In October 2004 I attended the Living the Field Conference 2004 organised by Lynne McTaggart the author of the book "The Field". Here I discovered a forum for people with remarkably similar views to my own. One topic that arose frequently was that of connectivity - the idea that all things in the universe are somehow connected. It's close companion is entanglement - an expression from quantum physics. Entanglement puzzles scientists because it appears to break the rule that nothing travels faster than the speed of light - not even information.
I have decided to present my own version here. I may be wrong in some of the detail but these ideas feel right to me. My writing time is very limited but I intend to present these ideas over a period of time, gradually layering the high level concepts with detail when I get the chance. Follow the links to find these explanations. In this context, high and low levels of detail are purely arbitrary. No single idea is more important than any other.
Connectivity (the idea that all things in the universe are connected) and its mechanism, entanglement, is a consequence of there being two distinct phases to reality. In physical life we experience the phase where all things are distributed according to where they are in space and time as patterns of information expressed through chaos. Here all things are divided and defined by their diferences. The whole process is driven by a univeral pulse, an endless cycle of time.
What science does not accept is that the universe accounts not just for the disposition of objects but also what is happening to them. Each thing has its role in the story of everything. When somebody signs a document there is usually a great deal happening beyond the action of a few sinews and muscles. It might be a love letter with a delightful consequence. It could be an order to start a war. World leaders might be less keen to sign such orders if they understood that they will become personally responsible for the consequental suffering and will ultimately be required to experience every single moment of that suffering in a different dimension of being. Connectivity means that we are intimately linked to the consequences of our actions. Entanglement will ensure that eventually we will experience those consequences until every lesson has been learned. The way this will happen is mysterious and subtle. If it was obvious we would be conditioned into acting harmoniously rather than educated. This is because we do not experience the other phase of existence that happens outside of or between moments of time.
In the second phase, the universe collapses to a single point in an infinite void. All things are co-incident around it. Each idea inhabits its own singular vesion of the void according to what it is; its essence being a single idea. This is not new. Shakespeare says in Hamlet: "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." The bad dream is the life we create for ourselves and each other on this world. We do this from a state of conceptual isolation within a context of absolute oneness. (The identity of the dreamer? The infinite being.) The nutshell is the unique quality of the idea we represent; an absolute barrier in anybody's terms. The infinite space is the void, a true emptiness unlike the chaotic continuum. The king is the one that inhabits this personal version of the void and gives it being. One is one's own creator. Paradoxically, the individual concept can only conceive its own existence because all others have made room for it by implicating it within themselves.
The state of oneness, of all things being together is not chaotic like this universe. It is based on order. All things are neighbours to those they are most like. All things are joined by their similarities. The particle created in a common event, the identical twin; these remain entagled in the physical, contextual phase because they are closely bound conceptually. There is a complex geometry that links concepts and allows entities to employ them. When the universe collapses to a single point, it becomes a single living entity of which we are an integral part, at one with all things. It is in the explicate phase of separation that chaos dwells and all concepts explore their meaning by associations based on difference rather than similarity. There can be only love in oneness but there is endless scope for hatred in separation as concepts jostle to establish their role and position in the infinite scheme of things. In separation, things of like nature are connected by phenomenon like entanglement, tunnelling and resonance (more or less synonymous) that appear to bypass the speed of light. This is simply because of the other phase where all things are co-existent in oneness around a single point in an infinite void.
The sea of chaos we call zero point fluctuations in quantum space are caused by the upwelling of concepts waiting to be born (emergence) in the oneness that poke through into space-time momentarily awaiting an opportunity to establish a timeline. That is why the evolution (origin) of nature is an implicate conceptual process and not a strictly physical explicate one.