Text of an invited address given at the Blackpool Unitarian Church, June 16th 2002 For a long time I have viewed meditation as very useful to me. A life saver in fact. One which has made it possible to continue my day job, teaching that is. When my meditation goes well I feel comfortable, warm and a s feeling of being nurtured. Time does not seem to matter and my frustrations diminish or disappear and I am left with a sense of peace. I have used a meditation called the 'light body' meditation for a long time but recently I have found myself changing and extending its scope. In this meditation, starting at a point within, I visualise my body slowly being filled with light. Now when I meditate, this light grows until it extends beyond the body. It can extend a few feet, fill the room, the building, the district etc. I am left with the feeling that I have not made that which I see. I am just illuminating it. Is this purely a mind induced visualisation or is it, as John Donohue suggests, contact with the soul? When doing this meditation I have such a sense of 'rightness' that I feel that there is something here that I have to take notice of, to learn. What is soul? Soul. An airy fairy term. A word that has a place in world religions and spiritual practices down the millennia. A word that we cannot agree amongst ourselves as to what it means leaving a dictionary with a range of suggestions. Immaterial, vital principle, animating, essential are the words that are used to describe soul. Something which is here and not here. Something which we cannot be without. The part of us that exists beyond death. The part of us which is eternal. Is that right? 'The part of us' Or is it that we are a part of it as Meister Eckhart, John Donaghue and others would suggest. For my part I feel that this last is right. My 'feel right' factor tells me so but I have no proof. Just little hints. Over the past fifty or so years, the understanding of reality has changed. Physicists and mathematicians now view our world through different ideas. Yes this does sound a bit like Ray but please bare with me. I am not going to go back to Planck's idea of quanta, even if at sub atomic level, matter and energy are as one, are each the other and are interchangeable. I'll start with David Bohm. He postulated the hologram and the idea that the whole is implicit within each of the parts. That is what is special about any hologram. Take a small piece of it and you have an image of the whole. He also said that because of this 'whole to part linkage, each of the parts would also be interconnected in some way. This was substantiated mathematically by J.S. Bell who went on to show that this connection of the parts transcended time and space. Great! Now we know that we are connected at a sub atomic level. In fact everything in some way is connected or interconnected. Wonderful but how does that affect me? I seem to be of a higher order of size. On the back of Bell's work Rupert Sheldrake postulated the presence of Morphographic fields. To you and me that means 'invisible organising fields'. These fields seem to have no energy in the normal sense because their effect reaches across time and space in a way that energy cannot. These fields have the same strength no matter what the distance. Does this matter, I say to myself. Well it seems that if right, it does, or at least it might. Sheldrake went on to suggest that these fields form the basic blueprint for organising both form and behaviour. So before we get totally bogged down let us recap. The image of the whole is in a sense held within each part. All the parts are interconnected in a way that transcends time and space which means that it cannot be in our dimension. Now in our world, reality or dimension any good idea is used over and over again in lots of different ways and at different levels of complexity. Can this be true? Can we see some evidence for this at other than at sub atomic levels? The answer is yes and we heard about them earlier. At the more molecular level is the glycerine event in which glycerine across the world seemed to learn how to crystallise itself even when it was sealed in airtight containers. At the cellular level, an experiment in Russia with a tissue culture showed that when split in two and held within separate sealed containers, the poison induced death of one tissue sample somehow caused the other to die within twelve hours and with identical symptoms. At the specie level, Lyall Watson described the 'hundredth monkey' principle in which a group of monkeys learned a new behaviour. Other monkeys, often separated by distance and geographical barriers, learned the self same new behaviour. Other species have exhibited similar abilities, for example the Blue tits. Some of the more mature amongst us will remember the introduction of foil caps in 1952, for milk bottles, replacing the then traditional card inserts. The London Blue tits learned quickly, they're a sharp lot down there, that they could acquire breakfast by pecking through the foil cap. This ability spread in a manner which was seen to be unusual. Birds separated by great distance and geographical barrier suddenly acquired this breakfast habit as the ability spread across the U.K. and Europe. There are hundreds of specie experiments which suggest that individuals are interconnected and that this interconnectedness involves abilities seemingly to break the normal time and distance barriers. This is true of very large shoals of fish and flocks of birds. Here, direction changes of the group, are instigated by a single individual. Those on the edge the shoal or flock who are often out of sight of the change instigator also change direction appropriately. However the speed at which they respond is shorter than it would take a visual signal to work outwards away from the instigator to the periphery. Normal time and distance has somehow been transcended. For humans, it seems that there is an enormous amount of information transferred between people. This ranges from feelings formed, for or against, about someone only glimpsed across the room, sometimes at distance. 'Mind messages' between separated family members at times of stress or trauma, breaking the normal time and distance barriers are not unknown. This, to such an extent that it would seem that at times we all have the ability to somehow step out of our normal reality. But what of our ability to perceive the whole from the part? It is not unknown for authors and composers to suddenly glimpse the complete, fully fleshed out story, poem tune or symphony before the basis for such was hardly conceived. The one sometimes triggers the other. The part triggers the whole or is somehow encapsulated within the part. Major scientific leaps have often been seen to be this type of event. Here, from a few isolated ideas a whole unified idea or concept was generated in one leap. It is based on this type of evidence and more, that Karl Pibram postulated that our brain structures our senses in a holographical way. Our brains are always taking a piece and generating the whole even if the whole has to be adapted later in light of experience. So where does this leave us? Well it seems that we can operate, at least sometimes, outside linear time or three dimensional space. Somehow we seem to tap into another dimension. How do we do this? What is this other dimension where linear time and three dimensional space do not exist. It seems that it would not be a place of no time and no space but rather where all time is now, and all places are here. This dimension could justifiably be referred to as eternity where everything is eternally accessible. If our physical body has this connection built into it as a facet of the physical body surely that part would have in some measure an aspect of the eternal. That is, it could not die. To my knowledge, even though different parts of the body die at different times, no part of the physical body seems to be eternal. It all dies and much of the apparent weight loss at death has been put down to continued respiration of these parts of the physical body that don't die straight away. Is then the connection with the eternal to be found within our body's energy systems? Increasingly modern science is showing that all living things are surrounded by energy fields. Spiritual tradition across the world have said this for millennia. Yes there is some research to suggest that our energy field around us is multi layered both filling our physical body and extending outwards in layers. Seven layers, each more tenuous than the last one nearer the physical body. A part of this energy system even seems capable of travel away from the physical body for periods. In general though, the body's energy system seems focused on the physical body which in some way supports. At death this energy system, aura or bioplasm just fades away in proportion to the death of the body as a whole. Even the travelling part stays near to the 'dead' person, usually fading over a period of two to three days after death. There is not even a tradition that this energy, or any part of it outlasts the physical body for long. This gives no indication of any possible eternity. The world's spiritual tradition does, however, give one particular aspect of our selves some attributes of the eternal. It is described to us as the soul. This is the part deemed eternal. If this is true then the soul must indeed have the attributes of eternity. That is, it should not be bound by either linear time or three dimensional space. All time must be available to it and all places. In this sense therefore it would by definition extend beyond the confines of our physical body rather than being encompassed by it. Perhaps the soul is attached to or focused on our physical body. If this is true then perhaps it is through contact with our soul that we access the effect of the eternal. It is here where we can be in touch with any time and any place. How do we do this? Spiritual tradition says that we quieten ourselves down and turn our attention inward. Didn't Jesus say that the kingdom of God was within? When you pray and when it works hasn't our time and space been distorted in some way? The effect is immediate, anywhere, and neither past, present or future is a barrier. Now does this not seem to have aspects of the eternal? It is said that at death when the soul finally separates from the body, the essence of the person you have known, is suddenly gone leaving only a dieing physical shell and a fading energy system. Onlookers watching this process describe just this. That the person they knew is suddenly gone and what is left is somehow no longer the person they knew. Surely this means that the person they knew was perhaps more likely a product of the soul and not the body. For me this makes the soul important and trying to be in conscious contact with it a worthwhile activity. I believe that it is through this contact that I will begin to understand myself. Perhaps, as my soul is larger than myself it must impinge in some way on other souls. Is it this way that I will gain understanding of others through soul level interconnectedness? If 'part' interconnectivity seems to work this way at our physical level is it not likely that the same system occurs at the soul level? This would mean that I can get an understanding of others by opening myself to my soul. Now where have I heard this before? If the scientists are correct about the universe etc having holographic features the part that is me may yet get a glimpse of the whole and be surprised. Joe Potter