The Field (2 page)

Dozens of scientists in prestigious areas around the world have demonstrated that all matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection and that an information transfer is constantly going on between living things and their environment. Still others have produced evidence suggesting that consciousness is a substance outside the confines of our body. The brain and DNA, always assumed to be the body’s central conductors, should more properly be considered transducers—which transmit, receive from, and ultimately interpret quantum information picked up from the Field. Even our current understanding of time as flowing in a single direction has been exposed in orthodox circles as an incomplete human construct that may have to be drastically revised.

In the few intervening decades since the discoveries of these early explorers, so much has been discovered about the nature of consciousness that I felt compelled to write a sequel.
The Intention Experiment
concerns what
The Field
implied: that directed thoughts have a central participatory role in creating reality, a theory that is continually tested through massive, ongoing online experiments with readers around the world (www.theintentionexperiment.com).

Since I first published this book, the Zero Point Field as a field of all possibility and a free source of unimaginable energy has gripped the public imagination. Attempts to extract energy from the Zero Point Field as an exotic means of aerospace travel, once the object of secret projects funded by modest seed money, have now been lavishly underwritten by corporate giants such as Lockheed Martin.
The Field
has even entered the popular lexicon in computer games, movies, television series, and pop songs. In the cartoon
The Incredibles
, the chief antagonist Syndrome makes use of gauntlets armed with “zero point energy” to immobilize his opponents. Massive Internet search engines are said to be investigating the Zero Point Field as a possible technology for advanced intuitive searching.

Judging from the hundreds of letters I have received since the first publication of
The Field
, the meaning of this book is different for every reader. Nevertheless, everyone has understood that its central thrust is the hope of new possibility. At a time when the old scientific story, with its emphasis on technical mastery of the universe, threatens our planet with extinction,
The Field
offers an alternative future. Mainstream science has grown ever more fundamentalist, dominated by a few highly vocal scientists who believe that our scientific story has largely been completed. Nevertheless, a small body of resistance carries on in defiance of this restricted view. With every unorthodox question asked, with every unlikely answer, frontier scientists such as those featured in
The Field
remake our world. May they and their ilk light our way.

L
YNNE
M
C
T
AGGART
,

July 2007

PROLOGUE

The Coming Revolution

W
E ARE POISED ON
the brink of a revolution – a revolution as daring and profound as Einstein’s discovery of relativity. At the very frontier of science new ideas are emerging that challenge everything we believe about how our world works and how we define ourselves. Discoveries are being made that prove what religion has always espoused: that human beings are far more extraordinary than an assemblage of flesh and bones. At its most fundamental, this new science answers questions that have perplexed scientists for hundreds of years. At its most profound, this is a science of the miraculous.

For a number of decades respected scientists in a variety of disciplines all over the world have been carrying out well-designed experiments whose results fly in the face of current biology and physics. Together, these studies offer us copious information about the central organizing force governing our bodies and the rest of the cosmos.

What they have discovered is nothing less than astonishing. At our most elemental, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge. Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is the central engine of our being and our consciousness, the alpha and the omega of our existence.

There is no ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ duality to our bodies in relation to the universe, but one underlying energy field. This field is responsible for our mind’s highest functions, the information source guiding the growth of our bodies. It is our brain, our heart, our memory – indeed, a blueprint of the world for all time. The field is the force, rather than germs or genes, that finally determines whether we are healthy or ill, the force which must be tapped in order to heal. We are attached and engaged, indivisible from our world, and our only fundamental truth is our relationship with it. ‘The field,’ as Einstein once succinctly put it, ‘is the only reality.’
¹

Up until the present, biology and physics have been handmaidens of views espoused by Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics. Everything we believe about our world and our place within it takes its lead from ideas that were formulated in the seventeenth century, but still form the backbone of modern science – theories that present all the elements of the universe as isolated from each other, divisible and wholly self-contained.

These, at their essence, created a world view of separateness. Newton described a material world in which individual particles of matter followed certain laws of motion through space and time – the universe as machine. Before Newton formulated his laws of motion, French philosopher René Descartes had come up with what was then a revolutionary notion, that we – represented by our minds – were separate from this lifeless inert matter of our bodies, which were just another type of well-oiled machine. The world was composed of a load of little discrete objects, which behaved predictably. The most separate of these was the human being. We sat outside this universe, looking in. Even our bodies were somehow separate and
other
from the real us, the conscious minds doing the observing.

The Newtonian world might have been law-abiding, but ultimately it was a lonely, desolate place. The world carried on, one vast gearbox, whether we were present or not. With a few deft moves, Newton and Descartes had plucked God and life from the world of matter, and us and our consciousness from the center of our world. They ripped the heart and soul out of the universe, leaving in its wake a lifeless collection of interlocking parts. Most important of all, as Danah Zohar observed in
The Quantum Self
, ‘Newton’s vision tore us out from the fabric of the universe.’
²

Our self-image grew even bleaker with the work of Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution – tweaked slightly now by the neo-Darwinists – is of a life that is random, predatory, purposeless and solitary. Be the best or don’t survive. You are no more than an evolutionary accident. The vast checkerboard biological heritage of your ancestors is stripped down to one central facet: survival. Eat or be eaten. The essence of your humanity is a genetic terrorist, efficiently disposing of any weaker links. Life is not about sharing and interdependence. Life is about winning, getting there first. And if you do manage to survive, you are on your own at the top of the evolutionary tree.

These paradigms – the world as machine, man as survival machine – have led to a technological mastery of the universe, but little real knowledge of any central importance to us. On a spiritual and metaphysical level, they have led to the most desperate and brutal sense of isolation. They also have got us no closer to understanding the most fundamental mysteries of our own being: how we think, how life begins, why we get ill, how a single cell turns into a fully formed person, and even what happens to human consciousness when we die.

We remain reluctant apostles of these views of the world as mechanized and separate, even if this isn’t part of our ordinary experience. Many of us seek refuge from what we see as the harsh and nihilistic fact of our existence in religion, which may offer some succour in its ideals of unity, community and purpose, but through a view of the world that contradicts the view espoused by science. Anyone seeking a spiritual life has had to wrestle with these opposing world views and fruitlessly try to reconcile the two.

This world of the separate should have been laid waste once and for all by the discovery of quantum physics in the early part of the twentieth century. As the pioneers of quantum physics peered into the very heart of matter, they were astounded by what they saw. The tiniest bits of matter weren’t even matter, as we know it, not even a set
something
, but sometimes one thing, sometimes something quite different. And even stranger, they were often many possible things all at the same time. But most significantly, these subatomic particles had no meaning in isolation, but only in relationship with everything else. At its most elemental, matter couldn’t be chopped up into self-contained little units, but was completely indivisible. You could only understand the universe as a dynamic web of interconnection. Things once in contact remained always in contact through all space and all time. Indeed, time and space themselves appeared to be arbitrary constructs, no longer applicable at this level of the world. Time and space as we know them did not, in fact, exist. All that appeared, as far as the eye could see, was one long landscape of the here and now.

The pioneers of quantum physics – Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli – had some inkling of the metaphysical territory they had trespassed into. If electrons were connected everywhere at once, this implied something profound about the nature of the world at large. They turned to classic philosophical texts in their attempt to grasp the deeper truth about the strange subatomic world they were observing. Pauli examined psychoanalysis and archetypes and the Qabbalah; Bohr, the Tao and Chinese philosophy; Schrödinger, Hindu philosophy; and Heisenberg, the Platonic theory of ancient Greece.
³
Nevertheless, a coherent theory of the spiritual implications of quantum physics remained beyond their grasp. Niels Bohr hung a sign on his door saying ‘Philosophers keep out. Work in progress.’

There was other, quite practical, unfinished business with quantum theory. Bohr and his colleagues only got so far in their experiments and understanding. The experiments they’d conducted demonstrating these quantum effects had occurred in the laboratory, with non-living subatomic particles. From there, scientists in their wake naturally assumed that this strange quantum world only existed in the world of dead matter. Anything alive still operated according to the laws of Newton and Descartes, a view that has informed all of modern medicine and biology. Even biochemistry depends upon Newtonian force and collision to work.

And what of us? Suddenly, we had grown central to every physical process, but no one had fully acknowledged this. The quantum pioneers had discovered that our involvement with matter was crucial. Subatomic particles existed in all possible states until disturbed by us – by observing or measuring – at which point, they’d settle down, at long last, into something real. Our observation – our human consciousness – was utterly central to this process of subatomic flux actually becoming some set thing, but we weren’t in any of the mathematics of Heisenberg or Schrödinger. They realized that we were somehow key, but they didn’t know how to include us. As far as science was concerned, we were still on the outside looking in.

All the loose strands of quantum physics were never tied up into a coherent theory, and quantum physics got reduced to an extremely successful tool of technology, vital for making bombs and modern electronics. The philosophical implications were forgotten, and all that remained were its practical advantages. The rank and file of today’s physicists were willing to accept the bizarre nature of the quantum world at face value because the mathematics, such as the Schrödinger equation, works so well, but shook their heads at the counter-intuitiveness of it all.
⁴
How could electrons be in touch with everything at once? How could an electron not be a set single thing until it is examined or measured? How, in fact, could anything be concrete in the world, if it was a will o’ the wisp once you started looking closer at it?

Their answer was to say that there was a single truth for anything small and another truth for something much bigger, one truth for things that were alive, another for things that weren’t, and to accept these apparent contradictions just as one might accept a basic axiom of Newton’s. These were the rules of the world and they should just be taken at face value. The math works, and that’s all that counts.

A small band of scientists dotted around the globe was not satisfied to simply carry on with quantum physics by rote. They required a better answer to many of the large questions that had been left unanswered. In their investigations and experimentation, they picked up where the pioneers of quantum physics had left off, and they began probing deeper.

Several thought again about a few equations that had always been subtracted out in quantum physics. These equations stood for the Zero Point Field – an ocean of microscopic vibrations in the space between things. If the Zero Point Field were included in our conception of the most fundamental nature of matter, they realized, the very underpinning of our universe was a heaving sea of energy – one vast quantum field. If this were true, everything would be connected to everything else like some invisible web.

They also discovered that we were made of the same basic material. On our most fundamental level, living beings, including human beings, were packets of quantum energy constantly exchanging information with this inexhaustible energy sea. Living things emitted a weak radiation, and this was the most crucial aspect of biological processes. Information about all aspects of life, from cellular communication to the vast array of controls of DNA, was relayed through an information exchange on the quantum level. Even our minds, that
other
supposedly so outside of the laws of matter, operated according to quantum processes. Thinking, feeling – every higher cognitive function – had to do with quantum information pulsing simultaneously through our brains and body. Human perception occurred because of interactions between the subatomic particles of our brains and the quantum energy sea. We literally resonated with our world.