In 1998 I persuaded my publishers to fund what was essentially a voyage without a compass — to see if there was such a thing as “human energy fields”.

In the course of trying to find a scientific explanation for homeopathy and spiritual healing, I inadvertently uncovered the makings of a new science.

At a certain point I began to recognize, first with wonder and then alarm, that I had trespassed into dangerous new territory, a fledging science in the very act of its creation. The scientific foundation that we had all believed in, on which all our confident assertions about ourselves and our place in the world presently rested, was disintegrating right in front of me. The book that I’d talked my way into writing was going to require no less than redefining our present concept of reality.

For a number of years, I was patiently tutored in quantum physics by some 75 frontier scientists. I badgered, cajoled, demanded and wheedled from each one of them countless hours, up to 20 interviews apiece, teasing out explanations, eventually wresting some crude translation for concepts that often exist for the physicist purely as mathematics. What exactly is quantum coherence? Why does the Zero Point Field exist?

I would take their frequently incomprehensible answers and play them back via a metaphor until we could both agree on a lay approximation.

For several years, I paced my hallway, sobbed at my desk, ignored my children, and left my other work in a pile on my desk. I held nightly discussions with my husband, a philosophy graduate, on arcane subjects: What exactly are time and space? If we aren’t looking, does the universe disappear?

“Take time out of it and it all makes sense,” Bob Jahn once remarked to me in what was meant as a throwaway line. Was that possible? Or, more to the point, was that now an imperative?

At a certain point, I began to write in a manner suggesting that the process was happening through me. Every morning I would go to my computer, and words and concepts would pour out of me in a language that felt foreign — until I recognized that I’d found a new voice and a new subject, or in fact they had finally found me. I would reread the book when it was first published with a sense of astonishment that any of it was in fact my work.

I launched my journalistic career in the 1970s as an investigative reporter, and that hard, fact-based approach to my work has never left me. I am not given to Eastern esoterica or mysticism, and I tend to decry the fluffy end of New Age spirituality, all claims of ‘quantum’ medicine without hard evidence, and any overarching or inchoate uses of the term ‘energy’. There is little of the woo-woo about me.

Nevertheless, the process of creating The Field changed the messenger. Once this alchemical process was finished, I emerged as a person not only with a different voice, but also with a radically different world view. The remarkable discoveries of these scientists suggested to me that modern man was viewing the world through a blurred lens, and that applying these new discoveries to our lives would require nothing less than making our world anew.

Joan Didion once observed that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Of all our stories, it is the scientific ones that most define us. Those stories create our perception of the universe and how it operates, and from this, we shape all our societal structures: our relationships with each other and our environment, our methods of doing business and educating our young, of organizing ourselves into towns and cities, of defining the borders of our countries and our planet.

Our current scientific story, based on the theories of Isaac Newton, describes a reliable and well-behaved universe in which all matter is thought to move within three-dimensional space and time according to certain fixed laws. This, in its essence, is a story that idealizes separateness. From the moment we are born, we are told that for every winner there must be a loser. From that constricted vision we have fashioned our world.

The Field tells a radically new scientific story. The latest chapter in our scientific story, written by a group of largely unknown frontier scientific explorers, suggests that at our essence, we exist as a unity, a relationship — utterly interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment.

The implications of this new story on our understanding of life and the design of our society are extraordinary. If a quantum field holds us all together in its invisible web, we will have to rethink our definitions of ourselves and what exactly it is to be human. If we’re not separate, we can no longer think in terms of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’. We have to reconsider how we choose and carry out our work, structure our communities and bring up our children. We have to imagine another way to live, an entirely new way to ‘be’.

According to the hundreds of letters I have received since the first publication of The Field, the meaning of this book is different for every reader. Nevertheless, everyone has understood that its central thrust is the hope of new possibility. At a time when the old scientific story, with its emphasis on technical mastery of the universe, threatens our planet with extinction, The Field offers an alternative future. With every unorthodox question asked, with every unlikely answer, frontier scientists such as those featured in The Field remake our world. May they and their ilk light our way.

© Lynne McTaggart 2008

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