The Layman's Answers to Everything

The meaning of life according to some guy who likes TV and stuff.

“We’re all connected.” It’s the ubiquitous mantra of new-agey types. Chances are if you’ve ever watched Oprah, were a fan of the TV show Lost, or have read just about anything I’ve written, you are very familiar with this concept. Along with its close cousin “everything happens for a reason,” it’s pretty much become a cliché that isn’t really given much thought. Yet, how exactly are we all connected? Sure, we’re all made of the same elements, live on the same planet, and are plugged into the same Internet, but the phrase usually refers to the idea that all of our minds are somehow connected, that our lives are intertwined, that actions taken by you, now, could somehow affect a struggling shoe salesman living in Uzbekistan. I think it’s about time we explored this concept and saved it from the nether regions of trite, hackneyed banality. After all, if the idea that “we’re all connected” is a given, why doesn’t anyone (with the possible exception of Oprah herself) really believe it?

Back in September, 2010, Wired magazine published a discussion between two of its tech writers, Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson about where ideas come from. Despite the stereotype of the solitary genius toiling away in his basement, the duo argued that great discoveries typically come not from individual minds but from the hive mind, aka, the collective consciousness. History shows that the most game-changing innovations including calculus, the electric battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio, and thousands more, were all uncovered simultaneously by different inventors who had no knowledge of one another. As Malcolm Gladwell brought up in a 2008 New Yorker article titled “In The Air,” this phenomenon of simultaneous discovery, innovation, and invention is extremely common. So much so, historians even have a term for it—“multiples.” It’s almost as if all these breakthroughs come from the same, unseen information source, and anyone who’s tuned into it, can have access.

The concept reminds me of a lesson from one of my college anthropology classes that had been wedged somewhere deep within the recesses of my brain. It was about an isolated group of monkeys on some island that had learned to use sticks as tools to get at termites or wash sweet potatoes or something to that effect.  Despite no other group of monkeys on record having this knowledge, allegedly, after a critical mass of these monkeys had learned the technique, monkeys on other islands began to use the same technique, as if their minds were somehow all connected.

“Hive mind” experiments have also been done with humans to see if we are similarly connected. In the late 1980’s British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s The Presence of the Past reported on experiments that he felt proved a collective human memory. In one, a difficult hidden figure puzzle was solved much faster by various groups around the world after its solution had been made known to millions during a British television broadcast. Even though these groups had not seen the broadcast, they were able to solve the puzzle much faster than earlier groups who’d tried before the solution had been aired. It’s as though they all somehow had access to the same info or were sharing one mind.

Sheldrake’s belief is that we are surrounded by morphic fields—a “universal database” of stored information that influences the bodies and brains of living things. This database enables minds to extend beyond the physical brain in both space and time, giving us all access to shared information. Morphic fields transfer information via morphic resonance, whereas the more similar certain fields are, the more easily information flows between them. This might explain why we are attracted to some people and not others, why a mother and her child often have a special, extra-sensory connection, and how mediums, prophets, artists, writers, and shaman get their divine inspiration.

These and similar observations all seem to point to some kind of uniting energy that binds us, connects us, and sounds an awful lot like The Force. As I mentioned in “Diary of A Layman #28: Fasten Your Safety Belt,” this energy may connect our minds using the magnetic field of the earth. It may also be able to slip through the illusion of time to connect to the minds of our past and future selves (you can’t get two fields any more similar than two of your own). Perhaps this time traveling resonance is responsible for our intuition or the myth of guardian angels or fairy godmothers. These various instincts could actually be strong energy frequencies transmitting from our mind in another time, connecting all of our selves into one moment. Perhaps, this even explains where I get the information to write this blog—it comes from a clear connection I have to my future self—a future where all this information is already common knowledge.

From “hive mind” and “collective consciousness” to morphic fields, the source field, or even The Force, this uniting energy may explain many mysteries of life including evolution, simultaneous innovation, animal migration, and most mysteriously, that creepy feeling you get when someone is looking at you before you see that they are (another of Sheldrake’s experiments). It may also explain a phenomenon I noticed in high school that served as my introduction to the collective conscious.

I’d begun to notice that many movies with similar themes would often come out at the same time. From 1987-89 a whole bunch of switcheroo movies came out— Like Father, Like Son; Vice Versa; Big; 18 Again; and  Dream a Little Dream. While successful movies always have imitators, these films all came out within just months of each other—and the only successful one, Big, was pretty much in the middle of the bunch. A similar pattern emerged with the life-as-illusion movies like Dark City, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenZ that all came out in 1998-99. It was almost as if the writers of these films were all tapped into the same energy or tuned into the same frequency, to come up with similar movies at around the same time. In fact, this is exactly what I think is happening.

Thanks to modern technology, more and more of the mysteries of our world are being understood because we have invented things that work in similar ways. While the concepts behind morphic fields and hive minds may seem convoluted, they actually become quite simple when you relate them to something we’re now all familiar with— cloud computing.

In the very near future, computers will no longer come with hard drives. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google are already pushing hard to get us all on the cloud. That’s because once we all have our personal accounts in their hands, their domination of us will be complete. They will completely own all of our data and can make up any monetary demands they wish for us to gain access to it. It’s a scary Orwellian scenario, which I believe is already our reality.

Much like The Matrix, our brains are likely already all plugged into this cloud. In previous posts, I’ve brought up a lot of scientific evidence arguing why I believe we all live in a simulation, but literal belief of this scenario isn’t even necessary to buy the cloud concept. We could easily all be living in a real world, but sharing a single data source that our individual “accounts” (our minds) are all linked into. This is what gives us our thoughts, memories, and individual sense of self. As the cloud platform gets updated, we all follow suit. Voila! Evolution. Once this happens, those who have the best connections will have access to some of the newer features of the platform before others. This is the reason why many innovations and ideas come to multiple people at the same time—their similar connections (or morphic resonance) gave them more direct access to the data. To put it another way, our individual WiFi brain connections could allow for some bleed through, causing crossed frequencies between similar individual accounts.

Thanks to cloud technology, wireless airport connections, and WiFi, we all understand how individual computers can have access to both personal and shared accounts that aren’t physically located on their hard drives. In fact, it doesn’t matter where they’re located. So who’s to say that our minds are in our brains? Perhaps our memories, thoughts, and personalities are all filed in some hive mind hub that wirelessly connects to our individual body through the antenna that is our brain (likely from the pineal gland). That brain offers individual RAM memory only—just that which we need to access in order to do what we are doing at the moment. Everything else is stored on huge servers in the cloud, mythologically referred to as heaven. Getting creeped out yet? Just as souls that make up our essence reside in heaven, the data that makes up who we are is stored in the cloud.

If all this doesn’t seem too creepy, maybe that’s because it’s all just the ramblings of some guy with an overactive imagination. Surely, our brains are nothing like the WiFi connections to cloud platforms. There’s no real evidence that we’re connected to some invisible hub and therefore all have access to the same info. Actually, there’s plenty of evidence—and it’s coming from all different fields of science.

In the social sciences and fringe science, there have been all kinds of experiments related to and building on that of Rupert Sheldrake’s findings. Some of these experiments show how thoughts surrounding major world events can fly across space, and sometimes occur even before the events they’re reacting too (Random number generators around the world began showing statistically significant changes in randomness right before the events of 9/11). Then there are experiments in neuroscience, which have revealed what’s been called “mirror neurons.” These neurons fire both when we perform some action and observe it happening with someone else. In this way they enable us to directly feel what they are feeling.

For me, the most exciting findings, are coming from quantum physics, where research into quantum entanglement is yielding results that continue to baffle physicists. What scientists are finding is that when subatomic particles interact but then become separated—even if by thousands of miles, measuring an aspect of one (revealing that it has a clockwise spin) will have an affect on the other (that it has a counterclockwise spin)—as though they were somehow still connected. And this connection happens instantaneously, even faster than the speed of light could travel. What all these and many more experiments are pointing to, is that somehow there is some kind of invisible web or thread that is making connections on a massive scale. A spiritual worldwide web if you will.

When I was working on the novels that this blog is based on—The Layman’s Answers to Everything, I felt like I was channeling some information that was beyond my conscious knowledge—almost as if I were tapping into something beyond myself. What I didn’t really think about at the time though, was that I wasn’t the only one who had access to this wisdom.

I figured it out soon enough however, when I began noticing that much of these revelations began showing up in newly released books, movies, and TV shows, like The Secret, Touch, Awake, Knowing, Avatar, The Source Code, and especially, Lost.  With Lost, even specific elements from my story appeared in some episodes—uncannily so. While there’s always room for mythic interpretations of universal truths, it made me realize that much like simultaneous discovery and invention, with simultaneous inspiration, the person who gets it out there first gets the credit, even if, as with Lost, what comes out was a bit half-baked. It reminds me of what Michael Jackson once said in an interview. He said that whenever he gets musical inspiration, he immediately writes it down or else, “Prince will get it.”

Since we’re all connected, none of this should matter of course. There is no room for ego if we’re all one. The point is to move humanity forward, regardless of who’s responsible for each stage of development. Should my fingers get the credit for writing this blog, my brain, my eyes, or my soul? They are all part of my body so what’s the difference? Similarly, if we truly believed that we’re all connected, it wouldn’t matter who got credit for what, just that a part of our oneness helped us all evolve a bit more, so that we might able to handle even more difficult challenges with greater ease—hooray us!

While I believe that we’ll eventually evolve to the point where we can truly feel this way, I think it’s still several leaps away from where we are now. Each new innovation will bring us closer to this realization, but since we’re not yet ready to hear it now, we won’t recognize it as truth.  As Kevin Kelly mentions in the Wired article, “ideas that leap too far ahead are almost never implemented—they aren’t even valuable. People can only absorb one advance, one small hop at a time.” He then goes on to talk about how Gregor Mendel’s genetics model was ignored for 35 years because it was too ahead of its time. Once the hive mind was finally ready for it, three different scientists independently rediscovered his work within a year of each other.

This being said, is it even possible for us to begin to accept that we’re truly all connected? That our minds are not in our brains? That everything we know is actually stored in “the cloud”? That we access our individual accounts through virtual WiFi connections enabled by the planet’s magnetic field? That our brains are simply antenna acting like wireless Apple AirPorts? That this reality is in fact a simulation…within a simulation…within a simulation. And that our God is simply the programmer of this universe? And that the original God simply created the first simulation just so that it could slowly experience everything it already knew?

I’ve discussed these and many more seemingly outlandish topics in this blog over the years. All of them have felt as though they’ve come to me from some other source. They’ve also always felt to be real truths of our world. The thing that’s really surprised me the most though, is how few people there are who feel the same way. But who knows? Maybe it’s all been a bit beyond the circle of what we’re ready to accept. Maybe in 35 years, three different scientists will independently validate many of the same principles I’ve written about here. Considering that these ideas are being channeled from some other source, I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad if I don’t get any recognition for trying to advance them years earlier. If the oversight annoys me in any way, it would be a sign that I didn’t fully believe my own writings and still see myself as separate and owning this wisdom. A conundrum to be sure.

I guess this is the reason why those who walk the enlightened path need to incorporate another bit of clichéd spiritual wisdom—to learn let go. Once you can unplug from your ego’s need to have an individual cloud account—with your own thoughts, memories and sense of self—you suddenly have much more storage space and quicker download speeds for even more advanced data. And that’s pretty cool—even if it means that you won’t able to share it until others update their older platforms…in about 35 years.

May Your Inner Spark Grow To Light Your Way,
The Layman

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Marc Oromaner is a spiritual author and speaker who teaches how we can discover our destiny using clues found in the media and in our lives. His book, The Myth of Lost deciphers the hidden wisdom of the hit TV show and explains how we can use this wisdom to overcome our own challenges. His blog, “The Layman’s Answers To Everything” points out the patterns that run through all great stories including our own. These patterns are clues that are meant to guide us towards a life full of love, light, and fulfillment.