I Heart Me (26 page)

I won't go into the arguments for and against NDEs because they would fill an entire book and that's not what this book is about. But rather than writing them all off as hallucinations or something else along those lines, could we consider that these experiences are telling us something about the nature of reality?

If it's true that our consciousness is infinite and exists not only outside our brain but throughout the universe, how might it be that we feel ourselves to be human and how does it relate to self-love?

We might think of the brain akin to a Smartphone that's connected to wi-fi, or even a TV. The movie that we watch on our TV set isn't actually inside the television, even though it looks as though it is. Closer inspection of the TV will teach us that the actors are not miniature people inside the set.

The movie is actually buzzing around the atmosphere at close to 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometres) per second. That's about the speed that electromagnetic information is transmitted. The television tunes in to the frequency of the movie and extracts it for us to watch.

If I were to fiddle about with the wires or circuitry in my TV, it would affect the quality of the signal. In a similar way, damage
to the brain can affect the signal quality of consciousness. In science, we have stood by a long-held assumption that the fact that damage to the brain affects consciousness means that consciousness is produced by the brain. But the same reasoning would mean that movies are created by the wires and circuit boards in a television set and not simply
received
by the television aerial.

I don't mean to diminish the assumptions made in science. I was trained as a scientist myself. I love science. But science is always evolving. We're always discovering new things and expanding upon the assumptions, theories and experiments of the past.

The idea that consciousness is outside our brain, in fact everywhere in the universe, ties in well with a growing number of experiments that seem to show connectedness between people who are separated by a distance; for instance, studies that use scans of the brain to show that the neural state of one person is correlated with the neural state of another. When one person is stimulated, or even sends a thought by imagining the other person, the neural state of their partner matches theirs.

For example, in a 2004 study 60 individuals were paired into 30 groups and separated in different rooms by approximately 33 feet (10 metres). One person in each pair was asked to send a thought or an image to the other. When they did, the brain of their partner reacted in sync.
³

In his book
The Sense of Being Stared At
, Rupert Sheldrake, a former fellow and director of studies at Cambridge University
and current fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, wrote that when RAF pilots in the Second World War were aiming to shoot down an enemy plane from behind, they were advised not to stare directly at the enemy pilot because the intensity of their stare was known to make them turn around.

Surveys have shown that 70–90 per cent of people say they have sensed someone staring at them from behind,
⁴
and in one survey 83 per cent of people said that the person they stared at turned around and looked at them.
⁵
Many CCTV surveillance officers report that people seem to sense when they are being covertly watched.
⁶

Have you ever heard your phone ring and immediately got a sense of who it was, then found out you were correct? Sheldrake tested this in a 2009 study. Volunteers between the ages of 11 and 72 offered three phone numbers of friends, colleagues or family members. A computer then randomly selected one of the three numbers and sent the volunteer a text message. They had to guess who it was from. The results were way above statistical chance. The volunteers who scored particularly highly were filmed in an additional experiment and found to guess correctly 44.2 per cent of the time. Chance would have been 33 per cent.
⁷

There's an interesting parallel in physics with the idea that consciousness is everywhere.

When a scientist sets up an experiment in a lab to study the behaviour of an electron, until they press the ‘on' button and
observe the electron it can be thought of as being everywhere in the universe at the same time – including past, present and future. This is known as the Feynman ‘sum over histories' (also known as path integral formulation). The late Richard Feynman is considered one of the most highly gifted scientists of all time. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965.

The sum over histories assumes that for a particle like an electron to get from A to B it can take every conceivable path. So, rather than move in a straight line like a ball rolling from one place to another, it can conceivably zig and zag. It can also jump a trillion miles to the left and even zip forwards and backwards in time, do a little jiggly dance and stop off at a little
p
â
tisserie
in France and enjoy a coffee and an almond croissant before eventually arriving at B.

As ludicrous as that sounds – whoever heard of an electron dancing? – there's nothing in the equations of quantum physics that says it can't happen. In fact, equations that have led to great advancements in science only work out when you make the assumption that until it is observed, a particle is pretty much everywhere.

Does that sound like a description of consciousness?

Consciousness, too, can be thought of as being everywhere until we observe it. Basically that means we – our consciousness, essence, being, etc. – are smeared over the whole universe, past, present and future. Wow! Why doesn't it feel like that?

Well, if you're sitting on a chair right now, chances are you can feel your bottom and you're not listening in to a conversation
between two aliens on a distant planet. Detecting sensations in your bottom is called observing, just as detecting electrons in a lab is called observing. And since you're observing your body, you have the sensation of being ‘in' your body.

So, consciousness feels as though it's inside our head because we
have
a head and we can feel it, and because we look out through our eyes and listen with our ears. As we do these things, we're observing what we know of as ourselves, just as if we've pressed the ‘on' button in a lab.

It's only when we stop observing ourselves, which happens in an NDE or even in a transcendental experience of meditation, that we experience ourselves differently because our attention is not currently on our body. It's so far away from our body that we experience ourselves as infinite.

It can be a difficult concept to get our ‘head' around and I can understand why mainstream science is sceptical. We can't prove it one way or the other. We can only rely on experience, and that doesn't hold up too well with the way science is done. But neither does it mean it's wrong!

The atoms that make up our body only exist by virtue of the attractive forces that hold them together. If those forces didn't exist then neither would the atoms, just as a cake couldn't exist if we didn't have eggs to bind the ingredients together. If the attractive forces were to be lost at any time, the whole universe as we know it would simply disappear.

You could say there was a law of attraction operating inside atoms. And if that law didn't exist then neither would our body, because atoms make up our DNA, and our DNA combines with other large collections of atoms to make our cells, and our cells join together in an 80-trillion-strong community to form our body.

Here's why, then, I believe we're made of love. The attractive forces emerge out of the quantum field, just as protons do. Science has always assumed that the quantum field is inert, lifeless, partly because of the belief that consciousness is inside the head, but if we move to the idea that consciousness is smeared over the universe and is not inside the head at all, that means it's also smeared all over the quantum field. That's what ‘infinite' means – it's everywhere. So it's also in the attractive forces. Consciousness is in the law of attraction.

So, what is the quality of consciousness when one thing, or person, is attracted to another? What is the attractive force? Yes, it's love. We might say that the attractive forces that hold atoms together are quantum expressions of love.

Each of us is made of atoms. That makes us quite a large expression of love. Technically speaking, we're made of love … kind of.

Some spiritual and religious teachings interchange love and light. So we might even say that we're beings of light.

This leads me nicely on to a cool thing that happened while I was working on this book.

I was playing around with the ‘being of light' thought for a while and started meditating on the idea that we are all beings of light. I often do a walking meditation when I'm out with Oscar in the early mornings while working on this book, and I'd imagine a being of pure white light materializing right in front of me. Then I'd walk into it as if I was stepping into some clothing, so that I was wearing a being of light suit. For effect, I'd stand up straight, as such a being would, and even flex imaginary angel wings. I'd then combine this with a power pose, or a power walk, which is basically a power pose while walking. I'd state in my mind, ‘I am a being of light,' then ask myself, ‘How would a being of light walk?' Then I'd walk as a being of light for the next couple of minutes, focusing on my posture, style of movement, face, eyes and breath, all the while imagining myself as pure light and connected with everything and everyone.

I practised this for a few weeks, then went to London to speak at a conference. The day after that I was to speak again in Salzburg, Austria. I'd run out of deodorant and needed to get some so I'd smell fresh for my events. I'd been using the Dove Men's brand for a while, so I left my hotel in search of Dove.

It was starting to rain and I didn't have an umbrella, but suddenly I had an idea. I imagined my being of light suit and stepped into it. (I guess it didn't have a hood, because I still got wet.) I pictured myself as a being of light and connected to the whole city and imagined that the information about where to obtain a Dove deodorant close by would come to me, so I wouldn't get too wet.

My instinct was to turn left at the next street. But on the way, I had the thought that, as a being of light, I really could just stand where I was and hold my hands out and, since I was connected to everything, a Dove Men's deodorant would land in one of them. A being of light would know that it
was
enough and that it was therefore entitled to love, health, happiness, success, wealth and a Dove deodorant. ‘As I thinketh, so shall it be,' it would say. That's what was going through my mind as I stood there in the rain.

I didn't test my faith too far though, because the rain was starting to get heavy and, as I said, my being of light suit didn't have a hood. I realized I'd probably have to wait with my hands outstretched for a while and I'd probably get soaked. I did manage to find a shop that sold the brand when I turned left at the next street, though.

But it doesn't end there, because that's really not much of a Dove miracle.

A week later I had another lecture to give in London. My flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow was delayed by four hours, so the staff at British Airways kindly allowed me to transfer to the flight bound for Gatwick.

Arriving at Gatwick meant I needed to take the Gatwick Express train to Victoria station. I wasn't overly familiar with that station, having only been there a handful of times previously. There are also several exits, so it can be a bit confusing if you don't know your way around. Trying to get my bearings, I looked up at the signs to establish where the exits were and which I should take.
Perhaps I should have been paying more attention to looking ahead, though, because I bumped into a young girl and nearly knocked her off her feet.

I instinctively stretched out my hands and said, ‘I'm so sorry.'

She looked right at me and then she dropped a Dove Men's deodorant into my hand!

For a few seconds I was stunned. Then the realization of what had just happened hit me. Overcome with that realization, I shouted out, ‘
Score
!' while pumping the air with my fist.

I'm not sure what the girl thought – maybe that I was rather an excitable chap or even that I'd been travelling for a while and was a bit smelly. Who knows? Several dozen heads turned too, and I'm not sure what they thought either.

I actually keep that deodorant in my pocket as a totem, a reminder of what happened that day. I've not even used it – well, apart from once, when I'd run out of deodorant and was due to speak at a conference the following day. Hmmm, I sense a pattern.

My little Dove Men's deodorant totem reminds me, in my moments of doubt, challenge, worry or fear, of what's possible when we believe.