Inside the Mind of God
Rocking the Foundations, Part 1
B Y   D R.   M A N J I R   S A M A N T A - L A U G H T O N,   M D

IN SEPTEMBER 2003, I had a profound insight that would change my entire worldview and fuel the writing of this book. At the time, I had actually begun to write, not knowing how the book would end. Having decided on the content of the first few chapters, I turned my attention to some of the current problems that exist within cosmology. I had a sense that there was something missing, if only I knew what it was. It seemed to be on the tip of my mind!

One afternoon, I took a break and went for a walk in the Ashridge woods near my home. I found an oak tree with a low branch and sat so that my feet were left dangling. I remembered a video I had seen a few years back, featuring the cosmologist, Brian Swimme, in which he described how it is possible to sense the rotation of the Earth by simply becoming aware of it. So, whilst sitting suspended on an oak tree, I tried to feel the Earth's rotation.

Suddenly, I was thrust into an infinity of spinning orbs. In a moment that seemed to transcend space and time, conveying many books of information in just a few seconds, I understood what I now call the Black Hole Principle.

All the pieces of information I had been studying suddenly fitted together into a framework that is elegant and simple, but also allows for infinite, emergent complexity. This vision has formed the basis for this book and is nothing less than a new view of the cosmos.

What was also clear to me during this experience is how little we know about the universe. Even the Black Hole Principle is just a tiny part of an infinite design. The human race may never truly understand the full workings of the cosmos. All we can do is move from paradigm to paradigm.

Each scientific revolution refines and completes the one before it, but requires a total leap in consciousness. Hence Newton realized that the force that causes an apple to fall is the same one that keeps the planets in orbit. Einstein realized that space and time are not fixed, but relative. Heisenberg developed the idea of wave-particle duality. And now, in the early 21st century, we are ready to take another leap.

In our era, the situation in science is similar to that of the end of the 19th century. People are yet again announcing that all the laws of the universe have been found; there are no further conceptual leaps to be made. All we have left is to refine what we already know. In the book, The End of Science, John Horgan writes, "the great era of scientific discovery is over ... Further research may yield no more great revelations of revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns."(1)

The time is right for a change in science: for the next big discovery. This revolution will place consciousness at the very heart of an intelligent universe. This movement started to gain momentum in the early 1970s and every year sees a gathering of pace.

There are many who decry this movement as heresy and pseudoscience. Just as in all scientific revolutions that have come before, those firmly entrenched in the older paradigm will try to discredit the proponents of the new. Eventually, time provides the answer and the old guard will be dead and forgotten, leaving future generations incredulous at their lack of vision, just as we are amazed by the blindness of those who refused to believe that the Earth is round.

Before my visionary experience in the woods, I had set out to explain those aspects of life that are currently deemed unscientific and paranormal. I had realized, during my experience as a medical doctor and a practitioner of energy medicine, that the techniques used in energy medicine could greatly benefit patients within the orthodox system. However, one of the main barriers to the use of energy medical techniques within the mainstream is the lack of a scientific explanation as to how they work. I started to realize that developments in modern physics, such as the concept of nonlocality, have direct parallels with energy medicine. So I began to explore these connections and uncovered many more links between esoteric knowledge and modern physics.

In fact, Horgan's statement, that there is nothing more to find in science, is an extraordinary one, as there are many aspects of life that we find inexplicable. Our current scientific establishment does not even deem these anomalies worthy of study, yet they have crept into the public consciousness and are gradually becoming mainstream interests.

The realms of mysticism and esoteric wisdom, including psychic abilities, distant healing, channeling, near death experiences and angelic encounters are becoming commonplace in our popular culture. The public interest in such subjects is growing. If this were mere fashion or fad, this growth would not be sustained. This genuine interest comes from the fact that many have had actual life experiences of the above. This has resulted in a personal understanding of the reality of such phenomena. However, the scientific establishment tends to ignore such experiences and fails to explain them.

As more people have such experiences, a new science is called for. Amazingly, we have all the information we need to provide possible scientific explanations for many esoteric phenomena, but in many cases, these links have not been made. This is starting to change as we realize that the content of modern science looks remarkably similar to esoteric knowledge.

For example, by linking separate areas of science, the conclusions made about our universe, obtained by a branch of physics called quantum theory, can be applied to other areas of science. This can help us make sense of anomalies of Nature that have puzzled scientists for centuries. These conclusions also lay the foundation for the Black Hole Principle, a model of the universe that fits cosmological data and solves mysteries currently plaguing scientists such as the origin of high-energy cosmic rays.

This is how Punk Science was born: from a recognition that science needs to find a radical voice yet again. It has become lost in the quagmire of funding and bureaucracy and lost its spirit of adventure.

This book will take you on a journey exploring the importance of science itself in our modern culture and why it underpins our lives and shapes our paradigms. It will explore how science has lost its soul and how it is beginning to regain it.

Once the soul is put back into science, certain scientific conundrums become clear in the realms of biology, physics and those areas of life commonly known as paranormal. Hence we gain new perspectives on topics such as evolution, the origins of life and distant healing.

Once we have gained this understanding, we will then explore Black Hole Principle: a new vision of the cosmos that makes sense of astronomical data currently puzzling astrophysicists. This principle has applications in many areas of life from medicine to politics.

But first, we shall start with examining why such an exploration is necessary at all. We shall start by saying it like it is.

M S-L, January 2006.

Chapter 1:
Saying it Like It is - Science is Sorted!

As we start the 21st century, it seems that science has answered all the big questions about the universe. The human mind has conquered the world; there is little left to find. We have staked our claim on the moon and even Mars. We have cracked the genetic code, probed deep space and looked into the origins of the universe. We know how life began and how it continues. We can clone sheep and even humans, making us the creators of life itself.

Science is sorted and we are just filling in a few gaps. Or so many people believe. The reality is very different. We may know about the first few seconds after the big bang, but we don't know what banged and why. We have catalogued every single molecule of the body, but we don't know how they become organized. We have taught ourselves about every last part of the machine, but we don't know why it runs. We have been so busy with the tiny pieces that we have lost sight of the big picture.

The truth is that the big questions still remain: how did life arise; why did the big bang occur; what is consciousness? If science cannot answer these questions, then effectively we are only just beginning to discover our universe. Furthermore, we are increasingly discovering aspects of our universe that just don't seem to fit our current scientific models. Certain phenomena such as psychic abilities are seen as unscientific. Yet if science has not answered some of the basic questions about our universe then how can it be an authority on such issues? As people become more interested in such subjects, the demand grows for an explanation, which science has not provided so far. It is not enough to dismiss these aspects of human experience, when so many people are having them. Clearly, science is far from sorted, and there is much to be discovered.

Why science?
For most people, science was their least favorite subject at school. However, it has become the definitive authority in our world. This is because science is supposed to be objective and beyond the imperfections of the opinion of the individual. We use science to justify everything in our world, especially when we want to sell something.

We have advertisements for washing powders in which blue stains disappear faster with one particular brand. We illustrate any serious discussion with scientific facts, presenting charts and statistics. We may have dropped this subject at school, but science and the scientific method deeply influence our daily lives. The scientific method relies on solid, tangible objective results and seems to be an oasis of certainty in turbulent times.

Despite its underpinning of society, there is a rise of dissent against the cold, objective detachment that science represents. It has a bad reputation for many people and deservedly so. We are faced with reports of pharmaceutical companies experimenting on children in developing countries and biologists releasing genetically modified organisms into the wild, putting profit before public opinion.(1)

Such events have left many feeling that science is out of balance. As we move towards practices such as human cloning, this feeling intensifies: science is lacking something. The scientific establishment often ridicules this public sense of imbalance, dismissing these outcries as the opinions of people who do not know the facts. The implication is that irrational emotions are clouding the steps of progress and if people just knew enough about science they would feel differently. However, some learned scientists also speak out about these issues. There is a real sense that science has lost its way.

The Old School
So how did science get like this? How did it become so blind in the eyes of so many? Originally the scientific quest was no different from the questions that everyone asks of our universe. There was no separation between science, philosophy and mysticism, but a dichotomy eventually occurred. Science emerged as a separate discipline and concerned itself with the physical and the tangible and started to ignore matters of the soul and the mind.

The science that we know today, with its objective measurements and mathematics, has really only existed for a few centuries. Its ethos has been to eradicate subjectivity in our way of dealing with the world. This way, everyone has common ground; the same experiment done by separate people around the world should yield the same results. We see science as a way of finding the truth about our universe instead of relying on the opinions of mere, fallible human beings.

After the work of Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes, scientists started to see the mind as separate from the body. (Whether these men really meant to do this or not is another story.) We often talk about the Newtonian or Cartesian world when describing this scientific view.

The universe started to be seen as a big clockwork machine of many separate parts. These parts run to a universal, constant clock ticking away in the background, no matter where you are in the universe. Many people still view the world in this way because it seems obvious to us: we shall discuss why this is not the case later.

If the universe was seen as a machine in Newton's day, then so was everything in it, including us. The Newtonian view sees humans as machines of many parts too. When our parts break down, we take them to be mended by the doctor. Our innermost thoughts and feelings are seen as the results of little pieces of machinery or brain chemicals. Everything about us is determined by a molecule called Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) which exists in our cells and contains the complete code for who we are, how we behave and even which diseases we are likely to get. In the Newtonian view, it is the size of our brains that allows us to think, unlike animals. The bigger the brain, the better the machine.

This is the view many people have today and some scientists want to go further. They dream of the ultimate human machine and are trying to blend living cells with machinery to produce 'cyborgs' with artificial intelligence.

This view of a purely solid, material world has served us very well. It has allowed us to explore a lot of amazing technology that we take for granted today. Can we imagine a world where diabetics do not have access to insulin treatment, or a world without antibiotics? We have become used to air travel: the dynamics of which are researched using Newtonian principles.

But when is enough, enough? It seems that we are tipping over the edge of what is comfortable. The paradigm of life as a machine is drawing to a close. Many don't want us to build genetic nightmares; Dolly the sheep had many prototypes that were riddled with problems.(2) How do we bring science back to balance?

There is a new spirit of science emerging. Those who are at the cutting-edge are reflecting on what science is truly about: a continual adventure of discovery. Science is coming out of the old school and entering the new. The results are astonishing and point the way to a new science of the future. Science is finding its soul.

The New School
In all extreme situations, inevitably there has to be a swing back of the pendulum. This is the case in science too. It all really started in the early 20th century with that wild-haired rebel, Albert Einstein. Although we normally think of Einstein as an old man, when he first presented his theories he was in his twenties and a scientific outsider. His degree result had been so bad that he could not even get a job teaching physics. Despite this, his work managed to change the scientific worldview and the rest of the world.

Einstein showed that the universe does not have universal time, but instead, time runs differently according to what speed you are traveling. This was one of the major blows to the Newtonian view. Since then there have been more and more findings in physics and in biology that have changed our ideas about how our universe works. Some leading thinkers have been calling it the 'New Science' and have realized that if science underpins our society then we are about to have a major rethink about how we operate. We not only have whole new theories, but we have cutting-edge experiments too. All this is opening up a new unlimited world of possibilities and human potential.

This New Science is one that many don't hear about and is a far cry from those boring lessons at school. It is a science that goes beyond the mechanical view of reality and demonstrates that the universe behaves very differently from how we previously thought. With the advent of quantum physics, which emerged in the 1920s, we realized that the universe behaves very strangely indeed.

Where we had previously thought that the world is mechanical and solid, we now know that this is not how Nature operates. Some scientists have thought about what this means for us and have realized that all sorts of possibilities are opening up. Quantum physics introduced the notion that our own thoughts interact with matter. For many years it was thought that this principle only applies to very small, subatomic levels but researchers are showing that, under controlled conditions, it can be demonstrated that our own thoughts influence events. We shall further discuss this research in Chapter 6.

Some have gone further to reflect on what this truly means about the nature of reality and of consciousness from a logical perspective. Their conclusions can revolutionize our view of the cosmos, throwing new light on everything from the origins of life, to paranormal phenomena and the creation of the entire universe and ourselves.

It's not just about the PhDs
The true spirit of science is the spirit of adventure. Science is really about our exploration of our universe. It is about asking questions about how things work. What the word 'science' has come to be synonymous with is actually the application of science: technology. What most people think of when it comes to science is 'can we discover something useful so we can make some money out of it?' This is not the same as discovery for the sake of discovery, from truly knowing and experiencing how the universe works.

Science is now mainly confined within social structures, with aims to make discoveries that have applications to technology. This approach has proved to be very useful to society. Yet this is not the only path to make scientific discoveries. Einstein himself, as previously stated, was not actually in the system when he made his great insights.

We owe much in our lives to Michael Faraday, including our methods of daily transport. Until recently Faraday was featured on British twenty-pound notes, such is his recognized contribution to society. It may be surprising to some that such a prominent scientific figure was not actually formally educated in science and left school at around fourteen years of age.(3) It was Faraday's job as a bookbinder that led to his interest in science, sparked by the books he came across in his work.

This is not to say that education is not needed or useful to the furthering of human knowledge, of course it is. We have become so attached to the structures built up around knowledge that sometimes we forget the purity of the truth that we are searching for. Universal truths exist whether you have a PhD or not. It is up to us to take the time to find out what they are.

When trying to understand the universe, progressively new perspectives are needed. If you attempt to solve a problem with the same thinking as before, you run the risk of gaining similar results as before (to paraphrase Einstein). It is those sudden insights that appear to come out of nowhere that can be so revolutionary. An insight by itself is not much use without the backing of experiment or mathematical proof, but it is interesting to realize that some of the biggest ideas in science have emerged via this method. It does not depend on what academic job you hold.

This is where we stand at the beginning of the 21st century: at the brink of another scientific revolution. Far from being the end of science, a new paradigm is just beginning. Just as we are reaching the very edges of our discomfort with the current scientific model, it is starting to make a leap back to holism. A swell of radical voices can be heard across the world and this movement is gaining momentum. They are the ones who bridge science and 'spirit', until there is no longer any distinction. As this occurs, phenomena that were previously seen as paranormal suddenly have a scientific explanation.

Gradually the soul is being put back into science. So how exactly is this happening? For this we need to explore the central idea of this book; that is, the fundamental nature of consciousness in our universe.

Join us next month for more
from Punk Science!

© 2006, Dr. Manjir Samanta-Laughton, MD, All Rights Reserved

Excerpted with permission from Punk Science: Inside the Mind of God by Dr. Manjir Samanta-Laughton, published by O Books (ISBN 1905047932). Available for purchase from your local bookseller, or any of the following online locations: www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.o-books.com.

For more information, check out www.PunkScience.com.

References for Preface
(1) Horgan J. The End of Science. (Broadway) 1997.

References for Chapter 1
(1) Ready T. Pfizer in "unethical" trial suit. Nature Medicine. 2001; 7:1001-1077.
(2) Wolf PL, Liggins G, Mercola D. The Cloning debates and progress in biotechnology. Clinical Chemistry 1997; 43:2019-2020.
(3) Morus IR. Michael Faraday and the Electrical century. (Icon books Ltd) 2004.