We live our lives in fields. The electo-magnetic field, the gravitational field, and apparently the Higgs field. Physicists have been working on a Grand Unification theory, aka the Theory of Everything or Unified Field, a single field that explains all the other fields we live in. What they’re looking for is the source, the place where everything comes down to being the same thing. All that we see, bookshelves, birds, binoculars, trees, planets, water, all come down to the same constituent parts, from this one field that holds everything in its most essential elements. As of now, the place where all this multiplicity and diversity arises from remains a mystery. Physicists have been chipping away at this one encompassing field and right now gravity is the lone hold out.
What it means is what I imagine mystics have known for millenea, in the most basic sense everything is one. One essence manifesting in zillions of different expressions. What we see as completely separate things all have their emanations from the same, single source. Mystics are concerned with the vast inner stillness, the singularity of silence. They’ve gone on this journey from the level of consciousness, rather than mathematics, but that doesn’t change the fact that everyone is talking about the same thing, they’re just talking about it in their own particular language. Maybe that helps explain why sometimes things that are foreign feel so familiar.
When I began Transcendental Meditation many years ago there was, and still is, an emphasis on the connection between meditation and physics. They are complementary, one is used as a way of explaining the other. These are two different languages for two different experiences of the same universal phenomena. There is intellectually knowing about the Unified Field, and then there is our individual experience of it. This is the goal of meditation, to settle the mind down to the simplest state of awareness, which is exactly what physicists are looking for, this most basic level. But quite frankly we could say everything we explore is just a different language for talking about the same essential elements. Biology, art, geology, farming, dancing, calligraphy, Japanese tea ceremony. When we get to the bottom of any of it, we are talking about, or experiencing, this source in one form or another.
So what does it really mean, and why does it matter? We are a world of explorers, we search out meaning, and crave understanding. These invaluable connections tell us more about who we are and why we matter. This unified field is a level of reality we all share, this is where everything comes down to the same thing. What more important connection could there be? We’re talking about becoming more familiar with the source through many different mediums, through seemingly contradictory avenues. It may not be plain to the eyes, but if we look with our hearts I imagine we’d see more clearly that we are all connected, to one another, to the earth, and to the universe. It is the one song we each sing in our own unique way. Living with this knowledge might change the way we treat others, our self, and the environment. It will certainly change the level of depth we live at, enriching our lives as well as the lives of those around us.
There are many different ways to talk about this one underlying truth, what’s important is that we start the discussion.
kb
