Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall not all sleep …
When Galileo and Copernicus showed that our planet was heliocentric, the Earth did not change. When Magellan circumnavigated it and proved that it was a globe, the Earth did not change. The famous “blue marble” picture taken from Apollo 17 didn’t change it either, it simply changed how we saw it, and how we saw ourselves. We realised what had always been, and those realisations have been transformational, maybe not instantly, but certainly over time. The first changed religious power and authority structures. The second removed limitations to our boundaries and the third opened us up to see a new connectedness, the dawn of a one-world, one-humanity perspective. What is the next expansion?
Today’s conventional picture from science is simply another mindset. Many humans see our world as only matter, also believing that we have mastered significant elements of that. Some of us have embraced Einstein’s reality, that matter is energy made into form, but only as theory. E=MC2 is a mathematical construct. A few may know a little about quantum reality and entangled particles, even if we can’t grasp that. These too are descriptions of what was always there but not seen. After so many centuries we might have been expected to learn how much less we know than we imagine we know, but it seems to be difficult.
What have we still not seen yet? Are you willing to step across that difficulty and into the next realisation? What might that bring? What might it enable and empower that raises our capacity to deal with the challenges we face? That might be worthy of some effort to stretch ourselves.
Creating God in a Human Image
Human history has witnessed similar changes to its perspective on what might be beyond us. We had a view that God was a kind of tribal ancestor, one that resembled us, looked and felt as we do, but with more power and wisdom. To some extent, we have gotten over that and perhaps we know somewhere that Michelangelo’s old man in the sky isn’t real, yet it has been hard to escape that personification, that father-figure who might punish us, and whom we pray will intervene to stop the wars and punish whomever you see as an evil-doer. It will help us if we can shift out of that and stop projecting human ways of thinking onto the Divine. It will help if we own our own rules and principles of behavior, beyond the limits of stone tablets.
A more recent historical trend came with materialist science, which brought with it a full-on atheistic rejection of anything resembling a Divine presence. That science doesn’t have any ecosystem for God to live in because it allows nothing outside of matter and nothing outside of you or me. There is nothing between us either, except for feelings or emotions. There’s nothing real, nothing to actually connect us, only figments of our imagination. The only spirit that materialism allows is human spirit, but it doesn’t think much of that.
The Blue Marble supports a sense of our shared participation in something larger and that has become associated with a transcendent, sometimes mystical, experiential sense of connectedness. The reality presented from that frame is oneness, there is no separation, and to the extent that God is an allowable concept, we all live in that. But we only live there in spirit, because the rest is illusion and the imagination from our egos, which are false.
While that has an underlying truth in regard to the nature of the cosmos as a single energetic entity and the all-pervading connection at the quantum level, it has always felt unhelpful to me as a human trying to live a life of meaning in my biological form. There were no questions arising in day-to-day existence, either at a personal or collective level, to which it delivered useful answers. It is like a chocolate teapot, at best ornamental, and at worst dangerous when filled with boiling water. Oneness is similarly unhelpful when crossing a busy street. We need differentiation, the boundary between I and Not-I.
Shaping Energy into Form
It is time for something more. Knowing that matter is made from energy is also a truth, but similarly misses the point. What shapes energy into form? Perhaps an answer to that question might lead somewhere useful, and indeed it does. It enables us to realise something powerful that always was, but which we haven’t seen yet.
There have been clues to the answer offered by past awareness of the Akashic Field and by the much more recent theory of morphogenetic fields put forward by Rupert Sheldrake. Fields are indeed a significant part of the picture, but these examples represent a more general feature of the universe.
That general feature calls for us to turn all that we have thought upside down, or perhaps inside out. I am inviting you to see information fields, cosmic consciousness, the spiritual realms and intuitive awareness all as demonstrations of the reality that all of creation is shaped by what the universe has created throughout its existence, from its first moment until now. Let me try to describe how that has worked, and how it continues to operate now.
Omniscience
In its first moments, the universe of energy created zillions of forms, most of which were unable to sustain for more than tiny amounts of time, but a few of which were viable, robust and sustainable. These were the building blocks of a material universe, quarks, protons, electrons and the like. Over longer time, those units coalesced and were formed into larger structures, atoms and molecules, stars and galaxies, the fabric of the cosmos as we know it.
In order to do that, to replicate initial sustainable structures over time and at massive scale, the universe had to have had a way of “remembering” its blueprints. More than that, it had to hold the knowledge of what it had created down to the level of every particle and the relationships between them. When physicists speak now of quantum entanglement, the connection is informational. There is an expression taken from Matthew’s gospel (10:29-31) which says that God is aware of every sparrow that falls, “And the very hairs on your head are all numbered.” Detailed as this sounds, it is crude by comparison when the field of information is aware of every particle of every molecule in every cell of the sparrow’s body.
The information field does that because it continued to retain its recording as elements and molecules became organic, creating amino acids and proteins, evolving into cells and multi-celled organisms and eventually into you and me. The processes of life continue the self-creating activity by which the universe has developed increasing complexity and continues still to do so. It is never-ending. It is the nature of life as we know it.
Omnipresent Organic Divinity
The field is everywhere. Please don’t view what I am describing as some kind of exterior or as disconnected and observing from a distance. The field is in everything, present through everything and connected in its knowledge of it all. Since life developed in that organic manner, creating its increasing richness, the information is located within. It is part of matter, and connects all of it. It is omnipresent. It IS the oneness.
Among the results of that, the universe, the field of information, knows precisely who you are. Yet it isn’t personal in any human sense. It has the record of everything that is and everything that has happened on the way. In that sense, St Matthew was accurate. But what I am describing here is a cosmic science, the laws of creation which are the way they are because that is what happened. It isn’t an exterior design; rather it is a self-created outcome, an emergent evolutionary result in which the processes themselves are God’s law. It is an organic divinity. This makes it essential that we don’t think of God like a superpowered human. When I talked earlier about our historical views, they were all projections of ourselves and our earthly relationships. That was understandable for people who lived in a rainforest or only knew a world that was 50 miles wide. Even when our worldview expanded to one with awareness of other nations, it was not totally irrational to project our power onto the Sun, or to wish to appease Thor and avoid being struck by a thunderbolt. It was conceivable to think of God as residing in the clouds, waiting for us to join him as angels with harps.
None of those stages in our view of spirit come close to what is needed for today’s humanity, knowing as we do that Earth is a speck among billions of galaxies. Star Trek and Dune may be fictions, but it is not a massive stretch for us to believe that such things are possible. Instead of projecting human-scale thinking on to spirit or the Divine, we are now called to find our place in an order that has the vastly different scale of cosmic consciousness, not just bigger than we ever imagined but bigger than we are even capable to imagine now.
This delivers us a remarkable mixture of something vast with something quite intimate. Your own interior1 information field is largely concerned with you and what or who is near you. I use the word near either in the sense of spatial proximity, or in regard to your daily concerns and the people you are connected with and who are connected with you. Your awareness and thinking is part of the field. This is a matter of what you are in relationship with such that the nearness is of a very different dimension than even that of your nation, let alone our solar system or the cosmos. Similarly, it is intimate in the sense that the field’s connection to you is also relatively local. To put it another way, the influence is stronger where the field concerns you in particular.
Inverting the Map
Let me recap for a moment, in case the unfamiliarity of what I am presenting has set you adrift. While the concept is really simple, it is not necessarily easy. I said previously that it turns our map of reality upside down. Disorientation is inevitable, until the new perspective resolves and everything drops into place. So, let’s come at the concept from another direction.
What does intuition mean to you? What about being psychic or clairvoyant? Have you ever known what someone was about to say or had a person come into your thoughts minutes before they phoned you? It is not so unusual, but often discounted as coincidence or accident.
My personal journey with this scientific enquiry began when I had a profound experience of very specific psychic knowing, created under witnessed and quite well-controlled conditions. I was forced to recognise that I had just done something that my scientific upbringing said was not possible and that my rationalist mind-set could not compute.2 It brought a profound shift which has underpinned decades of exploration, producing the frame for the inside out view of reality that I am describing here.
In that experience, I was able to detect an aspect of someone’s body – someone of whom I had no previous knowledge and who was apparently 100 miles away. He was merely “David”, a name on a card that someone else was holding. Yet I was able to make a connection to him and feel something of his experience, as if for that moment I was him.
I was impelled to explore this phenomenon because I don’t believe in magic. By that I mean I didn’t stop being a scientist and I view the seemingly magical only as something about which our knowledge is not yet adequate. Therefore, I treated it as a certainty that there must be an explanation for how it was possible. I needed to understand the universe in a different way. Further experiences followed on a regular basis such that there was no alternative for me but to seek an expanded scientific model for the universe which would embrace the old one.
What’s the Connection?
For such phenomena to be possible required there to be a feature of the Universe which connected my awareness to this other person. That feature was quite specific in enabling me to locate him individually on a planet of billions. It was without any limits in space because it would have been the same if he had been thousands of miles away. The connection that took place was wide-band and qualitative; it wasn’t a single data point but a stream of felt-sensing. I knew the nature of his pain (he had a brain tumour) as if it was my own.
I would like you to have a sense of what that takes, because that is key to grasping the nature and the power of the Information Field. You may have seen references to quantum entanglement, the scientifically proven fact that two tiny particles can be connected across huge distances such that a change to one brings a change in the other. While that is significant as a proof that informational connectedness is real, it is infinitesimal when compared with what I am describing, where the Field encompasses everything that is.
The Field is a master description of the entire universe, down to the state of every atom and cell within it. If you want a “mind of God”, that would be it, the creator before form. At the same time, it is all accessible to us, and aspects of its unfolding can be shaped by us because we hold, or we are, a portion of the Field. As a result, you can choose what to connect with, just as I chose to connect with David. You are a receiver for everything in the Information Field, with built-in addressing mechanisms that no-one understands yet, but which work in practice. If there are limits, no-one knows what they are, so there is a very, very big space for us to expand into. Merely having that awareness of everything is potentially transformative to what human beings are and to who you or I are.
Awakening from the Mystery
In one sense, it is a mystery because of how new the concept is. Yet once again, this is about realising what always was. The frame I am presenting does not change the nature of reality in regard to what the universe is, but it should change how we view it. It does provide a lot of possible responses to the fundamental and age-old human questions about who we are and why we are here. There is also a great deal of data about how humans have experienced this reality. It can be found throughout the centuries in reports of mystical experiences and myriad stories of psychic, shamanistic and non-ordinary phenomena. It is in the Vedas and the Tao Te Ching.
I use the word data because despite how much there is and how it comes from every kind of human in all kinds of culture, it is not “evidence” in terms that our current scientific method would allow. In my book The Science of Possibility3 I laid out in detail the many ways in which the data is present around the edges of what science has shown and is willing to accept. However, I am not trying to drum up readership. You don’t need it; it’s there for the curious and those who want more backup. Instead, you only have to open your mind to a new way of seeing. The Earth always orbited the Sun, it was always a globe and it has always been an organic, connected whole, the outworking of a whole realm of connection. The Information Field opens a new way to understand how that connectedness works. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.
Perhaps you already see it and have embraced it. If not, what would it take for you to see and accept it, to add a new dimension to your existence and to never go back to the flatland? It’s your choice, after all.
Allowing for the fact that interior vs exterior have a fuzzy meaning in this context, where all boundaries are porous.
I describe this event in more detail in a previous Substack.
The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness.
For more about Jon Freeman and Relational Being
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The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness
Your Access to Possibility: 7 Amazingly Simple Success Keys
to Creating Your Life Consciously
7-Stage Parenting: How to Meet your Child's Changing Needs
Reinventing Capitalism: How We Broke Money and How We Fix it, From Inside and Out
Thank you, John, for writing this. You speak from my heart while using a slightly different vocabulary.