19. We Are All Connected

Is it selfish to seek happiness?

Psychological tests prove that when you are happy, you are more likely to lend people money or carry their groceries. Similar tests prove that when you are miserable you are more likely to steal their wallet or kick a dog.

So your happiness benefits everyone around you and all the dogs in the neighbourhood.

It doesn’t stop there …

Helping People at a Distance

During the Israeli-Lebanese War in 1983, Dr Charles N Alexander and Dr David Orme-Johnson³⁶ conducted a stunning study in Jerusalem.

They wanted to find out, “What happens when a group of people feel peaceful? And what happens if a group of people feel happy and peaceful in the middle of a war zone?”

For two months between August 1 and September 30, a group of meditators, ranging in number between 65 and 241, meditated twice daily in a hotel in East Jerusalem. Their mission was simply to come together and feel peace. And what happened?

During these two months, war deaths, terrorist attacks, fires, hospital emergencies and automobile accidents decreased markedly – in Lebanon, Jerusalem and Israel as a whole. There was a precise relationship.

Dr Alexander and Dr Orme-Johnson made a sophisticated analysis, accounting for variables such as weather, days of the week and holidays. The data showed that when the experiment began, violence decreased immediately. When more mediators participated, violence decreased further. When the experiment stopped, the violence returned to former levels.

Their research paper, The International Peace Project in the Middle East, is online.³⁷

Similar studies to this have been conducted in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, in Delhi, India and in twenty-four cities across the United States. It only takes a small group to make a difference – as few as a hundred people in a city of a million.

What Else?

You may ask, “If we are invisibly connected, shouldn’t there be scientific evidence?” There is. Here are some examples.

• In 1988 Dr Randolph Byrd³⁸ conducted a study at the San Francisco General Hospital coronary care unit, demonstrating that heart patients who were prayed for by random groups scattered around the world recovered significantly better than patients who were not prayed for.
• Biofeedback expert, Dr Elmer Green,³⁹ has compared the electrostatic energy released from the bodies of ordinary people (10-15 millivolts) with the electrostatic energy released by meditators when they are meditating and healers when they are healing. He found healers produced voltages of up to 190 volts – or 100,000 times the normal amount.
• In 1966, Cleve Backster⁴⁰ connected a polygraph (lie detector) to a pot plant. He was curious to see whether his dracaena plant would react to being watered. When the polygraph recorded a small response, he wondered, “What would happen if I burned a leaf?” That is when the recording pen swung wildly and nearly jumped off the page. Backster hadn’t even burned the plant yet! He had simply thought about it. Backster had stumbled onto something. He spent the next thirty years in research demonstrating that plants, mould cultures, eggs and even yoghurt have an awareness of their surroundings that he called “primary perception”.
• Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, discovered that, once sub-atomic particles have been in contact with each other, they remain forever influenced by each other. To explain, let’s imagine two particles; we’ll call them Bob and Alice. They spend one crazy night together in Rio, and then Bob moves to Miami. Here’s what’s amazing: whenever Bob changes the speed at which he is spinning, Alice will change, too. Even if Bob moves to the other side of the Universe, when Bob changes his speed of rotation, Alice will change, too, AT THE EXACT SAME INSTANT.

This phenomenon, where particles remain linked forever, is known in quantum physics as “entanglement”. My quantum physicist friend, Phil, explains, “It doesn’t take a genius to figure that, as everything was created at the same time, then everything is entangled. And that includes you and me.”

The phenomenon where particles like Bob and Alice, millions of light years apart, dance in perfect step, regardless of time or distance, is known as “nonlocality”.

What more proof do we need that everything is connected?

For 2600 years the Buddhists have been saying that all life is connected, and you are part of it.

Aboriginal cultures know it. To quote Dr Bruce Lipton, “Aboriginal cultures do not make the usual distinctions between rocks, air and humans; all are imbued with spirit, the invisible energy. Doesn’t this sound familiar? This is the world of quantum physics in which matter and energy are completely entangled.”⁴¹

This is the Universe we live in. We take radio waves and ultrasound for granted. And microwaves – isn’t it amazing that you can be standing in a solid steel elevator and take a phone call from your mother? How does your Mum get through solid steel?

Humans are simply sophisticated transmitters and receivers. Edison and Einstein had no doubts about that.

Parts Reflecting the Whole

The idea of every tiny part being connected to the whole is not new. Here are some examples.

• Holograms – those 3D images that we often see on credit cards and software packages. You may have, for example, an image of an eagle. The entire image is in every part of the hologram. If you smash the hologram into a thousand pieces, you get a thousand complete little images of an eagle.
• Every cell in your body contains the DNA blueprint for your entire body.

Remember Professor Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle – elements throughout the Universe are continually adjusting and responding to each other? What does this resemble?

It resembles how a single cell works. It resembles how the 50 trillion cells in your body cooperate. It resembles the Gaia effect – how the Earth continues to bring itself back into balance.

A hundred years ago Nobel Prize winner and originator of quantum physics, Max Planck, discovered that a vacuum isn’t a vacuum. Empty space is actually a hive of activity.

If the Universe is actually a hive of roaring activity and there is no such thing as empty space, then everything IS connected to everything else.