Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [124]
You get the idea. At base, of course, this is not so far from the idea of non-local mind suggested by quantum physics—namely, that everything is connected in a fabric of intelligence, and we have access to this larger “mind” that is not limited by time or space.
The days stretched on and my disks made no appearance. Every moment that passed shaved down the chances of finding the minidisks before they were sent to a warehouse in Atlanta (the size of two football fields), or, more likely, thrown out as trash. But I stubbornly clung to this image of an intelligence that keeps an eye on everything; I had hit the “search” function and was now waiting for the results.
Nearly three weeks after the minidisks disappeared into a black hole at the U.S. Postal Service, I received a call from Dennis Panich, the manager of one of the distribution centers in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve got good news,” he said. “One of my guys found your tapes.”
I was struck dumb.
“Where were they?” I finally asked.
“They were in the bottom of a large orange container, along with a few other things.” He laughed. “You know, I wrote a book myself, and I know how much work goes into it. So every day I showed my folks the photo of the minidisks and told them we were going to find those tapes. And we did.”
When I visited the Institute of Noetic Sciences about a month later, I related my story to Dean Radin. Radin does not believe in a traditional God, but he does believe we can access information by tapping into a larger, non-local mind. I asked him to explain the happy outcome from his perspective. I waited for the low, appreciative whistle of amazement that would make such a lovely scene in my book. No whistle came.
“Your story is mind-boggling in one way,” Radin observed,“but I’m a little blasé about it now because I’ve seen it happen so many times.”
I was both miffed and intrigued. How did the recovery work, according to his theory of entanglement? Remember, entanglement suggests that reality is like a fabric in which everything is woven together. Or, to continue with the Jell-O analogy: if you touch one side, the other side jiggles.
“Things appear to be separate,” Radin said, “but with the right way of focusing your attention, they’re not so separate. My suspicion is that you sort of imagined in your mind’s eye that the universe is connected, and there was one piece of the universe—where the tapes were—that you really needed. And you created a network of attention, a lot of people’s attention dedicated to finding this particular thing. There was an army of people out there who wanted to please you, they wanted to find those tapes, and so it’s almost as if a momentary network was created that had a little bit higher valence to it, it shined a little bit brighter for you and all the other people, and this group attention became focused on finding the thing which is there.”
Radin paused.“Everything is there,” he said.“Nothing can be lost in a holistic medium.”
I nodded, thinking silently that this “holistic medium” sounded an awful lot like “God.”
My experience with the minidisks proves nothing, of course. To those who believe in miracles, God intervened to return my precious items. To those who think of the universe as a fabric of reality in which all is connected by a vast intelligence, I had tapped into information that was waiting for me all along. And to many others, I had caught a lucky break, nothing more. But let’s be clear: Which way you view the universe and “God” is a matter of choice, not hard evidence. Hard science does not mean petrified science. And in this moment, science may be in the middle of a paradigm shift.
CHAPTER 12
Paradigm Shifts
THE MORNING OF JUNE 15, 2005, arrived way too early. For two weeks, my friends and I had been thinking hard all day and bantering long into the wee hours in pubs around Cambridge University—a gru eling regimen for a forty-something crowd. But nothing