Think of an Elephant: Combining Science and Spirituality for a Better Life

Introduction

As we watch the way the world is changing and evolving around us, most of us worry about what is driving today’s environmental, political and social upheavals. We also wonder how we, as individuals, can ever reach out effectively and positively impact these global problems from the local landscape of our daily lives.

September 11, in particular, highlighted a global spiritual crisis, propelling many of us into a deeper spiritual search and personal introspection. It is as if we have entered a 360-degree war zone. Meanwhile, global warming has snapped our attention towards an environmental crisis rapidly developing worldwide. Environmental and political instability is everyone’s concern, while global poverty and corporate collapses have highlighted cruel social and economic inequities.

With our social, political and environmental worlds becoming increasingly chaotic and uncertain, it is not enough to wonder how we can halt the crises we see unfolding around us. Before we have any hope of resolving these increasingly urgent problems, we need to address a deeper, underlying issue: the extent to which these ecological and social crises reflect on our progress and direction as a species, on our personal behaviour, and on our spiritual evolution.

How can a highly evolved species such as ours, with its natural instinct for happiness and hope, stop doing some of the things we do and turn the tide to create a better future? Our world has evolved to a point where one animal, the human species, has the power to influence the evolution and destiny of the planet, for better or worse. Put simply, the future direction of life on Earth is now in human hands. What happens from here depends on the choices we make personally and globally.

The spiritual progress of humanity has come to an exciting high-point. At last we are beginning to realize how science, religion and spirituality can work together to enlighten us about reality and creation – and where our life fits in to it all. With the mounting scientific evidence of the extent to which observation and mind affect reality in many ways, science is about to take a momentous step: an acknowledgement that the ‘hard sciences’ (physics, chemistry and so on) and the ‘soft sciences’ such as psychology and philosophy are not only interrelated but in fact inseparable. Our quest is to balance what science is telling us today about the nature of physical reality, biological evolution and life in general with what religion and spirituality have been teaching throughout the centuries in their calls to eternity, ‘divine’ experiences, and life beyond ourselves.

Although these two positions have traditionally been presented as mutually exclusive, people of all persuasions and times have suspected that not only is reality bigger and vastly more wonderful than we can grasp with our limited senses, but also that it is something all of us are already influenced by and part of. Think of an Elephant establishes that the traditional positions of science and religion are profoundly intertwined, and that there are more dimensions to reality and spiritual maturity than most of us ever realized.

This book sets out to explain these connections and discover how they can be applied to our day-to-day lives.

We might think we live in a three-dimensional world of space plus time, but science today tells us there may be ten or more dimensions to greater reality. My graduate studies, archival research, professional observations and personal experience have led me to the conclusion that most of us live parallel lives – presently unbalanced – between forces of separation and isolation on one hand, and forces of connection and unity on the other. Our spiritual search remains the life-long quest to balance these two realities in our lives.

This spiritual quest is in itself part of our personal and collective evolution. Life has so far evolved through several transitions on its way from simple bacteria to more intricate organisms, and then on to human consciousness and our recent large-scale complex societies. Now another major transition is underway, a spiritual awakening that involves the development of ‘breakthrough’ or spiritually holistic consciousness.

On a physical level, our network of connections is being expanded everywhere by new technologies. The World Wide Web – with its bulletin boards, blogs, and other arrays of online networks – points to a globally interactive world where physical space is now interchangeable with cyberspace to create a new and extended self. The Internet, in particular, is becoming our external brain – an extension of our consciousness, and as much a key to the evolution of thinking as the grey matter of our own brain. Embraced by most who experience it, the ultra-connectedness of Internet technology and telecommunications is being matched within our own biology by the enhanced connections of our evolving (yet rudimentary) psychic intelligence and our emerging creative abilities.

While challenging the bedrock of many belief-systems, Think of an Elephant joins the momentum of the human potential movement and its literature. This is a book about discovering deeper connections within our physical, psychological and spiritual worlds, about the evolution of the human soul as we begin to understand the full impact our psychic separation is having on us and the way we live, our spiritual fitness and our world. These discoveries do not come with a formula or an instruction sheet; rather, this is a process of gradual enlightenment that will unfold throughout these pages. You will be presented with some astonishing ideas that challenge everything you think you know. Although some of these ideas may seem difficult, they are worth following, as they offer us the key to unleashing the full power of human potential.

This book is written in defence of the best in human consciousness, and the best within the spirit of modern civilization. The book not only distils the evidence for multiple realities within an infinity of higher connections, but also explains the steps that will take us further towards our evolving spiritual maturity by putting our personal search for meaning into a scientific framework designed to be understood by the layperson. As well as identifying the different levels of personal spiritual development in today’s global context, this book provides insights into the converging forces operating within the fields of science, health, the environment and psycho-spiritual evolution. It takes the reader on an exploration of our most profound possibilities, uncovering our personal power and indicating how we can make an immediate, real and significant difference. We can do this by using the capacities each of us has within us today, irrespective of where we are or what resources we think we have or haven’t got.

In addition to the body of scientific research supporting these arguments, Think of an Elephant also addresses a number of questions to which there are no readily agreed answers. The idea here is not to argue the finer points of any single theory, but merely to make us think, inquire, debate and wonder; to find significant answers we first need to challenge our assumptions about what we think we know, about what is important, and about the limits of what is possible. Cynicism before investigation is one of the surest ways to kill creativity and inhibit exploration and discovery. To make any material or spiritual progress we must first learn to open our minds to new ideas, possibilities and choices.

At every moment of our lives we are choosing between safety and growth – a profound moment that registers a planetary turning point within each of us, a time either to stay locked into fear and distrust or to open up to our spiritual maturity and global stewardship. In choosing to open ourselves to deeper insights and personal transformations, we recognize that there is more to living than mere existence, and more to life than mere survival.

Human consciousness has been grasping for a central truth ever since our brains became sufficiently evolved to do so. Achieving this is humanity’s promise and our personal responsibility. It is also the possibility reflected in the insights of the scientists, philosophers, artists, politicians, religious teachers and writers quoted in this book. The next great wave of human potential is beginning to take shape. We are equipped with a consciousness capable of registering the most subtle connections, intangible relationships and multi-dimensional networks. More and more of us realize that only by understanding the true nature of the universe both scientifically and spiritually can we can get to see where we fit into it all, how we each affect everyone and everything around us, and how we can make a significant difference. This understanding is the key to personal responsibility for change and also, ultimately, to our lasting happiness and fulfillment.

The best of human experience is just beginning.

Section One

ISLANDS OF

SEPARATION

CHAPTER 1

Your part in the scheme of things

The most beautiful and most profound … experience is the sensation of the mystical.

And this mysticality is the power of all true science.

Albert Einstein¹

It is a characteristic of human nature that from an early age we start questioning everything, making the word ‘why?’ a fixture of our conversation. Across history we have been seeking answers to the most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and how we fit into it – a desire to understand the connections that make us who and what we are today.

Yet here we are in the 21st century, still unable to agree on how these questions should be answered. While we yearn for intimacy, recognition and a sense of meaning, many of us feel disconnected from our planet, our work, our community, our partners, and even ourselves. Many of us want to make a positive difference but don’t know where to start…

If we were to look for one universal feature spanning all cultures and times, we would certainly uncover humanity’s hunger for a meaningful existence. Yet in our hostile world of factions and frictions, life so often becomes a spectator sport. Populist ideas and theories are kicked around without result. It remains very easy to merely theorize about spiritual connections and the meaning of life yet still not change the way we live. Ours is a spiritual search for meaning and unity, a quest that is in itself part of our evolution. No matter what our apparent differences, this fundamental hunger is one we all seem to share.

In our search for higher meaning, we have founded an almost endless array of religions and spiritual traditions down through the ages, while science has more recently begun probing for answers to big questions as well. Most religions search for their highest meaning in a unifying heavenliness and an ultimate godliness, while science similarly sets its sights on what it calls ‘the unifying theory of everything’. This ‘Holy Grail’ of physics is what Einstein said would allow us to ‘read the mind of God’. Apparent opposites, yet remarkably similar, the evolving positions of science and religion are bringing prayer and pragmatism closer together.

The current crises we are seeing in the world – ecological, social and religious – cry out for us to think and act in new ways. This is sometimes described as linked-up thinking, and it begins right here, by recognizing that science and religion have more in common than meets the eye. One cannot work in isolation or be excluded from the other; they are co-dependent, with each having part of the answer. What we are missing is a level of insight and experience that takes us beyond the boundaries separating the here and the hereafter – that captures both the world of science and the world of religion without collision or contradiction.

For as long as either science or religion excludes the other, or is taken up in isolation, then we will always miss the point. Certainly, scientists who believe in God – as do 15 per cent of scientists in the US National Academy of Sciences – find no contradiction in their dual position. In a similar way, scientific discoveries awaken in us a sense of mystery, if not the mystical. The spiritual heart of religion and life, and the factual understanding of the physical as it supports the spiritual, are entwined. In this combination we can find a true account of the world and how it works.

The liberating insight we need to help us grasp fully the true significance of our life can only be gained by what history tells us is the most life-changing personal breakthrough: enlightenment, or what I call in this book ‘the unifying experience within everything’. Find our way to this experience within ourselves and we will have found the equivalent of the philosopher’s stone: a way of being that transforms lives, generates happiness and allows us to unleash the full force of human consciousness dormant in so many of us.

When we experience true unity in this way, we no longer see reality as something independent of us that we receive from the outside, but rather a phenomenon continuously changed by our perception of it. When we ‘get’ this point about co-creation, our relationship with the world is transformed forever – from the way we look at our personal and spiritual health to how we begin to solve the social, political and ecological problems of our time. In our fragmented world we find it easy to be dismissive and disparaging of one another, yet unity of experience need no longer be thought of as some armchair discussion among the intellectual elite, nor as an exercise for philosophy classes. It has direct, daily relevance to our lives.

From the burnings of the libraries of the ancient world to the enraged medieval purges of Europe’s teaching monasteries, history shows that much has been learned and lost, much done and undone. And still we hunger. In early societies, people saw spirits and mystical meaning in almost everything, including the wind, forests, water, rocks, clouds, plants and fire. The human mind has designed everything from the dastardly to the divine. It was not until the ancient Egyptians created the ‘unknowable’ god Amun that we had an early version of unity under one god.² Since then, each religion’s assumption of superiority and preoccupation with exclusivity has slowed our spiritual progress and hastened separation and sectarianism while neglecting higher connections and the spirit of unity.

In more recent times, science has looked for unity in more measurable things, finding links between different types of energy (Faraday) and matter (Lavoisier), and finally the connection between matter and energy (Einstein). Science has also questioned the logic behind the concept of a personal God, wanting an answer in the form of a mathematical equation, such as Einstein’s famous quest for ‘a unified theory of everything’. However, just as science has been seeking a unified theory and can’t quite get there, so too religion in general has been seeking the unified experience of God and the divine, yet can’t quite agree on how to get it.

This failure is because the search for universal truth by both science and religion is fundamentally flawed.

Scientists forget that any ‘unified theory of everything’ needs an observer positioned outside the theory (and outside of everything) to validate the theory’s claim that it embraces everything. But this ultimate point of observation, by its very existence as external adjudicator, forever escapes the theory and so invalidates the theory. This inability of a theory to capture its own ultimate act of observation means that science can never attain its unifying Holy Grail.

Similarly, religion and spirituality have largely depended on attaining and holding onto unity and eternity as their own – an impossibility when infinity and eternity have no boundaries and no circumference, yet almost all our thinking is restricted to the finite and measurable. Furthermore, while many religions claim an infinite unity with God, they are invariably diverted by having to defend their own claims of exclusive access to the divine and the superior, squandering energy on arranging the exclusion of those who do not follow. In this state of mind, any God can only ever remain an enthusiastic idea at best, never truly and directly experienced.

However, in the following pages we will be finding the ways to resolve this double conundrum and get beyond the divisions of the ages. Along the way we will uncover our most powerful abilities, as well as the dormant connections deep within each of us – connections that maintain us while interweaving our lives with a profound sense of purpose and meaning. Eventually we gain enough insight to arrive at the ultimate breakthrough in understanding, the ultimate unifying experience. And in that moment our life blooms into full significance.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.

We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King Jr

To begin our quest into this overarching unity, we need an initial appreciation of what holism is and a little background to our present emergency. There have been two emergencies in the evolution of the human race. The first was the need – shared by all life – to ensure the survival of our species and the protection of our personal boundaries during life’s early evolution. To do so, we developed internal (immune) and external (social) systems to protect, support and defend us as we extended our sphere of power and control into a hostile environment. Accompanying this biological mechanism of self-protection is an entrenched and primitive psychology of separation, a mental instinct for self-preservation still underpinning our outlook and much of our behaviour in the world. Our five senses have been crucial in this successful survival strategy, keeping us in touch with the changing environment around us and alerting us to ‘risk and reward’ situations.

We have learned to cooperate to overcome common enemies. The fact that we have become the dominant species demonstrates the effectiveness of our particular brand of cooperative aggression as a survival tool. This first emergency – physical survival – remains ongoing, with our aggressive immune system forever on the brink of being overwhelmed by opportunistic invaders such as bacteria and viruses. However, the question now is whether survival into old age is enough to call a life ‘well lived’. This book is written from the understanding that life invites a legacy from each of us that involves more than merely getting to death safely.

The second emergency, which we are now facing, is the environmental crisis threatening our planet. Paradoxically, although aggressive cooperation has made our species the most successful survivors, we have now overused that aggression to the point of destroying the environment on which we depend for our continued survival. What we have made our greatest advantage has now become our greatest handicap: we have been so successful that we are literally ‘improving’ our planet to death.

In order to confront this new emergency, we need to start looking at a better model for our existence. The standard model of evolution focuses on survival of the fittest – a good model, except that this type of fitness favours the physical, with survival focused on the individual. The scope of Darwinian evolution is fundamentally mechanistic, and without the addition of spiritual experience Darwinian evolution misses the impetus of life – which, as we will see, is the creation of whole-health as something more than mere individual survival.

Although aggressive cooperation – uniting against a common enemy or for a common benefit – is not necessarily wrong (and forms the basis of most social evolution), something more is needed if we are to find a better way of dealing with the complexity of problems around us. This will require from us a higher range of adaptive skills, so that we can finally evolve from being merely successful at survival and go on to reach the higher state of becoming spiritually significant. The only way to achieve this is with what I call ‘breakthrough consciousness’ – a level of personal awareness that extends our take on reality beyond the separate, the singular, and the self; a conscious perception of the complete and undivided whole that takes our attention beyond space, time and matter.*

An integral part of this new, higher ‘spiritual’ outlook is a deeper understanding and experience of holism: the capacity to sense that we are an inseparable part of the larger whole and it a part of us, and that when we harm our environment – whether ecological or social – we are in fact harming ourselves. Our spiritual immaturity shows up in our psyche as a mentality of separateness – a mental zone of separation that secures our sense of separate self while reinforcing our instinctive suspicion of strangers and our assumption of distance and separateness from almost all other people, places and things. With this un-evolved spiritual outlook, both our activity and identity remain biased towards things physical and formed.

Spirituality – and let us be clear about this – is different from religion, because spirituality is a purely private experience, whereas religion also involves public ritual. In this book, the term spirituality is used to describe the process of looking into our deepest internal resources – the divine experience within, and our deepest connections – rather than devotion to a figurehead or deity. We all share the same spiritual potential – the same possibility for enlightenment and breakthrough consciousness – but our spiritual capacities are different, depending on our degree of accumulated spiritual development and experience.

With a less developed outlook, all we see are those things that we observe from the outside. However, when we develop a holistic outlook we are also aware of every whole that we are a part of, rather than only seeing those things we are apart from. In effect, we get to see some things from the inside.

The holistic outlook dissolves unnecessary boundaries, makes molehills out of mountains and takes the sweat out of the small stuff. What begins as a state of mind becomes a force for holistic healing and ultimately the ability to ‘see’ beyond or through boundaries – ‘seeing beyond everything’. Holistic thinking and holistic healing go hand-in-hand. Holistic thinking is linked-up thinking. Discovering holism is about the progressive discovery of not-so-obvious links and deep connections. The facility to see beyond all forms and structures – which are themselves the final result of networked links between smaller contributory parts – is a healthy part of breakthrough consciousness. Health is a relationship, an outcome, an indication of ‘whole’ or unbroken networks. Every biological network can be measured for its healthiness against its degree of wholeness.

Increasingly, many research scientists are realizing that we cannot effectively study any part without studying the whole. Life itself gathers together the right mix of inanimate molecules, and presto! – this collection of assembled parts begins behaving in ways no study of their separate properties could have predicted. In the same way, mainstream health professionals are realizing that our health is the result of many contributory causes. Accordingly, doctors are becoming more concerned about treating the whole person rather than just the symptom. Western medicine is coming to recognize that health, wellness and disease are entirely communicated conditions, passed on by a complexity of culture, environment, genetic transferences, family and upbringing, state of mind and personal attitude, as well as by life’s experiences in general.

More and more scientific papers on holism are being presented and accepted at orthodox medical conferences, indicating the rising tide of change as doctors shift their outlook from the tradition of reductionism (reducing everything to its smallest part) to the science of holism.³ Living systems are far too complex and integrated to be studied in isolation: the secret of birdsong is not discovered with the vivisectionist’s scalpel.

This expanded definition of health – as something operating for the better of the whole and extending beyond the parts while at the same time including them all – is one entry-point we will take on our path to ultimate recovery. While doctors confidently describe disease, they have no agreed definition of health; doctors are unclear about just what full health and wellness are, and the modern art of healing (as practised in the West) has not had a really significant breakthrough for decades. Recent discoveries show that good health is not guaranteed or even controlled by any one single factor such as diet, exercise, sanitation or environment. The path to good health extends beyond the physical, and in this book I take you beyond the limits of personal health, and show you how to combine the spiritual with the physical to create whole-health.

The common-sense view of how the world works is that things are assembled, bolted together, pulled into place, pushed around and manipulated. Yet this ‘assembly line’ world-view is inadequate to explain the existence of consciousness, choice, creativity, or life itself. From this limited outlook, creativity is not seen as a strong force or field but more as a leisure activity, a soft option, an add-on. But creative genesis and sparks of creative insight represent forces bigger than art, allowing the instantaneous effect of transformational change to exist in the world alongside the mechanics of assembly and reaction.

Holism – where the integrated whole is greater than the sum of its parts – means that all parts are creatively integrated. The holistic age is upon us, where the forces of creativity and transformation emerge to create connections that surpass the era of mechanical assembly, cause, effect and disassembly. Holism, which has its origins in religious belief,⁴ is now progressing simultaneously in religion, science, business, education and training, and the environmental movement. Multi-denominational conferences are becoming a theme within mainstream religions worldwide. Ethical businesses attract strong investor interest along with enthusiastic consumer support, and have begun including workers in decision-making and problem-solving. Urban recycling of household waste is another indicator of growing community awareness of holistic environmental issues. In some countries, forestry management is slowly yielding to international pressure to introduce sustainable harvesting techniques.

However, the absence of an overarching holistic outlook is a symptom of our fragmented times, affecting everything from our psychological outlook, our nutrition, our health, our relationships, politics, and even the architectural harmony of our city skylines. Buildings consume 30 per cent of the world’s energy output and need to be integrated into the whole symphony of city life as well as the city skyline. Where architectural design has paid attention only to its one particular structure and not to how that design integrates and harmonizes within the surrounding cityscape, we see ugliness. It takes a better architect to see and create unbroken harmony between a stucture and its surroundings. As with architecture so too with life: in any whole system, parts positioned in the wrong place affect the integrity of the whole.

As we are beginning to see, holism and the spirit of integration affect all aspects of life. Tens of thousands of symbiotic relationships have been studied in detail, and it has been found that without these mutually beneficial relationships most life would cease.⁵ From our first breath to our last, we are all connected through one atmosphere to the environment. All people in a room are intimately connected – after 20 minutes, each person has absorbed the DNA of every other person in the room through their sweat and breath.⁶ In this way, our shared breath blurs the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’, weaving us into the ecology through the filaments of our lungs. Our unseen connections also extend deeper and wider than this. For example, increased anxiety in a pregnant mother can raise her cortisol levels, which then crosses the placenta into the unborn, leading to the increased likelihood of childhood depression.⁷ Even too much cleanliness is a bad thing for an infant – our immune system needs exposure to certain combinations of bacteria if it is to form robustly and protect us fully.

As we evolve, we come to realize that everything forms an integral part of one dynamic whole, which then forms another integral part within an even larger dynamic whole and onwards, ad infinitum. This system of overlapping, interdependent, integrated networks is the fabric of holism, woven around our personal interests, influences, hopes and aspirations. Understanding this system is key to our personal experience of a fully integrated, ‘spiritual’ and balanced life. In this sense, integrity’s reach extends way beyond issues of personal honesty; integrity, in the form of integration extending seamlessly through us and including the whole of creation, goes to the heart of our mature spiritual life.

While an integrated outlook knows no bounds and is alert to the highest connections, a disintegrated outlook misses the connections that form whole-health networks, leaving us fragmented in mind and body. An outlook of separation and disintegration is ultimately unhealthy.

Nature abounds with instances of group behaviour revealing networks that are often complex, sometimes astonishing. For example, the Portuguese man-of-war (a jellyfish) appears to be one individual but is in fact a conglomerate of tiny, single-celled creatures living in delicious cohabitation as one super-organism. What strategic mechanism provides the template for this gelatinous association of parts? And what mystifying network orchestrates the blueprint of the termite mound, or the symmetry of the beehive, so that all players know their part? One of reality’s riddles is that while every identifiable form or entity is no more than the sum of its component parts and contributory causes, it also stands alone as uniquely different from any one of those parts.

In reality, everything is a network. Any whole, from you to the entire universe, is the inter-relationship of its components, the interconnected network of its contributory causes. There is more to networks than mechanical connections and solid structures; networks are relationships of parts, often arranged symmetrically, but always engaged to form a larger entity. Matter is a fuzz of organized energy, and reality is an energy network. Our so-called spiritual life, and the path to uncovering life’s meaning, involves us in the unifying experience of higher networks. Higher networks increase our range of opportunity, with the velocity of opportunity in our lives depending on the scope of our networks.

The science of networks is gaining momentum and, as the first big idea of the 21st century, is poised to provide the discipline for a new world-view. The study of networks – what they are, the way they influence us and how we can better access them – is uniting science, philosophy, religion, psychology, sociology and other disciplines. Our increasing knowledge of interconnectivity is key to understanding how the world really works. Though many networks have no detectable mechanism for their existence (which might make their existence questionable), science already accepts uncertainty in fields such as psychology and astrophysics. The study of networks and network transference are candidates for an entirely new group of subjects without tangible structure, mechanism or medium.

As will be discussed in this book, it is vital to recognize the nature and extent of the networks in which we live in order to understand our significance within them. Networks and higher connections give significance to life itself.

Just as ‘wars begin in the minds of men’, peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace.

The responsibility lies with each of us.

‘Seville Statement on Violence’, 1989.⁸

When we change ourselves we change the world around us, and in these troubled times, everyone must take some responsibility for how that change is brought about. Many are already active on the front-lines, selflessly donating time, money and expertise to build a better world. Yet the rest of us cannot afford to keep procrastinating. If we continue to deny this moment of personal responsibility, the crises now afflicting us and our planet will deepen. To borrow from Dickens, it is the best and worst of times.

Only when we make progress by breaking down the barricades of our psycho-spiritual isolation and experience the other dimensions of ourselves as the fully integrated beings we are becoming, will we rediscover the personal power and joy of life on this beautiful, fragile planet. Only when we fully understand and value who we are, will we value where we are.

Humanity is now poised to enter the next exciting breakthrough in spiritual evolution – a shift of emphasis away from separation, conflict and competition and towards connection, communication, the forces of creativity and positive transformation. Already we are seeing a convergence between the fields of science, psychology, religion, philosophy and environmental studies. Welcome to the age of evidence-based spirituality, the age of spiritual rationalism. This is the age in which science, spirituality and religion become mutually inclusive, evolving to inform and create a healthier, happier and more spiritually mature world.

* While quantum physicists and mathematicians chide that there is nothing beyond reality, there is acknowledgement that an infinite field of energy in perfect balance ‘exists’. It is impossible to consider the vastness of the infinite whole from within created reality without reference to notions contrasted against time and place. Where this book uses phrases such as ‘beyond time and place’, in this context the use of ‘beyond’ is my attempt to invoke a sense of infinity that is, by definition, impossible to grasp completely.

CHAPTER 2

Looking after Number One

Most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Henry David Thoreau

The search for immortality is a growth industry. There have been about 3,000 supposed cures and treatments for the ageing process, with more than 300 in vogue today. Yet although we may rail and struggle against the inevitability of death and ageing, for many of us the real human tragedy is not the fact of dying, but of not having fully lived. And to live fully we need to be fully integrated, mind and body, within ourselves; connected to our environment in its entirety, and spiritually awakened to the wholeness of creation. However, many of us remain numb to higher connections, anaesthetized against pain but, in the process, unable to feel much at all.

We hold onto life, fear death, and seek out how we can live longer because we rate our separate existence so highly. There is more to the art of living than learning social skills, avoiding loss and accumulating wealth. As we evolve spiritually and learn to let go of our limited way of looking at the world, we uncover more of the connections that exist between us and our world rather than continuing to see everything as separate from us, or ‘other’ than us. Along the way, even the fear of death is overcome as we rekindle some bone-deep memories and come to see the meaning of life-beyond-life and the limitations of self-absorption.⁹

Whatever the reason, humanity’s search for spiritual links and higher connections has been a work in progress for 40,000 years at least. In that time, the structures and rituals of religion have evolved a long way–from cave paintings to cathedrals, from sacrifice to supplication. Now we are ready to supersede our reliance on these forms and connect directly to the personal spiritual experience. Spirituality no longer needs to be riddled with mysterious, unanswerable questions. Spirituality is evolving beyond the limitations imposed by formal religious practice, so that religious devotion is no longer needed to create the spiritual experience.

Evolution also reflects the nature of this spiritual progress; as we will see later, survival of the strongest and fittest is yielding to survival of the healthiest, the most interconnected and the most whole. If we merely concentrate on issues of personal health and wealth, we miss the point, which is that each and every individual affects the collective whole, and the whole affects the individual, because each is part of the other.

The real issue is not how to live longer, but how to live. With this approach, our life becomes a quest for spiritual connections. We can choose to stay locked into the limited outlook where everything is viewed as separate from ourselves and where we maintain a world of separation and division. Alternatively we can open ourselves to the spiritual panorama of connection and discover new links, paths, answers, possibilities and freedom.

Although we all suffer in enclosures, many of us still choose to live like caged animals, chasing elusive securities–the comforts of predictable food, shelter and mateship–that never completely compensate for a life caught up in the economic grind. Our ‘separation identity’ drives a wedge between nations, religions and families as we arm ourselves with our different values and barricade ourselves with our different beliefs. Many of us postpone our dreams, reaching mid-life only to realize we have spent too much time concentrating on how and what we have been doing, while neglecting to question why we have been doing it. This is why mid-life is less a crisis and more a wake-up call, a reorienting of priorities and a discovery of greater possibilities.

Preoccupied as many of us are with the specifics of our lives and the drama of our personal existence, we fail to see our two selves clearly–the biological, individual self, and the so-called spiritual or connected self. These are the two intermingled aspects of us, two cross-networked dimensions creating one whole life.

Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

Albert Einstein

Creation is almost certainly made up of more dimensions than we realize. If we are to gain a better understanding of how ‘separation’ and ‘connection’ underwrite both our existence and our day-to-day behaviour, we need first to understand where everything comes from and how the reality we see around us was created. To do this we begin with a look at the Big Bang – an amazing set of cosmic events that includes the original creative burst of energy or inflation that subsequently transformed into matter, galaxies and the universe as we know it.

That the Big Bang was a genuine event (rather than mere theory) has been confirmed by the existence of residual microwave radiation left over from that first electromagnetically charged ‘fireball’ of original creation, radiation that has been detected and measured.¹⁰ Further confirmation comes from studies showing that the universe is still expanding and accelerating.¹¹* In addition, only 10 per cent of the total helium in the universe can be accounted for from those nuclear furnaces we call stars – the other 90 per cent is left over from the Big Bang blast. After the Big Bang there was a 400,000-year period of darkness during which the original hydrogen froze as snow, only thawing when the first starlight appeared.¹² The ever-expanding Big Bang remains visible today in some of the off-channel ‘snow’ or haze on your television; look at that and you are looking at the Big Bang.

It is important to realize that before the Big Bang there was no ‘before’, because there was no time as we know it. And there were no atoms or molecules; no space, no time, no matter of any kind – a total absence of physical existence and its dimensions. The universe did not begin as a shrunken entity surrounded by space, into which it inflated after the Big Bang, as is commonly imagined, because there was no time or space until the Big Bang – just what science calls ‘an infinity of energy in perfect balance’. In other words, infinity is neither a location nor a fiction; it is an energetic state. Space, time and matter first appeared in the same instant that the universe began to expand – and continues to expand today.

To see how all of this is relevant to our understanding of who we are, and how we fit into this universe, begin by picturing two realities, one created, the other uncreated or original.

Created reality is everything that we see around us. This is the reality we are born into, and where we are today, with our five senses developed to keep us informed about our world and our existence in it. This view of reality is what our brain registers to give us the sense of ourselves as separate individuals, contained within our bodily cocoon, looking at the world as if it was a picture-perfect impression of a reality that exists outside us and all around us. This created reality brings with it the appearance of distance, separation and distinct differences. This is where we see causes and their effects, and where events appear to unfold consecutively. Later we will see how the appearance of depth, distance and separation is as much a creation of our mind as our mind is a creation of this reality. Our created world of familiar observations is where the laws of causes and their effects operate – Isaac Newton’s fundamental laws of the physical universe.

The other reality – original reality – is more mysterious. This is the reality we are born with, the reality we arise from. This original reality, the ‘infinite field of energy in perfect balance’, provided the ‘background’ to the Big Bang – and perhaps of many Big Bangs other than the one that created our particular universe. It still exists in spite of creation, and is referred to generally as ‘infinity’. The infinity remains intact, co-existing with and supporting created reality, but unaffected by the Big Bang that has exploded in its midst. Though hard to grasp, this original, timeless state of reality remains forever present everywhere, yet invisible. This reality is the source of creativity and spontaneity and concurrence, the source of instantaneous or timeless transformation, a reality only vaguely explained through the mathematical language of theoretical science.

These two realities continue to coexist. Though they also coexist in the roots of our attention, we are much more conscious of created reality than the infinite original. With right teaching and right practice, these two realities – the one we are born into and the one we are created with – emerge into joyful and liberating co-existence within our conscious attention. All unhappiness and hurt arises from the imbalance of these two realities within us. To live a significant, healthy and happy life, we need to bring these two realities into balance.

Think of the original reality as a never-ending, invisible force-field that (paradoxically) does not come into anything like existence as we know it until disturbed (by a Big Bang). Then, with one creative pulse, the Big Bang (silently) interrupts the field; but the interruption is localized and cannot possibly break the infinity that is the force-field. (A bit like a small hole appearing in a windscreen that leaves the rest of the glass clear and unaffected – except that a windscreen is flat and what we’re talking about here is a field infinitely large and everywhere, without circumference.) After a cool-down period, the disturbed energy at the interruption site converts into cosmic ‘condensation’ that evolves into spiral galaxies, suns, and in fact every atom of everything around us. Meanwhile, the infinite energy of original reality – because it is infinite – remains unchanged, a forever-present background to everything everywhere.

Somewhere within the intermingling of both realities–which still coexist today–life was created, and our life depends on a continuing collaboration between them both. Yet when theoretical physicists speculate on other likely dimensions and possible parallel realities, they often miss the fact that we