Let’s do a thought experiment. Take a look at your hand. You know that it’s made up of tissues, blood, and bones. You may further realize that these things are each made of tiny cells, which are in turn made of minute proteins which are constructed from DNA and RNA . . . which are themselves made from molecules . . . which come from atoms . . . which come from . . . what?
Squint now . . . what comes next? Pretend that you’re seeing your hand down at its most basic level. It’s not solid at all, is it. See how there’s so much space between the atoms? What’s in that space? Nothing, you say? Emptiness? Empty space? Is that really what you’re made of?
This is where most people leave it. Good enough, they say. After all, what good is it to know more? Ninety-nine percent of us, no matter what our religion or philosophical bent, have been taught to believe in the doctrine of “dualism”: that your mind and soul are completely separate from your body. Mind and matter occupy different realms, and baby, they don’t tango. Whatever’s in that empty space is not for me to know. It’s some fuzzy border reality between matter and . . . what, God? Oh right, we don’t want to know.
So what’s wrong with this old way of thinking? It’s just not working for us anymore.
Our 400-year-old way of thinking, based on Descartes vision way back in the 1600s of “two realms” of existence, has broken down under the scrutiny of today’s quantum physics.
Mind and matter are becoming much harder to keep separate. In fact, the more you try to keep them apart, the more they seem to want to work together. Of course, for hundreds of years, Spiritualists and other forward-thinking groups have been suggesting that your mind and matter are really made of the same invisible stuff, and just like when you stick your finger in a pool of water and see the ripples moving away, when you think something, it can’t help but affect the matter (the world) around you. In fact, you really can’t separate them. Every thought you have disturbs the “water” around it in one way or another . . . for good or ill.
“Oh right,” said the old-guard scientists. “Your mind is only good for OBSERVING the matter around you, it can’t really affect it.”
“Not so,” say a surprising group of new scientists-from physics professors to mathematicians to biologists. A growing number are saying, “Well, your mind affecting your world-even creating your world-wouldn’t really contradict the laws of science after all, since these laws are evolving right under our noses . . . in fact it helps explain a lot of things!”
Like what? How about premonition. And intuition. And luck. And how like-attracts-like AND how “opposites attract.” And how you “know” when certain things will happen, and when they won’t. It’s how your dog knows to be waiting for you when you walk in the door, and how ”the strangest coincidences” occur in your life. It’s how being near a healthy, positive person can cause an ill person to get well . . . or vice versa. It’s how you suddenly think of your friend the minute the phone rings, and it’s her.
Oh, we’re on to something very big, indeed.
So what does this mean to the “two realms” theory? It’s gone the way of the dinosaur. Today, we’ve begun talking about the Zero-Point Field. and multi-dimensional space. And for this little thought experiment, the most important thing . . . a new way of looking at your own mind.
Are you still with me in this thought experiment? Great! It’s time to shift gears and start thinking about your mind. If you grew up in a Western culture, you probably thought of your body as your physical self, your mind as mostly your brain circuitry and emotional makeup (with maybe a touch of something else, not sure what, but some kind of “higher consciousness”-again not sure where that exactly resides-might be in the brain, might not), and finally a soul, which definitely exists on another plane of existence, and which is really hard to connect to, but some part of it, at least, is either connected to your body or somehow lodged in the physical-again, not sure how or where, somehow our religion just skipped over that detail.
A lot of vague stuff here, isn’t there? About the only clear-cut thing is the soul/body split. That’s pretty firm. Except it isn’t. Not to a whole new generation of scientists and philosophers.
So put that old model aside, and let’s think about a new one. In this model, you, your entire YOU, are like a string of musical notes, from the lowest, low note to the highest high note. So high and so low, in fact, that you can’t see or hear where they begin or end. You can hear some of these low notes-the ones that make up your physical body. They’re made up of the atoms and molecules in your body.
But now let’s go up the scale. The midtones are your mind. Hmmmmm. Hear their sounds? All day long, as thoughts, inspiration, dreams, breakthroughs, deja vu. And the highest notes, the ones that are just out of your hearing (because after all, the lowest notes of your body only have a limited spectrum that can “hear”) are your soul.
Another way of looking at your body, mind, and soul is as a continuum of frequencies. Frequencies are simply measurements of waves. As physics professor Goswani puts it, frequencies are simply “how fast a wave wiggles.” Just about everything can be measured in terms of frequencies. Light frequencies make up both visible and invisible spectrums. You can see red light as the color red. But you can’t see ultraviolet light-that’s the light that gives you a sunburn. Sounds also travel in frequencies. Dogs hear frequencies that we can’t. Our radios and cell phones pick up frequencies that are around us all the time-all through the air-that we can’t hear.
My point is that our physical bodies are very limited in perceiving frequency spectrums, or wave energy. But because we can’t hear or see it does not mean that, say, TV signals don’t exist.
In fact, all life-everything in our solar system, is made of wave energy at its source. You are, I am, and so is the computer you are looking at right now. This background wave energy that makes up everything is the Flow itself. And all the smaller, subdivided wave frequencies that make up the concrete objects in the Universe are simply different “tunings” of this energy. Just by virtue of existing, you are participating in the Universal Flow right now, at this very moment.Your Flow (the Flow that makes up You) and the Flow of everything you are interacting with are mixing and colliding with each other right now, indeed existing as PART OF one another. This includes your thoughts, other people’s thoughts, the frequencies of light and color around you, the frequencies of the electrons spinning in every physical object surrounding you. Which, interestingly, leads us right back to your hand. Can you see what’s in the empty spaces between those atoms now? The Flow-the radiant energy of all things, stored, ultimately, as wave information.
fascinating, thanks Summer