Shattering the Paradigm: The Experiments That Change Everything

philosopher

he first rays of the morning sun cast long shadows from the

Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains that towered behind us to the east. I had agreed to meet my friend Joseph (not his real name) there in the valley simply to walk, talk, and enjoy the morning. As we stood on the rim of the vast expanse of land that connects northern New Mexico with southern Colorado, we could see for miles across the fields that separated us from the great gash in the earth, the Rio Grande Gorge, which forms the banks of the Rio Grande. The high-desert sage was especially fragrant that

morning, and as we began our walk, Joseph commented on the family of vegetation that covers the land.

“This entire field,” he began, “as far as our eyes can see, works

together as a single plant.” The heat from his breath mixed with

the icy morning air, and brief clouds of steam lingered for a few

seconds as he formed each word.

“There are many bushes in this valley,” he continued, “and

every plant is joined to the others through a root system that’s

beyond our view. Although they’re hidden from our eyes beneath

the ground, the roots still exist—the entire field is one family of

sage. And as with any family,” he explained, “the experience of one

member is shared to some degree by all others.”

I contemplated what Joseph was saying. What a beautiful metaphor for the way we're connected to one another and the world around us. We’ve been led to think that we’re separate from one another, our world, and everything that happens in it. In that belief, we feel isolated, alone, and sometimes powerless to change the things that cause our own pain and the suffering of others. The irony is that we also find ourselves inundated with self-help books and workshops that tell us how connected we are; how powerful our consciousness is; and how humankind is really a single, precious family.

As I listened to Joseph, I couldn’t help but think of the way in which the great poet Rumi described our condition. “What strange beings we are!” he said. “That sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark, we're afraid of our own immortality.”?

Precisely, | thought. Not only are the plants in this field connected, but they possess a power together that’s greater than any of them has alone. Any single shrub in the valley, for example, influences only the small area of earth that surrounds it. Put hundreds of thousands of them together, though, and you have a power to reckon with! Together, they change features such as the pH of the soil in a way that assures their survival. And in doing so, the by-product of their existence—their abundant oxygen—is the very essence of ours. As a unified family, these plants can change their world.

We may actually have more in common with the sage in that New Mexico valley than you'd think. Just as they have the power individually and collectively to change their world, so do we.

A growing body of research suggests that we’re more than cosmic latecomers simply passing through a universe that was completed long ago. Experimental evidence is leading to a conclusion that we’re actually creating the universe as we go and adding to what already exists! In other words, we appear to be the very energy that’s forming the cosmos, as well as the beings who experience what we're creating. That’s because we are consciousness, and consciousness appears to be the same “stuff” from which the universe is made.

This is the very essence of quantum theory that troubled Einstein so much. Until the end of his life, he held to a belief that the universe exists independently of us. Responding to analogies about our effect on the world and the experiments showing that matter changes when we observe it, he simply stated, “I like to think that the moon is there even if J am not looking at it.””

While our precise role in creation is still not fully understood, experiments in the quantum realm clearly show that consciousness has a direct effect on the most elementary particles of creation. And we ate the source of the consciousness. Perhaps John Wheeler, professor emeritus at Princeton and a colleague of Einstein, may have best summarized our newly understood role.

Wheeler’s studies have led him to believe that we might live in a world that’s actually created by consciousness itself—a process that he calls a participatory universe. “According to it [the participatory principle],” says Wheeler, “we could not even imagine a universe that did not somewhere and for some stretch of time contain observers because the very building materials of the universe are these acts of observer-participancy.”? He offers the central point of quantum theory, stating, “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed (or registered) phenomenon.”

SPACE 1S THE MATRIX

If the “building materials of the universe” are made from ob- servation and participation—our observation and our participation— what’s the stuff that we’re creating? To make anything, there must first be something there for us to create with, some malleable essence that’s the equivalent of Play-Doh for the universe. What are the universe, the planet, and our bodies made of? How does it all fit together? Do we really have control of anything?

To answer these kinds of questions, we must move beyond the boundaries of our traditional sources of knowledge—science, religion, and spirituality—and marry them into a greater wisdom. This is where the Divine Matrix comes in. It’s not that it plays the small role of a by-product in the universe or is simply a part of creation; the Matrix is creation. It’s both the material that comprises everything as well as the container for all that’s created.

When I think of the Matrix in this way, I’m reminded of how University of California at Santa Cruz cosmologist Joel Primack described the instant that creation began. Rather than the big bang being an explosion that happened in one place, in the manner we typically expect explosions to happen, he says, “The big bang did not occur somewhere in space; it occupied the whole of space.”> The big bang was space itself bursting into a new kind of energy, as that energy! Just as the origin of the universe was space itself manifesting energetically, the Matrix is reality itsel/—all possibilities, ever moving, as the enduring essence that connects all things.

The Force Before the Beginning

The ancient collection of writings from India called the Vedas are among the world’s oldest scriptures and are believed by some scholars to date as far back as 7,000 years. In what’s perhaps the best-known text, the Rig Veda, there’s a description of a force that underlies creation from which all things are formed—the force that was there before the “beginning.” This power, named Brahman, is

identified as the “unborn . . . in whom all existing things abide.”° Further in the text it becomes clear that all things exist because “the One manifests as the many, the formless putting on forms.”’

In different language, we could think of the Divine Matrix in precisely the same way—as the force before other forces. It’s the container that holds the universe as well as the blueprint for everything that happens in the physical world. Because it’s the substance of the universe, it stands to reason that is has existed since the beginning of creation. If this is the case, then the logical question is: “Why haven’t scientists found evidence of the Matrix before now?”

This very good question is one that I ask scientists and researchers investigating this field every opportunity I get. Each time I do so, the response is so similar that I can almost predict what’s about to happen. First, there’s the look of disbelief that I could in any way imply that science has somehow missed a discovery as important as the field of energy that connects everything in creation. Next, the discussion turns to equipment and technology. “We simply haven't had the technology to detect such a subtle field” is the way the answer usually goes.

While this may have been true at some point, for at least the last hundred years we have had the ability to build the detectors that would tell us that the Divine Matrix (or the ether, web of creation, or whatever we choose to call it) exists. It may be more accurate to say that the greatest stumbling block to our discovery of the Divine Matrix has been the reluctance of mainstream science to acknowledge that it’s there.

This primal force of energy provides the essence of all that we experience and create. It holds the key to unraveling the deepest mysteries of who we are, as well as to answering the oldest questions about how things work in our world.

Three Experiments That Change Everything

History will look upon the last century as the one of discovery and scientific revolution. Arguably, the key breakthroughs that have become the foundation for entire disciplines have occurred over the course of the last 100 years. From the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Watson and Crick’s model of the DNA double helix to our ability to miniaturize the electronics for microcomputers, the 20th century was unprecedented in terms of scientific advancement. Many of the findings came so quickly, however, that they left us reeling in their wake. While they opened the door to new possibilities, we weren’t yet able to answer the question “What does this new information mean in our lives?”

Just as the 20th century was a time of discovery, we may find that the 21st is a period for making sense of what we've found out. Many of the mainstream scientists, teachers, and researchers of our day are engaged in this process. While the existence of a universal energy field had been theorized, visualized, written about, and imagined for a long while, it’s only been recently that experiments were performed proving once and for all that the Matrix exists.

Between 1993 and 2000, a series of unprecedented experiments demonstrated the existence of an underlying field of energy that bathes the universe. For the purpose of this book, I’ve chosen three that clearly illustrate the kind of studies that are redefining our idea of reality. I emphasize that these are representative experiments only, since others are being reported, seemingly on a daily basis, that offer similar results.

While the studies themselves are fascinating, what really interests me is the thinking behind each investigation. When scientists design experiments to determine the relationship between human DNA and physical matter, for example, we can rest assured that a major paradigm shift is just around the corner. I say this because before these experiments proved that such a relationship exists, the common belief was that everything in our world is separate.

Just as we've heard scientists from the “old school” state clearly that if you can’t measure something, it doesn’t exist, in a similar vein, prior to the publication of the following experiments, the belief was that if two “somethings” are physically separate in the world, then they have no effect on one another—no connection. But all that changed in the final years of the last century.

It was during this time that quantum biologist Vladimir Poponin reported the research that he and his colleagues, including Peter Gariaev, were doing at the Russian Academy of Sciences. In a paper that appeared in the U.S. in 1995, they described a series of experiments suggesting that human DNA directly affects the physical world through what they believed was a new field of energy connecting the two.’ My sense is that the field they found themselves working with is probably not really “new” in the truest sense of the word. The more likely scenario is that it’s always existed and has simply never been recognized because it’s made of a form of energy that we’ve never had the equipment to measure.

Dr. Poponin was visiting an American institution when this series of experiments was repeated and published. The magnitude of what his study, “The DNA Phantom Effect,” tells us about our world is perhaps best summarized in the words of Poponin himself. In the introduction to his report, he says, “We believe this discovery has tremendous significance for the explanation and deeper understandings of the mechanisms underlying subtle energy phenomena including many of the observed alternative healing phenomena.”®

So what is Poponin really saying to us here? Experiment I describes the phantom effect and what it says about our relationship to our world, one another, and the universe beyond. . . . It’s all about our DNA and us.

EXPERIMENT |

Poponin and Gariaev designed their pioneering experiment to test the behavior of DNA on light particles (photons), the quantum

“stuff” that our world is made of. They first removed all the air

from a specially designed tube, creating what’s thought of as a

vacuum. Traditionally, the term vacuum implies that the container

is empty, but even with the air taken out, the scientists knew that

something remained inside—photons. Using precisely engineered

equipment that could detect the particles, the scientists measured

their location within the tube.

They wanted to see if the particles of light were scattered everywhere, clinging to the sides of the glass, or perhaps clustered in a pile at the bottom of the container. What they found first came as no surprise: The photons were distributed in a way that was completely unordered. In other words, the particles were everywhere inside of the container—which is precisely what Poponin and his team expected.

In the next part of the experiment, samples of human DNA were placed inside the closed tube with the photons. In the presence of the DNA, the particles of light did something that no one anticipated: Rather than the scattered pattern that the team had seen before, the particles arranged themselves differently in the presence of the living material. The DNA was clearly having a direct influence on the photons, as if shaping them into regular patterns through an invisible force. This is important, since there’s absolutely nothing in the tenets of conventional physics that would allow for this effect. Yet in this controlled environment, DNA— the substance that composes us—was observed and documented to have a direct effect on the quantum stuff that our world is made of!

The next surprise came when the DNA was removed from the container. There was every reason for the scientists involved to believe that the particles of light would return to their original scattered state throughout the tube. Following the Michelson- Morley experiment (described in Chapter 1), nothing in the traditional literature suggests that anything other than this would happen. But instead, the scientists witnessed a very different occurrence: The photons remained ordered, just as if the DNA were

still in the tube. In his own words, Poponin described the light as behaving “surprisingly and counter-intuitively.”?°

After checking the instruments and the results, Poponin and his colleagues were faced with the task of finding an explanation for what they’d just observed. With the DNA removed from the tube, what was affecting the particles of light? Did the DNA leave something behind, a residual force that lingered after the physical material was removed? Or was an even more mysterious phenomenon at work? Were the DNA and the light particles still connected in some way and on some level that we don’t recognize, even though they were physically separated and no longer in the same tube?

In his summary, Poponin wrote that he and the researchers were “forced to accept the working hypothesis that some new field structure is being excited.” Because the effect appeared to be directly related to the presence of the living material, the phenomenon was named the “DNA phantom effect.” Poponin’s new field structure sounds surprisingly similar to the “matrix” that Max Planck identified more than 50 years earlier, as well as the effects suggested in ancient traditions.

— Summary of Experiment I: This experiment is important for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that it clearly shows us a direct relationship between DNA and the energy that our world is made of. Of the many conclusions that we may draw from this powerful demonstration, two are certain:

1. A type of energy exists that has previously gone unrecognized.

2. Cells/DNA influence matter through this form of energy. Produced under the rigid control of laboratory conditions

(perhaps for the first time), evidence arose of the powerful relationship that ancient traditions have held sacred for centuries.

The DNA changed the behavior of the light particles—the essence of our world. Just as our most cherished traditions and spiritual texts have informed us for so long, the experiment validated that we have a direct effect on the world around us.

Beyond wishful thinking and New Age isms, this impact is real. The DNA phantom effect shows us that under the right conditions and with proper equipment, this relationship can be documented. (We'll revisit this experiment in a later part of the book.) Although it stands on its own as a revolutionary and graphic demonstration of the connection between life and matter, it’s within the context of the next two experiments that the DNA phantom effect takes on even greater significance.

EXPERIMENT Il

Research has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that human emotion has a direct influence on the way our cells function in our body.’ During the 1990s, scientists working with the U.S. Army investigated whether or not the power of our feelings continues to have an effect on living cells, specifically DNA, once those cells are no longer part of the body. In other words, when tissue samples are taken, does emotion still impact them either positively or negatively?

Conventional wisdom would assume not. Why should we expect such a finding? Refer once again to the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, the results of which were believed to show that there’s nothing “out there” to connect anything in the world with anything else. Following a traditional line of thinking, once tissue, skin, organs, or bones are removed from a person, any connection with those parts of the body should no longer exist. This experiment, however, shows us that something very different is actually happening.

In a 1993 study reported in the journal Advances, the Army performed experiments to determine precisely whether the emotion/DNA connection continues following a separation, and

if so, at what distances?* The researchers started by collecting a swab of tissue and DNA from the inside of a volunteer’s mouth. This sample was isolated and taken to another room in the same building, where they began to investigate a phenomenon that modern science says shouldn’t exist. In a specially designed chamber, the DNA was measured electrically to see if it responded to the emotions of the person it came from, the donor who was in another room several hundred feet away.

In his room, the subject was shown a series of video images. Designed to create genuine states of emotion inside of his body, this material ranged from graphic wartime footage to erotic images to comedy. The idea was for the donor to experience a spectrum of real emotions within a brief period of time. While he was doing so, in another room his DNA was measured for its response.

When the donor experienced emotional “peaks” and “dips,” his cells and DNA showed a powerful electrical response at the same instant in time. Although distances measured in hundreds of feet separated the donor and the samples, the DNA acted as if it was still physically connected to his body. The question is “Why?”

There’s a footnote to this experiment that I’ll share here. I was on a book tour in Australia during the September 11 attacks on the American Pentagon and World Trade Center. When I arrived back in Los Angeles, it was immediately clear that I’d come home to a country that was different from the one I'd left only ten days before. No one was traveling—the airports and their parking lots were empty. The world had changed tremendously.

I was scheduled to speak at a conference there in L.A. shortly after returning, and even though it appeared that very few people would show up, the hosts made the decision to go forward with the program. When the presentations began, the producers’ fears were realized: Only a handful of attendees had shown up. As the scientists and authors began their talks, it was almost as if we were presenting to one another.

I'd just finished offering my program on the interconnected nature of all things, complete with the Army experiment I just

described. At dinner that evening, another presenter came up to me, thanked me for my program, and informed me that he had been a part of the study that I’d spoken of. To be accurate, the man, Dr. Cleve Backster, had designed the experiment for the Army as part of an ongoing project. His pioneering work on the way that human intention affects plants had led to the military experiments. What Dr. Backster offered next is the reason why I’m sharing the story here.

The Army stopped their experiments with the donor and his DNA when they were still in the same building, separated by distances of only hundreds of feet. Following those initial studies, however, Dr. Backster described how he and his team had continued the investigations at even greater distances. At one point, a span of 350 miles separated the donor and his cells.

Furthermore, the time between the donor’s experience and the cell’s response was gauged by an atomic clock located in Colorado. In each experiment, the interval measured between the emotion and the cell’s response was zero—the effect was simultaneous. Whether the cells were in the same room or separated by hundreds of miles, the results were the same. When the donor had an emotional experience, the DNA reacted as if it were still connected to the donor’s body in some way.

While this may sound a little spooky to us at first, consider this: If there’s a quantum field that links all matter, then everything must be—and remain—connected. As Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, a colleague of Cleve Backster, states so eloquently, from this viewpoint: “There is no place where one’s body actually ends and no place where it begins.”

— Summary of Experiment II: The implications of this experiment are vast and, to some, a little mind-boggling. If we can't separate people from the parts of their bodies, does this mean that when a living organ is successfully transplanted into another human being, the two individuals somehow remain connected to each other?

On a typical day, most of us come into contact with dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of other people—and often that contact is physical. Each time we touch another person, even simply by shaking his or her hand, a trace of that individual’s DNA stays with us in the form of skin cells that he or she leaves behind. At the same time, some of ours remains with the other person. Does this mean that we continue to be linked to those we touch as long as the DNA in the cells we share is alive? And if so, just how deep does our connection with them go? The answer to these questions is yes—it appears that the link exists. The quality of that connection, however, appears to be determined by how conscious we are of its existence.

All of these possibilities illustrate the magnitude of what this experiment is showing us. At the same time, they lay the foundation for something even more profound. If the donor is experiencing emotions within his or her body and the DNA is responding to those emotions, then something must be traveling between them that allows the emotion to get from one to the other, right?

Perhaps . . . or perhaps not. This experiment could just be showing us something else—a powerful idea that’s so simple it’s easy to overlook: Maybe the donor’s emotions didn’t have to travel at all. It could be that there’s no need for the energy to travel from the donor to a distant location in order for it to have an effect. The person’s emotions might have already been in the DNA—and everywhere else, for that matter—the instant they were created. I mention this here to plant the seed of an amazing possibility that we’ll explore with all the consideration that it deserves in Chapter 3.

The bottom line—the reason why I’ve chosen to share this experiment—is simply this: For the DNA and the donor to have any connection whatsoever, there must be something that links them together. The experiment suggests four things:

1. A previously unrecognized form of energy exists between living tissues.

2. Cells and DNA communicate through this field of energy. 3. Human emotion has a direct influence on living DNA.

4. Distance appears to be of no consequence with regard to the effect.

EXPERIMENT Ill

While the effect of human emotion on our body’s health and immune system has long been accepted in spiritual traditions throughout the world, rarely has it been documented in a way that’s useful to the average person.

In 1991, an organization named the Institute of HeartMath was formed for the specific purpose of exploring the power that human feelings have over the body, and the role that those emotions may play in our world. Specifically, HeartMath chose to focus its research on the place in our bodies where emotion and feeling seem to originate: the human heart. The pioneering work of its researchers has been extensively published in prestigious journals and cited in scientific papers.

One of the most significant findings reported by HeartMath is the documentation of the doughnut-shaped field of energy that surrounds the heart and extends beyond the body. This field of electromagnetic energy exists in a configuration called a torus and is between five and eight feet in diameter (see Figure 2). Although the heart field is not the body’s aura or the prana described in ancient Sanskrit traditions, it may well be an expression of the energy that begins in this area.

Knowing that this field exists, the HeartMath researchers asked themselves if there could be another kind of energy we haven't yet discovered that’s carried within this known field. To try out their theory, the researchers decided to test the effects of human emotion on DNA—the essence of life itself.

energetic field that surrounds the human heart. (Courtesy of the Institute of HeartMath.)

The experiments were conducted between 1992 and 1995, and began by isolating human DNA in a glass beaker'® and then exposing it to a powerful form of feeling known as coherent emotion. According to Glen Rein and Rollin McCraty, the principal researchers, this physiological state may be created intentionally by “using specially designed mental and emotional self-management techniques which involve intentionally quieting the mind, shifting one’s awareness to the heart area and focusing on positive emotions.”!” They performed a series of tests involving up to five people trained in applying coherent emotion. Using special techniques that analyze the DNA both chemically and visually, the researchers could detect any changes that happened.

The results were undeniable and the implications were unmistakable. The bottom line: Human emotion changed the shape of the DNA! Without physically touching it or doing anything

other than creating precise feelings in their bodies, the participants were able to influence the DNA molecules in the beaker.

In the first experiment, which involved only one person, effects were produced by a combination of “directed intention, unconditional love and specific imagery of the DNA molecule.” In the words of one of the researchers, “These experiments revealed that different intentions produced different effects on the DNA molecule causing it to either wind or unwind.”"* Clearly, the implications are beyond anything that’s been allowed for in traditional scientific theory until now.

We've been conditioned to believe that the state of the DNA in our body is a given. Contemporary thinking suggests that it’s a fixed quantity—we “get what we get” when we're born—and with the exception of drugs, chemicals, and electrical fields, our DNA doesn’t change in response to anything that we can do in our lives. But this experiment shows us that nothing could be further from the truth.

The Inner Technology to Change Our World

So what are these experiments telling us about our relationship to the world? The common denominator among all three is that they involve human DNA. There’s absolutely nothing in conventional wisdom that allows for the material of life in our bodies to have any effect whatsoever on our outer world. And there’s also nothing to suggest that human emotion can in any way affect DNA when it’s inside the body of its owner, let alone when it’s hundreds of miles away. Yet this is precisely what the results are showing us.

When we think of each experiment on its own, without any consideration of the others, it’s interesting. Each one shows us something that appears to be an anomaly existing beyond the bounds of conventional thinking, and some of the findings may even be a little surprising. Without a greater context, we might be tempted to put the experiments into the category of “Things to take another look at on another day .. . one far, far away.” But when we

consider the three experiments together, something no less than paradigm shattering happens: They begin to tell us a story. When we look at each experiment as a piece of a bigger puzzle, that story jumps out at us like the hidden images of an Escher drawing! So let’s look a little deeper. . . .

In the first experiment, Poponin showed us that human DNA has a direct effect on the vibration of light. In the second—the military experiment—we learned that whether we’re in the same room with our DNA or separated by distances of hundreds of miles, we're still connected to its molecules, and the effect is the same. In the third experiment, the HeartMath researchers showed us that human emotion has a direct effect on DNA, which in turn directly impacts the stuff our world is made of. This is the beginning of a technology—an inner technology—that does more than simply tell us we can have an effect on our bodies and our world . . . it shows us that this effect exists and how it works!

All these experiments suggest two similar conclusions, which are the crux of this book:

1. There is something “out there”: the matrix of an energy that connects any one thing with everything else in the universe. This connective field accounts for the unexpected results of the experiments.

2. The DNA in our bodies gives us access to the energy that connects our universe, and emotion is the key to tapping in to the field.

In addition, the experiments show us that our connection to the field is the essence of our existence. If we understand how it works and the way we’re connected to it, then we have all that we need to apply what we know of the field to our lives.

linvite you to think about what these results and conclusions mean in your life. What problem can’t be solved, what illness can’t be healed, and what condition can’t be improved if we're able to tap the force and change the quantum blueprint where all of these things

come from? That blueprint is the previously unrecognized field of energy that Max Planck described as the “conscious and intelligent Mind.”

THE DiViNE MATRIX

The experiments show that the Matrix is made of an energy form that’s unlike any we’ve ever known in the past—that’s why it took so long for scientists to find it. Called “subtle energy,” it simply doesn’t work the way a typical, conventional electrical field does. Rather, it appears to be a tightly woven web, and it makes up the fabric of creation that I’m calling the Divine Matrix.

The Divine Matrix

is the “web...”

*

SSS

the universe exists as a tightly woven web that makes up the underlying fabric of our reality.

Of the many ways we could define the Divine Matrix, perhaps the simplest is to think of it as being three basic things: (1) the container for the universe to exist within; (2) the bridge between our inner and outer worlds; and (3) the mirror that reflects our everyday thoughts, feelings, emotions, and beliefs.

There are three more attributes that set the Divine Matrix apart from any other energy of its kind. First, it can be described as being everywhere all the time . . . it already exists. Unlike a broadcast from a TV or radio station that has to be created in one place before

being sent and received somewhere else, this field seems to be everywhere already.

Second, it appears that this field originated when creation did— with the big bang or whatever we choose to call the “beginning.” Obviously, no one was here to tell us what was present before, but physicists believe that the massive release of energy that jolted our universe into existence was the very act of creating space itself.

As the Hymn of Creation from the ancient Rig Veda suggests, before the beginning “not even nothing existed then, no air yet, nor a heaven.” As the existence of “nothing” exploded into the “something” of space, the stuff between the nothing was born. We can think of the Divine Matrix as an echo of that moment when time began, as well as a link made of time and space that connects us with the creation of everything. It’s the nature of this ever-present connection that allows for the nonlocality of things that exist within the Matrix.

The third characteristic of this field, and perhaps the one that makes it so meaningful in our lives, is that it appears to have “intelligence.” In other words, the field responds to the power of human emotion. In the language of another time, ancient traditions did their best to share this great secret with us. Inscribed on the temple walls, penned onto timeworn parchments, and engrained into the lives of the people themselves, the instructions that tell us how to communicate with the energy that connects everything were left by those who came before us. Our ancestors tried to show us how to heal our bodies and breathe life into our deepest desires and greatest dreams. It’s only now, nearly 5,000 years after the first of those instructions was recorded, that the language of science has rediscovered the very same relationship between our world and us.

The energy found in these experiments (and theorized by others) is so new that scientists have yet to agree on a single term to describe it. Thus, there are many different names that are being used to identify the field that connects everything. Edgar Mitchell, the former Apollo astronaut, for example, calls it “Nature’s Mind.”

Physicist and coauthor of superstring theory Michio Kaku described it as the “Quantum Hologram.” While these are modern labels for the cosmic force believed to be responsible for the universe, we find similar themes and even similar words in texts created thousands of years before quantum physics.

Dating to the 4th century, for example, the Gnostic Gospels also used the word mind to describe this force and how “from the power of Silence appeared ‘a great power, the Mind of the Universe, which manages all things. . . .””!° As different as the names sound from one another, all of them appear to be describing the same thing—the living essence that is the fabric of our reality.

It’s this mind that Planck made reference to in Florence, Italy, in the mid-20th century. During a lecture he presented in 1944, he made the statement that in all probability was not even fully understood by the scientists of the day. In prophetic words that would be as groundbreaking in the 21st century as they were when he spoke them, Planck said:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear- headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as the result of my research about the atoms, this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. .. . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”°

Beyond any reasonable doubt, the experiments and discussion of this chapter show us that Planck’s matrix exists. Regardless of what we choose to call it or which laws of physics it may or may not conform to, the field that connects everything in creation is real. It’s here in this very instant—it exists as you and as me. It’s the universe inside of us as well as the one that surrounds us, the quantum bridge between all that’s possible in our minds and what becomes real in the world. The matrix of energy that explains why the three experiments work as they do also demonstrates how the positive feelings and prayers within us can be so effective in the world around us.

But our connection to the Matrix of all matter doesn’t stop there . . . it continues into the things that we can’t see. The Divine Matrix is everywhere and everything. From the bird that’s flying in the air high above us to the cosmic particles that pass through our bodies and homes as if we were empty space, all matter exists within the same container of reality: the Divine Matrix. It’s what fills the emptiness between you and the words on this page. It’s what space itself is made of. When you think about the Matrix and wonder about its location, you can rest assured that wherever space exists, there is also subtle energy.

50 WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Like the great secret that everyone suspects but rarely talks about, through the Divine Matrix we're all connected in the most intimate way imaginable. But what does that connection really mean? What does it imply to be so deeply enmeshed with our world and one another’s lives that we share the pure quantum space where imagination lives and reality is born? If we're truly more than simply casual onlookers watching as our lives and the world “happen” around us, then how much “more” are we?

The previous experiments demonstrate that there’s a power within each of us that’s unlike any ever created by a machine in a laboratory. It’s a force that’s not bound by the laws of physics—at least not the ones we understand today. And we don’t need a lab experiment to know that this connection exists.

How many times have you gone to call someone on the phone, and found that he or she was already on the line when you picked up the receiver... or when you dialed the number, you discovered that the line was busy because your pal was calling you!?

On how many occasions have you found yourself enjoying time with friends in a busy street, mall, or airport, only to have the eerie feeling that you’ve already been in that place or with those people before, doing exactly what you’re doing at that moment?

While these simple examples are fun to talk about, they’re more

than random coincidences. Although we may not be able to prove scientifically why these things happen, we all know that they do. In such moments of connectedness and déja vu, we find ourselves spontaneously transcending the limits imposed by physical laws. In those brief instances, we’re reminded that there’s probably more to the universe and us than we may consciously acknowledge.

This is the same power that tells us we’re more than just observers in this world. The key to experiencing ourselves in this way is to create those experiences intentionally—to have our transcendent insights when we want to have them, rather than just when they seem to “happen.” With the exception of a few gifted people among us, there appears to be a very good reason why we're not bilocating, time-traveling, and communicating faster than the laws of physics permit: It all comes down to what we believe about ourselves and our role in the universe. And that’s what the next section is all about.

We're creators—and even more than that, we’re connected creators. Through the Divine Matrix, we participate in the constant change that gives meaning to life. The question now is less about whether or not we're passive observers and more about how we can intentionally create.