by Gregg Braden
From the leaders of nations whom we’ve learned to fear and hate to the people in other countries who touch our hearts and invite our love, we’re all connected in what may be the most intimate way imaginable: through the field of consciousness that’s the incubator for our reality. Together, we create the healing or the suffering, the peace or the war. This could very well be the most difficult implication of what the new science is showing us. And it might also be the source of our greatest healing and survival.
Neville’s work reminds us that perhaps the biggest error in our worldview is to look to external reasons for life’s ups and downs. While there are certainly causes and effects that may lead to the events of every day, they seem to originate from a time and a place that appear completely disconnected with the moment. Neville shares the crux of the greatest mystery regarding our relationship to the world around us: “Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.”3 Just what does this mean? It’s the practical question that naturally arises when we talk about living in a participatory universe. When we inquire how much power we really have to bring about change in our lives and our world, the answer is simple.
Key 6: We have all the power we need to create all the changes we choose!
This capability is available to us through the way we use the power of our awareness and where we choose to place our focus. In his book The Power of Awareness, Neville offers example after example of case histories that clearly illustrate precisely how this works.
One of his most poignant stories has remained with me for years. It involves a man in his 20s who’d been diagnosed with a rare heart condition that his doctors believed was fatal. Married with two small children, he was loved by all who knew him and had every reason in the world to enjoy a long and healthy life. By the time Neville was asked to speak with him, the man had lost a tremendous amount of weight and “shrunk to almost a skeleton.” He was so weak that even conversation was hard for him, but he agreed to simply listen and nod his understanding as Neville shared with him the power of his beliefs.
From the perspective of our participating in a dynamic and evolving universe, there can be only one solution to any problem: a change in attitude and in consciousness. With this in mind, Neville asked the man to experience himself as if his healing had already taken place. As the poet William Blake suggested, there’s a very fine line between imagination and reality: “Man is all Imagination.” Just as physicist David Bohm proposes that this world is a projection of events in a deeper realm of reality, Blake continues, “All that you behold, tho’ it appears Without, it is Within, / In your Imagination, of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.”4 Through the power of consciously focusing on the things that we create in our imagination, we give them the “nudge” that brings them through the barrier from the unreal to the real.
In a single sentence, Neville explains how he provided the words that would help his new friend accomplish his new way of thinking: “I suggested that in imagination, he see the doctor’s face expressing incredulous amazement in finding him recovered, contrary to all reason, from the last stages of an incurable disease, that he see him double-checking in his examination and hear him saying over and over, ‘It’s a miracle—it’s a miracle.’”5 Well, you can guess the reason why I’m sharing this story: The fellow did get better. Months later, the visionary received a letter telling him that the young man had, in fact, made a truly miraculous recovery. Neville later met with him and found that he was enjoying his family and his life in perfect health.
The secret, the man revealed, was that rather than simply wishing for his health, since the day of their meeting, he had lived from the “assumption of already being well and healed.” And herein we find the secret of propelling our heart’s desires from the state of imagination to the reality of our everyday lives: It’s our ability to feel as if our dreams have already come to life, our wishes are fulfilled, and our prayers already answered. In this way, we actively share in what Wheeler called our “participatory universe.”
LIVING FROM THE ANSWER
There’s a subtle yet powerful difference between working toward a result and thinking and feeling from it. When we work toward something, we embark upon an open-ended and never-ending journey. While we may identify milestones and set goals to get us closer to our accomplishment, in our minds we’re always “on our way” to the goal, rather than “in” the experience of achieving it. This is precisely why Neville’s admonition that we must “enter the image” of our heart’s desire and “think from it” is so powerful in our lives.
In the ancient study of martial arts, we see a beautiful metaphor in the physical world for precisely the way this principle works in consciousness. You’ve no doubt seen the demonstrations of people trained in these disciplines marrying their powers of concentration and strength into a single moment of intense focus where they’re able to perform a feat—such as breaking a concrete block or stack of boards—that would otherwise be impossible for them to achieve. The principle that allows for these displays is the same one that Neville described in his story of the young man’s healing.
While there are “tricks” that can sometimes be used in order to do these amazing feats without the spiritual emphasis, when they’re authentically performed, the key to success lies in where the martial artists place their attention. When they choose to break a concrete block, for example, the very last thing in their mind is the point of contact where their hand will touch the surface. Just as Neville suggested in his instruction to the dying man, the key is to put our focus in the place of the completed act: the healing already accomplished or the brick already broken.
Martial artists do this by centering their awareness on a point that’s beyond the bottom of the block. The only way their hand can be in this place is if they’ve already passed through the space between them and that point. The fact that the space happens to be occupied by something solid, such as a concrete block, becomes almost secondary. In this way, they’re thinking from the point of completion, rather than about the difficulty of getting to there. They’re experiencing the joy of what it feels like to accomplish the act, as opposed to all the things that must occur before they can be successful. This simple example offers a powerful analogy for precisely the way consciousness seems to work.
I experienced this principle personally when I was in my early 20s. It was during that time that the center of my life turned away from working in a copper mill and playing in a rock band—and toward the spiritual focus of an inner power. On the morning of my 21st birthday, I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself drawn to the combination of long-distance running, yoga, meditation, and martial arts. I passionately began to pursue all four together, and they became the “rock” that I clung to whenever it seemed that my world was crumbling around me. One day in the dojo (the martial-arts studio) before our karate class began, I witnessed the power of a concentrated focus unlike anything that I’d ever seen growing up in the heartland of northern Missouri.
On that day, our instructor walked into the room and asked us to do something very different from the form and movement practices that were familiar to us. He explained that he would seat himself in the center of the thick mat where we honed our skills, close his eyes, and go into a meditation. During this exercise, he would stretch his arms out on either side of his body, with his palms open and facedown. He asked us to give him a couple of minutes to “anchor” himself in this T position and then invited us to do anything that we could to move him from his place.
The men in our class outnumbered the women by about two to one, and there had always been a friendly competition between the sexes. On that day, however, there was no such division. Together, we all sat close to our instructor, silent and motionless. We watched as he simply walked to the center of the mat, sat down with his legs crossed, closed his eyes, held out his arms, and changed his breathing pattern. I remember that I was fascinated and obser
ved closely as his chest swelled and shrank, slower and slower with each breath until it was hard to tell that he was breathing at all.
With a nod of agreement, we moved closer and tried to move our instructor from his place. At first, we thought that this was going to be an easy exercise, and only a few of us tried. As we grabbed his arms and legs, we pushed and pulled in different directions with absolutely no success. Amazed, we changed our strategy and gathered on one side of him to use our combined weight to force him in the opposite direction. Still, we couldn’t even budge his arms or the fingers on his hands!
After a few moments, he took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and with the gentle humor we’d come to respect, he asked, “What happened? How come I’m still sitting here?” After a big laugh that eased the tension and with a familiar gleam in his eyes, he explained what had just happened.
“When I closed my eyes,” he said, “I had a vision that was like a dream, and that dream became my reality. I pictured two mountains, one on either side of my body, and myself on the ground between the peaks.” As he spoke, I immediately saw the image in my mind’s eye and felt that he was somehow imbuing us with a direct experience of his vision.
“Attached to each of my arms,” he continued, “I saw a chain that bound me to the top of each mountain. As long as the chains were there, I was connected to the mountains in a way that nothing could change.” Our instructor looked around at the faces that were riveted on each word he was sharing. With a big grin, he concluded, “Not even a classroom full of my best students could change my dream.”
Through a brief demonstration in a martial-arts classroom, this beautiful man had just given each of us a direct sense of the power to redefine our relationship to the world. The lesson was less about reacting to what the world was showing us and more about creating our own rules for what we choose to experience.
The secret here is that our instructor was experiencing himself from the perspective that he was already fixed in one place on that mat. In those moments, he was living from the outcome of his meditation. Until he chose to break the chains in his imagination, nothing could move him. And that’s precisely what we found out.
In Neville’s words, the way to accomplish such a feat is to make “your future dream a present fact.”6 In a nonscientific language that sounds almost too straightforward to be true, he tells us precisely how this is done. Please don’t be deceived by the simplicity of the visionary’s words when he suggests that all we need to do to transform our imagination into reality is to “assume the feeling of our wish fulfilled.”7 In a participatory universe of our making, why should we expect it to be difficult to have the power to create?
MANY POSSIBILITIES/ONE
REALITY
Why would the way we think and feel about our world have any effect whatsoever on the events that play out in our lives? How does simply making our “future dream a present fact” change the course of events that are already under way? If it looks as if our world is barreling down the path toward a global war, for example, does that conflict really have to occur? When it seems as though our marriage is about to crumble or that we’re destined to live with a debilitating heath condition, does the outcome of these experiences have to happen as predicted?
Or is there another factor—one that’s often discounted—that may, in fact, play a powerful role in how we experience the things that have already been set into motion? Does life follow our predictions or meet our expectations? The key to living from the place where our imagination is already fulfilled and our dreams and prayers are already answered is to understand how the possibilities exist to begin with. And to do that we need to return briefly to the central discovery that quantum physics makes about our world.
Quantum physics has been hugely successful in describing the behavior of things that are smaller than the atom—so successful, in fact, that a set of “rules” has been created to describe what we can expect to happen in this tiny invisible world. While the rules are few and simple, they can also sound strange as they describe the things that particles do at the subatomic level. They tell us, for example, that:
• The “laws” of physics are not universal, because on small scales things behave differently from the way they do in the everyday world.
• Energy can express itself either as a wave or a particle, and sometimes as both.
• The consciousness of the observer determines how energy will behave.
As good as these rules are, however, it’s important to remember that the equations of quantum physics don’t describe the actual existence of particles. In other words, the laws can’t tell us where the particles are and how they act once they get there. They describe only the potential for the particles’ existence—that is, where they may be, how they might behave, and what their properties could be like. And all of these characteristics evolve and change over time. These things are significant because we’re made of the same particles that the rules are describing. If we can gain insight into the way they function, then maybe we can become aware of greater possibilities for how we work.
Herein lies the key to understanding what quantum physics is really saying to us about our power in the universe. Our world, our lives, and our bodies exist as they do because they were chosen (imagined) from the world of quantum possibilities. If we want to change any of these things, we must first see them in a new way—to do so is to pick them from a “soup” of many possibilities. Then, in our world, it seems that only one of those quantum potentials can become what we experience as our reality. In my karate instructor’s vision, for instance, he observed himself fixed to the mat in a place in time—and he was … no one could move him.
Which of the many possibilities becomes real appears to be determined by consciousness and the act of observation. In other words, the object of our attention becomes the reality of our world. This is the area where Einstein himself had a problem with quantum theory, stating, “I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements.”8 In this context, the “measurements” are the equivalent of the observer—us.
Key 7: The focus of our awareness becomes the reality of our world.
Clearly, our role in the universe is central to the question of why the quantum world works in the way that it appears to. This is precisely why it’s important first to understand the “what” of scientific observations so that we can understand how we may apply them in our lives.
The mystery of why we need two sets of rules to describe the world can be traced to an experiment that was first conducted in 1909 by Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, a British physicist. While the experiment is nearly a century old, its results are still the subject of controversy and uncertainty. Since the time of the original experiment, it’s been re-created a number of times. Each time the results are identical—and just as mind-boggling.
The experiment, called the “double-slit” experiment, involves projecting things such as quantum particles through a barrier that has two small holes in it and measuring the way that they’re detected after they come through the openings. Common sense suggests that when things start out on one side as particles, they would travel throughout the experiment in that form and end as particles as well. The evidence, however, shows that something quite extraordinary happens at some point between the place where the particles begin and where they finish. Scientists have found that when an electron, for example, passes through the barrier with only one opening available, it behaves in just the way we’d expect it to: It begins and ends its journey as a particle. In doing so, there are no surprises.
Figure 4. When a single opening is available in the barrier, the particle behaves just as we’d expect.
In contrast, when two slits are used, the same electron does something that sounds impossible. Although it definitely begins its journey as a particle, a mysterious event happens along the way: The electron passes through both slits at the same time, as only a wave of energy can do, forming the kind of pattern
on the target that only an energy wave can make.
Figure 5. When two openings are available, the particle acts like a wave, passing through both openings at the same time.
This is one example of the kind of behavior that scientists simply have to call “quantum weirdness.” The only explanation here is that the second opening has somehow forced the electron to travel as if it were a wave yet arrive at its destination just the way it began: as a particle. To do so, the electron has to somehow perceive that the second opening exists and has become available. And this is where the role of consciousness comes in. Because it’s assumed that the electron cannot really “know” anything in the truest sense of the word, the only other source of that awareness is the person watching the experiment. The conclusion here is that somehow the knowledge that the electron has two possible paths to move through is in the mind of the observer, and that the onlooker’s consciousness is what determines how the electron travels.
The bottom line of the experiment is this: Sometimes the electrons behave just as we would expect. When they do, the rules for our everyday world in which things are distinct and separate seem to apply. At other times, however, the electrons surprise us and act like waves. When this occurs, they require the quantum rules to explain their behavior. And this is where we have the opportunity to see our world and ourselves in a new light, because it means that we’re a part of everything, and that consciousness plays a key role in the universe.
