Lynne McTaggart – Part 1: Evolutionary Perspective on The Field
Living Dialogues
Duncan Campbell
volume_up

Episode 43 - Lynne McTaggart – Part 1: Evolutionary Perspective on The Field

In this dialogue, with another fellow visionary, Lynne McTaggart, I expand, build upon, and update the subjects that Duane Elgin and I talked about in the three prior dialogues on this site (Programs 40, 41, and 42).  Here is an excerpt from the opening of this dialogue Program 43:

Duncan Campbell:  We're going to talk about how science in the West has moved forward beyond ‘modern mind’ conventional classical physics of the 17th-19th centuries, and the Quantum Physics of the 20th century, to the contemporary 21st century discoveries of the “field effect” and its implications, and what these exciting, really revolutionary discoveries have been in just the last few years, and what they indicate in terms of the evolution of consciousness.

Lynne McTaggart: OK. I think the most fundamental point is to understand that we, all of us in the universe, swim in a sea of light is the way I like to put it -- there's a field out there of energy that’s very much like ‘the Force’ in Star Wars. It is very interesting if you go back and look at Star Wars after seeing the later movie What the Bleep on quantum physics, you see a lot of the presence of the original moviemakers there, too.

A lot of scientists realized, after the discovery of Quantum Physics, that there was a thing called the “vacuum” or the “zero point field”. This is the energy, basically, in empty space, in ground space because what they realized is that even if you reduce temperatures to even much colder that we've got today to nearly absolute zero, some atomic particles don’t stop moving. They do a little energy dance with empty space.

If you imagine all of us, it takes us to our absolute nether particles, the undercode of our being, we're just, basically, energy in charge. Our subatomic particles are constantly treating energy with the energy of the field. So it means that there is this insurmountable amount of energy lying there in empty space. If you were sitting a yard away from me, this energy is so dense and has such extraordinary inherent potential that it would be enough to boil all the oceans of the world. So I think the most fundamental thing is that we have this constant energy dense with the field. It's so fundamental that we realize that we are all one, we're all connected.

Duncan Campbell: That really, I think, is one of the things that we can key off on now to talk about the history of this and of our consciousness altogether. One of the ways I like to look at it is that in the vast sweep of the evolutionary history of the species, if we go back to our early indigenous ancestor roots -- the DNA of which we still have in our contemporary bodies [and emotional bodies, as we shall see in my next set of dialogues, Programs 45 and 46, with Eckhart Tolle] -- we find that our ancestors had a profound understanding of the inner connectedness of all things.  [What a number of contemporary intellectuals and scientists sometimes confuse and conflate with “magical thinking”, which they use in a derogatory sense.]

In scholarly terms, this sense of the interconnectedness of all things (called the “Web of Wyrd” by the Celts, and “Indra’s Net” in the Indian Vedas) is sometimes called the “participation mystique” from the French, or the “mystical participation”, with nature. The ‘indigenous’ early members of our species, before the advent of the ‘modern mind’, understood innately that they were in an alive, wondrous and at times dangerous universe, and that even rocks and stones had sentience or consciousness in the sense that they were a part of creation and all of creation was infused with what sometimes is called “The Great Mystery”. So there could be communing with standing stones, there could be communing, of course, with plants and animals as well as humans.

Then we as a species got into what we might call, and what I refer to generally as, the ‘modern mind’.  Some people date the advent of what I term this “adolescence” of our species’ consciousness (which continues to our contemporary “late adolescence” today) back as long as 35,000 years ago, when people, at that time, began as humans to move from homo sapiens to homo sapiens sapiens (“the aware human that is aware of its own awareness”), and put symbols on caves’ sides and so on, the first graphic record of radically self-aware human consciousness which has survived.  (Others would also date it back to 70,000 years ago, the time of the first known decorative shell artifact used as separate self-recognizing “jewelry”.)  The separation from our sense of embeddedness in the womb of an alive universe into individuated human identity can subsequently be seen evolving from the time humans moved to develop agriculture and tried to control nature, domesticating plants and animals for our use. Then most importantly, in the last 500 years – starting in the West say, with Copernicus, and then moving into the Industrial, Scientific, Technological and Information Revolutions -- we have an intensification of the individuating modern mind which literally disenchanted the universe. This made the world beyond the separate human mind simply an array of separate objects that was inert, without consciousness, existing only for us to try to figure out the rules that apply to this fragmented, objectified universe, a perspective sometimes referred to as the ‘Newtonian/Cartesian’ world view. [One of the most recent and dramatic examples of our species’ predilection to try to ‘control’ matter (nature) with our technology is the Chinese Army practicing using artillery to shoot into clouds to precipitate their rainfall before the clouds can drift over Bejing in August 2008 and rain on the Olympics.]

This really is at the heart of a quotation I'm about to read to lead into our next set of comments, Lynne, and this was made by the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzche, who realized at the end of the 19th century that the epochal crisis of the modern mind would happen when it became conscious of its destruction of the metaphysical world or of the alive universe. He said it in this aphorism, “God is dead.” By that, he meant that people had literally killed the mystery, a kind of Midas’ touch of the mind: instead of everything turning to gold, everything turned to dead matter that we could try to organize according to the laws of physics and mathematics but that had no independent interactive consciousness of its own.

So here's what Nietzche said to predict what our crisis would be in the 20th century: “What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?” Following that, we had the 20th century with its attempt to unilaterally master the mystery of the universe with the human mind and its mind-made artifacts alone, and the death by human hands of more millions of people in one century than all of prior human history.

So with that backdrop, I think now, Lynne, let us talk about how Quantum Physics began to shift that perception and open the door to what has become an ongoing rediscovery and reawakening of an evolving alive universe infused with consciousness -- in which current cutting edge Western science now perceives and demonstrates by its own methodology -- in the many examples highlighted in your book The Field -- what the ancients knew with theirs:  that we are, in fact, not all separate but deeply interconnected and possessing the skills and the heart and the energy within ourselves – the life Force -- to actually bring about a new harmony, a new evolutionary era.”

[See also in this connection my dialogues with Richard Tarnas, Programs 31 and 32 on this site, regarding his description of the “participatory epistemology” characteristic of this new era.]

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING
WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, CAROLINE MYSS, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

Transcript

Transcript

Woman: This program is brought to you by PersonalLifeMedia.com.

[musical interlude]

Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of Western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning--a dia (flow) of logos (meaning)--beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in “Living Dialogues”.

This is Duncan Campbell, your host and I'm delighted to have as my guest here Lynne McTaggart, internationally renown journalist, author of--among other books--“The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe”. Her groundbreaking book which brings up-to-date Quantum Physics which was really discovered almost a century ago with the latest cutting edge discoveries in physics, biology, and so on.

It does, in fact, fill in some of the gaps that were there for decades in Quantum Physics and that actually have a very direct impact on our lives. This is not just a theoretical scientific conversation, this is really about how ordinary people, we who are not scientists, can change our lives and the scientists can, too, in a way that is really very revealing and different than how we were taught in school.

So I'd like to welcome to the program Lynne McTaggart.

Lynne McTaggart: Hi, there! How are you doing?

Duncan Campbell: Hey, Lynne. It's a real pleasure to have you on. For those who don’t know you, you just arrived from the UK, from Britain, where you live joining us here in this field of energy. So without further ado, Lynne, there's so many ways to introduce you, maybe I'll let you pick out the things that you think are most relevant. You had a really varied career, you've written several books including “What Doctors Don’t Tell Us”, one on Kathleen Kennedy, and various other books. Let's ask this question, what cause you to turn your considerable skills and attention to this somewhat seemingly esoteric field of Modern Physics and Biology?

Lynne McTaggart: It's a very interesting journey, Duncan. I am the Editor of a publication called “What Doctors Don’t Tell You”. We're the largest health newsletter company in the UK. We own this company and we publish three newsletters. What our [xx] 2:55 with them is to look at the scientific evidence for medicine and alternative medicine and we write about what’s proven and what isn’t proven.

Somehow we're studying medical literature and in the course of that, I kept coming up against study after study showing things like homeopathy and spiritual healing work. It was so amazing, these are good scientific double blind-type trials that I started thinking that something fundamental must be left out of the paradigm that we're given in Biology about how we work and in Physics, about how the universe works.

So it really started me on a quest and this is really about eight years ago. I started thinking and looking at this and I traveled to many parts of the globe talking to frontier physicists about their portion of experimental or theoretical evidence. I stuck with very credible, prestigious-type people who work for universities like Stanford, Princeton, and the like. Then, it was my task really to put it together and try to synthesize this into a new theory.

Duncan Campbell: So could you describe for us, in brief, that theory. Then let's go back and unpack it, we'll go back then to the two or three primary discoveries of Quantum Physics that maybe familiar to some of us - the observation effect, the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty, the principle of nonlocality, and so on that really have changed our view of the world quite radically but have not--even today, almost a century later--really penetrated mainstream culture.

That’s why “What the Bleep” is such an interesting film because it is getting people educated in the mainstream that really don’t know anything about this. They're flocking to this movie, it's become a sleeper hit all over the country. Sometimes people go back four or five times, they form discussion groups and Internet chat rooms about it. So something is beginning to perk up in the field. Why don’t you tell us what the field is? Then, we're going to go back and talk about how it's moved forward and what these exciting, really revolutionary discoveries are just the last few years.

Lynne McTaggart: OK. I think the most fundamental point is to understand that we, all of us,--in the universe swim in the sea of light is the way I like to put it--there's a field out there of energy that’s very much like the force in “Star Wars”. It was very interesting that movie if you go back and look at it after seeing “What the Bleep”, you see a lot of the presence 5:25 of the moviemakers there, too.

A lot of scientists realized, after the discovery of Quantum Physics, that there was a thing called the “vacuum” or the “zero point field”. This is the energy, basically, in empty space, in ground space because what they realized is that even if you reduce temperatures to even much colder that we've got today to nearly absolute zero, some atomic particles don’t stop moving. They do a little energy dance with empty space.

If you imagine all of us, it takes us to our absolute nether particles, the undercode of our being, we're just, basically, energy in charge. Our subatomic particles are constantly treating energy with the energy of the field. So it means that there is this insurmountable amount of energy lying there in empty space. If you were sitting a yard away from me, this energy is so densed and so extraordinarily that it would be enough to boil all the oceans of the world. So I think the most fundamental thing is that we have this constant energy dense with the field. It's so fundamental because we realize that we're all one, we're all connected.

Duncan Campbell: That really, I think, is one of the things that we can key off on now to talk about the history of this. One of the ways I like to look at it is that in the vast sweep of the evolutionary history of the species, if we go back to our early indigenous ancestor roots,--the DNA of which we still have in our contemporary bodies--we find that they had a profound understanding of the inner connectedness of all things.

In scholarly terms, it sometimes called the “participation mystique” or the mystical participation with nature. They understood that they were in a live wondrous and sometimes dangerous universe and that even rocks and stones had sentient or consciousness in the sense that they were a part of creation and all of creation was infused with what’s sometime is called “The Great Mystery”. So there could be communing with standing stones, there could be communing, of course, with plants and animals as well as humans.

Then when we got into what we might call the “modern minds”, some people date it back as long ago as 35,000 years when people, at that time, began humans to move from homo sapiens to homo sapiens sapiens and put symbols on caves’ sides and so on and certainly, when we moved to agriculture and tried to control nature. Then most importantly, in the last 500 years or 300 years, starting to say--with Copernicus and then moving into the scientific revolution--we have an intensification of the modern mind which literally disenchanted the universe. This made it simply an object that was inert, without consciousness, existing only for us to try to figure out the rules that apply to it, then sometimes that’s referred to as Newtonian/Cartesian world view.

It really is at the heart of a quotation I'm about to read to lead into your next set of comments, Lynne, and this was made by the German philosopher, Nietzche, who realized at the end of the 19th century, that the epical crisis of the modern mind would happen when it became conscious of its destruction of the metaphysical world or of the alive universe. He said it in this aphorism, “God is dead.” By that, he meant that people had literally killed the mystery, a kind of Midas’ touch of the mind instead of everything turning to gold, everything turned to dead matter that we could try to organize according to the laws of physics and mathematics but had no independent interactive consciousness of its own.

So here's what Nietzche said to predict what our crisis would be in the 20th century, “What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Wither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?” Following that, we had the 20th century with its attempt to master the mystery of the universe with the mind and the death by human hands of more millions of people in one century than all of prior human history.

So with that backdrop, I think now, Lynne, if you could tell us how Quantum Physics began to shift that perception and open the door to a rediscovery and a reawakening of an alive universe infused with consciousness. In which we are, in fact, not all separate but deeply interconnected and possessing the skills and the heart and the energy within ourself--the life force--to actually bring about a new harmony, a new evolutionary era.

Lynne McTaggart: OK. I think that’s a very good summing up of Newtonian Physics and the whole idea of ripping the heart out of the universe. Every single ancient culture has always believed in a life force and it's only in these last hundreds of years that we have and we've replaced it with this “clockwork universe”. But about 60 years ago, the Quantum physicists came up with a couple of really strange things and they realized they’d wondered in some very weird metaphysical territory. The first thing they observed was, basically--and the thing called the “Copenhagen interpretation”--that basic matter is indeterminate. I like to say that basic matter is unset Jello. It's just this old possible thing.

When you take the subatomic particle like an electron, you can't ever know everything about it. You can know where it is but not where it's going or what speed. You can know in particular whether it's spinning up but not whether where it is. All that sort of indeterminate energy, it's sort of like having somebody buy every condo on the block and live in it all at the same time. They're all possible situations and it means basic matter is a potential, it's a possibility, a range of possibilities, and anyone of those could be true. So that’s one thing, the whole idea that we've got this unset Jello of reality.

The other really important point is normocality [sp]. Again, I like to call it this “separated at birth”, and what it is is this very strange telepathic signaling between subatomic particles. No matter how far they remove the part, once they’ve been in contact, they're always in contact and they influence each other. So it's like you'd have two twins that have been separated at birth and one move to Boulder and the other one moved to Tokyo. No matter the fact that they’ve never seen each other, if you follow them over time, you find that they're both marry a woman called Jane, they both like the color blue, and even more importantly, when one is skiing in Boulder and breaks a leg, the other one breaks his leg, too, even though he's sitting there in the Starbucks drinking a latte.

So you have that constant connection all the time and they're finding this in every part of, the new physicist are looking and finding this all over the place. They're finding these nonlocal connections, this instant information in parts of empty space, they're finding it in our bodies, they're finding us in the light coming from stars. They get connected to things when a light comes to earth, so it's all over the place. So these are two really important things.

They basically say nothing solid or stable, nothing is predictable, everything exists as a state of infinite possibility. There's only one thing that sort of collapses it down to any one’s state and that’s basically us and that’s what they call the “observer effect”. They realized that our consciousness, our active noticing creates reality at the moment of attention. When they found this in a lot of experiments where as soon as you take a measurement, that electron starts to set, you get the Jello to set, basically.

So for me, this really says to me that reality isn’t fixed but fluid and, hence, open to influence and there's plenty of evidence that we can talk about later that we are the influencers, we are the ordering systems.

Duncan Campbell: I think that’s a really good phrase there, “the universe is fluid and, thus, open to influence”. If we understand that at the fundamental level, instead of being a grouping of separate solid particles, the universe is really a dance of energy. Because it's a dance of energy--these waveforms--that we are, in fact, all interconnected and our DNA does contain the wisdom and the knowledge, we might say, of even our ancestral cultures if it is, in fact, reawakened. In my view, that seems to be what's happening with these recent developments in science.

So once again, to give a little historical overview, we might say that the beginning of this unlocking of the rediscovery of an enchanted or alive or conscious universe began in the West when the scientific paradigm stumbled upon Quantum Physics. At the beginning of that, Einstein himself was frustrated and irritated saying that there were anomalies there that just couldn't possibly be true. They didn’t square up with the kind of laws of physics that our understanding and view the universe had become accustomed to.

So let us start with what happened after the discovery of Quantum Physics and when Einstein--somewhat reluctantly and then embraced it--and we've moved forward now for nearly 100 years. There were gaps in the early discoveries of Quantum Physics that have now been filled in by lesser known scientists. People sometimes know the names of Schrödinger or Max Planck or Niels Bohr or others that were central to this revolution in Science. But in terms of newer people like Robert Jahn, Hal Putoff, Fritz-Albert Popp, Karl Pribram, and others you mentioned in your book, perhaps you could contrast this recent group, far less well known, and what they have brought to the table in terms of their most recent discoveries?

Lynne McTaggart: OK. These scientists, this is really 30 years ago--these kinds of frontier scientists you mentioned--began to ask a couple of fundamental questions like what hadn’t been completed in Quantum theory? Real fundamental question, how come there are two kinds of Physics? There’s the Physics of the Large, that’s where all those Newtonian things - things have to happen with force, the law of thermodynamics, things fall apart, the law of entropy. But then, there's another weird Physics, the Physics of the Small and how come they don’t correlate? They also ask things like, “But what's consciousness? How far should we take this whole idea of the ‘observer effect’?”

So the first one, and really one of the heroes of my book, is how Putoff who rediscovered the whole idea of the “zero point field” and said and believed that this was really fundamental physicist since they’ve discovered it, they’ve known about it for many hundreds of years, they used to call it “the ether”. But scientists have subtracted it out because it messes up their equations.

So I would like to say it's a bit like subtracting out God because it's so fundamental. But Hal realized that there is this vast inexhaustible Quantum energy sea and that we were packets of pulsating energy doing some sort of constant energy tango with this. We were probably resonating with our world, but he didn’t have all the information about how weird Quantum systems. Scientists still maintain that, “No, these Quantum effects only occur with dead things, not live things and only when things are very cold and not a hot and messy thing like a human body.”

Duncan Campbell: Let's just hold on right there. An article quotes, a scientist here from the CEU Physics Department who says as follows, “I've never seen the movie “What the Beep”, but I believe it's a mistake to try to use Quantum Physics to answer spiritual questions. The notion that a person could somehow perceive what is happening at the Quantum level is nonsense. That kind of observation takes big complicated machines in extremely low temperatures. To me, it is very hard to believe that something at room temperature like the brain should be exhibiting any kind of Quantum phenomena which we can observe or experience.”

There we have the voice of conventional science and authority right here from our University of Physics Department. So what's wrong with this picture? Why should people not take our local authority at face value?

Lynne McTaggart: OK. Well, because the frontier scientists that are out there doing the work don’t agree with that anymore. Now, this is material from my latest book that I'm working on now but I've been on the phone just a week ago with a number of scientists in special Quantum workgroups in Vienna, Israel, and Brussels and they're all saying the same thing. They're finding Quantum effects in the body, they're finding Quantum effects from DNA. Russian physicists, they just come up with information, an experimental evidence demonstrating that there is frequency coming out of our DNA. You can actually play this frequency and encourage plants to grow faster and do all sorts of strange things with it.

There are scientists that are going to be at the conference that are going to be talking about the Quantum effects they discovered in tiny thing called “microtubules” in the brain. I mean, it's all over the place, we're finding it. The big problem, the only reason that we find it in inert things and in very cold temperatures is a technological limitation that we have. It's our problem, we can't measure it yet, or at least, we haven’t been able to measure it yet but similar [xx] are, they are discovering. The University of Chicago found Quantum effects in atoms and not just the subatomic particles, that means in the big world, too.

Many people are saying, “Nonlocality is everywhere and Quantum Effects are everywhere.” The other point, to say that this is not spiritual, the Quantum Fathers, the Fathers of Quantum Physics all realized they trespassed into very, highly metaphysical territory. They were absolutely blown away by what they were discovering and the implications, and they all observed and looked at and studied ancient text like the [xx] and many of the Eastern text and the ancient cultures, the ancient Aztecs, and Native American cultures, and all of that who believed in something that was very akin to what they were discovering in Quantum Physics.

Duncan Campbell: So let's pause now before we go back to, actually, some of these discoveries which I'm eager to get on to. But I think it's crucial for our audience that we visit now the Sociology of Science and I'm going to start here with demystification of Science in showing that it's just exactly like any other realm of authority whether it's political or religious or any other kind of institutional setting in which the human beings that inhabit it.

As Lord Acton said famously in the 19th century--the British historian thought to be “the most civilized man of his era in Europe.” He said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely”, meaning that people do not walk their talk when it comes to something that threatens their egoic or territorial realm. We see this constantly with politicians and religious authorities who say one thing and do another. But sometimes it's surprising to our secular society which has, in a sense, deified Science to find out that the scientists are just as susceptible to this as any other people in an institutional setting in society.

I'm going to quote a great scientist known to many people, Max Planck, who famously said, “Science progresses funeral to funeral.” What did he mean by that was that even though science has the talkie-talk that we will respect and honor the results of any discovery or laboratory experiment or other experiment that follows rigorously the “scientific method and double-blind experiments” in the real world, this does not happen all that often. Particularly, it does not happen every time there's a revolutionary discovery that goes against the tenets that people have built their entire publishing career on, their entire academic reputation on, and so on. So we have these conflicts amongst scientist.

I think in the general culture, people think, “Well, gee, science is different than religion or politics.” President Bush can say whatever he says about social security and somebody else is going to say that he is actually mixed up about it or that he's deliberately dissimulating and the same with religious authorities. But when it comes to science, geez, shouldn’t there be some kind of ultimate way to verify what's right and what isn’t? So then they tend to go with the credibility of “the senior sciences which we find now if we look at the history of science to be exactly the wrong place to put credibility.

So when we come back to the comment of the local professor here at CEU, who’s a physics professor and described in our newspaper as an expert in string theory, this is the kind of typical journalism we see. They talked to some people who are going to be at this conference, “What the Bleep” and they say one thing about what's emerging in Quantum Physics and you're saying it in a more detail here on this program. But then the author of the article will go to a local authority, they’ll go to the University, a Physics professor who’s an “expert in string theory”, apparently, obviously to all of the things that you're talking about that are happening all over the world.

Now, I'd like you to address that and tell a couple of stories of how exactly this happens in the scientific community. How people who do discover these things get marginalized, get put off to the side in the famous case of Semmelweis who discovered “the existence of bacteria”. He was so hounded when he told his fellow doctors in the 19th to wash their hands before they operated because they might actually transmitting bacteria into the vulnerable innards of their patients. He was so ridiculed for this statement that he ended up dying in an insane asylum. We might say the “Semmelweis effect”, there are many, many examples of that and perhaps you could give a couple examples in terms of this Quantum theory.

Lynne McTaggart: Sure. The problem with scientists is that it's the real paradox. First of all, the job of the scientist is always to be an explorer and to find new ground and to stake out new territory. The problem is it also is supposed to provide a world view, and every time you stake out new territory, you destroy the old world view. So that means that you're destroying a paradigm that many people have built their career on.

So of course, they're going to fight against any kind of new experimental breakthroughs that are going to undermine the kind of work and their belief system, and of course, scientist like many things just the belief system. A really important point is it's also a process, we can never really know everything. We're just learning as we go along, and when we go along we have to discard the old and favors the new when we come up with discoveries.

I want to point out that all the people that I talked about in my book are credible scientists, again, from prestigious universities. But many of the people who decided to move into this new territory have absolutely been--it was the step of treason, basically, what they were talking about. So for instance, Fritz-Albert Popp, this is an absolute genius of a man who, he's a physicist in Germany--in playing around with light as he did, he was looking at defective radiology and things like that--he discovered that tiny bits of light were coming out of the human body, that we were like candles, where we're just emanating these tiny bits of light.

He thought to himself, “My goodness, I'm going to get the Nobel Prize for this.” Well, he got thrown out of his university; for many years he couldn't get a job; he was absolutely attacked from every possible way. Now, of course, they're now rediscovering that Popp was right. That not only is this light coming out of our body, not only is it coming in this frequency from DNA but that were communicating with each other with this light. It's all over the body and it's got some resonating connection so that he said, “Study showing that when you put medicine on one part of the body, it increases the light coming out in that part and also everywhere else in your body.” There's some sort of anatomical connection going on with these frequencies.

So Popp, then poor Jacques Benveniste who has just died--he was a great hero of mine--he worked for Inserm which was one of the highest government organizations of science. He was a very prestigious biologist who was noted for his work in allergies. But in the middle of doing that almost by accident, he discovered that we need dilute water. When you dilute a substance when it's almost just water, it still has an effect.

Let's say you have a certain molecule, you take almost all of the molecules out of it and you just have plain water in a solution. You apply that to other molecules that are supposed to have a chemical effect with the original molecule, you still get the chemical effect even if there's not one molecule left from the water of the substance that you're using. From that he realized there must be some electromagnetic signaling going on between cells that is carried through water.

Now, he was credited with proving homeopathy which operates on this whole idea of taking all the substance out of something and just having its memory in water. He published his material in “Nature” but he got absolutely jollified [sp]. They sent back a fraud squad from this magazine and redid his test and changed a lot of the protocols. And lo and behold, they didn’t get the same results and really destroyed his career like that.

But Jacques was very, very proud and a very tenacious Frenchman and he carried on working at a portacabin with private [xx] trying to work further in all of his discoveries. He has brought forward a great deal of evidence that there is this kind of electromagnetic signaling going on. That you could just play the frequencies, so to speak, of a particular molecule and you're going to get the chemical reaction. All you need is the frequency, not the molecule itself.

So those are two examples that, personally, all the physicists and the scientists in my book have been attacked in one way or another or had been very guarded about their incredible discoveries.

Duncan Campbell: Again, we go back and revisit the quotation from Max Planck where he said himself--as a famous scientist--that “Science advances funeral to funeral”. The old guys with the vested interest in the power positions of dictating to the rest of us, lay people, what our belief in reality should be, exactly like the medieval Church. Only they're the new church, they're the modern church, telling us with great authority and insistence the equivalent of the earth is at the center of the universe.

People like Copernicus or Galileo that claimed to the contrary--they're not only heretics, but it's like Bruno, you were passionate enough as an Italian to actually say this out loud, “You got burned at the stake.” Copernicus published his “The Principia” on the day he died, wisely, and Galileo kept his mouth shut and actually renounced his findings that Copernicus was right. He--secretly it is said by legend—whispered under his breath, barely [xx] but it moves. But he actually kept quiet during his lifetime and was not forgiven--his heresy--by the Catholic Church until 367 years later in November of 1992, long after we've been on the moon and knew what revolved around what.

The Church didn’t really reluctantly agree to it until 1992, and that finally brings up a comment by the philosopher Schopenhauer who said famously that, “The truth emerges in three phases. First, it is ridiculed; secondly, it is viciously and violently opposed to the point of actually burning people at the stake or destroying their careers; and third, it is embraced then ultimately by the establishment as its own over the forgotten dead bodies of the pioneers that actually were bold enough to bring it forth into the public discourse in the first place.”

So if we understand that, you get this whole different attitude where you read the paper and you hear someone who’s described as a professor of Physics and an expert in string theory trying to pooh-pooh all of these as quackery, clearly, not addressing the issues if not even aware of the kind of research that’s being done that you have unearthed in your book as an independent “investigative journalist”. It takes an investigative journalist, for heaven’s sakes, to actually unearth what's happening out there because the scientific community is not bringing it forward in its conventional journals.

Lynne McTaggart: Yes. Remember, too, these guys are out there on the frontier. They're making discoveries they don’t even understand. They’ll just come up with it and say, “Wow! That’s interesting. That’s unusual.” They don’t really necessarily put it together with the other people. Everybody’s got their own little patch and I always say, it's like each one has discovered a bucket of earth that no one wants to declare the content because they each have their own little separate section.

Scientists hate to speculate and they also hate to tide in with other things, so I found that one of my real jobs was to put it together. But I did go back to them constantly to say, “Is this right? Do you think this could be?” I think they were surprised to, as they say, move outside of it but I had them all read sections of the book and three of the scientists read the whole thing to make sure that I was on the right track.

Duncan Campbell: In other words, anytime you'd talked about one of the scientists that had discovered something here on the edges, you basically had him read it or her to verify it was accurate. Then you had people like Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, read the whole book and the founder of the Institute of Noetic Scientist to verify the science. I think that’s a very important thing for us to emphasize.

Lynne McTaggart: What does this really mean? What does it really mean to be completely connected? It means that you've really got to rethink all of your notions of everything from time because some of the things are some very strange ideas about time going forward and backward and being demonstrated by evidence. Almost like you can go back and fix things, that time is much more circular rather an arrow going forward, that it means a whole other things.

One of the big central problems we had in our lives is the idea of separateness, mine is bigger than yours. I've got to win. I've got to compete. I've got to do better. I'm alone. I don’t have enough, all those sorts of ideas. Now, they're completely contrary, that’s a separatist view. It’s very contrary to view that we're trying, to the world view that we're bringing forward of connectedness.

So it's looking at that whole view and starting to look at how that translates into the workplace? How it translates into things with your children. What do you teach your kids, if you don’t want to teach them to compete? How do you cope with people you don’t like? You don’t like yourself then, if we're all connected. It's things like that. We're going to look at a lot of other cultures and how they do it. Cultures that are based much more on wholism. What they do and how they look at time and how they teach people? What they do as a group and how do they work as a community? So it's going to be looking at all of that.

It's also based on--I should say, Duncan, we've been doing this. Ever since I published my book, I've had thousands of letters from people saying, “How do I live the field? This is great but how do I incorporate this into my life?” So we've organized it, as a course, it's almost like a newsletter but we call it a “course” and it's a written course that has explored much of this for several years now.

So that’s one of the things we do and I'm going to just tell people about our website which is www.LivingTheField.com which has some information. It has also an e-news that is generating more information back and forth because we're creating groups all around, we're creating basically small groups that are working and doing this sort of thing together. We're working on developing and expanding human potential because many of the things that are implied in Quantum Physics indicate that we're only a glimmer of what we really can be.

Many of the things in Quantum Physics, as many of my scientists mentioned, really provides a framework for all of these so called paranormal experiences that are marginalized in Science and said to not really exist like ESP, like distant healing, and all those sorts of things. So we start working on how to develop this. How do you heal? We do healing and we do all kinds of things like that.

We're creating these small groups because, as we all know, small groups are where magic happens. We're even starting to have information where people can contact each other by our website. So hopefully this--what we call “living the field community” that is starting to grow up in people--really looking and reevaluating their lives.

Duncan Campbell: That’s very well said, I think small groups are where magic happens because it is what is now emerging and being identified and named as the field of collective intelligence, getting more and more feasibility--we might say--in our culture. The magazine “What Is Enlightenment” had an entire issue dedicated to collective intelligence and that’s available in reprint. It's very interesting because they said, “For collective intelligence to draw down the mystery for us to tap into our collective intelligence rather than just our individual limited storehouse of knowledge and individual limited capacities, there need to be certain conditions present.”

One of them is transparency where everyone in the group can see the whole and discreet parts at the same time and this happens, of course, most effectively in small groups. It can happen, increasingly, we see in technology with things like lexus or open systems where people can contribute actually from a very wide geographic base to the ongoing creation of a piece of technology because it is transparent.

But normally, when we're doing mouth-to-ear communication in the physical world, the small group is where you can actually feel and experience that energy field and connect with it directly. I'll give an example here who is somewhat poetic. Coleman Barks, the famous American translator of Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet who’s now become the most published poet in America through Coleman’s wonderful translations.

He was once asked by a journalist whether he really understood Rumi because Rumi was the poetic equivalent of some of these scientists. He was a mystic and they said his meaning is not always apparent on the surface. “So do you really understand him?” and Coleman said, “Well, I travel around the country about a hundred times a year reading Rumi’s poetry. I find that when I'm in the presence of an audience that’s done a lot of its own deep work, then I understand Rumi. But it's an elusive understanding and it depends on who I'm with.”

In other words, he acknowledged the field effect experiencially and I can say from my experience here in broadcasting that because I'm aware of the fact that the audience for this program is full of people whose depth of experience and depth of understanding of deep listening such that, with the kind of conversation you and I are having here on the public airwaves, would not even be evoked from us if there weren’t that kind of virtual understanding. Out there, there's a third party in this dialogue - the audience of deep listeners that is causing the level of this discussion to come forward at the level it is. If we thought that everybody out there thought this was complete hokum and was willing to dismiss it just because it wasn't something that they were familiar with, we may not even have this conversation at all.

Lynne McTaggart: Exactly.

Duncan Campbell: So the field is everywhere and it's very interesting. You can experience it and that to me is the key. It's not about scientific concept or religious concept or political concept, it's about learning how to unlock the wisdom that we already have in our DNA. I think, from this point of view, Lynne, why don’t you address this notion of where the intelligence is coming from and I'll just put it by quoting from your book. You say, “Each of these pioneering scientists had chanced upon an anomaly in this conventional thinking and had the courage and the independence to pursue that line of inquiry.”

To me, what it means is that they stumbled across something in the field, in the collective mystery that they just happened to draw down, frequently, by accident when they weren’t trying; when they weren’t paying attention; when they were on vacation. Famous stories of scientists having the “Aha!” in the bathtub or stepping off a bus. When they relax the intense effort that they had of trying to figure something out and all of a sudden it dropped in almost by grace.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell