My favorite books about science and spirituality in an evolving universe

This opened up new insights into my spiritual journey. Dr. Tiller presents amazing research that shows that when there is a link between subtle energy and ordinary physical space, the physical properties of that space are changed, such that disorder decreases, rather than increases. He has done experiments in which experienced meditators are asked to store an intention in a bit of circuitry that is not connected to anything, such that the pH in water in another laboratory that the circuitry is placed near will increase by one point. This happens, and the experiment has been replicated many times. This is already amazing enough, but the entropy (disorder) in the laboratory decreases, which is contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics in ordinary physical space. My inspiration from this research was that any time we bring about a connection between subtle energy and our environment, new possibilities become available.

I attended Caltech my freshman year of college, expecting to learn the tools to help me find the answer to any question I had about the nature of reality. Before the first quarter started, I purchased a copy of Gödel’s Proof. This describes that given any logical system at least as complex as the axioms for arithmetic, there will be at least one statement that makes perfect sense that can neither be proven nor disproven from the axioms of that system. Some axioms for arithmetic, for example, are that for any two numbers a and b, a=a and a+b=b+a. This was mind-blowing to me. Gödel proved that there will always be things that can neither be proven nor disproven in any system based on a series of axioms. I thought there must be some way to understand the deeper nature of reality, and began my path of spiritual exploration, which includes ways to use consciousness as the means of exploration. There will always remain things that remain unknown, no matter how much science progresses, and both science and spirituality have things to contribute to each other.

This book contains numerous research studies on subtle energy, energy medicine, and new technologies to measure phenomena that have generally been thought of as outside of the realm of Western science. What I learned from the research in this book is that it is possible to conclusively prove that the world we live in is much more interconnected than we realize. Theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and explanations are available that challenge our usual notions of time, space, and non-locality. Reading this book will show any open-minded readers that a dualistic frame of reference will never enable us to understand the universe that each of us is an integral part of.

I have come to understand that everything we know is by means of our relationship to whatever we are experiencing. This book describes a wonderful principle of Buddhism called mutual or dependent co-arising, which means that everything is the cause of everything else. This seems to me to be consistent with the findings of quantum physics, in which time is not what we think it is. There is a phenomenon called retrocausality, which means that something in the present can affect something in the past. On a deep level, everything is interconnected with everything else, and has an effect on everything else. The principles described in this book have a relationship to systems theory and chaos theory. I believe we are all participating in the self-organization of the universe to higher states of wisdom.

This book was very inspiring to me, and reinforces the idea that each of us is a unique and integral part of an evolving universe. The future is not fixed, and as we awaken to our higher possibilities, what becomes possible for everything is augmented. We live in a purpose-driven universe, and not the one described for centuries as a clockwork universe.