For eight years, I’ve been on what you might consider a rather foolhardy quest: to understand the true nature of the universe.

This quest came about because the fundamental paradoxes I kept bumping into in the course of my work on this newsletter - hard scientific evidence concerning methods of healing like homoeopathy, acupuncture or spiritual healing that flout every notion scientists have held about the way our universe works.

For years, these discoveries left me profoundly unsettled. All these practices were based on an entirely different paradigm of the human body from that of modern science. If something like homoeopathy worked, it upended everything we believe about our physical and biological reality.

These medical systems purported to work on ‘energetic levels’, and words like ‘subtle energy’ were often bandied about in the alternative community, but the debunker in me was left unsatisfied. Exactly what energy were they talking about? Did it account not only for these alternative forms of healing, but also for many of life’s mysteries that couldn’t be explained?

In between assembling this newsletter every month, I began seeking out top frontier scientists from different areas around the globe. In the main, I stuck to scientists with solid credentials operating according to rigorous scientific criteria. Enough speculation had already been made in the alternative community about energy and healing, and I wanted any new theories to be firmly rooted in what was provable, mathematically or experimentally - precise equations, a real physics to grapple with and understand.

Once I began digging, I discovered a small cohesive community of top-grade scientists with impressive credentials, all doing some small aspect of the same thing. Their discoveries were incredible. What they were working on seemed to overthrow the current laws of biochemistry and physics. It was my task to synthesise this disparate research into a cohesive whole. It was as though these scientists had been on a voyage of discovery and each had discovered a bucket of earth, but no one had been bold enough to declare it a continent.

At our most elemental, according to their discoveries, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge. Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is the central engine of our being and our consciousness, the alpha and omega of our existence. There is no ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ duality to our bodies in relation to the universe, but one underlying energy field.

This field is responsible for our mind’s highest functions, the information source guiding the growth of our bodies. It is our brain, our heart, our memory - indeed, a blueprint of the universe for all time. The field is the force, rather than germs or genes, that finally determines whether we are healthy or ill, the force which must be tapped in order to heal.

Unlike the world view of Newton or Darwin, theirs was a vision that was life-enhancing. These were ideas that could empower us with their implications of order and control. We were not simply genetic accidents of nature. There was purpose and unity to our world and our place within it, and we had an important say in it. We were not isolated beings living our desperate lives on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe. We never were alone. We were always part of a larger whole. We have far more power than we realise to heal ourselves, our loved ones, even our communities.

With this issue, I’ve included a taster of The Field, the book resulting from my quest, which is being published this month, because I believe these ideas herald a coming scientific and medical revolution as daring and profound as the discovery of relativity. At its most fundamental, this new science answers questions that have perplexed scientists for hundreds of years. At its most profound, this is a science of the miraculous.
Lynne McTaggart