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Dying. Often without even the faintest awareness of its indispensable and vital function within the greater "body. . . ." All creation is one person, one being, whose cells are connected to one another within a medium called consciousness." 13
Historically, the belief in our connected nature has been largely based on the personal experiences of the people who shared this view. Today, we recognize that just because large numbers of people have believed something (such as the flat earth) for several millennia, it does not by any means make it true. How are we to decide if we should consider this view of community of spirit to be deep nonsense unrelated to nature, or a valid concept of the workings of the world? The usual scientific approach is to see if the model offers testable predictions.
A contemporary nonreligious model of this connectedness has been presented by physicist David Bohm in his last book, The Undivided Universe.14 This physics text has great contemporary credibility, because Bohm derives quantitatively correct answers to some of the most puzzling questions at the ragged edges of modern physics. Bohm provides a compelling ontology (or model) encompassing all the data that we have been examining. He does this through the use of a holographic model of the universe. This model is especially appealing for the psi researcher at this time, because the defining property of the hologram is that every tiny piece of the hologram contains a complete picture of the whole.
English biologist Rupert Sheldrake developed a "hypothesis of formative causation," based on the existence of organizing fields very similar to Bohm's "active information" wave functions. Sheldrake's theory was published in his 1981 book, A New Science of Life, which introduced the idea that some sort of organizing fields that transcend space and time determine the characteristic forms and behavior of living organisms, as well as physical systems of all levels of complexity.15 He called these fields of formative causation or ''morphogenetic fields." According to Sheldrake, once such fields become established through some initial behavior of an organism, that behavior then becomes facilitated in others through a process called "morphic resonance."

 
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