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An Integral Theory of Everything
Inner Traditions 2004 ISBN #159477042-5
Ervin Lazlo started out as a very successful concert pianist, with a serious interest in philosophical and scientific questions. The birth of his first son in 1959 started him off on a forty year journey of searching for the meaning of life through science. He started this journey with systematic reading and research (remember, this gentleman had absolutely no formal training in the field of science), and ended up a professor of philosophy, systems theory, and futures studies in the U.S., Europe, and the Far East. He is founder and president of the international think-tank The Club of Budapest and of the General Evolution Research Group. Science and the Akashic Field is meant to act as an introduction to a Laszlo's seminal work The Conductivity Hypothesis. In layman's language Laszlo summarizes his search, and his conclusions relative to the existence of a physical Akashic field. For many of us, we have accepted (and even experienced) the Akashic field as a reality, without having a need to prove that it has a "physical" presence. That a specific energy field can be posited, an energy field that carries all knowledge, is a mind boggling thought. And that is exactly what has happened. In the beginning of the book, Laszlo gives a short background on what Theories of Everything are. To begin with, they are the territory of theoretical physicists, and they attempt to, as Einstein put it, "read the mind of God". Through various means, they attempt to bring all of the laws of the universe together to explain the world as we know it. Laszlo shows how these theories have progressed, from the "unified field theory" put forth by Einstein, to the current "string based theory". (Note that these are theories, and while the proof is considered within reach, to date they have not been proven.) Let us not lose track of what we are theorizing about - the Akashic field, that field of energy that stores the record of all that has ever happened on Earth and throughout the cosmos. In their own way, mystics, sages and scientists have all been searching for the one concept that would bring all things together, an Integral Theory of Everything. One of the things that Laszlo discusses is the next paradigm shift in science. (It is this chapter in particular that is presented in greater depth in Laszlo's The Connectivity Hypothesis.) Laszlo posits that now in the first part of the twenty-first century what he terms "puzzles and anomalies" are beginning to accumulate, and that science is facing another paradigm shift that will be just as fundamental as the shift from the mechanistic world of Newton to the relativistic universe of Einstein. One of the fundamental parts of the paradigm shift to come is a new kind of coherence, the bottom line of which is that what happens to one part of any system (from an atom to a galaxy) happens to all parts of that system. This is being experienced in fields as diverse as quantum physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology and consciousness research. Laszlo does a fine job of describing some of the contemporary "puzzles" in the fields of cosmology, quantum physics, biology and consciousness research. From here we go into the search for the "memory" of the universe, and the zero-point field (a part of the new field of vacuum physics, referring to an energy field where field energies prove to be present even when all classical forms of energy vanish - at the absolute zero of temperature ). This is the Akashic field, the original source of all things, and the absolute memory of the universe. The presentation here is coherent, to a depth that the layman can understand (and yet not feel talked down to), clear ... and exciting! For all that are interested in the Akashic field, for those that have worked with it, or for those that are coming from a point of wanting to understand more about our world, I highly recommend this book.
Bonnie Cehovet
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