The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [22]
Unlike the highly controlled remote viewing experiments, the psychokinesis experiments were largely exploratory and informal. With the more relaxed laboratory conditions, I would spend several hours at a time exploring my intuitive connection with the experimental apparatus. My primary motivation was to understand how the cosmos worked—and the feedback was powerful and convincing. As I learned through trial and error over a period of nearly three years, I received striking evidence that we all participate in a subtle though powerful ecology of consciousness.
I took away a number of important insights from these diverse experiments in what might be called “cosmic feedback training.” First, we all have an intuitive faculty and literal connection with the universe. An empathic connection with the cosmos is not restricted to a gifted few, it is an ordinary part of the functioning of the universe and is accessible to everyone.
Second, participating in these experiments demonstrated to me that our being does not stop at the edge of our skin but extends into and is inseparable from the universe. We are all connected with the deep ecology of the universe and each of us has the ability to extend our consciousness far beyond the range of our physical senses. I am reminded of the wisdom of George Washington Carver, a great educator and botanical researcher, who said that “If you love it enough, anything will talk with you.”
Third, our intuitive connection with the cosmos is easy to overlook. Before I became involved in these experiments, I didn’t pay much attention to the small, intuitive twinges and feelings that would arise and then pass away. They seemed so subtle that I assumed they were simply part of my bodily experience. Only gradually did I come to appreciate the extent to which I was experiencing my participation in a larger field of aliveness.
Fourth, I learned that psi functioning is not about achieving dominance over something (mind over matter) but rather learning to participate with something in a dance of mutual exchange and transformation. This is a two-way process in which both parties are changed by the interaction.
Fifth, at the same time these experiments were convincing me that consciousness is a field property of the universe, they also made me much more skeptical about the need for channeling, crystals, pendulums, pyramids, and other intermediaries to access our intuition. Validating consciousness as a basic property of the universe does not automatically validate all claims of paranormal phenomena. It is important to bring a critical and discerning science to this inquiry. We are just beginning to use the tools of science to cut away the superstition and find what is real and what is not. Our universe is a place of miracles, but it is not a place of magic. It is a miracle that anything exists at all. However, once the miracle of our universe exists, we find lawful dynamics at work throughout.
Sixth, scientific evidence of the existence of psychic functioning has been mounting for decades and is now so overwhelming that the burden of proof has shifted to those who would seek to dismiss its existence.36 It is time to move beyond the narrow, brain-based view of consciousness because it no longer explains important scientific evidence and it severely limits our thinking about the scope and depth of our connection with the universe.
Seventh, as interesting as psychic or intuitive functioning may be, the much more important insight is what it says about the nature of the universe—that it is connected with itself through the tissue of consciousness in non-local ways that transcend relativistic