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.]

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