part0010

T here is a place where all things begin, a location of pure energy that simply “is.” In this quantum incubator for reality, all things are possible. From our personal success, abundance, and healing to our failure, lack, and disease … everything from our greatest fear to our deepest desire begins in this “soup” of potential.

Through the reality makers of imagination, expectation, judgment, passion, and prayer, we galvanize each possibility into existence. In our beliefs about who we are, what we have and don’t have, and what should and shouldn’t be, we breathe life into our greatest joys as well as our darkest moments .

The key to mastering this place of pure energy is to know that it exists, to understand how it works, and finally to speak the language that it recognizes. All things become available to us as the architects of reality in this place where the world begins: the pure space of the Divine Matrix.

The last thing I expected to see on a late October afternoon hiking in a remote canyon of the Four Corners area in northwestern New Mexico was a Native American wisdom keeper walking toward me on the same trail. Yet there he was, standing at the top of the small incline that separated us as our paths converged that day.

I’m not sure how long he’d been there. By the time I saw him, he was just waiting, watching me as I stepped carefully among the loose stones on the path. The low sun created a glow that cast a deep shadow across the man’s body. As I held my hand up to block the light from my eyes, I could see a few locks of shoulder-length hair blowing across his face.

The path we were following wound through a series of archaeological sites built nearly 11 centuries before by a mysterious clan of people. No one knows where they came from or who they were. With no evidence of their skills evolving over time, the people that modern natives simply call “the ancient ones” showed up one day in history and brought with them the most advanced technology that would be seen in North America for another thousand years.

From the four-story-tall buildings and perfect stone kivas (round ceremonial structures) buried in the ground to the vast irrigation systems and the sophisticated crops that sustained the people, this place seems to have just appeared one day. And then those who built it were suddenly gone—they just vanished.

The ancient ones left precious few clues to tell us who they were. With the exception of the rock art on the canyon walls, no written records have ever been found. There are no sites of mass burials or cremations, or weapons of war. Yet the evidence of their existence is there: hundreds of ancient dwellings in an 11-mile-long, 1-mile-wide canyon in the remote corner of a desolate canyon in northwestern New Mexico.

I’ve gone to this place often to walk, immerse myself in the strange beauty of the open desolation, and feel the past. On that late October afternoon, both the wisdom keeper and I had come to the high desert on the same day for the same reason. As we exchanged our beliefs about the secrets still held there, my new friend shared a story.

“A long time ago, our world was very different from the way we see it today,” the wisdom keeper began. “There were fewer people, and we lived closer to the land. People knew the language of the rain, the crops, and the Great Creator. They even knew how to speak to the stars and the sky people. They were aware that life is sacred and comes from the marriage between Mother Earth and Father Sky. In this time, there was balance and people were happy. ”

“Then something happened,” he said. “No one really knows why, but people started to forget who they were. In their forgetting, they began to feel separate—separate from the earth, from each other, and even from the one who created them. They were lost and wandered through life with no direction or connection. In their separation, they believed that they had to fight to survive in this world and defend themselves against the same forces that gave them the life they had learned to live in harmony with and trust. Soon all of their energy was used to protect themselves from the world around them, instead of making peace with the world within them.”

Immediately, the man’s story resonated with me. As I listened to what he was telling me, it sounded as if he were describing human beings today! With the few exceptions of isolated cultures and remote pockets of tradition that remain, our civilization certainly places its focus more on the world around us and less on the world within us.

We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year defending ourselves from disease and trying to control nature. In doing so, we have perhaps strayed further from our balance with the natural world than ever before. The wisdom keeper had my attention—now the question was, where was he going with his story?

“Even though they had forgotten who they were, somewhere inside of them the gift of their ancestors remained,” he continued. “There was still a memory that lived within them. In their dreams at night they knew that they held the power to heal their bodies, bring rain when they needed to, and speak with their ancestors. They knew that somehow they could find their place in the natural world once again.

“As they tried to remember who they were, they began to build the things outside of their bodies that reminded them of who they were on the inside. As time went on, they even built machines to do their healing, made chemicals to grow their crops, and stretched wires to communicate over long distances. The farther they wandered from their inner power, the more cluttered their outer lives became with the things that they believed would make them happy.”

As I listened, I saw the unmistakable parallels between the people I was hearing about and our civilization today. Our civilization has become steeped in feelings of being powerless to help ourselves or make a better world. So often we feel helpless as we watch our loved ones slip away from us into the clutches of pain and addictions. We think that we’re powerless to ease the suffering from the horrible diseases that no living thing should ever have to endure. We can only hope for the peace that will bring those we care about safely from the terror of foreign battlefields. And together, we feel insignificant in the presence of a growing nuclear threat as the world aligns itself along the divisions of religious beliefs, bloodlines, and borders.

It seems that the farther we stray from our natural relationship with the earth, our bodies, one another, and God, the emptier we become. In our emptiness, we strive to fill our inner void with “things.” When we look at the world from this perspective, I cannot help but think of a similar dilemma portrayed in the science-fiction movie Contact. The President’s science advisor (played by Matthew McConaughey) explores the fundamental question that faces every technological society. During a television interview, he asks if we are a better society because of our technology—has it brought us closer together or made us feel more separate? The question is never really answered in the movie, and the topic could fill an entire book unto itself. However, the point that the advisor is making when he asks how much of our power we give away to our diversions is a good one.

When we feel that video games, movies, virtual online relationships, and voiceless communication are necessities and they become substitutes for real life and face-to-face contact, this may be signs of a society in trouble. While electronics and entertainment media certainly seem to make life more interesting, they could also be red flags telling us how far we’ve strayed from our power to live rich, healthy, and meaningful lives.

Additionally, when the focus of our lives becomes how to avoid disease rather than how to live in a healthy way, how to stay out of war rather than how to cooperate in peace, and how to create new weapons rather than how to live in a world where armed conflict has become obsolete, clearly the path we’re on has become one of survival. In such a mode, no one is truly happy—nobody really “wins.” When we find ourselves living this way, the obvious thing to do would be to look for another route. And that’s precisely what this book is about and why I’m sharing this story.

By this time, the sun had disappeared behind the canyon walls, and for the first time I could actually see who I was talking to. The sun-darkened man standing in front of me smiled broadly upon hearing my question. He was quiet for just a moment, and then he whispered, “No one knows because the story isn’t finished. The people who got lost are our ancestors, and we are the ones who are writing the ending. What do you think … ?”

I only saw the man a couple of times after that in various places throughout the land and communities that we both love. I think about him often, though. As I see the events of the world unfold, I remember his story and wonder if we’ll complete the ending in this lifetime. Will you and I be the ones who remember?

The implications of the story that the man in the canyon shared are vast. The conventional wisdom of history is that the tools of past civilizations—no matter how ancient—were somehow less advanced than modern technology. While it’s true that these peoples might not have used “modern” science to solve their problems, they may have had something even better.

In discussions with historians and archaeologists whose livelihoods are based on interpreting the past, this topic is generally the source of passionately heated emotion. “If they were so advanced, where’s the evidence of their technology?” the experts ask. “Where are their toasters, microwave ovens, and VCRs?” I find it very interesting that in interpreting the development of a civilization, so much could hinge on the things that the individuals built. What about the thinking that underlies what they made? While to the best of my knowledge, it’s true that we’ve never found a TV or digital camera in the archaeological record of the American Southwest (or anywhere else for that matter), the question is why?

Is it possible that when we see the remains of advanced civilizations, such as those in Egypt, Peru, or the American Desert Southwest, we’re actually witnessing the remnants of a technology so advanced that they didn’t need toasters and VCRs? Maybe they outgrew the need for a cluttered and complex outer world. Perhaps they knew something about themselves that gave them the inner technology to live in a different way, knowledge that we’ve forgotten. That wisdom could have given them everything that they needed to sustain their lives and heal in a way that we’re only beginning to understand.

If this is true, then perhaps we need look no further than nature to understand who we are and what our role in life really is. And maybe some of our most profound and empowering insights are already available in the mysterious discoveries of the quantum world. During the last century, physicists discovered that the stuff that makes up our bodies and our universe doesn’t always follow the neat and tidy laws of physics that have been held sacred for nearly three centuries. In fact, on the tiniest scales of our world, the very particles that we’re made of break the rules that say we’re separate from one another and limited in our existence. On the particle level, everything appears to be connected and infinite.

These discoveries suggest that there’s something within each of us that isn’t limited by time, space, or even death. The bottom line of these findings is that we appear to live in a “nonlocal” universe where everything is always connected .

Dean Radin, senior scientist for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, has been a pioneer in exploring just what it means for us to live in such a world. “Nonlocality,” he explains, “means that there are ways in which things that appear to be separate are, in fact, not separate.”1 There are aspects of us, Radin suggests, that extend beyond the here-and-now and allow us to be spread throughout space and time. In other words, the “us” that lives in our physical selves isn’t limited by the skin and hair that define our bodies.

Whatever we choose to call that mysterious “something,” we all have it; and ours mingles with everyone else’s as part of the field of energy that bathes all things. This field is believed to be the quantum net that connects the universe, as well as the infinitely microscopic and energetic blueprint for everything from healing our bodies to forging world peace. To recognize our true power, we must understand what this field is and how it works.

If the ancient ones in that northern New Mexican canyon—or anywhere else in the world, for that matter—understood how this forgotten part of us works, then it makes tremendous sense for us to honor the knowledge of our ancestors and find a place for their wisdom in our time.

Modern science is hot on the trail of solving one of the greatest mysteries of all time. You may not hear about it during the evening news, and you probably won’t see it on the front page of USA Today or The Wall Street Journal. Yet nearly 70 years of research in an area of science known as the “new physics” is pointing to a conclusion that we can’t escape.

“Okay,” you say, “we’ve heard this before. What makes this conclusion so different? What does it really mean to be so connected?” These are very good questions, and the answers may surprise you. The difference between the new discoveries and what we previously believed is that in the past we were simply told that the connection exists. Through technical phrases such as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (or “the butterfly effect”) and theories suggesting that what we do “here” has an effect “there,” we could vaguely observe the connection playing out in our lives. The new experiments, however, take us one step beyond.

In addition to proving that we’re linked to everything, research now demonstrates that the connection exists because of us. Our connectedness gives us the power to stack the deck in our favor when it comes to the way our lives turn out. In everything from searching for romance and healing our loved ones to the fulfillment of our deepest aspirations, we are an integral part of all that we experience each day.

The fact that the discoveries show that we can use our connection consciously opens the door to nothing less than our opportunity to tap the same power that drives the entire universe. Through the oneness that lives inside of you, me, and all humans who walk the planet, we have a direct line to the same force that creates everything from atoms and stars to the DNA of life!

There’s one small catch, however: Our power to do so is dormant until we awaken it. The key to awakening such an awesome power is to make a small shift in the way we see ourselves in the world. Just as Logue’s initiates found that they could fly after receiving a little nudge off the cliff (from the poem on page ix), with a small shift in perception we can tap the most powerful force in the universe in order to address even seemingly impossible situations. This happens when we allow ourselves a new way of seeing our role in the world .

Because the universe seems like a really big place—almost too vast for us to even think about—we can begin by seeing ourselves differently in our everyday lives. The “small shift” that we need is to see ourselves as part of the world rather than separate from it. The way to convince ourselves that we’re truly one with everything that we see and experience is to understand how we’re joined and what that connection means.

Through the connection that joins all things, the “stuff” that the universe is made of (waves and particles of energy) appears to break the laws of time and space as we once knew them. Although the details sound like science fiction, they’re very real. Particles of light (photons), for example, have been observed to bilocate—that is, to be in two different places separated by many miles at precisely the same instant.

From the DNA of our bodies to the atoms of everything else, things in nature appear to share information more rapidly than Albert Einstein predicted anything could ever travel—faster than the speed of light. In some experiments, data has even arrived at its destination before it’s left its place of origin! Historically, such phenomena were believed to be impossible, but apparently they’re not only possible, they also may be showing us something more than just the interesting anomalies of small units of matter. The freedom of movement that the quantum particles demonstrate may reveal how the rest of the universe works when we look beyond what we know of physics.

While these results may sound like the futuristic script of a Star Trek episode, they’re being observed now, under the scrutiny of present-day scientists. Individually, the experiments that produce such effects are certainly fascinating and deserve more investigation. Considered together, however, they also suggest that we may not be as limited by the laws of physics as we believe. Perhaps things are able to travel faster than the speed of light, and maybe they can be in two places at once! And if things have this ability, what about us?

These are precisely the possibilities that excite today’s innovators and stir our own imaginations. It is in the coupling of the imagination—the idea of something that could be—with an emotion that gives life to a possibility that it becomes a reality. Manifestation begins with the willingness to make room in our beliefs for something that supposedly doesn’t exist. We create that “something” through the force of consciousness and awareness.

The poet William Blake recognized the power of imagination as the essence of our existence, rather than something that we simply experience occasionally in our spare time. “Man is all imagination,” he said, clarifying, “The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God Himself.”2 Philosopher and poet John Mackenzie further explained our relationship with the imagination, suggesting, “The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finely maintained … all existing things are … imaginary.”3 In both these descriptions, the concrete events of life must first be envisioned as possibilities before they can become a reality.

However, for the imaginary ideas of one moment in time to become the reality of another, there must be something that links them together. Somehow in the fabric of the universe there must be a connection between past imaginings and present and future realities. Einstein firmly believed that the past and the future are intimately entwined as the stuff of the fourth dimension, a reality that he called space-time. “The distinction between past, present, and future,” he said, “is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”4

So, in ways that we are only beginning to understand, we find that we’re connected not only with everything that we see in our lives today, but also with everything that’s ever been, as well as with things that haven’t happened yet. And what we’re experiencing now is the outcome of events that have occurred (at least in part) in a realm of the universe that we can’t even see.

The implications of these relationships are huge. In a world where an intelligent field of energy connects everything from global peace to personal healing, what may have sounded like fantasy and miracles in the past suddenly becomes possible in our lives.

With these connections in mind, we must begin to think of the way that we relate to life, our families, and even our casual acquaintances from a powerful new perspective. Good or bad, right or wrong, everything from the lightest and most beautiful life experiences to the most horrible occasions of human suffering can no longer be written off as chance happenings. Clearly, the key to healing; peace; abundance; and the creation of experiences, careers, and relationships that bring us joy is to understand just how deeply we’re connected to everything in our reality.

I remember the first time I relayed the news of our connectedness to my Native American friend from the canyon. During an unexpected meeting in a local market, I passionately shared information from a press release I’d just read about a “new” field of energy that had been discovered, a unifying field unlike any other energy known to exist.

“It’s this field of energy,” I blurted out, “that connects everything. It connects us with the world, one another, and even with the universe beyond Earth, just like you and I have talked about in the past.”

In a way that was typical of my friend, he was quiet for a moment as he honored my excitement. After a few seconds, he took a breath and then replied with a directness that I’d seen many times before .

He was honest and to the point. “So!” he said. “You have found that everything is connected. That is what our people have been saying all along. It is good that your science has figured it out, too!”

If an intelligent field of energy really plays such a powerful role in how the universe works, then why didn’t we know about it until recently? We’ve just emerged from the 20th century, a time historians may well come to regard as the most remarkable period in history. Within a single generation, we learned how to unleash the power of the atom, to store a library the size of a city block on a computer chip, and to read and engineer the DNA of life. How could we have accomplished all of these scientific marvels yet missed the single most important discovery of all, the one understanding that gives us access to the power of creation itself? The answer may surprise you.

There was a time in our not-so-distant past when scientists did, in fact, attempt to solve the mystery of whether or not we’re connected through an intelligent field of energy by proving once and for all whether or not the field even exists. While the idea of the investigation was good, more than 100 years later we’re still recovering from the way in which this famous experiment was interpreted. As a result, for most of the 20th century, if scientists dared to mention anything about a unifying field of energy that connects everything through what is otherwise empty space, they would be laughed out of the classroom or right off the university stage. With few exceptions, the idea wasn’t one that was accepted, or even allowed, in serious scientific discussions. However, this hadn’t always been the case.

Although our sense of precisely what it is that connects the universe has remained a mystery, there have been countless attempts to name it in order to acknowledge its existence. In the Buddhist Sutras, for example, the realm of the great god Indra is described as the place where the web that connects the entire universe originates: “Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.”5

In the Hopi creation story, it is said that the current cycle of our world began long ago when Spider Grandmother emerged into the emptiness of this world. The first thing she did was to spin the great web that connects all things, and through it she created the place where her children would live their lives.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, those who believed in a universal field of energy that connects everything have simply referred to it as the ether. In Greek mythology, ether was thought of as the essence of space itself and described as the “air breathed by the gods.” Both Pythagoras and Aristotle identified it as the mysterious fifth element of creation, following the four familiar elements of fire, air, water, and earth. In later times, alchemists continued to use the words of the Greeks to describe our world—terminology that endured until the birth of modern science.

Contradicting the traditional views of most scientists today, some of the greatest minds in history have not only believed that ether exists; many of them even took its existence one step further. They said that ether is necessary for the laws of physics to work as they do. During the 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton, the “father” of modern science, used the word ether to describe an invisible substance that permeates the entire universe, which he believed was responsible for gravity as well as the sensations of the body. He thought of it as a living spirit, although he recognized that the equipment to validate its existence wasn’t available in his day.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that the man who proposed electromagnetic theory, James Clerk Maxwell, formally offered a scientific description of the ether that connects all things. He described it as a “material substance of a more subtle kind than visible bodies, supposed to exist in those parts of space which are apparently empty.” 6

As recently as the early 20th century, some of the most respected scientific minds still used the ancient terminology to describe the essence that fills empty space. They thought of the ether as an actual substance with a consistency that was somewhere between physical matter and pure energy. It is through the ether, the scientists reasoned, that light waves can move from one point to another in what otherwise looks like empty space.

“I cannot but regard the ether, which can be the seat of an electromagnetic field with its energy and its vibrations, as endowed with a certain degree of substantiality, however different it may be from all ordinary matter” stated Nobel Prize–winning physicist Hendrik Lorentz in 1906.7 Lorentz’s equations were the ones that eventually gave Einstein the tools to develop his revolutionary theory of relativity.

Even after his theories seemed to discount the need for ether in the universe, Einstein himself believed that something would be discovered to explain what occupies the emptiness of space, stating, “Space without ether is unthinkable.” Similar to the way Lorentz and the ancient Greeks thought of this substance as the conduit through which waves move, Einstein stated that ether is necessary for the laws of physics to exist: “In such space [without ether] there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time.”8

Although on the one hand, Einstein appears to acknowledge the possibility of ether, on the other, he cautioned that it shouldn’t be thought of as energy in the ordinary sense. “Ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts [‘particles’] which may be tracked through time.”9 In this way he described how, due to ether’s unconventional nature, its existence was still compatible with his own theories.

The mere mention of the ether field today still ignites debate about whether or not it exists. Almost in the same breath, it resurrects the memory of one famous experiment that was designed to prove or disprove the field’s existence once and for all. As is often the case with this kind of investigation, the outcome raised more questions—and controversy—than it resolved.

Performed more than 100 years ago, the ether experiment is named after the two scientists who designed it, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. The sole purpose of the Michelson-Morley experiment was to determine whether or not the mysterious ether of the universe did in fact exist. The long-anticipated experiment—devised to verify the results of a similar one performed in 1881—was the buzz of the scientific community that gathered in the laboratory at what is now Case Western Reserve University in 1887.10 Ultimately, it held consequences that even the best minds of the late 19th century couldn’t have known.

The thinking behind the experiment was innovative, to be sure. If ether really exists, Michelson and Morley reasoned, then it must be an energy that is everywhere, quiet, and still. And if this is true, then the earth’s passage through this field in space should create a movement that can be measured. Just as we’re able to detect the air as it ripples through the vast fields of golden wheat on the plains of Kansas, we should be able to detect the ether’s “breeze.” Michelson and Morley named this hypothetical phenomenon the ether wind.

The pilot of any plane will agree that when an aircraft is flying with the currents of the atmosphere, the time to get from one place to another can be much shorter. However, when the plane is flying against the flow, it endures a rough ride, and wind resistance can add hours to the flight. Michelson and Morley reasoned that if they could shoot a ray of light in two directions simultaneously, the difference in the amount of time it took for each beam to reach its destination should allow the experimenters to detect the presence and flow of the ether wind. While the experiment was a good idea, the results surprised everyone.

Figure 1. If ether was present, Michelson and Morley believed that a beam of light should travel slower as it moved against the ether’s currents (A), and faster as it traveled with the currents (B). The experiment, conducted in 1887, found no ether currents; the conclusion was that no ether exists. The consequences of this interpretation have haunted scientists for more than 100 years. In 1986, the journal Nature reported on the results of experiments conducted with more sensitive equipment. The bottom line: A field with the characteristics of the ether was detected, and it behaved just as the older predictions had suggested it would a century before.

The bottom line was that Michelson and Morley’s equipment detected no ether wind. Finding what looked like the absence of the wind, both the 1881 and 1887 experiments seemed to lead to the same conclusion: No ether exists. Michelson interpreted the results of what has been called “the most successful failed experiment” in history in the prestigious American Journal of Science: “The result of the hypothesis of a stationary ether field is thus shown to be incorrect, and the necessary conclusion follows that the hypothesis is erroneous.”11

While the experiment may be described as a “failure” with regard to proving the existence of ether, it actually demonstrated that the ether field just might not behave in the way scientists originally expected. Just because no movement was detected doesn’t mean that ether wasn’t there. An analogy for this would be to hold your finger above your head to test for wind: To conclude that no air existed because you felt no breeze during the test would be a rough equivalent of the thinking behind the conclusions of the 1887 experiment.

Accepting this experiment as proof that ether doesn’t exist, modern scientists operate under the assumption that things in our universe happen independently of each other. They accept that what an individual does in one part of the world is completely unrelated to other areas and has no effect on someone else half a planet away. Arguably, this experiment has become the basis for a worldview that has had a profound impact on our lives and the earth. As a consequence of this kind of thinking, we govern our nations, power our cities, test our atomic bombs, and exhaust our resources, believing that what we’re doing in one place has no impact anywhere else. Since 1887, we’ve based the development of an entire civilization on the belief that everything is separate from everything else, a premise that more recent experiments show is simply not true!

Today, more than 100 years after the original experiment, new studies suggest that the ether, or something like it, does in fact exist—it just does not appear to come in the form that Michelson and Morley had expected. Believing that the field must be motionless and made of electricity and magnetism, just as the other forms of energy discovered in the mid-1800s were, they searched for the ether as they would a conventional form of energy. But ether is far from conventional.

In 1986, Nature published an unassuming report simply titled “Special Relativity.”12 With implications that absolutely shake the foundation of the Michelson-Morley experiment as well as everything we believe about our connection to the world, it described an experiment by a scientist named E. W. Silvertooth that was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. Duplicating the 1887 experiment—but with equipment that was much more sensitive— Silvertooth reported that he did detect a movement in the ether field. Furthermore, it was precisely linked to the motion of the earth through space, just as had been predicted! This experiment, and others since then, suggest that the ether does in fact exist, just as Planck suggested in 1944.

Although modern experiments continue to indicate that the field is there, we can be sure that it will never be called “ether” again. In scientific circles, the mere mention of the word conjures up adjectives ranging from “pseudoscience” to “hogwash”! As we’ll see in Chapter 2, the existence of a universal field of energy that permeates our world is being thought of in very different terms—the experiments that prove its existence are so new that a single name has yet to be chosen. Regardless of what we choose to call it, however, something is definitely there. It connects everything in our world and beyond and affects us in ways that we’re only beginning to understand.

So how could this have happened? How might we have missed such a powerful key to understanding how the universe works? The answer to this question cuts to the very core of the quest that’s created the most intense controversy and heated debate among the greatest minds of the last two centuries—a dispute that continues to this day. It’s all about the way we see ourselves in the world and our interpretation of that viewpoint.

The key is that the energy connecting everything in the universe is also part of what it connects! Rather than thinking of the field as separate from everyday reality, the experiments tell us that the mundane visible world actually originates as the field: It’s as if the blanket of the Divine Matrix is spread smoothly throughout the universe, and every once in a while it “wrinkles” here and there into a rock, tree, planet, or person that we recognize. Ultimately, all of these things are just ripples in the field, and this subtle yet powerful shift in thinking is the key to tapping the power of the Divine Matrix in our lives. To do so, however, we must understand why scientists view the world as they do today .

Science is simply a language to describe the natural world, along with our relationship to it and the universe beyond. And it is only one language; there have been others (such as alchemy and spirituality, for example) that were used long before modern science ever came along. While they may not have been sophisticated, they certainly worked. I’m always amazed when people ask, “What did we do before science? Did we know anything about our world?” The answer is a resounding “Yes!” We knew a lot about the universe.

What we knew worked so well that it provided an entire framework for understanding everything from the origins of life, to why we become sick and what to do about it, to how we calculate the cycles of the sun, moon, and stars. While this kind of knowing was obviously not described in the technical language that we’re accustomed to today, it did a pretty good job of providing a useful story of how things work and why they are as they are—so good, in fact, that civilization existed for more than 5,000 years without relying upon science as we know it today.

Science and the scientific era are generally acknowledged as beginning in the 1600s. It was in July of 1687 that Isaac Newton formalized the mathematics that seem to describe our everyday world, publishing his classic work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematic Principles of Natural Philosophy).

For more than 200 years, Newton’s observations about nature were the foundation of the scientific field now called “classical physics.” Along with Maxwell’s theories of electricity and magnetism from the late 1800s and Einstein’s theories of relativity from the early 1900s, classical physics has been tremendously successful in explaining the large-scale things that we see, such as the movement of planets and apples falling from trees. It has served us so well that we were able to calculate the orbits for our satellites and even put a man on the moon.

During the early 20th century, however, advances in science revealed a place in nature where Newton’s laws just don’t seem to work: the very small world of the atom. Before then, we simply didn’t have the technology to peer into the subatomic world or watch the way particles behave during the birth of a star in a distant galaxy. In both realms—the smallest and the largest—scientists began to see things that couldn’t be explained by traditional physics. A new kind of physics had to be developed, with the rules that would explain the exceptions to our everyday world: the things that happen in the realm of quantum physics.

The definition of quantum physics is found in its name. Quantum means “a discrete quantity of electromagnetic energy”—thus, it’s the stuff that our world is made of when we reduce it to its essence. Quantum physicists soon found that what looks like the solid world to us is really not so solid at all. The following analogy may help us understand why.

When the local movie theater projects a moving image on the screen in front of us, we know that the story we’re seeing is an illusion. The romance and tragedy that tug at our heartstrings are actually the result of many still pictures being flashed very quickly, one after another, to create the sense of a continuous story. While our eyes do see the single images frame by frame, our brain merges them into what we perceive as nonstop movement.

Quantum physicists believe that our world works in much the same way. For instance, what we see as the football touchdown or figure skater’s triple axel on a Sunday-afternoon sports program is actually, in quantum terms, a series of individual events that happen very quickly and closely together. Similar to the way that many images strung together make a movie look so real, life actually occurs as brief, tiny bursts of light called “quanta.” The quanta of life happen so quickly that unless our brain is trained to operate differently (as in some forms of meditation), it simply averages the pulses to create the uninterrupted action we see as the Sunday sports.

Quantum physics, then, is the study of the things that happen on the very small scale of the forces that underlie our physical world. The difference in the ways that the quantum and everyday worlds seem to work has created two schools of thought among scientists in contemporary physics: the classical and the quantum. And each has its own theories to support it.

The great challenge has been to marry these two very different kinds of thinking into a single view of the universe—a unified theory. To do so requires the existence of something that fills what we think of as empty space. But what could occupy it?

1867—Field-Theory Physics: James Clerk Maxwell proposes the existence of forces that cannot be explained by Newton’s physics. His research, along with that of Michael Faraday, leads to the discovery of the universe as fields of energy that interact with each other.

1900—Quantum Physics: Max Planck publishes his theory of the world as bursts of energy called “quanta.” Experiments on the quantum level show that matter exists as probabilities and tendencies rather than absolute things, suggesting that “reality” may not be so real or solid after all.

1905—Relativity Physics: Albert Einstein’s view of the universe upsets Newtonian physics. He proposes that time is relative rather than absolute. A key aspect of relativity is that time and space cannot be separated and exist together as a fourth dimension.

1970—String-Theory Physics: Physicists discover that theories describing the universe as tiny vibrating strings of energy can be used to explain the observations of both the quantum and everyday worlds. The theory is formally accepted by the mainstream physics community in 1984 as a possible bridge to unite all other theories.

20??—The New and Improved Unified Theory of Physics: Someday in the future, physicists will discover a way to explain the holographic nature of what we observe in the quantum universe, as well as what we see in our everyday world. They will formulate the equations to unify their explanation into one consistent story.

Early in the movie Contact, the main character, Dr. Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), asks her father the question that becomes the tagline for the rest of the movie: Are we alone in the universe? Her father’s answer becomes the touchstone for the things that are true in her life. When she finds herself in particularly vulnerable situations, such as opening herself up to romance or trusting her experience in the distant universe where she’s been transported, her father’s words become the guiding principle of her beliefs: His response is simply that if we’re alone in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space.

In much the same way, if we believe that the space between any two things is empty, then it seems like a tremendous waste as well. Scientists believe that more than 90 percent of the cosmos is “missing” and appears to us as empty space. That means that of the entire universe as we know it, only 10 percent has anything in it. Do you really believe that the 10 percent of creation we occupy is all there is? What’s in the space that we think of as “empty”?

If it’s really vacant, then there’s a big question that must be answered: How can the waves of energy that transmit everything from our cell-phone calls to the reflected light bringing this page’s words to your eyes travel from one place to another? Just as water carries ripples away from the place where a stone is tossed into a pond, something must exist that conveys the vibrations of life from one point to another. For this to be true, however, we must upset one of the key tenets of modern science: the belief that space is empty.

When we can at last resolve the mystery of what the space is made of, we will have taken a great step toward understanding ourselves and our relation to the world around us. This question, as we shall see, is as old as we humans are. And the answer, we’ll also discover, has probably been with us all along.

Our sense that we’re somehow connected to the universe, our world, and one another has been a constant, from the aboriginal history etched into the cliff walls of Australia (now believed to be more than 20,000 years old) to the temples of ancient Egypt and the rock art of the American Southwest. While that belief appears to be stronger than ever today, precisely what it is that joins us continues to be the subject of controversy and debate. For us to be connected, there must be something that does the connecting. From poets and philosophers to scientists and those who seek their answers beyond the accepted ideas of their day, humanity has had a sense that within the emptiness we call “space,” something is actually there.

Physicist Konrad Finagle (1858–1936) posed the obvious question regarding the significance of space itself, asking, “Consider what would happen if you took away the space from between matter. Everything in the universe would scrunch together into a volume no larger than a dust speck… . Space is what keeps everything from happening in the same place.”13 The pioneering anthropologist Louis Leakey once stated, “Without an understanding of who we are, we cannot truly advance.” I believe that there is a lot of truth to this statement. The way we’ve seen ourselves in the past worked well enough to get us where we are today. Now it’s time to open the door to a new view of ourselves, one that allows for an even greater possibility. It may be that our reluctance to accept just what it means for space to be occupied by an intelligent force, and for us to be part of that space, has been the biggest stumbling block in our understanding of who we are and how the universe really works .

In the 20th century, modern science may have discovered what’s inside of empty space: a field of energy that’s different from any other form of energy. Just as Indra’s web and Newton’s ether suggest, this energy appears to be everywhere, always, and to have existed since the very beginning of time. In a 1928 lecture, Albert Einstein said, “According to the general theory of relativity, space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space.”14

Max Planck stated that the existence of the field suggests that intelligence is responsible for our physical world. “We must assume behind this force [that we see as matter] the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind .” He concluded, “This Mind is the matrix of all matter [author’s brackets and italics].”15

Whether we talk about the cosmic gap between distant stars and galaxies or the microspace between the bands of energy that form an atom, we ordinarily perceive the space between things as empty. When we say that something is “empty,” we typically mean that nothing—absolutely nothing at all—exists there.

Without a doubt, to the untrained eye what we call “space” certainly looks vacant. But how empty can it be? When we really think about it, what would it mean to live in a world where the space between matter is truly void of anything? First, we know that to find such a place in the cosmos is probably impossible for one reason: As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. If we could somehow magically transport ourselves to such a location, however, what would life look like?

To begin with, it would be a very dark place. While we could turn a flashlight “on,” for example, its illumination couldn’t travel anywhere because there would be nothing for the light waves to pass through. It would be as if we’d thrown a stone into a dried-up pond and were looking for ripples on the surface. The rock would hit the bottom, whether or not the water was there, but there would be no waves, as the ripples that would normally radiate from the impact would have no medium to move through.

For precisely the same reason, our hypothetical world would also be very quiet. Sound must also travel through some kind of medium to perpetuate itself. In fact, almost any kind of energy as we know it today—from the motion of wind to the heat of the sun—couldn’t exist because the electrical, magnetic, and radiant fields—and even the fields of gravity—wouldn’t have the same meaning in a world where space was truly devoid of anything.

Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate about what such a world would be like, since the space that surrounds us is anything but empty. Regardless of what we call it or how science and religion define it, it’s clear that there’s a field or presence that is the “great net” that connects everything in creation and links us to the higher power of a greater world.

Early in the 20th century, Einstein made reference to the mysterious force that he was certain exists in what we see as the universe around us. “Nature shows us only the tail of the lion,” he stated, suggesting that there’s something more to what we see as reality, even if we can’t see it from our particular cosmic vantage point. With a beauty and eloquence that’s typical of Einstein’s view of the universe, he elaborated on his analogy of the cosmos: “I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it [the tail] even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.”16 In later writings, Einstein went on to say that regardless of who we are or what our role in the universe may be, we’re all subject to a greater power: “Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”17

With his declaration of an intelligence underlying creation, Planck had described the energy of Einstein’s lion. By doing so, he ignited a flame of controversy that continues to burn more intensely than ever today. At the center of it, the old ideas about what our world is made of (and the reality of the universe, for that matter) have flown right out the window! More than half a century ago, the father of quantum theory told us that everything is connected through a very real, although unconventional, energy.

On the smallest levels of the universe, atoms and subatomic particles do in fact act as if they’re connected. The problem is that scientists don’t know how or even if the behavior that’s observed on such tiny scales has any meaning for the larger realities of our daily lives. If it does, then the findings suggest that the amazing technologies of science fiction may soon be the reality of our world!

As recently as 2004, physicists from Germany, China, and Austria published reports that sounded more like fantasy than a scientific experiment. In Nature, the scientists announced the first documented experiments of open-destination teleportation—that is, sending the quantum information about a particle (its energetic blueprint) to different locations at the same time.18 In other words, the process is like “faxing a document and in the process destroying the original.”19

Other experiments have demonstrated equally impossible-sounding feats, such as “beaming” particles from one place to another and bilocating. As different as each investigation sounds from the others, they all share a common denominator that implies an even greater story. For these experiments to work as they do, a medium must exist—in other words, there has to be something for the particles to move through. And herein lies what may be the greatest mystery of modern times, since conventional physics states that this medium doesn’t exist .

In 1997, scientific journals throughout the world published the results of something that traditional physicists say shouldn’t have happened. Reported to over 3,400 journalists, educators, scientists, and engineers in more than 40 countries, an experiment had been performed by the University of Geneva in Switzerland on the stuff that our world is made of—particles of light called photons —with results that continue to shake the foundation of conventional wisdom.20

Specifically, the scientists had split a single photon into two separate particles, creating “twins” with identical properties. Then, using equipment developed for the experiment, they fired both particles away from one another in opposite directions. The twins were placed in a specially designed chamber with two fiber-optic pathways, just like the ones that transmit phone calls, extending away from the chamber in opposite directions for a distance of seven miles. By the time each twin reached its target, 14 miles separated one from the other. At the end of the pathway, the twins were forced to “choose” between two random routes that were identical in every respect.

What makes this experiment so interesting is that when the twin particles reached the place where they had to follow one course or the other, they both made precisely the same choices and traveled the same path each time. Without fail, the results were identical every time the experiment was conducted.

Even though conventional wisdom states that the twins are separate and have no communication with one another, they act as if they’re still connected! Physicists call this mysterious connection “quantum entanglement.” The project leader, Nicholas Gisin, explains, “What is fascinating is that entangled photons form one and the same object. Even when the twin photons are separated geographically, if one of them is modified, the other photon automatically undergoes the same change.”21

Historically, there’s been absolutely nothing in traditional physics that would account for what the experiments showed. Yet we see it time and again in experiments such as Gisin’s. Dr. Raymond Chiao of the University of California at Berkeley further describes the results of the Geneva experiments as “one of the deep mysteries of quantum mechanics. These connections are a fact of nature proven by experiments, but to try to explain them philosophically is very difficult.”22

The reason why these investigations are important to us is that conventional wisdom would have us believe that there’s no way for the photons to communicate with one another—their choices are independent and not related. Our belief has been that when physical objects in this world are separate, they are really separate in every sense of the word. But the photons are showing us something very different.

Commenting on this kind of phenomenon long before the 1997 experiment actually took place, Albert Einstein called the possibility of such results occurring “spooky action at a distance.” Today scientists believe that these unconventional results are properties that occur only in the quantum realm and acknowledge them as “quantum weirdness.”

The connection between the photons was so complete that it appeared to be instantaneous. Once it was recognized on the very small scale of photons, the same phenomenon was subsequently found to exist in other places in nature, even in galaxies separated by light-years of distance. “In principle, it should make no difference whether the correlation between twin particles occurs when they are separated by a few meters or by the entire universe,” says Gisin. Why? What connects two particles of light or two galaxies to such a degree that a change in the first happens simultaneously in the second? What are we being shown about the way the world works that we may have missed in earlier experiments from the past?

To answer this kind of question, we first have to understand where the Divine Matrix comes from. And to do that, we have to take a step back—way back—to the time that Western scientists believe is the beginning of everything … or at least of the universe as we know it .

Mainstream scientists today believe that our universe began between 13 and 20 billion years ago with a massive explosion unlike anything that had ever existed before or has existed since. Although there are conflicting theories about the precise timing and whether there were single or multiple explosions, there appears to be a general agreement that our universe began with a massive release of energy a long time ago. In 1951, astronomer Fred Hoyle coined a term for that unfathomable explosion that is still used today: He named it the “big bang.”

Researchers have calculated that just fractions of a second before the big bang occurred, our entire universe was much, much smaller than it is today. Computer models suggest that it was so small, in fact, that it was tightly compressed into one tiny ball. With all the “empty” space removed from what we see as the universe today, that ball is believed to have been about the size of a single green pea!

While it may have been tiny, it certainly wasn’t cool, however. The models suggest that the temperature within that compact space was an unimaginable 18 billion million million million degrees Fahrenheit—many times hotter than the present temperature of the sun. Within a fraction of a second following the big bang, the simulations show that the temperatures may have cooled to a balmy 18 billion degrees or so, and the birth of our new universe was well under way.

As the big bang’s explosive force ripped into the emptiness of the existing void, it carried with it more than just the heat and light that we’d expect. It also burst forth as a pattern of energy that became the blueprint for all that is now and all that can ever be. It’s this pattern that’s the subject of ancient myth, timeless lore, and mystical wisdom. With names that range from the Buddhist Sutra’s “net” of Indra, to the Hopi tradition’s “web” of Spider Grandmother, the echo of that pattern remains today.

It is this net or web of energy that continues to expand throughout the cosmos as the quantum essence of all things, including us and our surroundings. This is the energy that connects our lives as the Divine Matrix. It is this essence as well that acts as a many-dimensional mirror, reflecting what we create in our emotions and beliefs back to us as our world. (See Part III.)

How can we be so sure that everything in the universe is really connected? To answer this question, let’s go back to the big bang and the University of Geneva experiment in the previous section. As different as they appear from one another, there’s a subtle similarity: In each, the connection that’s being explored exists between two things that were once physically joined. In the case of the experiment, splitting a single photon into two identical particles created the twins, and this was done to assure that both were alike in every way. The fact that the photons and the particles from the big bang were once physically part of one another is the key to their connectivity. It appears that once something is joined, it is always connected, whether it remains physically linked or not.

This is key in our discussion for one really important and often-overlooked reason. As huge as our universe looks to us today, and notwithstanding the billions of light-years that it takes for the brilliance of the most distant stars to reach our eyes, at one time all the matter in the universe was squeezed into a very small space. In that unimaginable state of compression, everything was physically joined. As the energy of the big bang caused our universe to expand, the matter’s particles became separated by greater and greater amounts of space.

The experiments suggest that regardless of how much space separates two things, once joined they are always connected. There’s every reason to believe that the entangled state that links particles that are separated today also applies to the stuff of our universe that was connected before the big bang. Technically, everything that was merged within our pea-sized cosmos 13 to 20 billion years ago is still connected! And the energy that does the connecting is what Planck described as the “matrix” of everything.

Today, modern science has refined our understanding of Planck’s matrix, describing it as a form of energy that’s been everywhere, always present since time began with the big bang. The existence of this field implies three principles that have a direct effect upon the way we live, all that we do, what we believe, and even how we feel about each day of our lives. Admittedly, these ideas directly contradict many well-established beliefs of both science and spirituality. At the same time, though, it is precisely these principles that open the door to an empowering and life-affirming way of seeing our world and living our lives:

1. The first principle suggests that because everything exists within the Divine Matrix, all things are connected. If this is so, then what we do in one part of our lives must have an effect and influence on other parts.

2. The second principle proposes that the Divine Matrix is holographic —meaning that any portion of the field contains everything in the field. As consciousness itself is believed to be holographic, this signifies that the prayer we make in our living room, for example, already exists with our loved ones and at the place where it’s intended. In other words, there’s no need to send our prayers anywhere, because they already exist everywhere.

3. The third principle implies that the past, present, and future are intimately joined. The Matrix appears to be the container that holds time, providing for a continuity between the choices of our present and the experiences of our future .

Regardless of what we call it or how science and religion define it, it’s clear that there’s something out there—a force, a field, a presence—that is the great “net” that links us with one another, our world, and a greater power.

If we can truly grasp what the three principles tell us about our relationship to each other, the universe, and ourselves, then the events of our lives take on an entirely new meaning. We become participants rather than victims of forces that we can’t see and don’t understand. To be in such a place is where our empowerment really begins.