Spiritual Awakenings


the Space Between Us by Lynne McTaggart


O


ne chilly Saturday morning, I was standing in a drafty auditorium watching one of


my daughters in the midst of a dress rehearsal for her annual drama class production. A talented actress, she had been chosen for the lead part during the auditions, but a few weeks before the dress rehearsal had been shunted to a more minor role. I had never been able to discover the reason for the change—and my daughter refused to talk about it—until one of her friends let slip that, when a new director took over, another 13-year- old girl had lied about her acting experience in order to persuade him that she should be given the part that had been assigned to my daughter— her best friend. When I tried to raise this


tactfully with her mother, another spectator that day, she cut me off and shrugged. “Well, that’s life,” she replied airily, “isn’t it?” I was taken aback, but I had to


admit she had a point. Certainly that’s the life we grownups have designed for ourselves. Competition makes up the very warp and woof of the societies of most modern developed countries. It is the engine of our economy and it is assumed to be the basis of most of our relationships—in business, in our neighborhoods, even with our closest friends. Being first, no matter how, has permeated our lexicon as a given: All’s fair in love and war. Survival of the fittest. Winner take all. He who dies with the most toys wins. It is hardly surprising that highly


competitive tactics have crept into the social relations of our children, leading to transgressions, large and small.


28 Tucson I began to think about


the social exchange in my own neighborhood, and about how much of what psychologists call “relativity awareness” has played a part. How many children do you have? What kind of car do you drive? How many vacations are you off on this year? Which college has your kid gotten into? What’s his or her grade point average? Where, in other words, do you fit on the social ladder? Our current paradigm, as


provided by traditional science, maintains a view of the universe as a place of scarcity, populated by separate things that must turn against each other in order to survive. We’ve all simply assumed, “That’s life.” I began to ask myself a basic


question: Does it have to be like this? Were we meant to be so competitive with one another? Is it inherent in animal and human biology? How did it get like this? And if we’re not this, what are we supposed to be? Since that dress rehearsal,


I’ve been thinking that at some point we’d torn up the social contract and forgotten how to come together. Somewhere along the line, we’d forgotten how to be. It doesn’t have to be like


this. As I began researching and studying the latest discoveries in a vast array of disciplines—general biology, physics, zoology, psychology, botany, anthropology, astronomy, chronobiology, and cultural history— the more it became clear to me that the lives we’ve chosen to lead are not consistent with who we really are. A new understanding is


emerging from the laboratories of the


most cutting-edge physicists, biologists and psychologists that challenges the very way we conceive of ourselves. Frontier biologists, psychologists and sociologists have all found evidence that individuals are far less individual than we thought they were. Between the smallest particles


of our being—between our body and our environment—between ourselves and all of the people with whom we are in contact—between every member of every societal cluster, there is a Bond—a connection so integral and profound that there is no longer a clear demarcation between the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them—in a sense, in the space between things. These new discoveries in


physics and biology demonstrate that all living things succeed and prosper only when they see themselves as part of a greater whole. Rather than a will to compete and dominate, the essential impulse of all of life is a will to connect. I discovered other societies that


live very differently from us, with a worldview more in keeping with the findings of the new science. These cultures conceive of the universe as an indivisible whole, and this central belief has bred an extraordinarily different way of seeing and interacting with the world. They believe that they are in


relationship with all of life—even with the Earth itself. We see the thing; they see the glue between the things—the thing that holds them together. The


THE BOND Connecting Through


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48