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THE MECHANICS OF CREATION

AS MUCH AS we try to explain it, what happens when we die remains a miracle. We move from one world to another, we shed our old identity to experience “I am,” the identity of the soul, and we assemble the ingredients of a completely unique life in our next body. Science supports the claim that the field is capable of creative leaps and endless transformation. An oxygen atom, if it could tell its own story, would feel that a miracle has occurred when it bonds with hydrogen to form water. Its old identity was gaseous, its new one is liquid. Its old world was in the atmosphere, its new one is in oceans, rivers, and clouds. And what if this water molecule happens to become part of the human brain? Would oxygen suddenly experience being conscious?

This question is the final, most mysterious leap we have to explain. Oxygen, like every other atom in the brain, participates in consciousness as it courses through every neuron. Yet to say that oxygen itself is conscious goes too far. So how did consciousness creep in somewhere between oxygen atoms and the cerebral cortex? This is crucial in determining whether or not consciousness survives death. As I’ve already argued, the answer doesn’t lie in the brain. The brain is an inert object formed of organic chemicals. Those chemicals can be broken down into more basic molecules and atoms. Those atoms can be broken down into subatomic particles, which can in turn be broken down into energy waves that have their source in an invisible field.

Taking these steps one at a time, we get further away from consciousness rather than closer. The brain is aware, but we cannot say that energy waves are aware, even though the brain is ultimately nothing but energy. To solve this enigma, materialists argue that consciousness has no reality in itself; it is just a trick of the brain. Does this mean that if we could download a person’s complete memory into a supercomputer, we would achieve life after death? Would the living self continue to feel intact, experiencing the world just as before but from inside a machine?

This is a perfect example of how we can be victimized by our own explanations. Awareness can’t be found in information. The fact that a billion zeros and ones are loaded into a computer won’t make it conscious unless each zero and one is conscious already, which leads to the absurd conclusion that the numbers printed in a math textbook are thinking about themselves. You cannot explain consciousness at any level of nature without running into the same contradiction. So do we have to give up on scientific explanations or is science ready for insights that will force it to explain Nature differently?

Creative Leaps

One property we cherish in ourselves is the ability to create something new. We come by this honestly. The appearance of life on Earth depended on the sudden ability of a molecule, DNA, to replicate itself. No molecule before it had ever done that. We can explain the evolution of the universe entirely in terms of such creative leaps, or “emergent properties.” Before oxygen and hydrogen could discover how to become water, the cosmos had to create atoms, which weren’t present at the Big Bang, and atoms had to turn into gases, solids, metals, organic molecules, and so on. None of these events were simple combinations like pouring sugar into water. The sugar may disappear, but if you evaporate the water you find that the sugar has remained intact. There’s no new property in sugar water that wasn’t already present in the two components when they were separate.

An emergent property, on the other hand, is a creative leap that produces something out of nothing. In spiritual terms the cycle of birth and rebirth is a workshop for making creative leaps of the soul. The natural and the supernatural are not doing different things but are involved in transformation on separate levels. At the moment of death the ingredients of your old body and old identity disappear. Your DNA and everything it created devolve back to their simple component parts. Your memories dissolve back into raw information. None of this raw material is simply recombined to produce a slightly altered person. To produce a new body capable of making new memories, the person who emerges must be new. You do not acquire a new soul, because the soul doesn’t have content. It’s not “you” but the center around which “you” coalesces, time after time. It’s your zero point.

I was recently reminded of just how uncanny this transformation is. I know a couple from Italy who suffered a terrible family tragedy two years ago when their teenage son, Enrico, killed himself. He had gotten drunk with some friends, one of whom started playing with his father’s handgun. It went off and Enrico was killed. His family was devastated, all the more when it was suggested but never proved that their son had shot himself playing Russian roulette.

A week after he died his mother went into his bedroom. She had the impulse to pray for her son, and as she knelt by his bed she heard a noise. A remote-control toy car of Enrico’s had fallen off the shelf for no apparent reason. It began to run around the floor, and the mother removed its batteries. Still it continued to run. This strange phenomenon lasted three days, she told me. It was witnessed by the entire family, and Enrico’s older sister, the one he was closest to, insisted that her brother was operating the car. She asked it questions, as one would a Ouija board, and the car would go left or right to signal yes or no.

Months later Enrico’s father happened to be in India, and he went to a jyotishi, or astrologer. Certain jyotishis do not cast your chart but consult already written charts, many dating back centuries, that apply to the person who comes for a reading. (This decision is made according to the time a person appears and by matching certain personal data with charts that the astrologer has on hand.) This was true of my friend, who was told the following story: In his previous lifetime he had lived on the west coast of India. He was desperate to have a son, but unfortunately his wife was barren. The couple adopted a baby boy when suddenly she became pregnant and in time delivered a boy of their own.

After the biological son’s birth, the father began to ignore the adopted boy and abuse him. Tormented by this, the boy committed suicide at exactly the same age as Enrico. The astrologer told my friend that there was a connection here. The former son was reborn as Enrico, and he committed suicide again to show his father what it was like to lose a real son. Naturally, my friend was quite shaken to hear this, but when he met me some months later, he said that the final result was a sense of peace. He had come to terms with Enrico’s tragic death and understood the karma behind it.

I have no idea how many readers will scoff at this tale and how many will consider it uncanny but possibly true. To me, it says a great deal about how mysteriously life and death are woven together. They are two aspects of the same creative act. Our brains are set up to operate in time and space. We do not witness the mechanics of creation outside that framework. But the life you are experiencing now, the one that preceded it, and the one that will follow didn’t appear out of nowhere. They appeared through a continuous, evolving consciousness—the real you. There is a gap between lifetimes that we cannot observe, yet your soul keeps track of you as you enter the gap and reemerge. Consciousness doesn’t lose track of itself; the zero point of the soul is just as capable of correlating events across time and space as the Zero Point Field is.

In this story father and son remained joined across the gap between birth and death. They unconsciously recognized each other, they carried out a common purpose, and they worked out karma together—all these things defied death. At the same time their physical bodies, their private memories, and their sense of identity were transient—these didn’t survive death. Nature is built from the same intricate relationships. The oxygen atoms locked in a water molecule or in your brain are still themselves, but they have learned to relate in a totally new way, making it seem as if each separate atom has vanished—that is to say, died. I can’t emphasize enough that if science cannot explain the emergence of wetness from dryness, it cannot explain the emergence of consciousness in the brain. True creative leaps are always inexplicable and therefore miraculous.

The Source of Everything

What science should do is hold the miracle under a microscope to get closer to where creation occurs. There are faint physical traces to be followed down to a very subtle level. It has long been known that the brain, and the body as a whole, is surrounded by a very weak electromagnetic field. With the proper photographic emulsion, this field can be seen to glow; the minuscule electric charge given off by neurons as they fire is also measurable. If being conscious creates an energy field, can an energy field display consciousness? You would think that since the brain depends on electrical signals, it would be affected by the murky soup of radio, television, microwave, and many other electromagnetic emissions that surround us. Apparently this isn’t true. Parapsychology researchers have gone so far as to isolate subjects with psychic abilities in Faraday cages that block all electromagnetic energy without altering their abilities to see at a distance or exhibit other psychic phenomena. The case of “remote viewing” is especially intriguing because so much credible work has been done in this field.

Many experiments have been conducted in remote viewing, commonly called clairvoyance, but one of the most notable took place at Stanford University, where scientists built a machine called a SQUID, or superconducting quantum interference device. It’s enough for us to know that this device, which measures the activity of subatomic particles, specifically quarks, is very well shielded from all outside magnetic forces. This shielding begins with layers of copper and aluminum, but to fully ensure that no outside force can affect the mechanism, exotic metals wrap the inner core.

In 1972 a SQUID was installed in the basement of a laboratory at Stanford, apparently doing nothing except tracing out the same hill-and-valley S-curve on a length of graph paper. This curve represented the constant magnetic field of the Earth; if a quark passed through the field the machine would register it with changes in the pattern being drawn. A young laser physicist named Hal Puthoff (later to become a noted quantum theorist) decided that aside from its main use, the SQUID would make a perfect test of psychic powers. Very few people, including the scientists at Sanford, knew the inner workings of the machine.

A letter Puthoff wrote in search of a psychic who would take up the challenge drew a response from Ingo Swann, a New York artist with psychic abilities. Swann was flown to California without being told in advance about either the test or the SQUID. When he first saw it, he seemed a bit put off. But he agreed to “look” inside the machine, and as he did, the S-curve on the graph paper changed pattern—something it almost never did—only to go back to its normal functioning as soon as Swann stopped paying attention to it.

A startled Puthoff asked him to repeat this, so for forty-five seconds Swann concentrated upon seeing the inside of the machine, and for exactly that interval the recording device drew a new pattern, a long plateau on the paper instead of hills and valleys. Swann then drew a sketch of what he saw as the inner workings of the SQUID, and when these were checked with an expert, they perfectly matched the actual construction. Swann was vague about how he had changed the magnetic input that the machine was built to measure. It turned out that if he merely thought about the SQUID, not trying to change it at all, the recording device showed alterations in the surrounding magnetic field.

PEOPLE WHO ARE skeptical of psychic abilities ignore countless studies demonstrating that ordinary thought can actually affect the world. This is particularly important if mind is a field. I once participated in a controlled experiment in which a subject sitting in an isolated room (the sender) would intermittently look at a visual image, while I (the receiver) would press a button every time I sensed that this was happening. My accuracy, like most people’s, was far above average. (The British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who more than anyone has tried to explain how mind extends beyond the body, has done similar experiments. He has tested, for example, whether we can actually sense when someone is staring at us behind our backs. Those experiments have shown a greater than random outcome as well.)

In a long series of experiments in the Sixties, an FBI expert named Cleve Backster hooked plants up to polygraphs, knowing that lie detectors work by measuring changes of moisture on the skin surface. In his own words, here’s what happened next.

Then at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf I was testing. I didn’t verbalize, I didn’t touch the plant, I didn’t touch the equipment. The only new thing that could have been a stimulus for the plant was the mental image. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart.

This first startling observation in February 1966 led to a host of follow-ups as Backster measured responses to cigarette smoke, negative thoughts, and strong emotions; it turned out that houseplants register how people feel around them. The most remarkable finding, perhaps, was that if Backster hooked up a pair of plants and injured one plant in a separate room, the other plant registered the same disturbance in electrical activity as if it had been injured itself. The polygraph needle jumped even though the two plants had no physical connection, and it kept jumping even when the plants were separated by a greater distance. One can’t help but be reminded of the various studies in which identical twins sense what is happening to each other at a distance, to the point that one particular twin knew the instant his brother was electrocuted climbing a telephone pole and testified to actually feeling the pain himself. Are human twins paired through the same complementarity that bonds electrons in deep space?

To say that consciousness is a field creates only the outline of a proof. Nobody has accounted for the gap, and without that, consciousness remains totally mysterious; in fact, so do fields. The gap is the empty space between events; it contains nothing but itself, and yet it seems that everything comes out of it. When we look at DNA we are told by geneticists that life emerges not from the bits of amino acids strung on the double helix, but from the space between them. These spaces are little understood, but they play a mysterious role in the sequence of genes. In physical terms the DNA of gorillas and humans differs by less than 1%; the gaps between visible matter create the unbridgeable gulf between gorillas and humans. In the gap the source of consciousness must be revealed.

Sat Chit Ananda

The Vedic rishis followed the mind into the gap and declared that three primal qualities were the foundation of existence: Sat Chit Ananda. These are usually translated as a single phrase, “eternal bliss consciousness,” or individually as Sat (existence, truth, reality) Chit (mind, awareness) Ananda (bliss). But these definitions don’t help us much, since they assume an understanding of what we mean in English by reality, truth, bliss, and existence. These are far from settled. If you say, “It was blissful going to Aruba for Christmas. It changed my whole reality,” your words have meaning in everyday life, but they haven’t described Sat Chit Ananda.

If we unfold what the rishis meant, they were referring to an experience, which can be summarized as follows: Every thought you have, as well as every object you see in the world, is a vibration of the universe—the Sanskrit term is shubda. Shubda creates light, sound, touch, taste, and every other quality. In dreams you can also see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, but those vibrations are subtler. They don’t have the same feeling as concrete reality. When you go beyond the subtle qualities of the mind, shubda becomes so faint that the mind loses all experience of an outside reality, even shadowy wisps of memory. Eventually it experiences only itself, and there aren’t any vibrations at all. You are at the source.

The threshold of the source is silence. But you must step over the threshold into the room where reality is born. There you find that the raw materials are threefold. Creation springs from existence (Sat), consciousness (Chit), and the potential for vibrations to arise (Ananda). These three are the most real things in the universe because everything else that we call real comes from them.

It’s this experience of the source, a state beginning beyond silence, that the Vedic rishis considered the field of all fields—what physicists call the ground state or vacuum state. Being pregnant with every possible flicker of energy in the universe, the vacuum state still isn’t Sat Chit Ananda. It has no mind, no bliss. It cannot be experienced subjectively. By leaving these factors out, physics leaves out the physicist, who pretends that he isn’t part of the field. John Wheeler, an eminent Princeton physicist, decades ago pointed out this flaw: as we make models of the universe, he said, we act like someone with his nose pressed against the window of a bakery, looking at everything on display from the outside. But there is no window separating the observer from the universe; we are not outside what we see.

Wheeler’s suggestion that we must find a science that combines subjectivity and objectivity has been meagerly pursued, because science remains stubbornly objective, and it can afford to be when conducting isolated experiments. Ultimately, however, there is a limit that cannot be crossed, and we are quite close to it. We can face the limit of knowledge in a simple problem like prayer.

By now the public is well aware that research on prayer has validated that it works. In a typical experiment volunteers, usually from church groups, are asked to pray for sick people in the hospital. They do not visit the person and often have only a number rather than a name to go by. The prayer isn’t specific; they are asked simply to pray for God’s help. The results of such experiments have been startlingly positive. In the best-known one, conducted at Duke University in North Carolina, patients who were prayed for recovered faster and with fewer side effects than those not prayed for. Here we have one more demonstration that we are all connected by the same field of consciousness. The properties of the field operate here and now:

The field works as a whole.

It correlates distant events instantly.

It remembers all events.

It exists beyond time and space.

It creates entirely within itself.

Its creation grows and expands in an evolutionary direction.

It is conscious.

The Vedic rishis began with these qualities as their first principles; in that regard they were wiser than we are, with our reluctance to admit consciousness unless we are forced to at the far limits of a difficult scientific issue. The field of consciousness is primary to every phenomenon in Nature because of the gap that exists between every electron, every thought, every instant in time. The gap is the reference point, the stillness at the heart of creation, where the universe correlates all events.

Has science proved that the rishis were right? I think the most we can say—and it is a lot—is that science and the rishis are consistent with each other. They come from different worlds but see with the same vision—almost. Science is still burdened by spiritual materialism, the belief that any explanation of God, the soul, or the afterlife is valid only if matter contains the secret. This is like saying we can’t understand jazz until we diagram the atoms in Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

In the end, a book on the afterlife cannot fully reconcile us with the inevitability of death. It can only lead the way to finding personal comfort on your own. You and I are unique people and therefore very different. I may be consoled by a vision of eternity that is foreign or even frightening to you. I may mourn my aging body more than you, or less. We each have our own personal view of God. Yet we are bound together in the field of consciousness, and we do the same work there.

We need to see that we are all entangled in the same reality. Isolation has been outmoded on every front, from ecology to the Internet. We need to remember our common source. The human spirit is degraded when we confine ourselves to the span of a lifetime and the enclosure of a physical body. We are mind and spirit first, and that places our home beyond the stars.

Knowing that I will return to the field one day to find my source provides me with immeasurable confidence in the purpose of life. As fervently as any devout believer, I have faith in this vision. My faith is renewed every time I have a moment of witnessing, in which I can touch the silence of my own being. Then I lose all fear of death—indeed, I touch death right now, and gladly. Tagore said it so movingly:

When I was born and saw the light

I was no stranger in this world

Something inscrutable, shapeless, and without words

Appeared in the form of my mother.

So when I die, the same unknown will appear again

As ever known to me,

And because I love this life

I will love death as well.

Without death there can be no present moment, for the last moment has to die to make the next one possible. There can be no present love, for the last emotion has to die to make a new one possible. There can be no present life, for the old cells in my body have to die to make new tissue possible. This is the miracle of creation, which in every second is one thing: life and death joined in an eternal dance. It would be a catastrophe to exclude death from the dance. That would guarantee a universe with no chance for renewal. Fortunately, creation wasn’t set up that way. We live in an endlessly re-created universe. On the other side of our fears and doubts, our deepest prayer should not be for life, which we have in abundance. It should be a prayer to lead the cosmic dance, for then the angels and gods themselves will have someone to follow.