The field: The quest for the secret force of the universe, by Lynne McTaggart. (HarperCollins)

When life changes or you wish it would: How to survive and thrive in uncertain times, by Carol Adrienne (William Morrow)

This essay is an exercise in creativity. It always is, but I’m explicitly making it so today. On some creativity tests, they ask, “What does a XX have in common with YY?” Trying to find common patterns in very different things challenges a creative kind of thinking.

I get all kinds of books to write about and it’s always hard to choose. For this issue I had decided to write about the book The field: The quest for the secret force of the universe (HarperCollins). It is a book about the new view of energy and its relationship to healing and other matters. Then another book came along and I just had to write about it: When life changes or you wish it would: How to survive and thrive in uncertain times (William Morrow). Its title is pretty descriptive of its contents.

Out on my meditative walk the idea came to me to try to write an essay based on what these two books, on very different subjects, had in common. Perhaps a new insight would emerge that would merit sharing it with you. Let’s see what happens.

The Field, by Lynne McTaggart, is about what this investigative journalist found about what is to become a revolution in science. It pertains to the theory of the “Zero Point Field.” You’ve probably heard that the size of the space between electrons is a lot, lot, lot bigger than the size of the electrons themselves. Same goes for the planets. Well, the Zero Point Field theory is about how that space in between is where the energy is! In the space in between is where the unitive field, uniting all creation, has its life. It’s where nothing is that the important stuff is happening! As scientists begin to learn how to tap into this energy, things are going to be different. The limitless energy of empty space will someday allow us to power aircraft by something like a radio beam, if you recognize that image from one of Edgar Cayce’s stories. It has tremendous implications for healing, especially what we call spiritual healing, or mental healing at a distance.

Let’s look at the second book, When life changes or you wish it would, by Carol Adrienne, which is a guidebook to dealing with change. Among her other credits, the author co-wrote with James Redfield the workbook to accompany the Celestine Prophecy. She’s writing this book because we find change difficult. Often it happens to us and we have to adapt. Sometimes we wish to initiate it but find it difficult. That seems to be one of the paradoxes about life: life is change, we are alive, but we can’t deal with change! So she writes this book explaining how to deal with it. I’m alive, so I’ve been through a lot of changes, both voluntary and involuntary, and I can recognize in her book many good ideas, suggestions, and, above all, an approach to change. She’s a teacher of intuition, and she has us use intuitive methods to focus on the internals, to help us get into harmony with the natural flow of change. In the pause—let’s call it a pause and not a block—between the status quo and what’s coming ahead, there’s a creative turmoil inside. Not a deep, black hole of anxiety and dread, she’d say, but creative turmoil, like what happens when the caterpillar in its cocoon has totally dissolved into liquid, but it’s not a butterfly yet. Ever been in that condition? Her book is how to deal with that.

So, what do these two books have in common? Time for a walk….

OK, so the first book is about how the world isn’t really made of things. It’s energy. And energy isn’t really a thing. It exists more in the space between what we think are things. In its existence in the space in between, energy is really an event, an event of relationships.

Now why do people find change difficult if it is the stuff of life? I think it is because we think of ourselves as “entities,” in other words, things! We are not really things, our atoms are changing all the time. We are events. We are stories! We are unfolding meaning. Now what makes a story? A story is not about the conditions of things, a story is about the changing conditions of things, or about the changing relationship between persons and circumstances.

It’s not what exists that makes a story, it’s what’s happening to what exists that makes the story. Change is difficult for us because we identify with the conditions of our lives, not our relationship to those conditions. According to The Field, there’s not much energy in conditions as such. The energy lies in what’s between conditions. Learning to deal with change gracefully, therefore, is learning to be comfortable with that space between the “you” whom you knew and loved at one point in time and the “you” whom you’ll come to know and love later, which is essentially one of the exercises that When Life Changes teaches. To be able to know that the time has come to make change, or, to know how to embrace change when it happens, requires the spiritual leap—to use some old metaphors--from being a bump on a log to being a wave in the sea. You probably recognize these images and will make connections with familiar metaphysical teachings about personal transformation. If so, then you’ll have an intuition about how to gracefully inhabit the space in-between and become your unfolding story.

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