FROM THE MOMENT we become aware of the world around us, we begin to wonder about our place within it. The questions we ask are timeless: Why am I here? How do I fit into the scheme of things? What is my destiny? As children, we tend to think of the future as a clean sheet of paper upon which we can write our own stories. The possibilities seem endless, and we are energized by the promise of discovery and the sheer pleasure of living immersed in so much potential. But as we grow up, become adults, and are “educated” about our limitations, our view of the future becomes constricted. What once lifted our imaginations now weighs us down with dread and anxiety. What once felt boundless becomes narrow and dark.
There is a way to regain the soaring joy of unlimited potential. All that is required is an understanding of the true nature of reality, a willingness to recognize the interrelatedness and inseparability of all things. Then, aided by specific techniques, you will find the world opening up to you, and the good luck and opportunities that popped up every once in a while will occur more and more frequently. How powerful is synchrodestiny? Imagine for a moment that you find yourself with a flashlight in your hand in a room that is totally dark. You turn on the flashlight and see a beautiful painting hanging on the wall. You might think, “Sure, this is a wonderful work of art, but is this all there is?” Then, all at once, the room becomes illuminated from above. You look around and see that you are in an art museum, with hundreds of paintings on the walls around you, each more beautiful than the last. As these possibilities stand revealed to you, you realize you have a lifetime of art to study and love. You are no longer constrained to view just one painting lit by the weak glow of your flashlight.
This is the promise of synchrodestiny. It turns on the lights. It gives us the ability to make real decisions instead of blind guesses as we move forward in our lives. It allows us to see meaning in the world, to understand the connectedness or synchronicity of all things, to choose the kind of life we want to live, and to fulfill our spiritual journey. With synchrodestiny, we gain the ability to transform our lives according to our intentions.
The first step to living this way is to understand the nature of the three levels of existence.
The first level of existence is physical or material, the visible universe. This is the world we know best, what we call the real world. It contains matter and objects with firm boundaries, everything that is three-dimensional, and it includes everything we experience with our five senses—all that we can see, hear, feel, taste, or smell. It includes our bodies, the wind, the earth, water, gases, animals, microbes, molecules, and the pages of this book. In the physical domain time seems to flow in a line so straight that we call it the arrow of time, from the past to the present to the future. This means that everything in the physical domain has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and is therefore impermanent. Sentient beings are born and die. Mountains soar from the molten core of the earth and are brought low again by the relentless scouring of rain and wind.
The physical world as we experience it is governed by immutable laws of cause and effect, so that everything is predictable. Newtonian physics allows us to predict action and reaction, so that when billiard balls hit each other with a particular speed and at a particular angle, we can anticipate exactly what route each will travel across the billiards table. Scientists can calculate precisely when a solar eclipse will occur and how long it will last. All of our “commonsense” understanding of the world comes from what we know of this physical domain.
At the second level of existence everything consists of information and energy. This is called the quantum domain. Everything at this level is insubstantial, meaning that it cannot be touched or perceived by any of the five senses. Your mind, your thoughts, your ego, the part of you that you typically think of as your “self” are all part of the quantum domain. These things have no solidity, and yet you know your self and your thoughts to be real. Although it is easiest to think of the quantum domain in terms of mind, it encompasses much more. In fact, everything in the visible universe is a manifestation of the energy and information of the quantum domain. The material world is a subset of the quantum world.
Another way of stating this is that everything in the physical domain is made up of information and energy. In Einstein’s famous equation, E = MC2, we learn that energy (E) equals mass (M) times the speed of light (C) squared. This tells us that matter (mass) and energy are the same thing only in different forms—energy equals mass.
One of the first science lessons taught in school is that every solid object is made up of molecules, and molecules are made up of even smaller units called atoms. We come to understand that this seemingly solid chair we are sitting on is made up of atoms so small that they cannot be seen without the aid of a powerful microscope. Later in the lesson we learn that tiny atoms are made up of subatomic particles, which have no solidity at all. They are, quite literally, packets or waves of information and energy. This means that, at this second level of existence, the chair you are sitting in is nothing but energy and information.
This concept can be difficult to grasp at first. How can invisible waves of energy and information be experienced as a solid object? The answer is that events in the quantum domain occur at the speed of light, and at that speed our senses simply cannot process everything that contributes to our perceptual experience. We perceive objects as being different from one to the next because energy waves contain different kinds of information, which are determined by the frequency or vibration of those energy waves. It’s like listening to the radio. A radio tuned to one station, say 101.5 FM, might play only classical music. Change to a slightly different frequency of radio waves by tuning in to, say, 101.9 FM, and you might hear only rock and roll. Energy is coded for different information depending on how it vibrates.
So the physical world, the world of objects and matter, is made up of nothing but information contained in energy vibrating at different frequencies. The reason we don’t see the world as a huge web of energy is that it is vibrating far too fast. Our senses, because they function so slowly, are able to register only chunks of this energy and activity, and these clusters of information become “the chair,” “my body,” “water,” and every other physical object in the visible universe.
This is similar to what happens when we watch a movie. As you know, a motion picture is made up of individual photographic frames with gaps in between frames. If you looked at a movie film on the reel in a projection room, you would see the individual frames and gaps. But when we watch the movie itself, the frames are strung together and played back so fast that our senses no longer observe the frames as discontinuous. Instead, we perceive a steady stream of information.
At the quantum level, the various chunks of energy fields vibrating at different frequencies that we perceive as solid objects are all part of a collective energy field. If we were capable of perceiving everything that was happening at the quantum level, we would see that we are all part of a great “energy soup,” and everything—each one of us and all the objects in the physical domain—is just a cluster of energy floating in this energy soup. At any given moment your energy field will come into contact with and affect everyone else’s energy field, and each of us responds in some way to that experience. We are all expressions of this communal energy and information. Sometimes we can actually feel this connectedness. This sensation is usually very subtle, but on occasion it becomes more tangible. Most of us have had the experience of walking into a room and sensing “tension so thick you could cut it with a knife,” or of being in a church or holy shrine and being engulfed by a sense of peace. That is the collective energy of the environment mingling with your own energy, which you register on some level.
In the physical domain we are also constantly exchanging energy and information. Imagine that you are standing on the street and you smell cigarette smoke from someone walking a block away. This means you are inhaling the breath of that person about one hundred yards away. The smell is just a tracer notifying you that you are inhaling someone else’s breath. If the tracer wasn’t there, if the person walking by wasn’t smoking, you would still be inhaling that person’s breath; you just wouldn’t know it without cigarette smoke to alert you. And what is breath? It is the carbon dioxide and oxygen that come from the metabolism of every cell in that stranger’s body. That is what you are inhaling, just as other people are inhaling your breath. So we are all constantly exchanging bits of ourselves—physical, measurable molecules from our bodies.
At a deeper level, there is really no boundary between our selves and everything else in the world. When you touch an object, it feels solid, as though there was a distinct boundary between it and you. Physicists would say that we experience that boundary as solid because everything is made up of atoms, and the solidity is the sense of atoms bumping against atoms. But consider what an atom is. An atom has a little nucleus with a large cloud of electrons around it. There is no rigid outer shell, just an electron cloud. To visualize this, imagine a peanut in the middle of a football stadium. The peanut represents the nucleus, and the stadium represents the size of the electron cloud around the nucleus. When we touch an object, we perceive solidity when the clouds of electrons meet. That is our interpretation of solidity, given the sensitivity (or relative insensitivity) of our senses. Our eyes are programmed to see objects as three-dimensional and solid. Our nerve endings are programmed to feel objects as three-dimensional and solid. In the reality of the quantum domain, however, there is no solidity. Is there solidity when two clouds meet? No. They meld and separate. Something similar happens whenever you touch another object. Your energy fields (and electron clouds) meet, small portions meld, and then you separate. Although you perceive yourself to be whole, you have lost a bit of your energy field to the object, and have gained a bit of its energy field in return. With every encounter, we exchange information and energy, and we come away changed just a little bit. In this way, too, we can see how connected we are to everything else in the physical world. We are all constantly sharing portions of our energy fields, so all of us, at this quantum level, at the level of our minds and our “selves,” are all connected. We are all correlated with one another.
So it is only in our consciousness that our limited senses create a solid world out of pure energy and information. But what if we could see into the quantum domain—if we had “quantum eyes”? In the quantum domain, we would see that everything we think of as solid in the physical world is actually flickering in and out of an infinite void at the speed of light. Just like the frame-and-gap sequence of a motion picture, the universe is an on-off phenomenon. The continuity and solidity of the world exists only in the imagination, fed by senses that cannot discern the waves of energy and information that make up the quantum level of existence. In reality, we are all flickering in and out of existence all the time. If we could fine-tune our senses, we could actually see the gaps in our existence. We are here, and then not here, and then here again. The sense of continuity is held only by our memories.
There is an analogy that illustrates this point. Scientists know that it takes a snail about three seconds to register light. So imagine that a snail was watching me, and that I left the room, robbed a bank, and came back in three seconds. As far as the snail was concerned, I never left the room. I could take her to court and she would provide a perfect alibi. For the snail, the time that I was gone from the room would fall into one of those gaps between the frames of flickering existence. Her sense of continuity, assuming snails have one, would simply not register the gap.
So the sensory experience of all living beings is a purely artificial perceptual construct created in the imagination. There is a Zen story in which two monks are looking at a flag that is waving in the wind. The first one says, “The flag is waving.” The second one says, “No, the wind is moving.” Their teacher comes over and they pose him the question. “Who’s right? I say the flag is moving. He says the wind is moving.” The teacher says, “You are both wrong. Only consciousness is moving.” As consciousness moves, it imagines the world into existence.
So the mind is a field of energy and information. Every idea is also energy and information. You have imagined your physical body and the whole physical world into existence by perceiving energy soup as distinct physical entities. But where does the mind responsible for this imagination come from?
The third level of existence consists of intelligence, or consciousness. This can be called the virtual domain, the spiritual domain, the field of potential, the universal being, or nonlocal intelligence. This is where information and energy emerge from a sea of possibilities. The most fundamental, basic level of nature is not material; it is not even energy and information soup; it is pure potential. This level of nonlocal reality operates beyond the reach of space and time, which simply do not exist at this level. We call it nonlocal because it cannot be confined by a location—it is not “in” you or out there. It simply is.
The intelligence of the spiritual domain is what organizes “energy soup” into knowable entities. It is what binds quantum particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into structures. It is the organizing force behind all things. This can be a slippery concept to grasp. One relatively simple way of thinking about this virtual domain is to recognize the dual nature of your own thoughts. As you read these words, your eyes are seeing the black print on the page, and your mind is translating the print into symbols—letters and words—and then trying to deduce their meaning. But take a step back and ask, Who is it that is doing the reading? What is the consciousness that underlies your thoughts? Become aware of the duality of these interior processes. Your mind is busy decoding, analyzing, and translating. So who is doing the reading? With this one little twist of attention you may become aware that there is a presence within you, a force that is always doing the experiencing. This is the soul, or nonlocal intelligence, and its experience takes place at the virtual level.
Just as information and energy forge the physical world, this nonlocal domain (“without location”) creates and orchestrates the activity of information and energy. According to best-selling author and metaphysical pioneer Larry Dossey, M.D., nonlocal events have three important qualities that distinguish them from events confined to the physical world: They are correlated, and this correlation is unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate. Let’s briefly explore what he means by this.
The behavior of two or more subatomic events is acausally interrelated, meaning that “one event is not the cause of another event, yet the behavior of one is immediately correlated or coordinated with the other.” In other words, they seem to be dancing to the same tune, even though they are not communicating with each other in the conventional sense. This is the meaning of unmediated.
The correlation between these nonlocal events is also unmitigated, which means that the strength of the correlation remains undiminished with distance in space and time. For example, if you and I were in a room talking, my voice would sound very different than if we were standing across the street from each other. At that greater distance my voice would sound much weaker, if you could hear me at all. If you were in the nonlocal domain, I would be heard clearly, regardless of whether I was standing right next to you, across the street, a mile away, or even on another continent.
Third, immediate means that no travel time is needed for nonlocal events. We are all familiar with the fact that light and sound travel at different speeds, which is why we see lightning in the distance before we hear the rumble of thunder. With nonlocal events there is no such lag time, because nonlocal correlations do not follow the laws of classical physics. There is no signal, there is no light, and there is no sound. There is no “thing” that has to travel. Correlations between events that occur at the nonlocal or virtual level occur instantly, without cause, and without any weakening over time or distance.
Nonlocal intelligence is everywhere at once, and can cause multiple effects simultaneously in various locations. It is from this virtual domain that everything in the world is organized and synchronized. This, then, is the source of the coincidences that are so important to synchrodestiny. When you learn to live from this level, you can spontaneously fulfill your every desire. You can create miracles.
The virtual domain is not a figment of the imagination, the result of some human longing for a universal force greater than ourselves. Although philosophers have been discussing and debating the existence of “spirit” for thousands of years, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that science could offer proof of the existence of nonlocal intelligence. Although the following discussion is somewhat involved, if you read it through to the end, I hope you will be filled with the same sense of wonder and excitement that I felt when I first learned of this work.
As most of us learned in science class, the universe is made up of both solid particles and waves. We were taught that particles were the building blocks of all the solid objects in the world. For example, we learned that the very smallest units of matter, such as the electrons in an atom, were particles. Similarly, we were taught that waves—such as sound and light waves—were nonsolid. There was never confusion between the two; particles were particles, and waves were waves.
Physicists then discovered that a subatomic particle is part of what is known as a wave packet. Although waves of energy are typically continuous, with equally spaced peaks and troughs, a wave packet is a concentration of energy. (Imagine a little ball of static, with quick, sharp peaks and troughs representing the amplitude of the wave.)
There are two questions we might ask about the particle in this wave packet: (1) Where is it, and (2) what is its momentum? Physicists discovered that you can ask one of these questions, but not both. For example, once you ask “Where is it?” and you fix a wave-particle in a location, it becomes a particle. If you ask “What is its momentum?” you have decided that movement is the critical factor, therefore you must be talking about a wave.
So is this thing we are talking about, the “wave-particle,” a particle or a wave? It depends on which of the two questions we decide to ask. At any given moment, that wave-particle can be either a particle or a wave because we can’t know both the location and the momentum of the wave-particle. In fact, as it turns out, until we measure either its location or its momentum, it is both particle and wave simultaneously. This concept is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and it is one of the fundamental building blocks of modern physics.
Imagine a closed box with a wave-particle in it. Its absolute identity is not fixed until it is observed or measured in some way. At the moment before observation, its identity is pure potential. It is both wave and particle, and it exists only in the virtual domain. After observation or measurement takes place, the potential “collapses” into a single entity—either particle or wave. Given our usual, sense-based way of evaluating the world, the idea that a thing can exist in more than one state at the same time is totally counterintuitive. But this is the wonder of the quantum world.
A famous thought experiment by physicist Erwin Schrödinger points out the kinds of odd occurrences that are made possible by quantum physics. Imagine that you have a closed box that contains a wave-particle, a cat, a lever, and a bowl of cat food with a loose lid. If the wave-particle becomes a particle, it will trip the lever, which will flip the lid off the bowl of food, and the cat will eat. If the wave-particle becomes a wave, the lid stays on the food. If we open the box (thereby making an observation), we will see either an empty bowl of cat food (and a happy cat) or a full bowl (and a hungry cat). It all depends on the type of observation we make. Now here’s the part that boggles the mind: Before we look in the box and make an observation, the bowl is both empty and full, and the cat is simultaneously fed and hungry. At that moment, both possibilities exist at the same time. It is the observation alone that turns possibility into reality. As remarkable as this might seem, physicists recently completed an experiment proving this phenomenon by demonstrating that a charged, unobserved beryllium atom was capable of being in two separate locations at the same time!
Perhaps even more mind-boggling is the notion that the very idea of two separate locations may be a perceptual artifact. In other words, two correlated events in two different locations might in fact be the movements of a single event. Imagine a single fish in a tank, with two video cameras recording its movements. The two cameras are at right angles to each other and project their respective images to two separate video screens in another room. You are sitting in this room looking at both screens. You see two different fish and you are amazed when one fish turns or moves in a certain direction and its behavior is immediately correlated with the behavior of the other fish. Of course you do not know what is happening behind the scenes. If you did, you would see that there is only one fish! If we placed many different cameras at many different angles, and projected these images to different screens in the same room, you would be amazed that all these different fish are in instant communicational correlation with one another.
Great seers from mystical traditions suggest that what we experience every day is a projected reality where events and things only “appear” to be separate in space and time. In the deeper realm we are all members of the same body, and when one part of the body moves, every single part of that body is instantly affected.
Scientists also propose a level of existence called Minkowski’s eight-dimensional hyperspace. In this mathematically conceived dimension the distance between two events, no matter how separate they appear to be in space-time, is always zero. This once again suggests a dimension of existence where we are all inseparably one. Separation may just be an illusion. When we feel love in any form, it has the effect of beginning to shatter that illusion.
Because observation is the key to defining the wave-particle as a single entity, Niels Bohr and other physicists believed that consciousness alone was responsible for the collapse of the wave-particle. It might be said, then, that without consciousness, everything would exist only as undefined, potential packets of energy, or pure potential.
This is one of the key points of this book. Let me repeat it because it is so important: Without consciousness acting as an observer and interpreter, everything would exist only as pure potential. That pure potential is the virtual domain, the third level of existence. It is nonlocal and can’t be depleted, it is unending and all-encompassing. Tapping into that potential is what allows us to make miracles.
Miracles is not too strong a word. Let me return to physics to describe how scientists have documented some of the astounding events that can occur from this level of potential.
Intrigued and troubled by the possibilities suggested by quantum physics, Albert Einstein devised his own thought experiment: Imagine creating two identical wave-particles that are then shot off in opposite directions. What happens if we ask about the location of wave-particle A and ask about the momentum of wave-particle B? Remember, the particles are identical, so whatever measurement is calculated for one will, by definition, hold true for the other. Knowing the location of wave-particle A (and thus collapsing it into a particle) simultaneously tells us the location of wave-particle B, and therefore also collapses it into a particle.
The implications of this thought experiment (which has been confirmed mathematically as well as experimentally) are enormous. If observing wave-particle A affects wave-particle B, that means that some nonlocal connection or communication is occurring in which information is exchanged faster than the speed of light, without the exchange of energy. That is contrary to every commonsense view of the world. This thought experiment is known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. And indeed, laboratory experiments have shown that the laws of quantum physics do hold up, and that nonlocal communication or connection is a reality.
Let me try to illustrate the magnitude of this point with an example that is a bit of an exaggeration, but at least it takes place in the physical world so its effects are easier to see. Imagine that a company simultaneously sends out two identical packages, one to me in California, and one to you at your home. In each of the boxes is a correlated, unobserved wave-particle, pure potential. You and I receive and open our packages at exactly the same moment. Just before I cut the tape and open the flaps, I create a mental picture of what I want the box to contain. When I open the box, I find that it contains just what I imagined, a violin. But that’s only half the miracle. When you open your box, it also contains a violin! When I imagined what I wanted the box to contain, the wave-particles collapsed into a specific form. And whatever I imagined also affected the wave-particles in your package. We could repeat this experiment over and over again, and we’d always have the same outcome: Whatever I imagine for myself is matched, at the exact same moment, for you. Not only can I influence the form of one set of wave-particles, but the wave-particles are somehow able to communicate the form they are taking across the distance from my house to yours, faster than the speed of light. This is what is meant by nonlocal communication or correlation.
Interesting experiments have been performed by researcher Cleve Baxter, an associate and friend of ours at the Chopra Center. In 1972 he developed a methodology for studying human cells that had been isolated from a person’s body. For example, in one of his experiments, he took human spermatozoa and studied them in a test tube by electroding them and measuring their electromagnetic activity using EEG-type instrumentation. The sperm donor was located in a room about forty feet down the hall from the lab. When the sperm donor crushed a capsule of amyl nitrate and inhaled the fumes there was an instantaneous spike in the electromagnetic activity of the lab sperm three rooms away.
One day Cleve Baxter was isolating white cells in order to study them, and a very interesting thing happened. As part of the procedure he centrifuged his saliva to get a concentrated number of white cells, then placed them in a small test tube and inserted gold wire electrodes connected to EEG-type instrumentation. He had the sudden idea to inflict a small cut on the back of his hand to see if this might affect his white cells. He went to search for a sterile lancet on a nearby shelf. When he came back he glanced at the chart that was recording the electromagnetic activity of the white blood cells: It had already registered intense activity among the white blood cells during his search for the lancet. In other words, his white cells were reacting to his intention to cut his hand even before he actually inflicted the cut.
On another occasion Cleve Baxter was training a colleague of his to collect oral leukocytes. Somehow they got into a discussion about an article in Playboy magazine, an interview with William Shockley, a scientist who was very controversial at the time. Cleve Baxter suddenly remembered that his partner had a copy of that particular issue of the magazine in his office desk. He dashed off, found the issue under discussion, and brought it up to the lab. By this time, Steve, his lab associate, had finished the cell collection and had electroded his cells. Cleve Baxter then aimed one video camera, mounted on a tripod, over Steve’s shoulder to allow for later correlation of what Steve would be viewing. Another video camera was mounted over the chart recording in progress. The two video camera images were then combined through split-screen technology. This ensured that there would be an accurate record of the timing of possible reactions. As Steve leafed through the Playboy magazine to find the article, he came across the centerfold featuring Bo Derek in her nothingness. According to Cleve Baxter, “Even as Steve said aloud ‘I don’t think she’s a ten,’ his white cells in the test tube showed a full-scale reaction, hitting the top and bottom limit stops on the chart recorder.” After two full minutes of continuous reactivity, Cleve Baxter suggested that Steve close the magazine. When he did so his electroded cells calmed down. Then, a minute later, when Steve reached over to reopen the closed magazine, the cells spiked again. Cleve Baxter states, “When Steve experienced this high-quality observation, knowing the feelings and thoughts of his own mind, it put an end to any skepticism.”
Cleve Baxter has performed many similar experiments revealing that the cells of all biological organisms, including plants and a variety of bacteria, have biocommunication ability. All living cells have a cellular consciousness and are able to communicate with other cells of the same or other species even when they are a distance apart. Moreover, this communication is instantaneous. Since distance in space is also distance in time, one could therefore say that events separated from each other in time, occurring either in the past or in the future, could be instantly correlated.
In an extension of this research, nonlocal communication has been demonstrated in people, too. In the famous Grinberg-Zylberbaum experiment, published in 1987, scientists used a device known as an electroencephalograph to measure the brain waves of two people meditating together. They found that some pairs of people they measured showed a strong correlation in their brain wave patterns, suggesting a close bond or mental relationship. These meditators could identify when they felt that they were in “direct communication” with each other, and this was confirmed by the machines measuring their brain waves. These strongly bonded pairs were asked to meditate together, side by side, for twenty minutes. Then one of the meditators was taken to a different room that was closed and isolated. With each person in a separate room, the meditators were asked to try to establish direct communication with each other. The meditator who had been moved was then stimulated by bright lights flashing in the room, which caused little spikes in his brain waves called evoked potentials. Because the brain waves of both meditators were still being measured, the scientists were able to see that the meditator who was exposed to light did, indeed, show the little spikes of evoked potentials. But the fascinating part of this experiment is that the meditator who was not exposed to the light also showed little spikes of brain waves that corresponded to the evoked potentials of the light-exposed meditator. So these two people were connected at a deep level (via meditation), and that connection allowed for measurable physical reactions even in the person who was not exposed to the light stimulation. What happened to one person also happened to the other, automatically and instantly.
These results cannot be explained by any means except nonlocal correlation, which occurs in the virtual domain, the level of the spirit that connects, orchestrates, and synchronizes everything. This boundless field of intelligence or consciousness is everywhere, manifesting itself in everything. We’ve seen it operate at the level of the subatomic particle—the building block of all things—and we’ve seen it connect two people at a level that transcends separation. But you need not go into a laboratory to see this nonlocal intelligence at work. Proof is all around us, in animals, in nature, and even in our own bodies.