19. PARTNERS IN EVOLUTION

IN DISCOVERING OUR OWN PURPOSE AND MEANING, WE ENRICH MEANING IN THE UNIVERSE – WE CREATE SOMETHING OF SIGNIFICANCE THAT HAS NOT BEEN THERE.

There was one final conversation that day that was of critical importance to me. As we finished talking about the advanced U-process and how powerful it can be when used properly, a protégé of one of the physicists raised the following question: “Yes, this process is robust, and the Lab team using it can manifest new realities – but what if it is used for evil? What if, for instance, a person with the mind of Hitler tried to employ the process?”

A very lively exchange then broke out, which lasted almost an hour. In the end, we went back to Bohm as the basis for the agreement we reached. Bohm wrote in Unfolding Meaning that meaning is an aspect of reality tied to the achievement of goals and to a specific context that is so subtle and complex that it cannot be represented by any closed formula. We inhabit a universe that is imbued with profound meaning. Wholeness, love, and significance infuse and inform the universe and give it shape and form. By its very definition, the advanced U-process is designed to access the Source and is also infused with meaning – truth and love are at its core, its essence. It is a process designed to bring forth the emerging reality as it desires – not as desired by people of ego or of mal-intent. In order to enable the collapse of boundaries between self, others, and the universe, one or a collective must unambiguously stand in a place of love, caring, and sacrifice for others – for the whole system under investigation. It is at this moment of oneness that the participants are acting out of the unfolding generative order – the unbroken wholeness from which seemingly discrete events take place. And it is at this moment that new realities are enacted for the benefit of the whole system. This is why the advanced U-process is so powerful. It is designed to serve life. The process itself is a volitional act of love, enabling new realities.

There is a well-known interview of Bohm by Renée Weber, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, which describes the worldview advanced by Bohm that was at the center of the conversation that day in Pari. In that interview, Bohm said that there is profound and self-evident meaning infusing the universe. “It is its meaning – it doesn’t have to have a reason.” The meaning or end “could be said to be love – it could be said to be harmony.”

Meaning is not final. We are continuously discovering it. And that discovery of meaning is itself a part of the reality. This worldview assumes a universal coherence and an all-encompassing principle that runs throughout the system at all levels. “We inhabit a universe that is alive with meaning and is conscious at all levels,” Bohm told me.

Bohm thought that we could be actors in transforming reality through changing our meaning. “What we think and feel count. The key is the Socratic maxim: ‘Know yourself – go inward and be observed.’”

After a long reflection on Bohm’s words in this interview and his words to me in London, I concluded that in discovering our own purpose and meaning, we enrich meaning in the universe – we create something of significance that has not been there. We are part of it and it is part of us. We are partners in the evolution of the universe.

Bohm, David, and others there that weekend believe that “fragmentation of mind” has prevented most of us from holding this view of reality; it is what has blinded us to the creativity of the universe.

Bohm said to me in London that our tendency to see individuals and groups as “other” than ourselves has led to personal and social isolation, selfishness, and wars. David and others agreed that society and the individuals within it tend to operate in a rather mechanical way, responding to chance and new situations from relatively fixed positions and in uncreative ways. “They appear to be trapped in structures and forms of their own making, such as the beliefs, goals and values that have become so rigid that they are unable to move in the flexible and subtle ways that characterize the general order of the universe.” In this process, the self rigidifies and becomes the supreme focus of attention.