New Age Soul: Zukav

julielangdonbarrett.com

The Hindu view of the soul is that it is a spark of divinity within. Hindu culture and civilization revolves around this presumption and fundamental premise. The personality is the material garb which it dons to experience the physical plane and in the process refines its host to the level of its own perfection. At that point of the personality’s evolution it becomes synonymous with the soul, which then becomes liberated from the need to reincarnate.

The Christian and Judaic view is that the soul is the spiritual counterpart of the personality and acts through it on the physical plane. Unlike the Hindu view, here the soul is the actor and therefore assumes full responsibility for acts of omission and commission and upon the death of the personality, on the day of judgement it becomes answerable for them and is accordingly consigned to heaven or hell for all eternity. The soul is not the Spirit or the Holy Ghost and there is nothing divine about it.

The Hindu view stems from its Monism where divinity is ubiquitous and all is one and one is all. The Christian view arises from its Dualism where God alone is divine, whereas His creation  ( including the soul) is not. The Dualist view holds that the creator and his creation are distinct, whereas the Monist view is that the creator and His creation are one. For the Dualist the drop of water is separate from the ocean, for the Monist the drop becomes the ocean when it falls into it.

The New Age view proposed by writers like Gary Zukav veers towards the Hindu view with distinctive differences. New Age metaphysical thought (Fritzof Kapra, David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, Lynne Mc Taggart, Renee Weber and others) endorses the Monist premise ( unity of everything). New age thinking reflects the Hindu view that souls are fragments of the Godhead, as a cup of water is of the ocean.

Gary Zukav

Zukav pictures the  soul as an immensely powerful concentration of spirit outside time, directly emergent from Godhead. If we imagined an entity like our sun on the ethereal plane , it would match Zukav’s conception. This glorious entity of high resonance, vibration and clarity, for some reason develops negativities, corruption and splintering in a minute part of itself (like sun spots on the face of the sun).The New Age conception is indeed, that the soul is Spirit ( unlike the Christian concept) but not divine (unlike the Hindu concept) as it is capable of developing flaws and getting splintered. It then by choice, wanting to eradicate the mole and heal the fault, incarnates through a massive reduction of its power, on the physical plane to heal itself. The personality into which it incarnates is those parts of the soul that require healing plus some luminous parts like compassion and love that it lends to the personality to aid in the process of healing during a lifetime.

Zukav also gives a novel twist to the theory of Karma, moving away from its determinism, to freedom of soul’s choice in reincarnation. He holds that the Law of Karma has no ‘moral dynamics’ as the universe is not judgmental. Karma cures negativities and aberrations which develop and seeks to heal them by presenting challenges and opportunities which exercise and test the personality in ways which help the healing process. As we are not aware what is being healed in a beggar, those suffering pain through loss of a child, a spouse or a catastrophe, we are not to judge but merely react with compassion. The healing process he terms as ‘balancing energy’.

Zukav holds that animals have group souls – cat group soul, horse group soul etc. Only humans have individual souls. Their combined activity contributes to the evolution of the group soul. Beyond the souls incarnating on the earthly plane are the ‘advanced levels of light’: Teacher and Guide souls are from these levels, as are Angels – all unblemished and therefore not affected by the law of Karma. There are also consciousnesses that we could term as Masters after whom many religious movements have developed. Beyond are ‘realms of light’ that can be termed as God.

Souls also incarnate together to heal, in relationships of parent-child, siblings, loving partners, and even adversaries, healing themselves and one another in the process through the challenges that such relationships produce.

Temptations and addictions are tools for healing. The more a soul endeavours to heal, the greater will be the challenges it will confront. Temptation and addiction are the ‘compassionate response’ of the universe to assist the process of healing. As healing takes place there is rejoicing in the nonphysical world and the soul  moves to a higher frequency of light.

The goal of life is to align your personality with your soul, accepting the wisdom and expertise of Teachers and Guides that come through intuition and hunches. This leads to ‘authentic empowerment’ when energy is released only in love, trust, forgiveness and compassion. This enables one to have a clear understanding of the process through which souls are endeavouring to heal on the physical plane.

Zukav’s book turned him into a New Age guru of sorts, selling more than three million copies and gaining an impressive following. He then proceeded to write a sequel, ‘Soul Stories’ citing cases to illustrate his thesis. There is now a Seat of the Soul Institute on the net for those who wish to explore, learn and experience his findings in greater depth.

The book profoundly influenced my own thinking, despite my firm belief in the unquestionable divinity of the soul. The adjustment in thinking that I made was to regard his concept of the soul as the extended subtle body in Hinduism, which is still in a kind of physical plane and to regard the ‘higher resonating entities’ as divinity. But the Soul Stories and other conceptions were all relevant in many other ways, particularly the ideas about transformation in human consciousness now occurring, which resonate with Russel’s dawning of a Consciousness Age and Mc Taggart’s Zero Point Age. All in all I seemed to be getting further in my search for the soul.

Advertisement

Science and Spirit – The Holy Grail : Lynne Mc Taggart’s Investigative Journalism

credit: metaphysics-for-life.com

Our tour has covered such luminaries both intellectuals and scientists as Peter Russel, Fritjof  Kapra, Gary Zukav, James Redfield, Renee Weber, David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake and  Jose De Silva. I now propose to review the writings of the eminent journalist Lynne Mc Taggart and her painstaking investigations in her tour de force of the subject. In what I consider her path breaking book ‘The Field’ (1999 Harper Collins, New York, copyright Lynne Mc Taggart ), Mc Taggart launched on what she described as her quest to ascertain the ‘Secret Force of the Universe’.

    Her research into different disciplines focussed on detecting an underlying Field that connects us all and everything. We have already seen ( Science and Metaphysics: Bohm) that the eminent physicist David Bohm conceptualized the existence of an ‘Implicate Order’ from which the material world unfolds and into which it enfolds again as ripples in a wave. We also saw the insightful biologist Rupert Sheldrake (   Biology and Metaphysics : Sheldrake’s Morphogenetic fileds) postulate ‘Morphogenetic Fields’ to explain diversity and evolution in a purposeful Nature.

Lynne Mc Taggart

Mc Taggart’s concern was to investigate the range of observations and research by scientists to highlight the crystalization of ideas about a unifying and underlying reality which has been gaining greater acceptance despite resistance from the conservative scientific mainstream.

She presented and traced for the lay man, much like Capra and Zukav had, the movement in scientific thought from the mechanistic Newtonian world view and Darwinian theory of random evolution to the interconnected world of Quantum Physics and the dissatisfaction of some scientists with the lack of scientific interest in applying these findings to our macro level of existence. She dwelt on their efforts to investigate our connection with this apparently intentional force in the universe. Through her investigative journalism she sought to find the scientific basis for this evolving ‘revolution’ in thinking. Her concerns were however not confined to academic conjecture but appeared to be driven by a need to tap into the ‘Field’ to search for a kind of alternative medicine of psychic and spiritual healing and miraculous cures.

 At the heart of the premise was a Zero Point Field, the vibrations between particles which themselves are knots of energy. A ceaseless exchange of energy takes place sourced from this Zero Point Field and in turn replenishing this inexhaustible reservoir of energy.

We need not here go into the mysteries and complexities of Quantum phenomena, which she explains, such as ‘non-locality’ and the startling effects that the act of observation have on particles, beyond noting briefly that in the former case an electron is seen to influence another particle instantaneously over any distance without exchange of energy, implying that a connection once established is retained even after they are separated over a great distance. In the latter case the act of observation effects the particles behaviour. These curious phenomena suggest the idea of an interconnected world in which  we as observers  are active participants which produce the reality we observe  through the act of observing. This is not unlike the mystical view of the ancients that the universe exists when we look at it but disappears when we look away.

Fritz Albert Popp

Mc Taggart dwells at length on the findings of Fritz-Albert Popp a German theoretical biophysicist who studied ‘ biophoton emissions’ of living organisms and even developed a machine for the purpose. Here again it is indicative of a force from which these emissions emerge, showing that at the macro level too there is a relevance of the quantum activity which we find at the micro level.

Mc Taggart’s investigations then move through the magical portals of ESP, linking its incredible feats and as yet unrealized potential also to the Zero Point Field.

She goes on to investigate research carried out at Stanford University to show the power of the mind to influence random outcomes in a machine deviced to study such phenomena. The effects of sacred sites and global interest in events portrayed on the TV on the machines in the programmes  appeared to change random outcomes to higher degrees of order, all indicative of the phenomenon of quantum mechanics being applicable at a macro level. The experiments appear to show that an act of will can affect the outcome and that by thinking we can create greater order out of random patterns. The question then arises whether the will can be applied to heal organisms. Research had shown that the will could be applied to affect bacteria, plants and cells. The conjecture was that all this was only possible because the Field, repository of all memory was being tapped into through these processes.

Some scientists had proposed that the brain itself was communicating through quantum processes within and consciousness was a global phenomenon occuring throughout the body, not merely the brain. Biology itself was a quantum process and as in Sheldrake’s Morphogenetic Fields memory resided in the ZeroPoint Field with the brain merely retrieving the information from the Field. Creativity, insight and intuition were all representative of this phenomenon.

Intention could therefore affect the probability of events, pre-empt disease before it developed, change the course of our lives. The universe was instantly present, embracing all time and space at a point – a kind of continumm of presence. Precognition, distance viewing and the ability in some to look into the future were indicative of this (these conceptions appear to be in synch with the physicist David Bohm’s Implicate Order and and the biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphogenetic Fields).

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Mc Taggart also examined experiments carried out by the Indian mystic Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi through his Transcendental Meditation (TM), mass meditation exercises to show how these affected  the graph of crime in specified areas which were the focus of participating meditators. Other phenomena observed were the affects of mass will on the environment and weather. More experiments showed the healing effects of prayer on controlled groups of patients. All these phenomena were shown as examples of tapping into the Field of benign energy, a store house of universal memory. Mc Taggart concludes that with growing interest in the phenomenon a Zero Point Age was emerging  ( much like Peter Russel’s Consciousness Age in his book  The Awakening Earth).

Mc Taggart, encouraged by the universal response to her book launched into her next book ‘The Intention Experiment’ which sought to engage enthusiastic readers in active participation on the net to affect an experiment in biology.

Her writings became an inspiration for the production of a popular documentary on quantum physics and its relationship to paranormal phenomena – ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ with interviews with scientists which illustrated some of  the complex phenomena investigated by her. 

Again I sat back to absorb the immensity of ideas proposed and to realign my thinking of the nature of the reality that surrounds us, shaping us as we too shape it.

A Temporary Peace

Credit: indiawilds.com

When one meditates on Nature things begin to happen. Can be like a symphony started, harmony and counter point. Songs of birds, wind ruffling leaves, shifting shadows seek to connect and speak. My poem from a rear window on a holiday in the hills – I’m glad I captured the moment with the click of a poem.

 

              A  TEMPORARY  PEACE

 

A lurching mountain defines

 And stays in place.

 

A low nimbus cloud moves on

A trifle quicker than the horizon rising up

To catch the sun still well above.

 

The phosphorescent sun-bird’s twitter

Keeps time

To flashing blades of wind ruffled leaves.

 

In mid-window hovers

A bird sized dragonfly, its wings

Drone heavily with the effort, poised for mating.

 

An outstreched shadow leaps up

To the peak of a sun splashed tree

And meets an eagle’s distant surveillance.

 

In the pond a toad arises

Over the flat lily leaf

Rock still, vegetable like.

 

I lift my hand

 In the lulling intermittant breeze

Leisurely

Feel a clean shaven cool cheek.

 

The appointed peace,

The toad’s even stare 

Explode

In my match box’s sudden flare.

 

Deliberate act

Involuntary sunset

As I light my cigarette.

Core

Matter unlike the spirit is dense – no nonsense, capable of strength and harshness too. It has things to do requiring muscle and sweat. It is not Bohm’s Implicate Order nor a Sheldrake’s potential field – it is here and now, like no pain no gain. Nothing ambiguous, nothing beyond space and time, it needs a clock, a feel a lock. No silent emptiness, no illusion, no dream. Matter is here to stay as explicate as can be. Test it for compassion if you like, again test it for passion. It rejoices in pain and pleasure, fortune and misfortune. Want to know matter? Just look at the sun as it warms you or again burns you , be careful. Matter has been made hard for a reason. It must react. And yes it can be what you call good or bad too. It is allowed that, for a reason. If there was no shadow how would we ever know substance? No night, then how would we know day? Without provocation would we ever move? Without attraction would we ever know love? Without competition would we ever excel? Real dense here this matter like our beloved sun. No angels allowed here just man to let them see what matter is truly capable of. A compassion which angels who never hurt would never know. Moved  by such thoughts I present a poem on our material core, which needs civilizing.

 

C O R E

Heart is like sun

Original

Terrible  core,

 

Thunder before

Molecules begin to loosen up

In drenching rain.

 

Not soft fruit but gnarled rooting

Compulsion of unadulterated fact.

 

Tear away the petal dressing

To get to pollen’s purpose,

 

Lift the thin veil of blue sky

revealing bold blacknesses

Throbbing in original;

 

Like infernal sol

Blasting away, another bull,

 

Twisting its failing mate

The cockroach cannibal,

 

Simple terrible original

Heart of the matter.

Of Mountains

Credit: goegraphysmileyface.blogspot.com

The spirit of mountains have enthralled us for millenia. A small local hill in a unkown town becomes its landmark casting its shadow from east and west to determine the life style of that town. People respect it, fear it and often attribute a spirit to it. Whether Fujiyama, Kilimanjaro, Vesuvius, Alps or the Himalayas they all inspire a sense of awe and  arouse mystical wonder. The Himalayas are reckoned as the seat of the gods and mystics and Yogis meditate there in its caves, while the holy river Ganges flows from its bosom to water the vast expanses of North India. A land with mountains is dominated by their presence which shapes the lives of the inhabitants, their philosophy, culture, and way of life. Once on a visit to the Himalayas I was so overwhelmed by their magnificence, stately beauty and awesome presence that I conceived a poem as a tribute to their majesty and ethereal splendour which I would like to share with you:

 

                        O F     M O U N T A I N S

 

Mountains sit and watch forever

In ranges, after all they are sentient beings;

Some lurch forward, others are contained

And drop one great rock after an eternity

In the only movement they know.

Mountains in motion are so slow

Like petals of flowers unfolding,

Plant and mineral in invisible motion

To our own fast forward mode,

More  imperceptible  even than their shadows

Shifting with the sun, forms and shapes

Watching our movements

Below their pensive profiles,

Holding us in stony thoughts millenia old;

But they grow like tallest Everest, hold

Crystals in their breasts and reefs of gold

And let precious waters in rivulets flow,

Or then their innards blow sky-high

As volcanos

In their only flowering,

Growing with the lava flow another shoulder,

Thigh or infant boulder,

Spreading against the sky expressions of ash

with rumbling roars,

Shaking the earth with their millennial spring

Before resuming their timeless chores

Of rocky meditations swathed in snow.

The Spirit

Nature’s Spirit
Credit: Painting by Josphine Wall – josephinewall.com

The Gita says that the Universal Essence is everywhere, ubiquitous. I have often wondered how can we sense this phenomenal presence in our daily lives? An intuitive thought suddenly struck me one day. Before I share that thought let me quote from the Gita about the manner in which divinity manages to be universally present:

” With hands and feet everywhere, with eyes and hands and mouths everywhere, with ears everywhere, He exists enveloping all.

Shining through the functions of the senses, yet without the senses; Unattached yet sustaining all; devoid of earthly qualities, yet He experiences them.

Without and within all beings; the unmoving and also the moving; because of His subtlety He is incomprehensible; He is far and near.

It does sound paradoxical and quite like a riddle in a crossword puzzle. So what thought comes to your mind? How could this universal presence without senses, hands, feet, eyes, ears and mouths manifest itself so we are sure of its existence? Returning to my eureka moment, my sudden realization was that it was so evident, why did I not see it before? Nature of course, that intangible spirit moving everywhere; teaching birds how to nest, trees when to shed leaves and when to flower; creating attraction between male and female to mate and procreate; changing the seasons; keeping the rare balances of temperature, magnetic fields, gravity, pressure and ozone covers and on and on, for survival of life and orderly behaviour of matter, solar systems and galaxies – Nature with a big N. Again the clue was already there when Krishna tells Arjun that when he releases the forces of creation he calls upon His Nature to order it:

”I animate my nature and creation occurs under her laws”

Yes, Nature is the manifestation and evidence of the universal presence of divinity, in the cell, the atom, the seasons, through instinct, reproductive drives, laws of physics, chemistry etc.

My poem seeks to bring this out:

 

                                             THE  SPIRIT

Always on the prowl,

Disembodied mind,

Urging a twig to sprout

Flower in spring, moving to bring

Two halves together in a mating.

 

More skilful than a pair of forceps

In delivering, urging a new calf

To hit the right spot for suckling,

This thing we call instinct;

 

A spirit, that cannot see or hear

With eyes or ears, nor feel

With any fingers, move on feet,

Yet it has being, materializing form

From ether with swift precision.

 

Shaping, erasing,

Severing with bacterial surgeries,

Composing diversities,

Stepping quickly back from the brink.

 

Masterly miniaturised

Double Helix

In every feature

Of moving living things;

With the alphabets of genetics

It thinks.

 

In a dimension

Of light and sound,

It has grown senses everywhere

To listen and peep from

At a living world

Of its own creation.

Plaque of a Yakshī (female nature spirit), India, Bengal, 3rd-2nd century BCE, terracotta,
Credit: Honolulu Academy of Arts