134. It's a Playful Universe – Marjorie Woollacott
Marjorie Woollacott was a scientist with a materialist worldview when she, in her 30s, had a spiritually transformative experience. Her heart opened. There was a feeling of total peace and equanimity. She felt at home. After the experience, Woollacott gradually reoriented her research and teaching in physiology and neuroscience towards the nonphysical human experience. Many of her 200 peer reviewed scientific articles are about the effects of meditation. “When we meditate, we begin to let go of our feeling of smallness and separateness to a feeling of interconnectedness with everything else in the world”, Marjorie says. Later, she began looking more fully into the nature of consciousness. In that context, she wants to highlight two scientists-philosophers in particular, Bernardo Kastrup and Federico Faggin (the inventor of the microprocessor). “They show us scientifically why seeing consciousness as fundamental is essential to our understanding of the universe.” Woollacott is co-editor of an anthology that is fresh on the shelves as we record this episode, The Playful Universe. It is about meaningful coincidences, something psychology giant Carl Jung called synchronicities. Cultural historian and archetypal cosmologist Richard Tarnas, who has written the introduction to the book, defines synchronicities like this: observed coincidences, in which two or more independent events, having no apparent causal connection, nevertheless seem to form a meaningful pattern in our lives. Synchronicities are often seemingly trivial. It could be something quotidian you haven’t thought about in 20 years, but when you do, that same thing suddenly appears all around you; in newspapers, signs, things you hear. Another contributor to the anthology, Jungian psychologist and mythologist Roderick Main, describes the evolution of our human understanding of the universe as having gone from enchantment to disenchantment (the scientific revolution) to reenchantment, which is happening now. “Life is still mysterious.” How can synchronicities happen? In Marjorie Woollacott’s view, we are points of consciousness within the universal consciousness, and we are all entangled and co-creating this universe. “Within that playful entanglement, we draw the situations to ourselves that are most important for the unfolding of our paths in this universe.” She also points out that our beliefs create our reality, which means that what we pay attention to in our lives is what we allow to unfold. So, how should we act on synchronicities? “Value them highly and explore them.” Marjorie Woollacott believes we have some kind of guidance from the nonphysical reality. She refers to research she has done on mediumship, where mediums say they are in contact with people from “the other side”. “I saw the incredibly strong evidence about these people communicating with us, telling us things we didn’t know that turned out to be true, and that could help us.” This is documented in peer reviewed papers, Many feel – and claim – that this world is unfair, and not only to themselves but to millions. “I believe it’s a fundamental misunderstanding”, Marjorie says. “But we all have these thoughts. We are both a soul with infinite awareness and a tiny point of awareness. And the tiny point, where our ego resides, is always making judgments about what’s pleasurable, what’s painful, what causes suffering, and what causes expansion. And from that point of view, yeah, things can be really difficult.” “But if we can take the view of the whole, which is our essence, there is probably something we can learn from that moment of pain that will move us forward in our expansion of knowing who we are.” Marjorie’s website The Playful Universe Bio at AAPS Bio at Galileo Commission