So in the midst of re-reading The Power of Intention, by Wayne Dyer, with my book club, I remembered his reference to The Field, and started reading it a week ago. What Lynne McTaggart does in this book is provide a great introduction and summary of the new discoveries in science around quantum physics, and explore how they inform the way that we view ourselves and our world.
She calls this new science a “science of the miraculous”. Basically what scientists have discovered is that “at our most elemental, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge.”
Current science is based on ideas from the 17th century, and a world view of separateness, where we sit outside the universe and “our bodies were somehow separate and other from the real us”. It was a ‘machine’ based view of the world.
And Darwin’s discoveries contributed to this view of life as “random, predatory, purposeless and solitary.”
The effects of this on us at a spiritual and metaphysical level have been damaging, and incorrect. Science thus far has provided a view of the world as “mechanized and separate”.
And I so identified with this, she says “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.”
Yes, this has been my quest. And she shows how quantum physics has solved this problem and “laid waste” the world as separate, but it has taken a long time to see the research be accepted, and used beyond the purposes of new technology to be applied philosophically.
I cannot at the moment attempt to summarize the science, but basically it means that everything is made up of one field of energy, and that our observation is “utterly central” to the existence of everything, and that everything is connected to everything else in a sort of invisible web.
Our minds are a powerful, integral part of the world, not separate or somehow ‘from another world’.
There is basically “a life force flowing through the universe – what has variously been called collective consciousness or, as theologians have termed in, the Holy Spirit.”
Unlike the previous paradigm, she says this one is ‘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.” And humans were no longer separate from each other, or on the outside looking in on the world.
She goes on to cover in depth, but in an accessible way, the journey of scientists and their discoveries.
The main point for the moment is that there is scientific basis for the way Wayne Dyer views the world, and that we can and should take a positive, creative stance toward the world. We have the ability to align ourselves with the divine force underlying the universe, and co-create our world, both creating the life we want and discovering who were meant to be, in that beautiful paradoxical way that he talks about.
Alicia Eichmann