Lynne McTaggart is the author of The Field, a book that focuses on sub-atomic reality and specifically the unified field that underpins consciousness, the universe and everything. She believes that top scientists are now validating these ideas, largely through quantum mechanics, and has set up a conference for them to explain their various points of view (March 18-19, 2006, London).

For example, orthodox science teaches us that:

* Human beings are a survival machine largely powered by chemicals and genetic coding.
* The brain is a discreet organ and the home of consciousness, which is also largely driven by chemistry ~ the communication of cells and the coding of DNA.
* Man is essentially isolated from his world, and his mind is isolated from his body.
* Time and space are finite, universal orders.
* Nothing travels faster than the speed of light.

However, the Zero-Point Field shows that:

* Communication in the world does not occur in the visible realm of Newton, but in the subatomic world of Werner Heisenberg.
* Cells and DNA communicate through frequencies.
* The brain perceives and makes its own record of the world in pulsating waves.
* A substructure underpins the universe that is essentially a recording medium of everything, providing a means for everything to communicate with everything else.
* People are indivisible from their environment.
* Living consciousness is not an isolated entity. It increases order in the rest of the world.
* The consciousness of human beings has incredible powers, to heal ourselves, to heal the world ~ in a sense, to make it as we wish it to be.

Lynne McTaggart’s bio reads in part: “She began work on ‘The Field’ four years ago as a personal quest to see if any new scientific theories could explain how homeopathy and spiritual healing work. This journey took her to many areas around the globe, meeting with top frontier scientists in Russia, Germany, France, England, South American, Central America and the USA.”

Much of this work is now fairly commonplace, but this does seem to be a good exposition of it. Moreover, the quality of the speakers at the conference speaks for itself.

Extended mind is a phrase used by Rupert Sheldrake, the Oxford biologist, to explain all kinds of paranormal phenomena. He believes that this mind stretches out beyond us and accounts for the way some of us know when another person is looking at us.

Try watching people on the street as they walk past from a high window. The number who suddenly look up directly at you shows that they “know” they are being “pinged” by you. The only way it could happen is if there is a continuity of “mindstuff” between the two people.

Sheldrake conducts many experiments in this field, with remarkable results. His book, The Sense of Being Stared At, is a classic of the genre. As an accredited scientist, his experiments are always well designed and hard to fault.

Deepak Chopra also writes widely about the extended mind, which he calls the “non-local mind”. In his book, SynchroDestiny, he outlines a way of being in contact with this mind, and a series of exercises to improve perception of it.

Unlike the scientific methods of Sheldrake, Chopra uses ancient Indian techniques, often from Vedanta. The two sides of this coin give us an interesting contrast : the extended mind seen from modern science and from ancient spiritual systems.

Chopra’s book is out of print, but can often be found in library stacks. To check on the best price for Rupert Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared At, click here.