The Secret of Life

Not Between You And Them...

Here are some words I love:

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
  Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind,
  people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful,
  you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway. 

If you are honest and frank,
  people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building,
  someone could destroy overnight.
Build anyway. 

If you find serenity and happiness,
  they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway. 

The good you do today,
  people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway. 

Give the world the best you have,
  and it may never be enough;
Give the best you've got anyway. 

You see, in the final analysis
  it is between you and God;
it was never between you and them anyway.

Mother Teresa

In the previous post - and, indeed, several times on this blog - I've talked about our need to validate ourselves in the eyes of others. How are we to lose this unhelpful habit? Perhaps one way can be found through these words of Mother Teresa. Because it may help to bear in mind that what is considered 'success' won't necessarily bring us true recognition - even in the eyes of the world. All too often the jealousy of others will get in the way. Only in the eyes of God can the truth prevail and our genuine worth be acknowledged.

These words can still resonate, even if we don't acknowledge the existence of God - or don't care for the word. It was never between you and them anyway. It is between you and the universe, you and truth, you and justice. It is what is to be done.

Philip Pullman - A Process Of Evolution

Reading an interview with author Philip Pullman in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, I was reminded of a post I wrote a few months ago, in which I argued that a wholesale change in human consciousness will be needed if we are to survive the approaching environmental crisis. Here's what I wrote at that time:

"Only when we come to think of ourselves as first and foremost an integral part of the human race and the universe at large, rather than as separate entities in competition with each other, will we have the perspective needed to sit down as one and work together to find a way out of this mess."

To some extent, Pullman appears to echo this in his Daily Telegraph interview:

"I think we've evolved in such a way that suited conditions on the savannah 500,000 years ago, a way of life that was acquisitive, territorial and combative. The degree to which the processes of civilisation, or socialisation, can overcome that depends on the timescale. In the long term, I back evolution - if we can survive this crisis that we're in...

"It's like going down a river, and about mid-century we're going to go through the rapids, and it's going to be terribly difficult for all of us. But we can survive and if we can get through this... it's going to be wonderful."

How exactly Pullman thinks that this necessary process of evolution is going to happen isn't entirely clear - but then with evolution it rarely is. Don't get me wrong - I'm no creationist - but the small print of evolution has always puzzled me. How did those fish come out of the water exactly? Gary Larson's explanation (in one of his Far Side cartoons) that the fish were playing baseball and evolved legs in order to get their ball back when it landed on dry land seems about as convincing as any other.

All Pullman seems to suggest is that the environmentalists' storytelling skills need to evolve so that they can better communicate the message about what people can do to help the planet. He says:

"People feel helpless when they see pictures of devastated forests cut down and the glaciers melting and the poor polar bear sweating on its bare rock in the sea. 'What can we do, what can we do?' People need to be told what it is that they can do."

I wish I shared his optimism that this will be enough to make a difference.

Pullman, of course, is widely known for the anti-religion stance of his fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, an ancient, authoritarian 'God' being unceremoniously killed in the final volume. Personally, I kind of like these books, such misgivings as I have about them having a lot more to do with the shambolic plotting than with any underlying agenda. I doubt that Pullman would view this blog in such a kindly light however. He has been quoted as saying "I don't think it's possible that there is a God: I have the greatest difficulty understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality'".

So I assume that Pullman would be fairly horrified - or at best bemused - by my belief that the necessary evolution is going to be a spiritual one, a process of evolution in which we come to realize that all of us are One, that all of us - including our planet and all the life forms upon it - are part of something which some might describe as 'God'.

Yet Pullman goes on to say in the interview:

"I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it's almost infinitely rich, but it's in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it."

Are we really so far apart, I wonder, the 'spiritual' me and the 'secular' Pullman?

I hope not, because it seems to me that it is a gap which is going to have to be bridged in our forthcoming process of evolution...

(You can read the Telegraph interview with Philip Pullman here. This in turn is an edited extract from the forthcoming book Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth? by Andrew Simms and Joe Smith.)

The Heart Of The Secret 4 - Gratitude

This is the last of a series of posts in which I've been focusing on The Secret, the DVD which has done so much to publicize the law of attraction, the idea that we can create our own reality through the power of positive thought. I've been discussing the three elements of The Secret which I believe to be the most important, and the third technique is perhaps the most valuable of all.

This one appears on The Secret DVD but does not, in my opinion, receive sufficient emphasis. The message is a simple one: give gratitude. Give thanks for all the good things in your life.

There may be many such things in your life or there may be very few just at the moment, but everyone - at least, everyone who is reading this - has something for which to be grateful. So make a list of your blessings - however short it may be! - and give thanks for them.

You may find that, as with the second technique, this is a valuable exercise in itself. It makes you feel good just to do it. But I think you will also find that it triggers the law of attraction. The way this works is obvious really. If someone gives you something good, they're more likely to do it again if you show that you're grateful. So why should the universe be any different? If you don't show that you're grateful for something, how does the universe know what you like? How does it know what to send you next? If, on the other hand, you give thanks for what you receive, then it may send you more of the same...

This is an idea which resonates with me, and I think it may be the reason why  religions seem to stress the importance of giving thanks. I used to wonder about this. Why does God need all that praise? Does he have a personality disorder or something? Why should this omnipotent being need the emotional crutch of having its ego stroked all the time? Why should something so powerful be so needy? But now I realize this isn't about what's good for God after all, but about what's good for us. We're asked to give thanks because this is the way the universe works. If we give thanks for what we like, we receive more of what we want in our lives. The exhortation to praise is simply telling us this.

If you aren't convinced by this, I can only suggest what I usually do: give it a try and see. There are two things to watch though. First of all, the gratitude has to be genuine. If you concentrate only on what you're going to get out of it, it won't work. But don't worry - I think you will find that as you practice gratitude, you will find it is such a pleasurable experience that you will be happy to do it for its own sake, instead of focusing on any rewards you may get.

The second potential problem is that those old familiar negative thoughts can rear their heads. You may find yourself asking why you have to be thankful for A when you have to put up with B. And for that matter, what about C and D, which are also a pain in the butt?

The way I deal with this is to tell myself that I can think about B,C, and D later. For the time being, I'm focusing on how good I feel about A. I can think about that other stuff when the gratitude session is over. This tactic seems to work for me, so I hope it will work for you.

The Secret suggests that this gratitude technique is particularly useful for relationship problems. If some things about your partner are annoying you, stop dwelling on them and make a list instead of the things you do like about them. Practice gratitude for these positive things and you will encourage more of them, while those annoying habits you are now ignoring will fade away.

Quite apart from the spiritual dimension, this seems like a good common sense idea to try. Law of attraction or no law of attraction, we see what we focus on most...

And of course, we don't have to concentrate just on ourselves. The same technique can be used to manifest peace and joy for the world. It is all too easy to focus on what is wrong with the world. Spend some time focusing on what is right with the world instead - and give thanks for it.

These, then, are my top three tips for 'law of attraction' techniques to practice - especially if you find that negative thoughts tend to get in the way of your imaginings. The first of them (described in Walk Before You Run!) is simply a beginner's version of the classic 'imagine what you want and so attract it' technique.  The other two (described in this post and the previous one) may be less specific than the idea of summoning up a fast car or a dream house, but they are delightful exercises in themselves. And who knows? - perhaps it is better not to be specific. It may be that the universe has a better idea of what will bring you happiness than you do...

(To read the Heart Of The Secret posts in sequence, please start here.)

Harry Potter And The Holy Trinity

As regular readers will know, this isn't a Christian blog, but I'm a bit of a Harry Potter fan, and by way of a bit of a change, I'd been planning a post about Christian ideas in the Harry Potter books - especially in the final volume, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. I'd spotted the parallels myself, but I did a search of the net a few days ago, and found that the Christian-Potter link was still being hotly debated. It was therefore interesting to search again today and find that the author, J K Rowling, is now talking openly about the whole thing on her US book signing tour.

"To me (the religious parallels) have always been obvious," she says, quoted on that well-known theological web site, mtv.com, "but I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going."

Of course, this is all particularly ironic because the Potter trilogy has long been vilified by many Christians due to its supposed links with witchcraft. Yet even before the final book, it seems that some such opinions were starting to soften, a change in perspective I can only applaud as a triumph of sense over superstition.

Spoiler alert: If you are a Potter fan who hasn't read the final volume, you may not want to read any further!

To illustrate the links with Christianity, the mtv.com article quotes a couple of biblical passages which appear in The Deathly Hallows and points out that towards the conclusion of the book, Harry appears to get zapped by his arch-rival Voldemort, only to apparently return from the dead in triumph. Meanwhile, another recent article (in Newsweek) points out that Harry spends his time between death and resurrection in a misty sort of afterworld which he calls 'King's Cross'. (Get it?)

What strikes me as particularly significant, though, is that Harry goes into the final battle with Voldemort in the full expectation of laying down his life to save his friends, after which gesture they are suddenly able to turn the tide of the battle in their favor -  all because, we are told, of what Harry has done.

The evidence for the Christian connection seems to be scattered throughout the book(s), and more ardent scholars than I will no doubt gather it all in, but I'm particularly grateful because it helps to explain the puzzling presence in the final book of all those magical artefacts. Magic swords, enchanted chalices and the like are the stock in trade of fantasy fiction, of course. The critic Nick Lowe used to call them 'plot tokens'. But rarely have so many been introduced in a single volume as Rowling manages to cram into The Deathly Hallows.

To start with, there are the Horcruxes. Harry doesn't have to find three of the things, not even five, but seven of them. Why so many? No doubt the clever kids could cope with them all, but were there any adult readers who hadn't lost track of the blessed things by half way through the book? A single magical artifact can have a certain power and charm if the writer describes it well, maybe even three of them can work at a pinch, but any more is too many and seven is just plain boring. Would The Lord Of The Rings have worked better if  Frodo had had to destroy seven rings instead of just one? I don't think so.

So why didn't the publishers ask Rowling to think again? Was it because she was adamant that there had to be seven Horcruxes? Because there are seven seals in the Book Of Revelation perhaps? Not to mention seven trumpets and seven basins into the bargain. (I think they were basins anyway - I can't really remember. Even St John  could have done with a firmer editorial hand...)

And not content with those seven Horcruxes, Rowling goes on to introduce yet more magical artifacts. Half way through the book we finally encounter the Deathly Hallows themselves - all three of the d**n things: the sword of power, the ring of resurrection and the cloak of invisibility. Now what is that all about? Even Harry is uncertain whether to turn his attention to the Hallows or the Horcruxes, and readers can only sympathize with his plight. Perhaps it was a good thing that he didn't look too closely. If he'd realized that the Deathly Hallows might symbolize the Holy Trinity - the power of God the father, the resurrection promised by God the son and, well, Ghosts are invisible, aren't they? - he might have chosen them instead of the Horcruxes. But of course, that would have been a mistake on Harry's part. That would have been using Godhood for earthly power, as Voldemort wished to do. Get thee behind me, Satan...

Aside from this muddle of artifacts, however, I do feel that some aspects of the final Potter book can genuinely speak to the soul. Harry's time in the wilderness is surprisingly bleak for a children's book. I had expected a breakneck chase from one location to the next as they tracked down the various Horcruxes, but it isn't like that all. A lot of the time, Harry and his friends just sit around clueless, not knowing what to do next. As I read, I wasn't sure whether this was just bad writing or deliberately making a point. In the end, I think, there's sufficient evidence that the latter is the case. It's as though the characters have to look inside themselves to find the answers, a concept which will be familiar to readers of this blog. At one point, Harry remarks that he was meant "not to seek but to know", a curious quote in the context of the book - and one which holds echoes for me of one of my earlier posts on enlightenment. As for Harry's frustration that things haven't been properly explained to him, there are many times in my life when I've felt exactly the same. What exactly are we supposed to be doing here? Why doesn't life come with a proper set of instructions?

So why was the Harry Potter series so popular, I wonder? Can it really be explained by the cozy school-story comfort food of the earlier books? Or was it Rowling's reputed use of the law of attraction to sell her books that made the difference?

Or did readers perhaps unconsciously sense the underlying spiritual message right from the start?

The latter may seem unlikely, yet I find myself wondering too about that most popular book of the twentieth century, The Lord Of The Rings. Again, why the immense popularity? I've been a great reader of science fiction and fantasy, believing that the former - and sometimes the latter - are greatly underrated, yet when I first read Tolkien's trilogy as a teenager I was disappointed. The quality of his writing did not seem to match his world-building skills and, well, I could have done with a little bit of humor. Yet I found watching the movie of The Return Of The King a profoundly moving experience. As I watched, I began to realize that the Great Ring, which promised the bearer so much power yet which weighed him down and threatened to destroy him, might be seen as a symbol of the human ego - this great weight which we all carry - which had to be burnt and cleansed in the fire of the mountain.

I don't know if that's what Tolkien (or director Peter Jackson) intended or not, but it's a great way to watch the movie! Do other people see - or sense - something similar, I wonder? It sometimes seems to me that such ideas - the kind of stuff we discuss in this blog - are actually of great importance not just to a wacky minority but to the population at large: not consciously perhaps, yet glimpsed beneath the surface of popular art.

Conversations With God

I've already mentioned the Conversations With God books by Neale Donald Walsch on this blog, but they made such a remarkable impact on me when I first read them that I thought they deserved a post to themselves.

Walsch started writing CWG Book One by writing an angry letter to God about how awful his life had become. At that point, he was not intending to write a book but simply to vent his spleen. So what happened next took him completely by surprise. He found himself still holding the pen, and writing an answer which apparently came from God. The book then developed along the same lines, with Walsch and God in conversation: Walsch asking questions and God providing surprisingly clear and straightforward answers.

I have to say that to a cynic like me, this didn't seem like a very good idea for a book, yet I found to my astonishment that it all made sense to me. I'd never found any religion which really spoke to me, yet here was this little paperback from some apparently crackpot guy which was setting out an explanation of God and us and the universe which resonated deeply within me. As I read, a little voice inside me kept saying "yes!" I felt that, after all this time, I was finally starting to understand what was going on.

A lot of the ideas which I have been writing about in this blog were ones which I first encountered in Neale Donald Walsch's book, and if you haven't already done so, I urge you to go and read it. The first book, Conversations With God Book One was the one which made the most impact on me, though I've also read the rest of the original trilogy, i.e. CWG Books Two and Three. Many others have followed, though I am not familiar with these. If you've read them, please feel free to leave comments on any views you may have on them.

I think it's important to note that Walsch makes no claim that these books of his are the absolute word of God. He fully accepts that they have been filtered through the very human brain of Neale Donald Walsch. I hope it will not shock you if I state my belief that similar limitations must inevitably be present in all religious texts.

If I have a criticism of the first three books, it is that they are very good at describing what is going on with God, the universe, and the human condition, but not so good at suggesting what we should do about it. For this, I have turned to other books, such as those I have previously mentioned by Eckhart Tolle and Nick Roach, and practices such as meditation. This does not, however, detract from the worth of the Conversations With God books - they are, to my mind, a magnificent achievement - and more practical information may be available in some of the later books which I haven't so far read. Any recommendations you may have of these are welcome.

I would also like to give special mention to Walsch's children's book, The Little Soul And The Sun, which is a wonderful parable of the human condition and how it arose - developed from one of the chapters in Conversations With God Book One.

I have now placed links to Conversations With God web sites in the sidebar.

Now on to a Public Service Announcement. If, after reading my recent post The Revenge Of The Slime Monster, you are eager to have a clothes valet experience for yourself, UK readers can now purchase one at a bargain price here. But don't delay - the opportunity to get hold of a clothes valet doesn't often arise! (I wonder why not?)

And don't miss out on taking a look at the comments on these posts. The conversation on Special Green Plates was particularly interesting. See it here.

Waking Up

Writing this blog is sometimes like opening a series of Chinese boxes. I write one post and that reveals something else which I have to write. In a recent post, I mentioned the idea of us 'waking up', and I thought it might help if I made it plain what I meant by that.

What I am talking about is coming to know from moment to moment that the ideas we've been discussing in this blog are a reality: that everything in the universe, ourselves included, are a single entity. We are all one. We are all part of the same being: part of a living energy field which some may choose to call God. This is what I am suggesting (very politely) in this blog.

But I'm not expecting you to believe this just because I say so. This isn't about 'belief'. All I suggest is that you approach these ideas with an open mind and an open heart and see what you make of them. Do they seem 'right' to you? Do they resonate in any way in your consciousness? If they do, or even if you are not certain about it, perhaps you will investigate some of the teachers I mention in this blog and some of the practices I suggest. I've mentioned some of these already but there are many more to come. It is all about finding a way to connect to that field of energy: that same field which lies behind the illusion we think of as matter. It is all about waking up to what is real.

This does not mean abandoning any belief system you may already have. I'm not trying to turn anyone away from any belief which already serves them. It seems to me that the concept of unity is entirely consistent with the great spiritual traditions and I'd like to talk about this in a future post. But at the same time, there isn't any conflict either if you don't believe in God. The energy field we're talking about can simply be viewed as a natural phenomenon, which doesn't have to be labeled as 'God' if you'd rather not.

This 'waking up' can also be called 'enlightenment', which might be described as 'a lightening of the load', literally a lifting of the burden of life from our shoulders. After all if we are really all part of the same being, if when we look into someone else's eyes, we see only ourselves looking back, where does this leave our striving for position, our need to stay 'ahead of the pack', our constant attention to the image of ourselves we display to the world?

In our present state, it as though we are all carrying an enormous statue of ourselves on our shoulders, a statue which we believe is of enormous interest to everyone else around us, all of whom are constantly studying the statue and seeking to identify some deficiency in it. In actual fact, unknown to us, our statue is hardly noticed, for everyone is too busy taking care of their own statues to pay any attention to ours. When we wake up, we realize this and can finally lift that statue, that great burden we have carried the whole of our lives, from our shoulders. We can finally feel the lightening of the load.

Happy New Year to you all! May the years ahead bring a lightening of the load for humanity...

The Universe Within

Just in case the TV is getting a bit dull, I thought you might like to follow this link by way of some holiday entertainment. It's called Secret Worlds - The Universe Within and its another way of changing your perspective on things. It takes you on a journey from the Milky Way at 10 million light years from Earth, through space to the Earth itself, then down into the microscopic world of the leaf of an oak tree.

I came across this link on one of the blogs in my sidebar, Jennifer's Goodness Graciousness, an inspiring collection of short posts which I recommend you to visit if you haven't tried it already. Here's a link to another post from Jennifer's blog, an American Indian story which she quotes by Bearwalker, a story which happens to come very close to encapsulating the guiding principle of The Secret Of Life.

Thinking Outside The Illusion

There have been some interesting comments on the previous post, including a bit of a therapy session for me! Click here to take a look.

I've finally had chance to read the Time Magazine article on God Vs. Science which I mentioned in the post before last. The article mainly comprises an interview between the biologist and ardent atheist Richard Dawkins, and (in the believers' corner) Francis Collins, who is Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. I find myself agreeing (and disagreeing) with Dawkins and Collins in pretty much equal measure. At the risk of seeming absurdly arrogant, as we're talking about two very clever guys here, it seems to me that both of them allow their beliefs to cloud their judgment from time to time and that both, too, sometimes fail to achieve the shift in perspective which is needed to really tackle the question of God.

I'd better give you some examples of what I mean.

Dawkins remarks: If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slighly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

I find myself kind of amazed that Dawkins should come out with something like this. He appears (from this particular quote) to be as limited in his thinking as some of the believers he so despises. His words summon up a vision of an old guy with a long beard who is watching us from on high, twiddling his thumbs till the dinosaurs die out. But doesn't the latest scientific thinking suggest that time is simply a characteristic of our universe and doesn't exist outside it? So God wouldn't really have to twiddle his thumbs (always assuming he has them, which I strongly suspect he doesn't) because from 'his' point of view, there is no such thing as time. He is in the eternal moment, where everything happens at once (as are we all, I would argue, if only we could remember!) And it seems to me that setting in motion a system which 'starts' with the big bang, then progresses through evolution to finally produce the human race - and probably on, in the fullness of time, to other, more impressive feats - is a perfectly sensible way to create a universe.

(And I feel I should mention in passing that 'worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in' are not necessarily of any special interest to God.)

Collins seems to have a much better grasp of things here.

He says: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

Apart from one glaring point of contention, I go along with that, but Collins gets distinctly dodgy, in my opinion, when it comes to the business of 'intelligent design'. He argues that if the universal constants, the six or more physical characteristics of our universe - the gravitational constant being cited as an example - had varied slightly, then life in the universe would have been impossible. Collins believes that this suggests the existence of a "designer".

Personally, I am not convinced by this argument. Dawkins provides a couple of alternative explanations, including the existence of a "multiverse": a large number of universes, in most of which the constants vary from ours and which therefore cannot contain life. Yet as there are so many of these universes, mere chance suggests that in one of them, the constants will be "correct" - which is how we may come to exist even without a god.

Collins responds that this is unlikely.

He says: I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor - Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward - leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

Though I am a 'believer', I can't go along with Collins here. The 'multiverse' seems a perfectly viable explanation to me. I think Collins just hasn't read enough science fiction. His argument sounds to me like the shellfish which inhabit a rock pool arguing that it is ridiculous to suggest that any other pools could exist. (One for fans of The Perishers there perhaps...)

So it seems to me that both of these men, from time to time, are guilty of getting trapped in the limitations of the familiar human world-view. As Neale Donald Walsch suggests in Conversations With God Book 1 (an excellent book if you haven't read it) this may well have been the origin of our traditional concepts of God, in which the divine being is confused with familiar figures such as earthly leaders and our parents, and is therefore associated with rules and retribution, rather than with the limitless abundance of infinity.

(Speaking of which, have you tried that tree thing yet?)

Richard Dawkins - 2

A guy over at the Way Of The Mind Forum has drawn my attention to an article in the latest edition of Time which relates to what we've been discussing here. It's called God vs. Science. I haven't had chance to read the whole article yet but my eyes were drawn to the final paragraph, a quotation from the man I've previously described as an "evangelical atheist", Richard Dawkins. Needless to say, do go and read the article or buy the magazine, but I'd like to give the quote here because I find it so heartening. Dawkins says:

"What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed."

Personally, I do find grandeur in Christianity if I discard some of the commonly touted ideas about it, but otherwise I find that by and large I agree with Dawkins here! Perhaps there is hope for consensus yet...

The Nature Of The Universe

(To see comments on recent posts, please click here for Vision, here for To Simply Be and here for Let's Pretend.)

In previous posts, I've mentioned Einstein's belief that our sense of separateness is "an optical delusion of consciousness" and the idea of unity, that all of us are essentially One. For the whole of this quotation from Einstein, please see this previous post. But what else do scientists have to say about all this? Does what we know of the natural world support the idea of Unity at all - or was Einstein just going off on a flight of fancy?

An interesting book to read in this respect is The Tao Of Physics by Fritjof Capra, first published in 1975, which draws parallels between modern science and Eastern religious & philosophical thought. In the words of one of the reviewers I've just come across on Amazon, Capra "demonstrates that both modern Western science and traditional Eastern spirituality share the same core truth: that the universe is one interconnected whole, a ceaseless flux of living energy of which we are all part". Does that sound familiar?

Many books making similar comparisons have followed, including The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami and The Field by Lynne McTaggart. Such books tend to be treated with varying degrees of scepticism by scientists and it's very difficult for the lay reader to make an objective assessment of them. This is especially true if you're like me and too much quantum mechanics makes your head hurt. Where some of them fall short, perhaps, is in claiming that the science proves that the philosophical & spiritual ideas we're talking about are correct. What may be more accurate - yet surely still exciting - is that they hold out the tantalizing possibility that they may be right, that science and spirituality may indeed concur.

Certainly it is true to say that what we think of as solid matter is mainly empty space. The particles which comprise atoms are very tiny indeed, with a large proportion of empty space between them.  But even these particles are not solid matter as we experience it in everyday life. They appear to be more like waves and only assume a fixed position when someone tries to measure them. So are they waves or particles, a bit of both, or something else which we don't yet understand? These sub-atomic entities are the building blocks of our own bodies and the matter we see around us every day. So what is in dispute here is the very nature of the fabric of reality.

I've previously mentioned the web site spaceandmotion.com, a fascinating repository of quotations and information on science and philosophy, the (not so) hidden agenda of which is to promote The Wave Structure Of Matter, a theory which proposes that particles are not particles at all but standing waves, interacting with each other to produce the effect of a particle. This would mean that there is no matter at all in the way that we normally understand it. Everything That Is, including ourselves, are really a series of interacting waves.

The Theory of Loop Quantum Gravity takes things even further, proposing that the universe is merely information in a giant quantum computer, stored by a series of twists in space-time. This would mean that we and everything we see around us are all part of a vast network of space-time, and furthermore don't even really exist. Which might sound extremely surprising - except to Buddhists.

It is clear, then, that some very imaginative concepts are being proposed to explain the universe, and in this context the idea that we are all part of a continuous field of energy - as many people experience through meditation - does not seem at all ridiculous. This 'connectedness' seems to be further confirmed by 'non-local effects' or quantum entanglement, whereby 'particles' which are separated in space - sometimes by large distances - appear to influence each other.

The universe is a strange place - or perhaps it only appears to be strange because we don't understand it. And if the so-called solid matter we see around us is not only mainly empty space but not even matter at all, then perhaps we should be open to the possibility that the way we see the universe - and our place in it - is in need of substantial revision.