist may be the foundation for a future which contains extra-sensory experience as a widespread attribute’.¹³ It is important that we embrace ideas now, so that they may become acceptable mental currency in advance of their actualization.

Such actualization would create new strata of meaning within our human lives to counteract the growing forces of psychological and social isolation, anxiety, stress, depression and other similar states of dis-ease that afflict materialistic societies, too heavily dependent upon a pharmaceutical lifestyle. The now redundant view that the physical life we have on Earth is the only life we have has been the driver of a physically abusive and hedonistic way of living that embraces rampant consumerism (retail therapy?), violence, sexual gratifications, chemical-infested food, drastic pollution and the severe desecration of our natural resources. It is a paradox that our extended conscious awareness has yet to fully acknowledge a cosmic heritage that has consciousness at its core.

The denial of the primacy of consciousness has been a prime factor behind humanity abusing the Earth and all her bounteous gifts as nothing more than a useful commodity to utilize as we see fit. This denial is systemic throughout our species and adds to our increasing inhumanity. It degrades the quality of our deepest thoughts, emotions, actions and inner states. It could ultimately also be our collective undoing if we, as a sentient species, remain unable to confirm any sense of meaning, wonder, dynamic creativity and living intelligence beyond our material agents and forces. If the truth of the primacy of consciousness were to be reasserted, and accepted on a wide scale within the hearts and minds of humanity, human life would become qualitatively different and many of the obstacles facing our world today would be removed.

Human self-consciousness is a recent evolutionary endowment, relatively speaking, and as yet we seem unable to grasp the full extent of its capacities and possibilities. It is as if we haven’t yet learnt how to think properly, still inundated as we are with the ‘old mind’. We haven’t yet engaged in a collective perceptual shift; however, the time is getting nearer when such a critical mass will be reached since a majority is not required. A mental mutation is already underway within our human societies, almost in a fractal sense. By this I mean each element of our diverse lives around the globe, although outwardly different, contains the same inner aspects that respond similarly to impacts and influences, be they mental or emotional. Humanity manifests more commonality than difference; like a fractal geometric design, if a small part of humanity is magnified into focus it still resembles the whole. As renowned Persian poet Rumi stated:

Let the drop of water that is you become a hundred mighty seas. But do not think that the drop alone becomes the Ocean. The Ocean, too, becomes the drop.

At the same time that our global networks of communication are interconnecting us in new, varied and fascinating ways, spreading empathy and commonality, the new sciences of consciousness are slowly beginning to recognize how we are non-physically connected through many subtle and indirect interactions (e.g. see ‘mirror neurons’ from the previous chapter). Cultural historian and environmentalist Thomas Berry observed that the universe is not a collection of objects but rather a communion of subjects. Likewise, we are coming around to viewing the fact that ‘a community, people working together with their hearts and minds in alignment around a shared intention of the highest integrity, creates an amplified field of intentionality, like a laser beam of coherent consciousness …’.¹⁴ Such sparks of a new ‘coherent consciousness’, a new perceptual paradigm, are breaking through around the world in diverse and unexpected ways, from both our elders as well as our younger generations (more on this in the next chapter).

Canadian psychiatrist Richard Bucke, in his Cosmic Consciousness, anticipated that this state of consciousness would gradually be experienced by more and more people until a ‘critical mass’ would unfold, shifting our collective human thinking onto a new trajectory. This phase-shift would mark the transition from a material ‘dead universe’ into the understanding that our planet, with its native species, is an inherent part of a much more vast, living, creative cosmos. As such, this new paradigm would bring with it the recognition that what we do here on Earth reflects back onto the larger canvas of life above and beyond our one planet. This new consciousness, as Bucke intimated, may seem far away yet in reality may require nothing more than the slimmest of shifts, as William James noted:

… our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness very different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and, at a touch, they are there in all their completeness … No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.¹⁵

Many other philosophers, especially those who were experimenting with transpersonal states of perception during the 20th century, began to perceive the strata of human consciousness and the narrow range that defined modern humanity’s viewpoint. Aldous Huxley, for example, once referred to our current limits of thought as ‘a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet’.¹⁶ Yet at the same time Huxley recognized that individuals could shift this ‘trickle’ of consciousness into a more receptive state, either through deliberate spiritual exercises, psychological mechanisms such as hypnosis, or by means of drugs. These ‘temporary by-passes’, as he called them, would allow glimpses of the bigger picture of reality. Similarly, Graham Hancock, whom I referred to earlier, believes that it is highly probable that around 2 per cent of the human population has the type of brain chemistry in ‘just the right state of flux’ that would allow them periodic glimpses into visions and an altered transpersonal state of consciousness without the need for drugs or other means of deliberate stimulus.

What this tells us is that there are alternative states of consciousness to which access appears to be inherent within the human being; only that a deliberate set of stimuli is often required in order to catalyse this shift. However, there is also a possible slim minority of individuals who are able to access these states, perhaps unknowingly, and at sporadic times. Some of these transpersonal shifts may also account for the presence of paranormal (psi) abilities and phenomena such as extrasensory perception and psycho-kinesis that are prevalent throughout many cultures, both modern and the more tribal-based. The Huxley/James/Hoffman school of thought would concur that alternate realities do indeed exist (perhaps at an alternate level of vibration?) and can be accessed when our ‘receiving apparatus’ – our brains and nervous systems – are altered in their chemical composition, wiring or vibration, either naturally or by artificial means.

It may also be speculated that if we take the cyclic Yuga Ages as a template, then our current rising Dwapara Age (Bronze Age) reflects the fact that our solar system is in a different part of its orbit around our binary star. Thus, our solar system is now entering a phase that reflects differing gravitational and electromagnetic forces. It could therefore be feasible to suggest that humanity’s dawning awareness of the finer, subtler energies of our universe will coincide with a shift in the mental faculties of our species. Our new sciences that investigate the quantum nature of the universe may be an initial step in this direction. So too may be the reported increase of people’s beliefs in the transpersonal properties of human consciousness.

The New Psychophysics

If our mental faculties are due for a tune-up then this will turn out to be a momentous shift upon our human evolutionary journey that is still so relatively recent. Since our origin as humans reaches back only a few million years (according to current scientific knowledge), then it is estimated that we have experienced only 200,000 generations. This is a short span of time when compared to the earliest known bacterial forms of life, which have gone through 10 trillion generations; horses – 27 million generations; and elephants – an estimated 10 million. Further, according to the skeletal remains of prehistoric human beings there appears to have been no observable change in human anatomy for at least 100,000 years. We have, however, made great progress upon our cultural, social and neurological evolutionary path. It is almost certain that we would find huge differences if we compared a brain’s neural structure from today’s modern society with that of a person’s brain from even 50,000 years ago. The cultural-social conditions, survival requirements, and everyday experiences all converge to influence and shape the neurological condition of our human brains. We are, to put it bluntly, at the whim of shifting energy and information flows. And under these conditions our neurons fire in different areas of our brains, thus forming diverse groups and specific connections. As neurologists like to say – neurons that fire together, wire together!

Our modern sciences have made great strides in unfolding the mystery of consciousness and human neurological functioning. We have analysed the way we think, feel and behave to a point where we are very clinical about this. Thus, evolution for us is as much a psychical and psychological adaptation as it is physical. As cultural historian Lewis Mumford once stated:

If ‘Be Yourself’ is nature’s first injunction, ‘Transform Yourself’ was her second – even as ‘Transcend Yourself’ seems, at least up to now, to be her final imperative.¹⁷

The notion of ‘transcending ourselves’ is very much a part of the evolutionary trajectory of humankind. That this is so can perhaps be seen from the ageless perennial wisdom traditions; the shamanic rituals; the earliest recorded otherworldly creatures on ancient cave walls; as well as the ongoing presence in human societies of the inherent search for meaning and the yearning for self-revelation. As some validation of this it has recently been discovered that the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France is full of painted monsters, 400 metres below the surface, where a mixture of carbon dioxide and radon gas leads to hallucinations. In these cave chambers the wall paintings become so strange and ‘otherworldly’ that scientists now think that heading down to the chamber may have formed part of a ritual for prehistoric man. These rituals may in fact be one of the earliest known examples of using substances (in this case the natural mixture of carbon dioxide and radon gas) to induce altered states of consciousness: in other words, a shamanistic experience.

As I have suggested throughout this book, humanity may now be in need of a new collective worldview; one that sheds the way of ‘old mind’ thinking and replaces it with a perceptual paradigm that is more relevant to today’s changing world. This transition is metaphorically described as resembling a collective planetary near-death experience; a rite of passage or underworld journey, where the ‘hero’ emerges with new perceptual faculties gained from the ‘dark’ experiences of the journey (see Chapter Three). In this sense it is worth remembering that humans are wired for change. The latest research in the quantum sciences, including biophysics, throws new light upon the workings of the human mind/brain and consciousness, as well as the human nervous system and our DNA.

We can think of the brain as a collection of nerve cells that operate much like a multilayered frequency receptor. Due to initial conditionings, early on in life (such as experiences and external impacts) each receptor becomes wired to perceive a particular wave frequency. As the brain’s receptors tune in to a particular pattern of waves a ‘pattern recognition’ response is received by the brain and interpreted according to the perceptions allotted to the frequency. In other words, the act of tuning in involves picking up familiar frequency patterns out of the ocean of frequencies that surround us constantly. By tuning to the same patterns again and again we are reinforcing a particular perception of reality which is, more often than not, shared because of our local cultural environment. We are thus tuning into a shared, or consensus, reality pattern unconsciously and forming our perceptions continually from this. Unfamiliar patterns often get ignored since they do not fall within our receptor remit.

Perception is thus dynamically created, moment by moment, as the brain constantly scans the bands of frequencies that surround us. However, if this pattern-recognition behaviour does not evolve over time, our perceptual development is in danger of stalling. The result is that we become fixed – or trapped – within a particular reality. This is why human development requires that we move through various paradigm shifts in order to evolve our collective thinking/perceptual patterns. In other words, our development rests upon simultaneous psychical processes as well as biological.

However, materialistic science has dominated our way of thinking to the point where we are taught to dismiss subjective and intuitive impulses and experiences. Yet it has now become an evolutionary necessity that our dominant reliance upon material pursuits be balanced with an increase in consciousness research that supports the significant role of a ‘shared’ or ‘extended’ mind. Part of this breakthrough is coming through the research into how our human minds are affected by electromagnetic fields, as was briefly touched upon in Chapter Six.

The existence of an electromagnetic (EM) field associated with the brain was known as far back as 1875, when the English physiologist Richard Caton made electrical recordings from the brain surface of dogs and rabbits. Then the breakthrough and beginning of modern EM-field theories in biology began to emerge from 1970 onwards, with reports coming out on the ground-breaking work of Soviet bioelectromagnetics researchers. This research was amongst the first to posit the outline for an EM-field theory of living organisms and their relationships to the environment. These days the theory of the electromagnetic field of consciousness is more popular amongst researchers; one of the principle proponents of this theory today is Johnjoe McFadden.

The current theories suggest that the electromagnetic field generated by the brain is the actual carrier of conscious experience. McFadden proposes that the ‘fields generated by one hundred billion neurones must overlap and superimpose, to generate an extraordinarily complex EM-field inside our brain’.¹⁸ In this way an EM field is created from the neuronal electrical activity in the brain, and this EM field will, in turn, amend neural electrical activity. Thoughts and images in our minds might be induced not by the firing of specific neuronal patterns but rather from the effects of a complex EM-field wave. That is, each neurone contributing to the thought or image will generate its own EM field, each of these superimposing to form the overall complex wave that becomes the final thought or image inside our minds.

As if to validate this, further consciousness research has shown that a person’s conscious experience correlates with the synchrony of neuronal firing rather than with the number of neurons firing. This aspect of the synchronous firing of neurons is thus argued by its proponents to greatly amplify the influence of the brain’s EM field; just as a team of people working harmoniously together on a project would be more efficient than each working as a non-communicative individual.

In this EM-field theory of human consciousness McFadden proposes that the information from the brain’s neurons is integrated to form a conscious electromagnetic information field in the brain. This has now been termed the cemi theory of human consciousness. One of the advantages of this theory is that it may help to account for a range of human psychic – psi – experiences, since it postulates the presence of an extended mind field, as I discuss later in the chapter. It also suggests that an individual’s attention and awareness can help to focus a synchronous firing of multiple neurons rather than the firing of individual neurons. Since neurons firing together generate a stronger EM field, practices that encourage this neuronal coherence will provide for a more balanced mental state. This may go some way in explaining why many religious, spiritual and holistic traditions encourage group meditation as a way of stimulating group consciousness and connection.

It has also been shown that practised meditators can achieve an extremely high level of cross-hemispheric synchronization. Similarly, people who mediate together have been discovered to synchronize their brain activity. Through the use of EEG brain scanning it has been found that brainwave activity is synchronized amongst the participants of the group. Likewise, families may, according to some psychotherapists, possess a common unconscious and shared emotional field; such as the established research proving brainwave correlations between the brains of identical twins. It can perhaps be speculated here that this is a result of resonance occurring between the various EM fields of human consciousness.

We can only hope that the brain’s conscious EM field is vigorous and sufficiently resistant to external impacts since the modern world is now hugely awash with the electromagnetic fields from our ubiquitous technologies. For example, according to the research of Robert O Becker ‘the human species has changed its electromagnetic background more than any other aspect of its environment … the density of radio waves around us now is 100 million or 200 million times the natural level reaching us from the sun’.¹⁹ Becker has no doubt that the greatest polluting element in the Earth’s environment during our present era is the rapid growth in electromagnetic fields. The fast rise in mobile phone usage worldwide has contributed significantly to our exposure to EM energy above and beyond our normal limits. Some mobile phones operate in the megahertz range, others in the gigahertz range, which is billions of cycles per second. This means that the EM radiation is oscillating at extremely rapid frequencies. However, the issue of EM radiation is still under debate and remains a controversial subject.²⁰

It is interesting that McFadden views life and consciousness as quantum phenomena, and that the interactions between our EM fields and matter can be described by the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). Here we may now be speculating on the coherence between EM fields and quantum fields, which I shall discuss further in the next chapter. We will leave McFadden’s ideas here with his enigmatic remark that ‘great ideas are not pulled out of the air; but out of the quantum multiverse’.²¹

However, the trail neither stops nor begins here; to get a fuller picture we need to take a look at what was being discovered in terms of brain research in the 1970s – and this picture brings us to the pioneering work of Karl Pribram. Pribram’s holonomic brain theory of perception and memory, first proposed in 1971, has also helped to contribute to the modern field theory of human consciousness. Pribram’s theory proposes that information received by the brain is enfolded by ‘Fourier-like transformations’, and since Fourier processes are the basis of holography the information is thus stored in the form of holographic interference patterns, i.e. coherent EM fields. Basically, holographic processes enable an information field (generally in the form of light) to be reconstructed once the original source of its information is no longer present. Further, since holography operates as a field, each part of the hologram contains the whole. In terms of the brain, Pribram proposed that memories can be accessed from different areas since each part of the brain contains the whole, in a holographic manner. In this way the holographic nature of the brain can store a huge amount of information. This would indeed be a very efficient way of storing information when we consider that eminent mathematician John von Neumann calculated that during an average lifetime of 70 years we accumulate some 280 trillion bits of information. In this way Pribram proposes that coherent holographic fields mediate between consciousness and neurological processes.

Together with physicist David Bohm, Pribram later merged his model with Bohm’s more general ‘holographic theory of reality’, which then suggested that reality may itself be organized in a holographic way. Thus, the external physical world we perceive would be a second-order manifestation of the more fundamental holographic ‘implicate order’ which forms the basis for the universe’s fundamental unbroken wholeness. A few years later John Eccles, a Nobel prize-winning neurophysiologist, postulated that consciousness has in fact an existence independent of the brain, and that the ‘self’ interacts with the body and the external physical world using the brain as an instrument. Then in 1984 the physicist Henry Margenau suggested that the mind may exist as a type of non-material field, analogous to quantum probability fields.²² What this has led to is the acknowledgement that there are varied respected researchers now basing their hypotheses on the notion that consciousness may have a field-like nature.

For example, the new field of quantum neurodynamics is based on the hypothesis that brain processes are to be understood on the basis of quantum field theory. Experimental data has now been published from various credible sources supporting quantum processes in the brain, as well as evidence for the presence of quantum holography.²³ There are even popular science books on the market today which have introduced many new readers to the interesting and eye-opening ideas of existence within a holographic reality, such as Michael Talbot’s highly readable The Holographic Universe.

With all these new discoveries in our physical and biological sciences we are gleaning more and more information that describes how, rather than existing as separate units like islands dotted on the ocean, living organisms are in fact swathed in energy fields and waves of penetrating information flows that immerse our senses, more as if we were drops within an ocean. It is fair to say that there is a renaissance underway in human understanding, and each new finding has, at its core, a common feature: they each confirm that humanity is an intrinsic, dynamic and participating player within a creative living universe. Our old Cartesian separateness is no longer valid as a working model as it goes against the very ecological core that forms the fundamental foundation of all cosmic life – the notion of reciprocal maintenance.

This realization of our hidden connections has been percolating through the corridors of human science as well as through our popular consciousness over the last few decades.²⁴ This represents, in the words of Fritjof Capra, the turning point of human cultural evolution.²⁵ In fact, since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization depends on fields, whether they are called biological fields, developmental fields, or organizing fields. However, whilst many of these field theories recognized that, for example, all cells inherit fields of organization, they couldn’t explain the organization itself. That is, until UK biochemist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a novel interpretation of how biological morphogenetic fields may operate. Morphogenetic fields refer to groups of cells that respond to specific signals in order to develop particular biological structures, such as organs. Sheldrake now proposed that these signals acted as evolving patterns of biological information that were transmitted nonlocally through what he terms morphic resonance.

When Sheldrake proposed this hypothesis in his book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance in 1981 there were outcries from the academic community, some of whom accused Sheldrake of pseudoscience and of deliberately mixing magic with science. Now that this fury has largely abated more people are beginning to see the validity in Sheldrake’s claims and have begun to test this hypothesis. The notion of morphic resonance helps to explain how different animal species have evolved from their ancestors in a way that is more adaptive and quicker than orthodox accounts of Darwinian evolution. Morphic resonance describes how a species collective memory is transmitted, or rather inherited, by later generations through nonlocal field transference, with each individual drawing upon and contributing to the collective memory of the species. In this way there is no need for the vast amount of past species memories to be stored inside the brain. This form of self-organization offers a more dynamic picture of the ongoing two-way interactions between living organisms and their environment. Further, this process of dynamic feedback may not only be restricted to biological evolution, suggests Sheldrake, but may also play a role in ‘physical, chemical, cosmic, social, mental and cultural evolution’.²⁶

Morphic fields can thus be described as patterns of organized information that exist external to the brain; i.e. as non-visible energy fields. These non-visible fields store consecutive generations of biological information that can be accessed by living creatures that share the same ancestry; each particular species can ‘lock-in’ to their particular biological patterns that are part of this nonlocally organized information. The idea of morphic fields that underlie nonlocal transmission of evolutionary patterns, gives us a whole new way of perceiving the relations, communication and actions between living beings – including humans. As Sheldrake has gone on to explain, the species morphic fields help to connect together the individual, or group, members even when they are many miles apart, and provides a means – a channel of communication – through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance. In effect Sheldrake is postulating a theory for the extended mind when he says that mental activity is not actually confined to the insides of our heads. Thus, not only thoughts and emotions but also our intentions and our acts of attention have influence in the external world around us. Whilst this may sound a little ‘too much’ for some people Sheldrake notes that we are already familiar with this idea of extended fields:

… for example magnetic fields extend beyond the surfaces of magnets; the earth’s gravitational field extends far beyond the surface of the earth, keeping the moon in its orbit; and the fields of a cell phone stretch out far beyond the phone itself. Likewise the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains.²⁷

The hypothesis that the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains can also account for such anomalous phenomena as telepathy. On this subject Sheldrake has performed thousands of experiments, with humans as well as animals,²⁸ and concludes that these occurrences are not paranormal since telepathy, and similarly the sense of being stared at, are both common happenings. Whilst they may seem ‘paranormal’ to those of a rational Cartesian mindset, such psychic phenomena may in fact be manifestations of an inherent capacity of the human brain.

One way to think of this is to consider that most of human knowledge rests upon anomalies, as each discovery often replaces one that came before it. According to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, a new paradigm of thought comes into being when a sufficient number of anomalies have arisen which cannot be explained within the current accepted view. Hence, the paradigm ‘shifts’ and incorporates the previous sets of anomalies into the accepted consensus knowledge base.²⁹ As the number of so-called ‘paranormal’ events begins to accumulate as valid occurrences within the mainstream, it may be that extended theories of mind, such as proposed by the likes of Sheldrake, will begin to be considered more seriously by the orthodox scientific establishment.

Referring back to the earlier discussion of our present Yuga cycle (our Dwapara Yuga or the Bronze Age of the ascending arc), we are moving into the era where humanity will gain knowledge on the finer energies of the cosmos. These finer, subtler energies may very well include awareness of how information/organizing fields (both electromagnetic and quantum) contribute to nonlocal effects and phenomena of the extended mind. Let us not forget that to our own ancestors only a couple of hundred years ago the modern television, with its nonlocal transference of images and sounds, must have seemed like an act of magic. As Arthur C Clarke’s third law states: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

And yet we don’t even need to rely on advanced technology to infer ‘magical’ workings – the phenomenon of our own inherent magic is around us all the time (if only we knew how to ‘see’ it). For example, Sir Laurens van der Post in his book The Lost World of the Kalahari, describes how local bushmen had telepathic communication far beyond the range of sensory communication, sometimes knowing about a hunt up to 50 miles away and thus when to prepare for the hunters’ return. In order to research such phenomena Sheldrake has created a database which, as of 2003, had 312 actual cases of human premonition, precognitions or presentiments; 76 per cent of which were warnings to individuals about dangers, disasters, or deaths. Similarly, a national survey in the US in 1990 resulted in 75 per cent of people saying they had had at least one kind of paranormal experience, and 25 per cent had telepathic experiences.³⁰ Perhaps the most succinct popular modern summary and analysis of such phenomena to date is Dean Radin’s book The Conscious Universe.³¹

The positive side of this is that such discoveries can be liberating:

… the recognition that our minds extend beyond our brains liberates us. We are no longer imprisoned within the narrow compass of our skulls, our minds separated and isolated from each other. We are no longer alienated from our bodies, alienated from our environment, and alienated from other species. We are interconnected.³²

It may well be that much of what passes as ‘unexplained phenomena’ is actually connected, directly or indirectly, with information that is being transferred through nonlocal energy fields. The shelves in book shops (and virtual shelves online) are full of volumes having been written, either by laypersons or scientists, discussing experiments on remote viewing, ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, etc. It is also now more commonly recognized that many police and intelligence agencies throughout the world routinely use ‘psychics’ to assist in criminal and information-gathering cases – and often with success. Also, much of the modern research on communication ‘at-a-distance’, often referred to as remote viewing, began in the early 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by the physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, which incidentally was largely funded by the CIA. Such is the nature of ‘exposure creep’, a great deal of information on this subject is now a part of popular culture, and is even being taught in public workshops. Also part of popular books are the discourses on the power of the extended mind to effect healing at a distance, researched and analysed by medically trained practitioners such as Larry Dossey and Charles Tart.

Unbeknown to the world a great deal of paranormal research was conducted in the USSR during the Cold War, surprising and alarming the Western governments when this information finally became public. It was reported that at one Russian conference a Dr Sergeyev remarked that, according to his research, the most favourable time for psychic activity to occur is when there are magnetic disturbances of the Earth caused by sunspot activity.³³ On a similar note, Russian physiologist Dr Leonid Vasiliev, who headed the Soviet Union’s first parapsychology laboratory in Leningrad, commented that ‘Discovery of the energy behind psi will be comparable to the discovery of atomic energy’.³⁴ Or, as another person put it – ‘Human society today is faced with the dilemma of a breakdown or a breakthrough in human consciousness to match the breakthrough in science and technology’.³⁵

Now we are more than half a century beyond these days of early investigations, and very quickly moving into a new era of quantum research – literally taking humanity on a journey into the very heart of how the universe works. Yet are we quite ready for this?

As I have attempted to propose in earlier chapters of this book, the modern technological flows of information and communication may be helping to get people accustomed to intimate and meaningful relations-at-a-distance, stimulating empathic relations in global contexts. With this in ‘mind’ it would appear that humanity may indeed be more prepared than we think to begin shifting towards a nonlocal field/wave paradigm of energetic connections. It may well be that Carl Jung’s proposition of a ‘collective unconscious’ nearly a century ago was the forerunner to preparing the human mind to conceive of a deeper, fundamental field-like unitary reality underlying life in a creative cosmos.