One More Reality to Go

All around us, an infinite new reality is peering through the cracks of our rigid, bounded conception of the known. If our future is going to be more than just a repetition of the past, we will have to leave the known behind and discover a region of reality not yet explored--the realm of the impossible.

Consider this experience of a friend of mine. He pulled the ligaments in his right foot during a workout. Hobbling and in constant pain, he went to an orthopedist, only to be told that surgery might be in the offing. He was reluctant to have an operation and waited, hoping the condition would improve on its own. When it didn't, he decided on impulse to visit a Chinese healer.

The healer looked at the injured foot and touched it lightly. Then he walked behind my friend's back and made a line of Xs in the air, up and down his spine. "Try to walk now," he said. My friend got up and, to his astonishment, walked around the room free of pain. He asked the healer what he'd done.

"Your body is a projection of your mind, a pattern of energy held together by your awareness. When you are aware that it is well, you hold your body together in a healthy state. But pain caused your awareness to withdraw from your body. You no longer held the right image, so I adjusted it for you."

My friend shook his head. "But all you did was move your hands in the air," he protested.

"No, I was shifting your energy," the Chinese healer corrected. "Certain channels were closed that needed to be open--very simple."

The most remarkable aspect of this healing experience is that my friend did not sense that his entire life had been changed for the better. Although he was pleased that his foot was healed, at first he had no understanding of the key to the mystery of this "very simple" procedure. The power exercised by the healer operated from a level deeper than my friend--or most people--can access. When I pointed this out, my friend suddenly remembered something important he'd overlooked. "The healer told me that anyone can learn to do the same kind of work," he said, "but the first step is giving up the idea that it is impossible."

I can cite books filled with nuggets of the unknown--the impossible--that are pure gold: eyewitness accounts of (continued on page 232)One More Reality(continued from page 176) psychokinesis, telepathy, miracle cures, premonitions that came true, prayers that were answered, people seen in two locations at once, holy figures who emanated light from their bodies and angels encountered by the roadside on rainy nights.

How do we explain the documented experience of an Italian military officer in the Sixties, his hip totally dissolved with cancer, who visited the shrine at Lourdes and grew a new hip in a matter of months? And what about the dying lymphoma patient in the Fifties who was injected with saline solution as a placebo and, because he believed the injection was powerful chemotherapy, had every trace of cancer vanish from his body in a matter of days--the tumors "melting like snowballs on a hot stove," as one commentator described it? Are these not "impossible" achievements?

Writing about the "rare but spectacular phenomenon of spontaneous remission," the renowned physician-essayist Lewis Thomas declares, "No one has the ghost of an idea how it happens. It is a fascinating mystery but at the same time a solid basis for hope in the future."

On the eve of the first millennium, the greatest event in history--the end of the world--was predicted. It failed to happen. Now, on the eve of the year 2000, the greatest event in our history is within reach: the final explanation of the material universe--creation, time, space, the origin of DNA and the physical dimensions beyond the four we have already mapped. It is the realization of the so-called Theory of Everything, or TOE. Stephen Hawking foresaw it as knowing the mind of God, or, in nonreligious terms, coming to grips with a universe that has no beginning and no end, no boundaries in time and space, no limits of any kind.

So-called miracles, anomalies and "impossible" phenomena that stand outside material existence await to be included in a Theory of Everything. No matter how much information we gather about them, anomalies are not explainable as information, energy or even as virtual energy--that invisible power source that supplies the physical universe with its atoms and molecules.

What will it be like to live in a TOE world? It seems inevitable that when we exhaust our curiosity about physical existence, we will at last be ready to explore the next universe: the immaterial domain of consciousness--in other words, inner space.

For example, if you tried to explain Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by taking apart a CD player, you would be totally stymied. The CD player can transmit the music, and the electrical patters of that transmission are incredibly complicated, but the origin of the music lies with Beethoven himself. He is the next universe, and so are you and I.

Go outside where you can stand on the grass and look up at the sky. Hold your hands in the air and feel the heat of the sun, the movement of the wind brushing over your skin. As the wind touches your hand, it deposits molecules of every chemical needed to create life. As the sun warms your face, it radiates all the energy that generates life. You are nothing more than these chemicals, this energy, but with one tremendous difference: An invisible principle holds you together.

Because of this invisible principle, you were created out of the whirlwind of atoms that fly through the universe. Instead of being scattered inside a galactic dust cloud, your body has organized itself into thousands of precise operations. With every breath, you inhale hundreds of millions of gaseous molecules, and within a tenth of a second, the ones that sustain life--primarily oxygen and hydrogen--enter your cells to create enzymes and proteins.

How do they know to do this? They don't. The oxygen in your blood is no more alive than the oxygen in a diver's tank; the sugars in your brain are no more intelligent than those in a sugar cube. Yet the whirlwind turns into life somehow, and the invisible principle causes this transformation.

Although the principle cannot be seen nor weighed, it possesses certain qualities:

Without any religious belief, you know that these qualities exist in yourself, as human beings have known for centuries. The invisible principle operates within all life, and it cannot be extracted without doing harm. The cells of your body will be chemically the same the instant after you die as the instant before, yet some difference has occurred to cause death. The composition of a shopping cart full of groceries is the same as that of a fetus in the womb, yet the fetus is imbibing something that makes it alive and growing.

The invisible principle doesn't need your cooperation to support life, but if you choose, you can bring it into your awareness. This is how the spiritual connection is made.

The Theory of Everything, as currently envisioned, will unite the four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and the weak interactions) into a single unified-field theory. But as the virtual graviton joins the virtual photon in a grand theoretical marriage, one glaring flaw will become evident. Physics treats the universe like a thing, an object that scientists stand outside of and measure, when in reality we humans are all woven into the universe. We are children of the field, and our minds must explain themselves or risk being wrong about everything else. Faith is at its best when it leads to an understanding.

In ancient India, one truth applied to the whole universe: "As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. As is the human body, so is the cosmic body." Quantum physics is on the verge of asserting the same truth but in different words: One unified field embraces galaxies and cells, stars and atoms, quasars and thoughts.

For nearly a hundred years, we have known that the material world is an illusion. Everything that seems solid--a rock, a tree, your body--is actually 99.999 percent empty space. Within this void, packets of energy wink in and out of existence millions of times per second. When you throw a baseball, you see a solid sphere making an arc through the air. But in truth the baseball is an energy packet with no hard-edged boundaries of any kind, disappearing completely and reappearing slightly ahead of itself in space-time.

You, and everything around you, are a cloud of probabilities actualizing yourselves in the quantum field. Nothing you sense is reliable--no smell, sound, taste, touch or sight actually exists. You are swimming through the quantum soup, trying to understand infinity with the crude tools of the five senses. Your brain disappears and reappears at every second, and yet this magic act occurs too quickly for you to detect it. You try to change the whirling dance of the cosmos into slow-motion events that seem "real."

When people catch up to reality and stop moving in slow motion, they will realize that the Theory of Everything suddenly makes things real for the first time. We will be free to throw away the crude tools so long outmoded--our limited senses, the conditioned beliefs frozen in our brains, the stupefying legacy of materialism--and truly become free.

As we cross this new frontier, we will find that there is one more universe to go before we know who we are and what reality is. I join with those who believe the Age of Information is about to become the Age of Awareness, and that cyberspace will implode into inner space. When that happens, the next generation of scientists--the Einsteins of consciousness--will emerge to explore this new universe. A technology of mental physics will be established. In effect, that's what healers, miracle workers, paranormals, saints and other "anomalous" people already know how to apply; they are the technicians of their own awareness.

You cannot be a respectable futurist without making predictions, and mine center on self-knowledge. "Know thyself" will become the most important dictum for the next millennium. Psychology will give way to a hard science of consciousness, and there will be new rules for living:

The future lies with the cosmic computer, and we will rely on it to organize our thoughts, wishes, visions, plans and, eventually, our whole world. Next time you think of someone's name, only to have that person call you on the phone, and next time you finish someone else's thought or have an overwhelming sensation of déjà vu, don't dismiss it. You have just accessed the nonlocal mind, at least in a small way. You are touching the control panel of the cosmic computer.

There is tremendous mystery in every coincidence, every flash of inspiration, every new insight. With the desire and willingness to explore these mysteries as we cross the border of the second millennium, infinite possibilities will become open to us. There is one more universe to go.

You have just accessed the nonlocal mind. You are touching the control panel of the cosmic computer.