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Authors: Lynne McTaggart

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BOOK: The Field
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Their discoveries were extraordinary and heretical. In a stroke, they had challenged many of the most basic laws of biology and physics. What they may have uncovered was no less than the key to all information processing and exchange in our world, from the communication between cells to perception of the world at large. They’d come up with answers to some of the most profound questions in biology about human morphology and living consciousness. Here, in so-called ‘dead’ space, possibly lay the very key to life itself.

Most fundamentally, they had provided evidence that all of us connect with each other and the world at the very undercoat of our being. Through scientific experiment they’d demonstrated that there may be such a thing as a life force flowing through the universe – what has variously been called collective consciousness or, as theologians have termed it, the Holy Spirit. They provided a plausible explanation of all those areas that over the centuries mankind has had faith in but no solid evidence of or adequate accounting for, from the effectiveness of alternative medicine and even prayer to life after death. They offered us, in a sense, a science of religion.

Unlike the world view of Newton or Darwin, theirs was a vision that was life-enhancing. These were ideas that could empower us, with their implications of order and control. We were not simply accidents of nature. There was purpose and unity to our world and our place within it, and we had an important say in it. What we did and thought mattered – indeed, was critical in creating our world. Human beings were no longer separate from each other. It was no longer us and them. We were no longer at the periphery of our universe – on the outside looking in. We could take our rightful place, back in the center of our world.

These ideas were the stuff of treason. In many cases, these scientists have had to fight a rearguard action against an entrenched and hostile establishment. Their investigations have gone on for thirty years, largely unacknowledged or suppressed, but not because of the quality of the work. The scientists, all from credible top-ranking institutions – Princeton University, Stanford University, top institutions in Germany and France – have produced impeccable experimentation. Nevertheless, their experiments have attacked a number of tenets held to be sacred and at the very heart of modern science. They did not fit the prevailing scientific view of the world – the world as machine. Acknowledging these new ideas would require scrapping much of what modern science believes in and, in a sense, starting over from scratch. The old guard was having none of it. It did not fit the world view and so it must be wrong.

Nevertheless, it is too late. The revolution is unstoppable. The scientists who have been highlighted in
The Field
are merely a few of the pioneers, a small representation of a larger movement.
5
Many others are right behind them, challenging, experimenting, modifying their views, engaged in the work that all true explorers engage in. Rather than dismissing this information as not fitting in with the scientific view of the world, orthodox science will have to begin adapting its world view to suit. It is time to relegate Newton and Descartes to their proper places, as prophets of a historical view that has now been surpassed. Science can only be a process of understanding our world and ourselves, rather than a fixed set of rules for all time, and with the ushering in of the new, the old must often be discarded.

The Field
is the story of this revolution in the making. Like many revolutions, it began with small pockets of rebellion, which gathered individual strength and momentum – a breakthrough in one area, a discovery somewhere else – rather than one large, unified movement of reform. Although aware of each other’s work, these are men and women in the laboratory, who often dislike venturing beyond experimentation to examine the full implications of their findings or don’t always have the time necessary to place them in context with other scientific evidence coming to light. Each scientist has been on a voyage of discovery, and each has discovered a bucket of earth, but no one has been bold enough to declare it a continent.

The Field
represents one of the first attempts to synthesize this disparate research into a cohesive whole. In the process, it also provides a scientific validation of areas which have largely been the domain of religion, mysticism, alternative medicine or New Age speculation.

Although all of the material in this book is grounded in the hard fact of scientific experimentation, at times, with the help of the scientists concerned, I’ve had to engage in speculation as to how all this fits together. Consequently, I must stress that this theory is, as Princeton Dean Emeritus Robert Jahn is fond of saying, a work in progress. In a few instances, some of the scientific evidence presented in
The Field
has not yet been reproduced by independent groups. As with all new ideas,
The Field
has to be seen as an early attempt to put individual findings into a coherent model, portions of which are bound to be refined in future.

It is also wise to keep in mind the well-known dictum that a right idea can never get definitively proven. The best that science can ever hope to achieve is to disprove wrong ideas. There have been many attempts to discredit the new ideas elaborated in this book by scientists with good credentials and testing methods, but thus far, no one has been successful. Until they are disproven or refined, the findings of these scientists stand as valid.

This book is intended for a lay audience, and in order to make quite complicated notions comprehensible, I’ve often had to reach for metaphors which represent only a crude approximation of the truth. At times, the radical new ideas presented in this book will require patience, and I cannot promise that this will always be an easy read. A number of notions are quite difficult for the Newtonians and Cartesians among us, accustomed as we are to thinking of everything in the world as separate and inviolate.

It is also important to stress that none of this is my discovery. I am not a scientist. I am only the reporter and occasionally the interpreter. The plaudits go to the largely unknown men and women in the laboratory who have unearthed and grasped the extraordinary in the course of the everyday. Often without their even fully comprehending it, their work transformed into a quest for the physics of the impossible.

Lynne M
C
Taggart

London, July 2001

Part 1

The Resonating Universe

Now I know we’re not in Kansas.

Dorothy,
The Wizard of Oz

CHAPTER ONE

Light in the Darkness

 

P
ERHAPS WHAT HAPPENED TO
Ed Mitchell was due to the lack of gravity, or maybe to the fact that all his senses had been disoriented. He had been on his way home, which at the moment was approximately 250,000 miles away, somewhere on the surface of the clouded azure and white crescent appearing intermittently through the triangular window of the command module of the
Apollo
14.
1

Two days before, he had become the sixth man to land on the moon. The trip had been a triumph: the first lunar landing to carry out scientific investigations. The 94 pounds of rock and soil samples in the hold attested to that. Although he and his commander, Alan Shepard, hadn’t reached the summit of the 750-foot-high ancient Cone Crater, the rest of the items on the meticulous schedule taped to their wrists, detailing virtually every minute of their two-day journey, had been methodically ticked off.

What they hadn’t fully accounted for was the effect of this uninhabited world, low in gravity, devoid of the diluting effect of atmosphere, on the senses. Without signposts such as trees or telephone wires, or indeed anything other than the
Antares
, the gold insect-like lunar module, on the full sweep of the dust-grey landscape, all perceptions of space, scale, distance or depth were horribly distorted; Ed had been shocked to discover that any points of navigation which had been carefully noted on high-resolution photographs were at least double the distance expected. It was as though he and Alan had shrunk during space travel and what from home had appeared to be tiny humps and ridges on the moon’s surface had suddenly swollen to heights of six feet or more. And yet if they felt diminished in size, they were also lighter than ever. He’d experienced an odd lightness of being, from the weak gravitational pull, and despite the weight and bulk of his ungainly spacesuit, felt buoyed at every step.

There had also been the distorting effect of the sun, pure and unadulterated in this airless world. In the blinding sunlight, even in the relatively cool morning, before the highs that might reach 270° F, craters, landmarks, soil and the earth – even the sky itself – all stood out in absolute clarity. For a mind accustomed to the soft filter of atmosphere, the sharp shadows, the changeable colors of the slate-grey soil all conspired to play tricks on the eye. Unknowingly he and Alan had been only 61 feet from Cone Crater’s edge, about 10 seconds away, when they turned back, convinced that they wouldn’t reach it in time – a failure that would bitterly disappoint Ed, who’d longed to stare into that 1100-foot diameter hole in the midst of the lunar uplands. Their eyes didn’t know how to interpret this hyperstate of vision. Nothing lived, but also nothing was hidden from view, and everything lacked subtlety. Every sight overwhelmed the eye with brilliant contrasts and shadows. He was seeing, in a sense, more clearly and less clearly than he ever had.

During the relentless activity of their schedule, there had been little time for reflection or wonder, or for any thoughts of a larger purpose to the trip. They had gone farther in the universe than any man before them, and yet, weighed down by the knowledge that they were costing the American taxpayers $200,000 a minute, they felt compelled to keep their eyes on the clock, ticking off the details of what Houston had planned in their packed schedule. Only after the lunar module had reconnected with the command module and begun the two-day journey back to earth could Ed pull off his spacesuit, now filthy with lunar soil, sit back in his long johns and try to put his frustration and his jumble of thoughts into some sort of order.

The
Kittyhawk
was slowly rotating, like a chicken on a spit, in order to balance the thermal effect on each side of the spacecraft; and in its slow revolution, earth was intermittently framed through the window as a tiny crescent in an all-engulfing night of stars. From this perspective, as the earth traded places in and out of view with the rest of the solar system, sky didn’t exist only above the astronauts, as we ordinarily view it, but as an all-encompassing entity that cradled the earth from all sides.

It was then, while staring out of the window, that Ed experienced the strangest feeling he would ever have: a feeling of
connectedness
, as if all the planets and all the people of all time were attached by some invisible web. He could hardly breathe from the majesty of the moment. Although he continued to turn knobs and press buttons, he felt distanced from his body, as though someone else were doing the navigating.

There seemed to be an enormous force field here, connecting all people, their intentions and thoughts, and every animate and inanimate form of matter for all time. Anything he did or thought would influence the rest of the cosmos, and every occurrence in the cosmos would have a similar effect on him. Time was just an artificial construct. Everything he’d been taught about the universe and the separateness of people and things felt wrong. There were no accidents or individual intentions. The natural intelligence that had gone on for billions of years, that had forged the very molecules of his being, was also responsible for his own present journey. This wasn’t something he was simply comprehending in his mind, but an overwhelmingly visceral feeling, as though he were physically extending out of the window to the very furthest reaches of the cosmos.

He hadn’t seen the face of God. It didn’t feel like a standard religious experience so much as a blinding epiphany of meaning – what the Eastern religions often term an ‘ecstasy of unity’. It was as though in a single instant Ed Mitchell had discovered and felt The Force.

He stole a glance at Alan and Stu Roosa, the other astronaut on the
Apollo
14 mission, to see if they were experiencing anything remotely similar. There had been a moment when they’d first stepped off the
Antares
and into the plains of Fra Mauro, a highland region of the moon, when Alan, a veteran of the first American space launch, ordinarily so hardboiled, with little time for this kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo, strained in his bulky spacesuit to look up above him and wept at the sight of the earth, so impossibly beautiful in the airless sky. But now Alan and Stu appeared to be automatically going about their business, and so he was afraid to say anything about what was beginning to feel like his own ultimate moment of truth.

He’d always been a bit of the odd man out in the space program and certainly, at 41, although younger than Shepard, he was one of the senior members of
Apollo
. Oh, he looked and acted the part all right, with his sandy-haired, broad-faced, Midwestern looks and the languid drawl of a commercial airline pilot. But to the others, he was a bit of an intellectual: the only one among them with both a PhD and test-pilot credentials. The way he’d entered the space program had been decidedly left field. Getting his doctorate in astrophysics from MIT was the way he thought he’d be indispensable – that’s how deliberately he’d plotted his path toward NASA – and only afterward did it occur to him to boost the flying time he’d gained overseas to qualify. Nevertheless, Ed was no slouch when it came to flying. Like all the other fellows, he’d put in his time at Chuck Yeager’s flying circus in the Mojave Desert, getting airplanes to do things they’d never been designed to do. At one point, he’d even been their instructor. But he liked to think of himself as not so much a test pilot as an explorer: a kind of modern-day seeker after truths. His own attraction toward science constantly wrestled with the fierce Baptist fundamentalism of his youth. It seemed no accident that he’d grown up in Roswell, New Mexico, where the first alien sightings supposedly had occurred – just a mile down the road from the home of Robert Goddard, the father of American rocket science, and just a few miles across the mountains from the first testings of the atomic bomb. Science and spirituality coexisted in him, jockeying for position, but he yearned for them to somehow shake hands and make peace.

BOOK: The Field
11.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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