by Gregg Braden
In addition to proving that we’re linked to everything, research now demonstrates that the connection exists because of us. Our connectedness gives us the power to stack the deck in our favor when it comes to the way our lives turn out. In everything from searching for romance and healing our loved ones to the fulfillment of our deepest aspirations, we are an integral part of all that we experience each day.
The fact that the discoveries show that we can use our connection consciously opens the door to nothing less than our opportunity to tap the same power that drives the entire universe. Through the oneness that lives inside of you, me, and all humans who walk the planet, we have a direct line to the same force that creates everything from atoms and stars to the DNA of life!
There’s one small catch, however: Our power to do so is dormant until we awaken it. The key to awakening such an awesome power is to make a small shift in the way we see ourselves in the world. Just as Logue’s initiates found that they could fly after receiving a little nudge off the cliff (from the poem on page ix), with a small shift in perception we can tap the most powerful force in the universe in order to address even seemingly impossible situations. This happens when we allow ourselves a new way of seeing our role in the world.
Because the universe seems like a really big place—almost too vast for us to even think about—we can begin by seeing ourselves differently in our everyday lives. The “small shift” that we need is to see ourselves as part of the world rather than separate from it. The way to convince ourselves that we’re truly one with everything that we see and experience is to understand how we’re joined and what that connection means.
Key 3: To tap the force of the universe itself, we must see ourselves as part of the world rather than separate from it.
Through the connection that joins all things, the “stuff” that the universe is made of (waves and particles of energy) appears to break the laws of time and space as we once knew them. Although the details sound like science fiction, they’re very real. Particles of light (photons), for example, have been observed to bilocate—that is, to be in two different places separated by many miles at precisely the same instant.
From the DNA of our bodies to the atoms of everything else, things in nature appear to share information more rapidly than Albert Einstein predicted anything could ever travel—faster than the speed of light. In some experiments, data has even arrived at its destination before it’s left its place of origin! Historically, such phenomena were believed to be impossible, but apparently they’re not only possible, they also may be showing us something more than just the interesting anomalies of small units of matter. The freedom of movement that the quantum particles demonstrate may reveal how the rest of the universe works when we look beyond what we know of physics.
While these results may sound like the futuristic script of a Star Trek episode, they’re being observed now, under the scrutiny of present-day scientists. Individually, the experiments that produce such effects are certainly fascinating and deserve more investigation. Considered together, however, they also suggest that we may not be as limited by the laws of physics as we believe. Perhaps things are able to travel faster than the speed of light, and maybe they can be in two places at once! And if things have this ability, what about us?
These are precisely the possibilities that excite today’s innovators and stir our own imaginations. It is in the coupling of the imagination—the idea of something that could be—with an emotion that gives life to a possibility that it becomes a reality. Manifestation begins with the willingness to make room in our beliefs for something that supposedly doesn’t exist. We create that “something” through the force of consciousness and awareness.
The poet William Blake recognized the power of imagination as the essence of our existence, rather than something that we simply experience occasionally in our spare time. “Man is all imagination,” he said, clarifying, “The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God Himself.”2 Philosopher and poet John Mackenzie further explained our relationship with the imagination, suggesting, “The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finely maintained … all existing things are … imaginary.”3 In both these descriptions, the concrete events of life must first be envisioned as possibilities before they can become a reality.
However, for the imaginary ideas of one moment in time to become the reality of another, there must be something that links them together. Somehow in the fabric of the universe there must be a connection between past imaginings and present and future realities. Einstein firmly believed that the past and the future are intimately entwined as the stuff of the fourth dimension, a reality that he called space-time. “The distinction between past, present, and future,” he said, “is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”4
So, in ways that we are only beginning to understand, we find that we’re connected not only with everything that we see in our lives today, but also with everything that’s ever been, as well as with things that haven’t happened yet. And what we’re experiencing now is the outcome of events that have occurred (at least in part) in a realm of the universe that we can’t even see.
The implications of these relationships are huge. In a world where an intelligent field of energy connects everything from global peace to personal healing, what may have sounded like fantasy and miracles in the past suddenly becomes possible in our lives.
With these connections in mind, we must begin to think of the way that we relate to life, our families, and even our casual acquaintances from a powerful new perspective. Good or bad, right or wrong, everything from the lightest and most beautiful life experiences to the most horrible occasions of human suffering can no longer be written off as chance happenings. Clearly, the key to healing; peace; abundance; and the creation of experiences, careers, and relationships that bring us joy is to understand just how deeply we’re connected to everything in our reality.
SEARCHING FOR THE MATRIX
I remember the first time I relayed the news of our connectedness to my Native American friend from the canyon. During an unexpected meeting in a local market, I passionately shared information from a press release I’d just read about a “new” field of energy that had been discovered, a unifying field unlike any other energy known to exist.
“It’s this field of energy,” I blurted out, “that connects everything. It connects us with the world, one another, and even with the universe beyond Earth, just like you and I have talked about in the past.”
In a way that was typical of my friend, he was quiet for a moment as he honored my excitement. After a few seconds, he took a breath and then replied with a directness that I’d seen many times before.
He was honest and to the point. “So!” he said. “You have found that everything is connected. That is what our people have been saying all along. It is good that your science has figured it out, too!”
If an intelligent field of energy really plays such a powerful role in how the universe works, then why didn’t we know about it until recently? We’ve just emerged from the 20th century, a time historians may well come to regard as the most remarkable period in history. Within a single generation, we learned how to unleash the power of the atom, to store a library the size of a city block on a computer chip, and to read and engineer the DNA of life. How could we have accomplished all of these scientific marvels yet missed the single most important discovery of all, the one understanding that gives us access to the power of creation itself? The answer may surprise you.
There was a time in our not-so-distant past when scientists did, in fact, attempt to solve the mystery of whether or not we’re connected through an intelligent field of energy by proving once and for all whether or not the field even exists. While the idea of the investigation was good, more than 100 years later we’re still recovering from the way in which this famous experiment was interpreted. As a result, for most of the 20th century, if scientists dared to mention anything a
bout a unifying field of energy that connects everything through what is otherwise empty space, they would be laughed out of the classroom or right off the university stage. With few exceptions, the idea wasn’t one that was accepted, or even allowed, in serious scientific discussions. However, this hadn’t always been the case.
Although our sense of precisely what it is that connects the universe has remained a mystery, there have been countless attempts to name it in order to acknowledge its existence. In the Buddhist Sutras, for example, the realm of the great god Indra is described as the place where the web that connects the entire universe originates: “Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.”5
In the Hopi creation story, it is said that the current cycle of our world began long ago when Spider Grandmother emerged into the emptiness of this world. The first thing she did was to spin the great web that connects all things, and through it she created the place where her children would live their lives.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, those who believed in a universal field of energy that connects everything have simply referred to it as the ether. In Greek mythology, ether was thought of as the essence of space itself and described as the “air breathed by the gods.” Both Pythagoras and Aristotle identified it as the mysterious fifth element of creation, following the four familiar elements of fire, air, water, and earth. In later times, alchemists continued to use the words of the Greeks to describe our world—terminology that endured until the birth of modern science.
Contradicting the traditional views of most scientists today, some of the greatest minds in history have not only believed that ether exists; many of them even took its existence one step further. They said that ether is necessary for the laws of physics to work as they do. During the 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton, the “father” of modern science, used the word ether to describe an invisible substance that permeates the entire universe, which he believed was responsible for gravity as well as the sensations of the body. He thought of it as a living spirit, although he recognized that the equipment to validate its existence wasn’t available in his day.
It wasn’t until the 19th century that the man who proposed electromagnetic theory, James Clerk Maxwell, formally offered a scientific description of the ether that connects all things. He described it as a “material substance of a more subtle kind than visible bodies, supposed to exist in those parts of space which are apparently empty.”6
As recently as the early 20th century, some of the most respected scientific minds still used the ancient terminology to describe the essence that fills empty space. They thought of the ether as an actual substance with a consistency that was somewhere between physical matter and pure energy. It is through the ether, the scientists reasoned, that light waves can move from one point to another in what otherwise looks like empty space.
“I cannot but regard the ether, which can be the seat of an electromagnetic field with its energy and its vibrations, as endowed with a certain degree of substantiality, however different it may be from all ordinary matter” stated Nobel Prize–winning physicist Hendrik Lorentz in 1906.7 Lorentz’s equations were the ones that eventually gave Einstein the tools to develop his revolutionary theory of relativity.
Even after his theories seemed to discount the need for ether in the universe, Einstein himself believed that something would be discovered to explain what occupies the emptiness of space, stating, “Space without ether is unthinkable.” Similar to the way Lorentz and the ancient Greeks thought of this substance as the conduit through which waves move, Einstein stated that ether is necessary for the laws of physics to exist: “In such space [without ether] there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time.”8
Although on the one hand, Einstein appears to acknowledge the possibility of ether, on the other, he cautioned that it shouldn’t be thought of as energy in the ordinary sense. “Ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts [‘particles’] which may be tracked through time.”9 In this way he described how, due to ether’s unconventional nature, its existence was still compatible with his own theories.
The mere mention of the ether field today still ignites debate about whether or not it exists. Almost in the same breath, it resurrects the memory of one famous experiment that was designed to prove or disprove the field’s existence once and for all. As is often the case with this kind of investigation, the outcome raised more questions—and controversy—than it resolved.
HISTORY’S GREATEST “FALLED” EXPERIMENT
Performed more than 100 years ago, the ether experiment is named after the two scientists who designed it, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. The sole purpose of the Michelson-Morley experiment was to determine whether or not the mysterious ether of the universe did in fact exist. The long-anticipated experiment—devised to verify the results of a similar one performed in 1881—was the buzz of the scientific community that gathered in the laboratory at what is now Case Western Reserve University in 1887.10 Ultimately, it held consequences that even the best minds of the late 19th century couldn’t have known.
The thinking behind the experiment was innovative, to be sure. If ether really exists, Michelson and Morley reasoned, then it must be an energy that is everywhere, quiet, and still. And if this is true, then the earth’s passage through this field in space should create a movement that can be measured. Just as we’re able to detect the air as it ripples through the vast fields of golden wheat on the plains of Kansas, we should be able to detect the ether’s “breeze.” Michelson and Morley named this hypothetical phenomenon the ether wind.
The pilot of any plane will agree that when an aircraft is flying with the currents of the atmosphere, the time to get from one place to another can be much shorter. However, when the plane is flying against the flow, it endures a rough ride, and wind resistance can add hours to the flight. Michelson and Morley reasoned that if they could shoot a ray of light in two directions simultaneously, the difference in the amount of time it took for each beam to reach its destination should allow the experimenters to detect the presence and flow of the ether wind. While the experiment was a good idea, the results surprised everyone.
Figure 1. If ether was present, Michelson and Morley believed that a beam of light should travel slower as it moved against the ether’s currents (A), and faster as it traveled with the currents (B). The experiment, conducted in 1887, found no ether currents; the conclusion was that no ether exists. The consequences of this interpretation have haunted scientists for more than 100 years. In 1986, the journal Nature reported on the results of experiments conducted with more sensitive equipment. The bottom line: A field with the characteristics of the ether was detected, and it behaved just as the older predictions had suggested it would a century before.
The bottom line was that Michelson and Morley’s equipment detected no ether wind. Finding what looked like the absence of the wind, both the 1881 and 1887 experiments seemed to lead to the same conclusion: No ether exists. Michelson interpreted the results of what has been called “the most successful failed experiment” in history in the prestigious American Journal of Science: “The result of the hypothesis of a stationary ether field is thus shown to be incorrect, and the necessary conclusion follows that the hypothesis is erroneous.”11
While the experiment may be described as a “failure” with regard to proving the existence of ether, it actually demonstrated that the ether field just might not behave in the way scientists originally expected. Just because no movement was detected doesn’t mean that ether wasn’t there. An analogy for this would be to hold your finger above your head to test for wind: To conclude that no air existed because you felt no breeze during the test would be a rough equivalent of the thinking behind the conclusions of the 1887
experiment.
Accepting this experiment as proof that ether doesn’t exist, modern scientists operate under the assumption that things in our universe happen independently of each other. They accept that what an individual does in one part of the world is completely unrelated to other areas and has no effect on someone else half a planet away. Arguably, this experiment has become the basis for a worldview that has had a profound impact on our lives and the earth. As a consequence of this kind of thinking, we govern our nations, power our cities, test our atomic bombs, and exhaust our resources, believing that what we’re doing in one place has no impact anywhere else. Since 1887, we’ve based the development of an entire civilization on the belief that everything is separate from everything else, a premise that more recent experiments show is simply not true!
Today, more than 100 years after the original experiment, new studies suggest that the ether, or something like it, does in fact exist—it just does not appear to come in the form that Michelson and Morley had expected. Believing that the field must be motionless and made of electricity and magnetism, just as the other forms of energy discovered in the mid-1800s were, they searched for the ether as they would a conventional form of energy. But ether is far from conventional.
In 1986, Nature published an unassuming report simply titled “Special Relativity.”12 With implications that absolutely shake the foundation of the Michelson-Morley experiment as well as everything we believe about our connection to the world, it described an experiment by a scientist named E. W. Silvertooth that was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. Duplicating the 1887 experiment—but with equipment that was much more sensitive—Silvertooth reported that he did detect a movement in the ether field. Furthermore, it was precisely linked to the motion of the earth through space, just as had been predicted! This experiment, and others since then, suggest that the ether does in fact exist, just as Planck suggested in 1944.
