Nexus - 1801 - New Times Magazine-pages

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HEALING THE WORLD BY COLLECTIVE MEDITATION HEALING WORLD THE COLLECTIVE MEDITATION Various initiatives around the world are linking millions of people in meditation for peace and healing, tapping into the zero-point field and achieving measurable effects that can be understood in terms of quantum physics. The Great Work* e are living now in the age of Kali Yuga. According to Indo- Tibetan mythology, this is a time when iron birds fly in the air and the life of the spirit falls to its nadir. Evidence for this can be seen all around us: in alienation, crime, drugs, degradation of the environment and, poignantly, in a recent figure giving suicide as the third- highest cause of death in children aged five to seventeen in the USA. Just recently, I was particularly disturbed on learning that, according to two polls, some 40 per cent of Americans believe in the literal truth of the Bible. This means that many of them regard attention to the accelerating deterioration of the environment as a waste of time because, according to apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation, the world is soon to end anyway. Likewise, they welcome wars with Islamic countries as a run-up to he final Battle of Armageddon, which will bring defeat of the anti-Christ and return of the Messiah for the Last Judgement. At this time, faithful Christians will be saved and go to Heaven in rapture and the rest will be damned. Incredible as this belief seems, it has been promulgated in two best-selling books. Moreover, the religious right exerts great power over decisions made in the US Congress. It is not hard to see how the age of Kali Yuga has arisen necessarily along with the predominant materialistic world-view. Matthew Arnold wrote of the ong withdrawing roar of the sea of faith. But the withdrawal has been under way much longer than perhaps he thought. For thousands of years, animistic beliefs have been giving way to the developing monotheistic religions. All the spirits, which used to inhabit the natural world, have been and are still being progressively withdrawn from it and "kicked upstairs", to be subsumed in one single Father God. In that he is now perceived as being separate from nature, this God has become more distant and less real than the spirits he replaced, and living nature has been debased to become merely a heap of dead matter out of which the raw materials for the human economy are to be mined. n this article, | want first to restate briefly what has been much written about: how the scientific way of thinking arose and has led us into this morass. | then consider how, strangely enough, science itself seems to be pointing to a way out. In support of this, I outline some recent scientific studies which could go a long way towards radically changing our world- view. Finally, | cite some initiatives already being undertaken to heal the world by meditation and suggest a few possible further developments. The Holistic World-View being Ushered in by Quantum Physics To reinforce the above (materialistic) world-view, the "church" of science over many centuries has come to insist that all truth, to be fully accepted, should pass the test of measurement. Note, however, that no matter what Email: rogerbt@onetel.com NEXUS ¢ 39 DECEMBER 2010 - JANUARY 20II www.nexusmagazine.com