The Field Updated Ed: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

THE

FIELD

THE QUEST FOR

THE SECRET FORCE

OF THE UNIVERSE

Lynne McTaggart

DEDICATION

FOR CAITLIN

YOU NEVER WERE ALONE

EPIGRAPH

Physics may be about to face a revolution similar to that which occurred just a century ago …

Arthur C. Clarke, ‘When Will the Real Space Age Begin?’

If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy … many of his statements might well sound like 2 x 2 = 13.

Georg Christophe Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

Lynne McTaggart on the Web

To visit Lynne at her official Web site, and for Living the Field master classes, conferences, workshops, and products, as well as Lynne’s regular blogs and podcasts, go to www.livingthefield.com.

To participate in her Intention Experiments, please visit www.theintentionexperiment.com.

For her health publications, go to www.wddty.com.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface to the 2008 Paperback Edition

Prologue: The Coming Revolution

PART 1: THE RESONATING UNIVERSE

1 Light in the Darkness

2 The Sea of Light

3 Beings of Light

4 The Language of the Cell

5 Resonating with the World

PART 2: THE EXTENDED MIND

6 The Creative Observer

7 Sharing Dreams

8 The Extended Eye

9 The Endless Here and Now

PART 3: TAPPING INTO THE FIELD

10 The Healing Field

11 Telegram from Gaia

12 The Zero Point Age

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgment

About the Author

Notes

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface to the 2008 Paperback Edition

MY MOTHER DIED four days before Christmas. We spent that grim last week of 1996 in her house in Florida, burying her, clearing out her possessions, tying up the hundreds of loose ends involved in ending a life. Sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of her bedroom one afternoon, I spotted a small maroon keepsake box under the bed and uncovered, next to a pink baby album and a few faded early Polaroids, a bundle of all my letters home from college.

I opened a few of the multicolored envelopes and sat back to read, in the loopy handwriting of my youth, a blow-by-blow account of my first year away from home. Amid a catalog of imagined accomplishments – tacit reassurance to my parents of the soundness of their investment – one passage stood out: Today, I am going to learn astronomy.

I smiled, recalling this upstart younger self, but any amusement was quickly dispelled by the realization that my mother would never share this moment with me. She of all people would have immediately grasped my true meaning – I am now going to take on all of astronomy in a single day – she who’d been so entertained by, so invested in this particular character trait, an early certainty that any behemoth across my path could be safely wrestled to the ground.

Today, I am going to learn astronomy. That line became a kind of catchphrase between my husband and me during the writing of this book. For a non-scientist like me to take on this project began to seem no less preposterous than trying to swallow the whole of astronomy in a single gulp.

The Field began as a confidence trick. I persuaded my publishers to fund what was essentially a voyage without a compass – to see if there was such a thing as human energy fields. I began, as journalists do, by scavenging. I attended conferences. I read scientific papers. I contacted frontier scientists all around the world.

At a certain point I began to recognize, first with wonder and then alarm, that I had trespassed into dangerous new territory, a fledging science in the very act of its creation. The scientific foundation that we had all believed in, on which all our confident assertions about ourselves and our place in the world presently rested, was disintegrating right in front of me. The book that I’d talked my way into writing was going to require no less than redefining our present concept of reality.

Today, I am going to learn astronomy. For a number of years, while researching The Field and subsequent work carried out in this area, I was patiently tutored in quantum physics by some seventy-five frontier scientists. I badgered, cajoled, demanded, and wheedled from each one of them countless hours, up to twenty interviews apiece, teasing out explanations, eventually wresting some crude translation for concepts that often exist for the physicist as pure mathematics. What exactly is quantum coherence? Why does the Zero Point Field exist? I would take their frequently incomprehensible answers and play them back via a metaphor until we could both agree on a lay approximation.

In the process I attempted to engage in a Socratic dialogue, posing each discovery as a philosophical problem to be placed in a wider context. Is there consciousness or just the Zero Point Field? Nevertheless, apart from a few impassioned individuals, such as physicist Hal Puthoff, Princeton’s former dean of engineering Robert Jahn, and Jahn’s colleague psychologist Brenda Dunne, the scientists studiously avoided metaphysical implications. No one had been willing to discuss, at least not in public, the wider picture – the collective meaning of so much individual discovery – or indeed to synthesize all of this material into a whole. That task, I realized with a gnawing unease, was being left to me.

For several years, I paced my hallway, sobbed at my desk, ignored my children, and left my other work in a pile on my desk. I held nightly discussions with my husband, a philosophy graduate, on arcane subjects: What exactly are time and space? If we aren’t looking, does the universe disappear? Take time out of it and it all makes sense, Bob Jahn once remarked to me in what was meant as a throwaway line. Was that possible? Or, more to the point, was that now an imperative?

During this time I wrote in a fevered panic, layering the manuscript like a cake, adding a new layer of meaning as each nuance became clear to me, the final layer added only a few months before the book’s publication.

At a certain point, I began to write in a manner suggesting that the process was happening through me. Every morning I would go to my computer, and words and concepts would pour out of me in a language that felt foreign – until I recognized that I’d found a new voice and a new subject, or that they, in fact, had finally found me. I would reread the book when it was first published with a sense of astonishment that any of it was in fact my work.

I launched my journalistic career in the 1970s as an investigative reporter, and that hard, fact-based approach to my work has never left me. For many years I have edited a newsletter called What Doctors Don’t Tell You, a critique of modern medicine. Although, after years of studying the limitations of orthodox medicine, my sympathies lie with the alternative variety, I still demand scientific proof. I am not given to Eastern esoterica or mysticism, and I tend to decry the fluffy end of New Age spirituality, all claims of quantum medicine without hard evidence, and any overarching or inchoate uses of the term energy. There is little of the woo-woo about me.

Nevertheless, the process of creating The Field changed the messenger. Once this alchemical process was finished, I emerged as a person not only with a different voice, but also with a radically different world view. The remarkable discoveries of these scientists suggested to me that modern man was viewing the world through a blurred lens, and that applying these new discoveries to our lives would require nothing less than making our world anew.

Joan Didion once observed that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Of all our stories, it is the scientific ones that most define us. Those stories create our perception of the universe and how it operates, and from this, we shape all our societal structures: our relationships with each other and our environment, our methods of doing business and educating our young, of organizing ourselves into towns and cities, of defining the borders of our countries and our planet.

Although we perceive science as an ultimate truth, science is finally just a story, told in installments. We learn about our world in piecemeal fashion, a process of constant correction and revision. New chapters refine – and often supplant – the chapters that have come before. With the discoveries that are enumerated in this book and those that have occurred since its publication, it is now clear that the story we’ve been told is about to be replaced by a drastically revised version.

Our current scientific story is more than three hundred years old, a construction largely based on the discoveries of Isaac Newton – a universe in which all matter moves within three-dimensional space and time according to certain fixed laws. The Newtonian vision describes a reliable place inhabited by well-behaved and easily identifiable matter. The world view arising from these discoveries is also bolstered by the philosophical implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its suggestion that survival is available only to the genetically rugged individual. These, in their essence, are stories that idealize separateness. From the moment we are born, we are told that for every winner there must be a loser. From that constricted vision we have fashioned our world.

The Field tells a radically new scientific story. The latest chapter of that story, written by a group of largely unknown frontier scientific explorers, suggests that at our essence we exist as a unity, a relationship – utterly interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment.

The implications of this new story to our understanding of life and the design of our society are extraordinary. If a quantum field holds us all together in its invisible web, we will have to rethink our definitions of ourselves and what exactly it is to be human. If we are in constant and instantaneous dialogue with our environment, if all the information from the cosmos flows through our pores at every moment, then our current notion of our human potential is only a glimmer of what it should be.

If we’re not separate, we can no longer think in terms of winning and losing. We need to redefine what we designate as me and not-me, and reform the way that we interact with other human beings, practice business, and view time and space. We have to reconsider how we choose and carry out our work, structure our communities, and bring up our children. We have to imagine another way to live, an entirely new way to be. We have to blow up all of our societal creations and begin again, building over scorched ground.

Most readers misconstrue the subject matter of this book as contemporary scientific discovery. In fact, The Field is a history. The scientific breakthroughs occupying its pages occurred a third of a century ago. Since The Field was first published, the scientists featured in the book have proved to be astonishingly prescient. Although the bulk of their work was carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, recent discoveries in frontier laboratories around the globe offer supporting evidence suggesting the strange properties of quantum physics – once thought to govern only the world of tiny particles – in fact occur in the world at large. New discoveries about the mutable nature of atoms and molecules lend more weight to the idea, advanced by a number of these scientists, that consciousness may be central in shaping our world.

Dozens of scientists in prestigious areas around the world have demonstrated that all matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection and that an information transfer is constantly going on between living things and their environment. Still others have produced evidence suggesting that consciousness is a substance outside the confines of our body. The brain and DNA, always assumed to be the body’s central conductors, should more properly be considered transducers—which transmit, receive from, and ultimately interpret quantum information picked up from the Field. Even our current understanding of time as flowing in a single direction has been exposed in orthodox circles as an incomplete human construct that may have to be drastically revised.

In the few intervening decades since the discoveries of these early explorers, so much has been discovered about the nature of consciousness that I felt compelled to write a sequel. The Intention Experiment concerns what The Field implied: that directed thoughts have a central participatory role in creating reality, a theory that is continually tested through massive, ongoing online experiments with readers around the world (www.theintentionexperiment.com).

Since I first published this book, the Zero Point Field as a field of all possibility and a free source of unimaginable energy has gripped the public imagination. Attempts to extract energy from the Zero Point Field as an exotic means of aerospace travel, once the object of secret projects funded by modest seed money, have now been lavishly underwritten by corporate giants such as Lockheed Martin. The Field has even entered the popular lexicon in computer games, movies, television series, and pop songs. In the cartoon The Incredibles, the chief antagonist Syndrome makes use of gauntlets armed with zero point energy to immobilize his opponents. Massive Internet search engines are said to be investigating the Zero Point Field as a possible technology for advanced intuitive searching.

Judging from the hundreds of letters I have received since the first publication of The Field, the meaning of this book is different for every reader. Nevertheless, everyone has understood that its central thrust is the hope of new possibility. At a time when the old scientific story, with its emphasis on technical mastery of the universe, threatens our planet with extinction, The Field offers an alternative future. Mainstream science has grown ever more fundamentalist, dominated by a few highly vocal scientists who believe that our scientific story has largely been completed. Nevertheless, a small body of resistance carries on in defiance of this restricted view. With every unorthodox question asked, with every unlikely answer, frontier scientists such as those featured in The Field remake our world. May they and their ilk light our way.

LYNNE MCTAGGART,

July 2007

PROLOGUE

The Coming Revolution

WE ARE POISED ON the brink of a revolution – a revolution as daring and profound as Einstein’s discovery of relativity. At the very frontier of science new ideas are emerging that challenge everything we believe about how our world works and how we define ourselves. Discoveries are being made that prove what religion has always espoused: that human beings are far more extraordinary than an assemblage of flesh and bones. At its most fundamental, this new science answers questions that have perplexed scientists for hundreds of years. At its most profound, this is a science of the miraculous.

For a number of decades respected scientists in a variety of disciplines all over the world have been carrying out well-designed experiments whose results fly in the face of current biology and physics. Together, these studies offer us copious information about the central organizing force governing our bodies and the rest of the cosmos.

What they have discovered is nothing less than astonishing. At our most elemental, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge. Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is the central engine of our being and our consciousness, the alpha and the omega of our existence.

There is no ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ duality to our bodies in relation to the universe, but one underlying energy field. This field is responsible for our mind’s highest functions, the information source guiding the growth of our bodies. It is our brain, our heart, our memory – indeed, a blueprint of the world for all time. The field is the force, rather than germs or genes, that finally determines whether we are healthy or ill, the force which must be tapped in order to heal. We are attached and engaged, indivisible from our world, and our only fundamental truth is our relationship with it. ‘The field,’ as Einstein once succinctly put it, ‘is the only reality.’¹

Up until the present, biology and physics have been handmaidens of views espoused by Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics. Everything we believe about our world and our place within it takes its lead from ideas that were formulated in the seventeenth century, but still form the backbone of modern science – theories that present all the elements of the universe as isolated from each other, divisible and wholly self-contained.

These, at their essence, created a world view of separateness. Newton described a material world in which individual particles of matter followed certain laws of motion through space and time – the universe as machine. Before Newton formulated his laws of motion, French philosopher René Descartes had come up with what was then a revolutionary notion, that we – represented by our minds – were separate from this lifeless inert matter of our bodies, which were just another type of well-oiled machine. The world was composed of a load of little discrete objects, which behaved predictably. The most separate of these was the human being. We sat outside this universe, looking in. Even our bodies were somehow separate and other from the real us, the conscious minds doing the observing.

The Newtonian world might have been law-abiding, but ultimately it was a lonely, desolate place. The world carried on, one vast gearbox, whether we were present or not. With a few deft moves, Newton and Descartes had plucked God and life from the world of matter, and us and our consciousness from the center of our world. They ripped the heart and soul out of the universe, leaving in its wake a lifeless collection of interlocking parts. Most important of all, as Danah Zohar observed in The Quantum Self, ‘Newton’s vision tore us out from the fabric of the universe.’²

Our self-image grew even bleaker with the work of Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution – tweaked slightly now by the neo-Darwinists – is of a life that is random, predatory, purposeless and solitary. Be the best or don’t survive. You are no more than an evolutionary accident. The vast checkerboard biological heritage of your ancestors is stripped down to one central facet: survival. Eat or be eaten. The essence of your humanity is a genetic terrorist, efficiently disposing of any weaker links. Life is not about sharing and interdependence. Life is about winning, getting there first. And if you do manage to survive, you are on your own at the top of the evolutionary tree.

These paradigms – the world as machine, man as survival machine – have led to a technological mastery of the universe, but little real knowledge of any central importance to us. On a spiritual and metaphysical level, they have led to the most desperate and brutal sense of isolation. They also have got us no closer to understanding the most fundamental mysteries of our own being: how we think, how life begins, why we get ill, how a single cell turns into a fully formed person, and even what happens to human consciousness when we die.

We remain reluctant apostles of these views of the world as mechanized and separate, even if this isn’t part of our ordinary experience. Many of us seek refuge from what we see as the harsh and nihilistic fact of our existence in religion, which may offer some succour in its ideals of unity, community and purpose, but through a view of the world that contradicts the view espoused by science. Anyone seeking a spiritual life has had to wrestle with these opposing world views and fruitlessly try to reconcile the two.

This world of the separate should have been laid waste once and for all by the discovery of quantum physics in the early part of the twentieth century. As the pioneers of quantum physics peered into the very heart of matter, they were astounded by what they saw. The tiniest bits of matter weren’t even matter, as we know it, not even a set something, but sometimes one thing, sometimes something quite different. And even stranger, they were often many possible things all at the same time. But most significantly, these subatomic particles had no meaning in isolation, but only in relationship with everything else. At its most elemental, matter couldn’t be chopped up into self-contained little units, but was completely indivisible. You could only understand the universe as a dynamic web of interconnection. Things once in contact remained always in contact through all space and all time. Indeed, time and space themselves appeared to be arbitrary constructs, no longer applicable at this level of the world. Time and space as we know them did not, in fact, exist. All that appeared, as far as the eye could see, was one long landscape of the here and now.

The pioneers of quantum physics – Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli – had some inkling of the metaphysical territory they had trespassed into. If electrons were connected everywhere at once, this implied something profound about the nature of the world at large. They turned to classic philosophical texts in their attempt to grasp the deeper truth about the strange subatomic world they were observing. Pauli examined psychoanalysis and archetypes and the Qabbalah; Bohr, the Tao and Chinese philosophy; Schrödinger, Hindu philosophy; and Heisenberg, the Platonic theory of ancient Greece.³ Nevertheless, a coherent theory of the spiritual implications of quantum physics remained beyond their grasp. Niels Bohr hung a sign on his door saying ‘Philosophers keep out. Work in progress.’

There was other, quite practical, unfinished business with quantum theory. Bohr and his colleagues only got so far in their experiments and understanding. The experiments they’d conducted demonstrating these quantum effects had occurred in the laboratory, with non-living subatomic particles. From there, scientists in their wake naturally assumed that this strange quantum world only existed in the world of dead matter. Anything alive still operated according to the laws of Newton and Descartes, a view that has informed all of modern medicine and biology. Even biochemistry depends upon Newtonian force and collision to work.

And what of us? Suddenly, we had grown central to every physical process, but no one had fully acknowledged this. The quantum pioneers had discovered that our involvement with matter was crucial. Subatomic particles existed in all possible states until disturbed by us – by observing or measuring – at which point, they’d settle down, at long last, into something real. Our observation – our human consciousness – was utterly central to this process of subatomic flux actually becoming some set thing, but we weren’t in any of the mathematics of Heisenberg or Schrödinger. They realized that we were somehow key, but they didn’t know how to include us. As far as science was concerned, we were still on the outside looking in.

All the loose strands of quantum physics were never tied up into a coherent theory, and quantum physics got reduced to an extremely successful tool of technology, vital for making bombs and modern electronics. The philosophical implications were forgotten, and all that remained were its practical advantages. The rank and file of today’s physicists were willing to accept the bizarre nature of the quantum world at face value because the mathematics, such as the Schrödinger equation, works so well, but shook their heads at the counter-intuitiveness of it all.⁴ How could electrons be in touch with everything at once? How could an electron not be a set single thing until it is examined or measured? How, in fact, could anything be concrete in the world, if it was a will o’ the wisp once you started looking closer at it?

Their answer was to say that there was a single truth for anything small and another truth for something much bigger, one truth for things that were alive, another for things that weren’t, and to accept these apparent contradictions just as one might accept a basic axiom of Newton’s. These were the rules of the world and they should just be taken at face value. The math works, and that’s all that counts.

A small band of scientists dotted around the globe was not satisfied to simply carry on with quantum physics by rote. They required a better answer to many of the large questions that had been left unanswered. In their investigations and experimentation, they picked up where the pioneers of quantum physics had left off, and they began probing deeper.

Several thought again about a few equations that had always been subtracted out in quantum physics. These equations stood for the Zero Point Field – an ocean of microscopic vibrations in the space between things. If the Zero Point Field were included in our conception of the most fundamental nature of matter, they realized, the very underpinning of our universe was a heaving sea of energy – one vast quantum field. If this were true, everything would be connected to everything else like some invisible web.

They also discovered that we were made of the same basic material. On our most fundamental level, living beings, including human beings, were packets of quantum energy constantly exchanging information with this inexhaustible energy sea. Living things emitted a weak radiation, and this was the most crucial aspect of biological processes. Information about all aspects of life, from cellular communication to the vast array of controls of DNA, was relayed through an information exchange on the quantum level. Even our minds, that other supposedly so outside of the laws of matter, operated according to quantum processes. Thinking, feeling – every higher cognitive function – had to do with quantum information pulsing simultaneously through our brains and body. Human perception occurred because of interactions between the subatomic particles of our brains and the quantum energy sea. We literally resonated with our world.

Their discoveries were extraordinary and heretical. In a stroke, they had challenged many of the most basic laws of biology and physics. What they may have uncovered was no less than the key to all information processing and exchange in our world, from the communication between cells to perception of the world at large. They’d come up with answers to some of the most profound questions in biology about human morphology and living consciousness. Here, in so-called ‘dead’ space, possibly lay the very key to life itself.

Most fundamentally, they had provided evidence that all of us connect with each other and the world at the very undercoat of our being. Through scientific experiment they’d demonstrated that there may be such a thing as a life force flowing through the universe – what has variously been called collective consciousness or, as theologians have termed it, the Holy Spirit. They provided a plausible explanation of all those areas that over the centuries mankind has had faith in but no solid evidence of or adequate accounting for, from the effectiveness of alternative medicine and even prayer to life after death. They offered us, in a sense, a science of religion.

Unlike the world view of Newton or Darwin, theirs was a vision that was life-enhancing. These were ideas that could empower us, with their implications of order and control. We were not simply accidents of nature. There was purpose and unity to our world and our place within it, and we had an important say in it. What we did and thought mattered – indeed, was critical in creating our world. Human beings were no longer separate from each other. It was no longer us and them. We were no longer at the periphery of our universe – on the outside looking in. We could take our rightful place, back in the center of our world.

These ideas were the stuff of treason. In many cases, these scientists have had to fight a rearguard action against an entrenched and hostile establishment. Their investigations have gone on for thirty years, largely unacknowledged or suppressed, but not because of the quality of the work. The scientists, all from credible top-ranking institutions – Princeton University, Stanford University, top institutions in Germany and France – have produced impeccable experimentation. Nevertheless, their experiments have attacked a number of tenets held to be sacred and at the very heart of modern science. They did not fit the prevailing scientific view of the world – the world as machine. Acknowledging these new ideas would require scrapping much of what modern science believes in and, in a sense, starting over from scratch. The old guard was having none of it. It did not fit the world view and so it must be wrong.

Nevertheless, it is too late. The revolution is unstoppable. The scientists who have been highlighted in The Field are merely a few of the pioneers, a small representation of a larger movement.⁵ Many others are right behind them, challenging, experimenting, modifying their views, engaged in the work that all true explorers engage in. Rather than dismissing this information as not fitting in with the scientific view of the world, orthodox science will have to begin adapting its world view to suit. It is time to relegate Newton and Descartes to their proper places, as prophets of a historical view that has now been surpassed. Science can only be a process of understanding our world and ourselves, rather than a fixed set of rules for all time, and with the ushering in of the new, the old must often be discarded.

The Field is the story of this revolution in the making. Like many revolutions, it began with small pockets of rebellion, which gathered individual strength and momentum – a breakthrough in one area, a discovery somewhere else – rather than one large, unified movement of reform. Although aware of each other’s work, these are men and women in the laboratory, who often dislike venturing beyond experimentation to examine the full implications of their findings or don’t always have the time necessary to place them in context with other scientific evidence coming to light. Each scientist has been on a voyage of discovery, and each has discovered a bucket of earth, but no one has been bold enough to declare it a continent.

The Field represents one of the first attempts to synthesize this disparate research into a cohesive whole. In the process, it also provides a scientific validation of areas which have largely been the domain of religion, mysticism, alternative medicine or New Age speculation.

Although all of the material in this book is grounded in the hard fact of scientific experimentation, at times, with the help of the scientists concerned, I’ve had to engage in speculation as to how all this fits together. Consequently, I must stress that this theory is, as Princeton Dean Emeritus Robert Jahn is fond of saying, a work in progress. In a few instances, some of the scientific evidence presented in The Field has not yet been reproduced by independent groups. As with all new ideas, The Field has to be seen as an early attempt to put individual findings into a coherent model, portions of which are bound to be refined in future.

It is also wise to keep in mind the well-known dictum that a right idea can never get definitively proven. The best that science can ever hope to achieve is to disprove wrong ideas. There have been many attempts to discredit the new ideas elaborated in this book by scientists with good credentials and testing methods, but thus far, no one has been successful. Until they are disproven or refined, the findings of these scientists stand