Living in a Mindful Universe by Eben Alexander MD & Karen Newell

Author:Eben Alexander, MD & Karen Newell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2017-03-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

BE THE LOVE THAT YOU ARE

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN (1881–1955),

FRENCH PHILOSOPHER AND PALEONTOLOGIST

One of the most profound realizations over the course of my spiritual awakening has been that emotions are what give us “skin in the game,” that apply value and meaning to the lessons we learn in living our human lives, whether of love or of loss. This has been a paradigm-shifting realization. Like many, I was raised with the understanding that expressing one’s emotions was not necessarily an admirable quality. In other words, I was taught to “stuff it,” and not to bother others with my emotional reactions to the challenges of life. Keeping a stiff upper lip and soldiering on, no matter what, were qualities that I learned from my mother and father, two hardworking and lovable souls. They had grown up during the Great Depression and spent their early adult years dealing with the horrific existential crisis offered up by the Second World War. Born from good intentions in a struggle to endure, many in our Western culture share this quality of emotional restraint, but it doesn’t necessarily serve us well.

At a conference in Chicago, I met spiritual teacher Gary Zukav and his wife, Linda Francis. Gary is a graduate of Harvard University and had been a Green Beret in the US Army Special Forces during the Vietnam War. He became captivated with the fascinating revelations of quantum mechanics and in 1979 wrote The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, a helpful resource for the layperson on this dense topic. Ten years later, Gary wrote The Seat of the Soul, which addresses human consciousness from a spiritual perspective. After teaching a workshop in Seattle, Karen and I were traveling through Oregon with my son Bond and were pleased to accept Gary and Linda’s invitation to visit them at their home in Ashland for a few days.

Gary and I enjoyed a lively discussion about some of the grand revelations that Einstein had drawn from musing over the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass. This was a fact known by physicists for three centuries, but had been simply dismissed as a curious correlation. Einstein’s brilliance was that he knew to pursue such observations much more deeply than had other physicists. I had a deep appreciation for Einstein’s thought experiments, and how he had used his own consciousness as the tool from which tremendous insights about the universe would spring forth. Engaging in these practices demonstrated the fundamental power of the observer and its connection to the Collective Mind.

I enjoyed these scientific discussions, but Gary was most interested in hearing from me about any significant changes I might have had in my personal life since my NDE. My complete flip away from scientific materialism seemed to permeate every aspect of my life, but Gary meant something deeper and more intimate.

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