We are all connected — the (sometimes tricky) art of letting go and be happy

This essay has previously been published as episode #25 on Mind the Shift podcast.

We are all connected.

Not just in the trivial sense that we have common interests and things like that. And not just we humans, but everything in this world is connected in the quantum soup it all exists in.

You know, 99.9999 — I can’t even remember the number of nines after the point — percent of our bodies consists of what we would call nothing. We would call it nothing because it is space, space between what we call the elementary particles that constitute what we call matter.

But that space isn’t nothing, it’s packed with energy. Scientists are trying to figure out what dark energy is, the enormous amounts of energy they reckon must be there in order to explain certain properties of the universe. I guess it is the energy that is jam packed throughout the ”nothingness”, the space that practically is everything in the physical world. A ”unified field” is probably a more accurate term to use. Listen to what Nassim Haramein has to say about these things.

And there’s more: Not even those elementary particles that constitute 0.0000 something percent of everything are particles in the way we normally perceive such things. They are also packages of energy, densified portions of that unified energy field.

When I went to school the structure of an atom was basically described as things rotating around things. Extremely tiny things, obviously, but nevertheless things. The physical world isn’t described that way anymore.

And since everything is connected, the notion that we are entities that are completely separated from every other entity must be completely false, of course. The universe and its dark energy isn’t something that is ”out there”, and we are walking around ”down here”, where everything is neatly separated into physical ”things”. No. We, our bodies and our non-physical aspects, are all bathing in that same field or dark energy or quantum soup as the Andromeda galaxy, the planet Jupiter and one single quark sailing across the Kuiper belt.

All of which means that separation is, in its essence, a meaningless concept. We can imagine it here in this dense dimension — and we’re designed to imagine it — but that imagination is to be likened with a dream, really. A very vivid and credible dream, no doubt, when we’re in the middle of it.

But the truth of the matter is that you are the centre of the universe. ”Wow, now he sounds like a megalomaniac”, you think. Well, megalomaniacs have a point, but they go grossly wrong when they believe they are the only centres of the universe. Every consciousness is.

Everything that you take in, what you see, hear, feel, sense, is your consciousness. And your particular perspective is unique. The universe as perceived from your consciousness cannot exist without your conscious perception of it. If you weren’t there to experience it, it would cease to be.

So, everything exists in this unified field, this quantum soup, and this must mean that also everything that we haven’t yet experienced on this physical plane exists. It’s just that here on earth there is a delay. Things don’t happen as soon as they are visualized by some conscious being. It takes what we call time. We have to wait. But every one of the billions of potential events and things, every possibility, was created already in the Big Bang, when time and space started. So we kind of just have to find it, pick it up and manifest it.

Of course, we have no way of understanding exactly how everything interacts. That’s why I think it works to focus on one’s intentions. As many spiritual guides have said: try to feel your intention, your desire, deeply in your heart as if it had already manifested. With gratitude and joy, that is.

It’s not self-deception, because on some quantum level it already exists — and when it finally manifests itself also on this inert earth plane it will probably not be exactly in the way you pictured it, but most likely in the way that suits all involved parties best.

Another way of putting it is that everything exists simultaneously, and you are pulled towards what you by virtue of your energies are poised to experience but which is not yet physically present.

I think focusing on intention by way of the heart is basically the same thing as prayer (well, prayer said the right way, not the top-down exercise traditional religions have made it).

If you worry, or worse, if you are convinced that what you wish for will never manifest, well, guess what will happen?

I believe it was Russell Brand I heard express this well. He said: worrying is praying for what you don’t want.

But of course, it’s not always easy to trust your inner power in this physical world.

Not only is there a disheartening delay. Our bodies are full of emotions that scream for attention. Our brains produce obsessive thoughts that lure us here and tempt us there.

No one should judge anyone who falls prey to these enticements. We’re human, and it’s all part of the human experience. Maybe it’s even as it should be. Some say we grow by passing through our frustrations and our pain, not by bypassing them.

And no one should judge anyone who says they don’t believe a thing of what I am talking about here, or even claims that what I’m saying points to an irresponsible way of living. A worldview is a worldview, nothing more, nothing less. Regardless of which one we embrace we are the same humans. Our worldviews are not who we are, and even less so our opinions. Those are just temporary mental constructs. Thoughts.

So. It’s not always easy. But I am trying, and I think it is making my life a little easier. Or rather, my life situation. My life, as every life, is perfect in its essence, and then my physical manifestation ends up in more or less adverse life situations.

In my experience, things work out the best when I focus on ”problems” (i put that word in quotes because what we consider a problem often encapsulates a possibility or an opening) for a short while, in meditation or whenever during the day, and then let go. I mean truly let go, which is the most tricky part. And that is a paradox, since on one level it ought to be the easiest, most basic thing to do: thinking intensely and obsessively should of course be what is hard and cumbersome, but we are so conditioned to doing that, and especially to believing that this is the responsible and sensible thing to do. We think that if we stop thinking we might lose track of that thing we’ve set our minds to, we might even regress back into some kind of child-like oblivious lifestyle…

Exactly. That child-like mindset is probably what is most needed to most easily reach our personal goals.

It’s important that your goals are your own true inner goals. Follow your passion. Don’t follow goals others have set up for you, be it directly or in the shape of structures like careers

Following what you are passionate about is the most important path, but that is an overarching goal. On that path you will have to make all kinds of smaller choices, which you sometimes might consider obstacles, or problems. They are all in fact daubs of color in the magnificent artwork of the life you are painting, but in the moment we see them as separate. Often as distractions.

Anyway: When you do succeed in completely letting go it is, as I mentioned, an enormously liberating feeling. It’s almost as if you weigh less.

You suddenly see that the sun is shining and there is a squirrel in the pine tree, and you feel like taking a walk down to the waterfront. And you do, and you meet somebody you like. You have a chat and realise you live not so far from each other, and you decide to have a coffee at your friend’s house, and you end up having an exciting conversation which leads to a couple of new ideas about your business. You walk back home with a glow in your heart, and when you get back and open your laptop your eye catches the heading of an email that solves a problem you have been wrestling with for some time.

Two years ago, my wife / soul mate and myself decided we should give each other more freedom and live separately. We saw this more or less as an act of love. We are still best friends, and it’s hard to imagine us not being that.

After we decided to do this, there was a period of several months, maybe a year, when I did a specific affirmation. I said it out loud almost daily during long walks (sometimes people I passed looked weirdly at me). The core message of the affirmation was that I was ”working with video and audio productions, explaining life and the world”, and that I and my associates ”were spanning the border between science and what we normally call spirituality, because there is no true contradiction between those two world views, it’s a false dichotomy”. Then I said something about the growing number of listeners, that I would eventually do most of my productions in English and that working with these things had made me meet many of the most amazing people in my life.

Not long ago I took up the affirmation again a couple of times, but it felt a bit lame. What I was saying out loud was basically a description of my life situation right now.

When my wife and I finally separated, to the best of our ability we let the process unfold the way it wanted to and tried not to force anything. We totally trusted our real estate agent. We got far more money for the house we sold than we had anticipated. We both managed to buy a two-bedroom apartment that we loved, both in the same area.

Around that time, my old father fell terminally sick. I had to handle the move out of the house and the move into the apartment at the same time as I had to visit my father 400 kilometers away a lot more often. I then had to administer the selling of his apartment. About a month after that deal was done, my father passed away. That meant that I had to handle everything around that, including the funeral. The pandemic struck about a week after he died. The funeral was barely allowed to take place as planned.

It all worked out miraculously smoothly, because no two events ever clashed. I was always able to finish one task before the next one needed attention. I never felt burnt out. I believe my sincere attempt to be aligned with the universe, my higher self, the quantum soup or whatever you want to call it, helped me get through that practically and emotionally very hectic period.

”Oh”, say many in this reason-loving society, ”this all sounds very mysterious, almost magical. You may believe some ’force’ is helping you here, but It can’t be a real thing, of course”.

Since we are all connected, individual growth and evolution are mirrored in the collective. I heard an interview on the London Real podcast with the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker. I think it was last year. He talked at length about his findings that humankind has steered away from violent behavior on practically every level for thousands of years. When asked whether this was likely to continue he said: ”I don’t think there is a direction to history, because that’s kind of mystical, and I’m not a mystic.”

That is kind of an astonishing answer. Pinker is adamant that humankind has relentlessly moved away from violence by successively changing attitudes and introducing rules and laws that ban violence, but when asked about the reasons it seems he thinks the development could just as well have gone the other way. Well, then my question is: why, then, hasn’t it done exactly that during large swathes of all these thousands of years?

By the way, Pinker is one of my role-models. That doesn’t mean we have to be on the same page in every book, obviously.

Here’s my take on this: life is mystical and magical. What isn’t mystical about you even being here, and being conscious of your being here? Why were you born in the first place? And why will you suddenly be unborn and not be here on this planet any more? Where were you before you were born? Why do you get emotional when you hear beautiful music that you’ve never heard before? What is music? It’s soundwaves, but what is it that makes you react? Why does the universe exist at all? What was before the Big Bang? Now, tell me that all that is fully Newton-science rational and has nothing to do with magic.

Seriously, I don’t think we need to call life mystical or magical, but what people call magical is sometimes closer to what I think life really is. One day, it will all be included in what we call science.

When you have this mindset, much of the mundane goings-on in this world seems weird, almost incomprehensible. The contrast is sometimes stark.

Diving into the news or some crass novel or engaging in some conflict-oriented conversation, it is all too easy to get pulled down into lower vibrations of fear, but even there an underlying feeling of connectedness to everything that is will never completely leave you once you have realized the true nature of that connectedness.

Perhaps death is a bit off topic. But it seems to me that much of the worry, the anxiety, the agony out there in the world can be derived from our fear of death. Sometimes I think this fear is very strange.

Death is the only thing we can be sure of, besides the fact that we exist and have at one point been born into our physical bodies.

Other than that we don’t have a clue. I could die the minute I walk out the door. Nobody on earth has any idea what will happen two minutes from now.

Therefore it’s really a stretch to imply, as some seem to do, that it is unfair, maybe even unnatural to die away from this life.

Many other phenomena are more unnatural. Like agonizing about dying. Or agonizing at all. Suffering.

Pain is real enough, but suffering is something different and in my book rather unnatural. Pain passes and can be learnt from, but suffering comes from dwelling on some pain that is no longer present. Suffering is what we should stay away from. And herein lies yet another paradox:

I don’t think it’s death per se that is terrifying. You may either believe that nothing comes after or that you return to a higher dimension — the same one you left when you were born, presumably — but death itself is not what scares the hell out of us, it is the suffering that emerges when we linger on the fear of death.

And let me tell you a story that points to the ultimate death fear paradox. My best friend in my teens and into my 20’s was a wonderfully talented, fun and generous person, but his mind was more sensitive and more tormented than most of us understood. He had a fear of death that was so large that it eventually became unbearable. He ended his own life.

My dear aunt died last week, on the same day that I published a podcast episode with Dr Eben Alexander, who tells about the journey he made to a heavenly realm during a week of coma, when his brain was all but destroyed.

This coincidence — or synchronicity — made me reflect.

My aunt was the last of her generation in my family that I have had any contact with. My mother passed away seven years ago. I am sad that my aunt is no longer among us. She was wonderfully caring and good-hearted and was loved by many. But I’m not sad for her. She lived a long life, 87 years, and she had the good fortune of dying from a massive stroke just a couple of days after having happily celebrated her birthday in good shape together with loved ones.

Now, I personally believe she is in a good place now, a realm more real than this world, as many near-death experiencers have described it. But I think I would have handled her death in much the same way had I not fully believed that.

Suffering comes from dwelling on fear of imagined things, things we don’t know anything about, the unreal.

I haven’t read the book ”A Course in Miracles”, unfortunately, but I know the first lines:

Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.