< previous page page_88 next page >

Page 88
blocked from ordinary perception. These data demonstrate that our perception can, and does, transcend the current physical description of the space and time in which we live. The experiments show that we misapprehend the nature of the apparent separation between things and people, challenging the space-time metric commonly used by physicists to measure distance.
The illusory nature of this distance and the separate self are cornerstones of the mystic teachings of many major faiths  Zen Buddhists, Hindu Yogis, Kabbalistic Jews, Islamic Sufis, and Christian mystics. The idea that there are levels of existence forming a continuum from mud to mysticism has been described by writers and philosophers for more than three thousand years. In more recent times, William James, Carl Jung, Krishnamurti, and Ken Wilber have written of our inherent connected nature, and that our experience of personal separateness is an illusion. This has been a fundamental idea of the "Perennial Philosophy," a term coined by philosopher Aldous Huxley to describe the unifying threads of Eastern and Western spiritual thought. These principles were most cogently recorded by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras (aphorisms) sometime around 400 B.C. 2 The same concepts are described beautifully and clearly in Ken Wilber's thoughtful books Spectrum of Consciousness and No Boundary, as well as in the seventh-century Hindu classic, The Crest Jewel of Discrimination, by Shankara.3
In Wilber's model of levels of awareness he includes: the objective external world, the five senses, the subjective Ego level in which we identify who we are, the Transpersonal level which is the subject of this book, and the infinite and eternal. The idea that our ego can and does experience levels of awareness integrated into a larger transpersonal and all-encompassing spiritual entity has been described by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his description of the Oversoul, by Jung in his writing of the collective unconscious, and by physicist David Bohm as quantum interconnectedness. We have called this transpersonal connection our community of spirit. The spectrum of consciousness is a metaphor, but the interconnectedness we are writing about is not metaphorical: It is real, and can be experienced and demonstrated.
Modern physics is, of course, not wrong, by any means. It is very successful, but it is significantly incomplete with regard to the phenomena

 
< previous page page_88 next page >