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This section is theoretical, with some ideas that are controversial. You may want to skip or skim it. I present it so that you will have access to some of what is said about higher creativity in the philosophical circles that are now seeing a merger of science and spirituality, such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences, established by astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Some of the ideas will be presented again in the discussion of universal principles, physics, and mathematics (Chapters 9 and 10).

Not controversial is the belief of some creators that their ideas come from a higher power. (See above, the “inspirational” theories of the Daimon and the wind; and Chapter 3, The Process.) In Star Wars it is called “The Force,” and in The Matrix it is the ultimate reality. Some creators, like Einstein, Emerson, and Fellini, use the word “God.” However, this word can be controversial because it comes with so much cultural baggage. (For this reason one writer calls this force G.O.D.: a higher intelligence that is Governing, Organizing and Designing.¹⁰¹) You can call this power what you like: Spirit, a higher part of yourself, the “Unified Field,” “The Force,” or “what is trying to happen.”

Whatever you call it, the mystical view is that some creators feel a higher intelligence is helping and guiding their efforts. They believe that cooperating with this intelligence will help us, and trying to “go against the flow” will frustrate us.

This higher intelligence is said to dwell in a realm that has been given many names. Some mystical philosophers today call it the “Causal” realm because it holds the ideas that cause manifestation in our physical reality. A familiar version in philosophy courses comes from Plato, who called it the realm of the “Forms.”

Ken Wilber explains that this realm literally “pulls” on us: a “manifest omega pull on each individual and finite thing.”¹⁰² Physicist David Bohm would say that forms are unfolded in the implicate order, where they exist in potentiality until they have become physical and explicate.¹⁰³ Goswami, drawing on quantum theory, says that “thoughts exist in consciousness as transcendent potentiality of many possible meanings; collapse manifests them in a form.”¹⁰⁴ Einstein, who wanted to read the mind of God, sensed it as a Unified Field but was unable to prove it mathematically.

Journalist Lynne McTaggart explains that this “Unified Field” concept as it exists today is “not simply based on beliefs but based on science, on thousands of published scientific studies.”¹⁰⁵ Scientists interviewed for her book The Field said that they had “discovered . . . that . . . there was a giant matrix, a field of fields called the Zero Point Field,” a pulsating energy field “like an invisible web” connecting everything that exists.¹⁰⁶

They also discovered that we were made of the same basic material. On our most fundamental level, living beings, including human beings, were packets of quantum energy constantly exchanging information with this inexhaustible energy sea.¹⁰⁷

McTaggart’s research has shown that cultures as far-flung as “the aborigines, the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians, Indians, the Eastern religions like Buddhism and Taoism . . . all share a description of the rise of matter from a non-physical energy field.”¹⁰⁸

The Bhagavad Gita (VII.7) describes this field as a great web of consciousness, a web of idea-beads, a consciousness that connects and embraces All That Is:

mayi sarvam ida prota

sūtre maigaā iva.

On Me all this is strung,

Like rows of gems upon a string.

Commentator Swami Chidbhavananda explains that “Pure consciousness” itself is a thread, “the string-like supporter of the manifest worlds.”¹⁰⁹ We are the beads upon it.

The pearls in the necklace are necessarily uniform and homogeneous, and its thread, which is generally unseen, passes through the central core of every pearl, and holds them all, the big and the small, into a harmonious ornament of beauty . . . the same conscious Principle works through all.¹¹⁰

The cutting edge of mid-1990s science described this concept as superstring theory:

In this picture, each subatomic particle corresponds to a distinct resonance that vibrates only at a distinct frequency . . . think of a violin string, which can vibrate at different frequencies, creating musical notes like A, B, and C . . . In principle, the string can vibrate at any of an infinite number of different frequencies . . . what is fundamental is the string itself . . . According to string theory, if we could somehow magnify a point particle, we would actually see a small vibrating string . . . The string can, in turn, break into smaller strings or collide with other strings to form longer strings.¹¹¹

McTaggart describes this idea in everyday terms: “We’re a bit like an antenna, beaming and receiving information with our environment.”¹¹²

Another Eastern metaphor for this concept is Indra’s Net:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the Great God Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.¹¹³

Michael Talbot remarks, “This is the key to creativity, that every thought is contained in every other thought like the pearls in Indra’s net.”¹¹⁴

P.M.H. Atwater stresses that this web is real: that survivors of near-death experiences have seen it:

microscopic “threads” of luminous, vibrating light they see connecting everything and everyone together in a giant “web.” . . . They also say that once light pulsates harmoniously through any section of the webbing, regardless of distance or time span, synchronicity naturally results, signaling that one portion of the network now resonates with others of equal light.¹¹⁵

McTaggart describes this network as “the plenum of all energy in the universe in a basic ground state . . . a vast information headquarters . . . a recording mechanism . . . a vast telephone network with everything the universe constantly on the phone.”¹¹⁶ Like McTaggart, Atwater says that stories about this field appear in traditions “across the globe, and each describes the same basic type of invisible, interconnecting threads or energy webbing created by life-forms interacting with each other,” an “entire fabric net existent throughout the universe since the beginnings of time and space.”¹¹⁷ In the Huna tradition of Hawaii, the vibrating strings are called Aka Threads.¹¹⁸ In the Hopi tradition they are the web woven by Spider Grandmother.¹¹⁹ Carlos Castaneda describes them as “an egglike cluster of luminous fibers” seen by sorcerers around the human body.¹²⁰

David Bohm, discussing the microcosm in quantum physics, speaks in similar terms: “the interactions between different entities (i.e., electrons) constitute a single structure of indivisible links, so that the entire universe has to be thought of as an unbroken whole . . . Further, the non-local, non-causal nature of the relationships of elements distant from each other evidently violates the requirements of separateness and independence of fundamental constituents that is basic to any mechanistic approach.”¹²¹ Ervin Laszlo, who calls this network the “a-field,” writes of “a universe that is made up neither of just vibrating strings, nor of separate particles and atoms, but is instead constituted in the embrace of continuous fields and forces that carry information as well as energy.”¹²²

In biological terms this “a-field,” as described by Rupert Sheldrake, is a “morphic field” of “information”¹²³ that shapes the embryo in the womb and the plant in the garden. It is the reason that the apple tree knows not to grow peaches and the chameleon knows how to grow a new tail. This field of information is so creative and ever-evolving that once any member of a species has accomplished a task, it becomes easier for the others.

For instance, rats have been getting smarter at running laboratory mazes. In one experiment at Harvard the first generation of rats “made on average over 165 errors” before locating a “safe” exit from a tank of water. The thirtieth generation “made an average of only twenty errors.” This continued learning is evident even in rats from differing genetic pools and in different locations. A replication of the experiment in Melbourne showed “the first generation tested far quicker” than those at Harvard. There was also “a progressive increase in the rate of learning” in fifty generations over twenty years, even “amongst rats not descended from trained parents.”¹²⁴

Plato spoke of the Forms, the Divine Ideas that structure physical reality. Roger Penrose (Oxford University) says that in mathematics, such an ideational realm “provides a blueprint” for scientific investigation. He explains, “Platonic existence, as I see it, refers to the existence of an objective external standard . . . Such ‘existence’ could also refer to things other than mathematics, such as to morality or aesthetics.”¹²⁵ In fact, he posits the existence of three worlds: the Platonic realm of Truth-Morality-Beauty and the other worlds of Mentality and Physicality. Each, he believes, “possesses its own distinctive kind of existence, different from the other two.”¹²⁶ There is also a “mysterious connection between the worlds,” what Penrose calls “three profound mysteries.”¹²⁷

Rupert Sheldrake notes that the Platonic concept implies stasis: “All possible forms have always existed as timeless Forms, or as mathematical potentialities implicit in the eternal laws of nature.”¹²⁸ In other words, “A Platonic interpretation of the forms of organisms in terms of archetypal Ideas implies a one-way influence from the Idea to the organism, and the Idea itself undergoes no change.”¹²⁹ However, Sheldrake’s hypothesis implies continuing change as the organism and field act in synergy: “By contrast, the hypothesis of formative causation postulates a two-way flow of influence: from fields to organisms and from organisms to fields.”¹³⁰

Physicist Fred Alan Wolf elaborates on this idea:

A single event, wherever it occurs, in the brain or anywhere else in the universe, will not constitute an event of consciousness. You need two events. Consciousness is the relationship between two events via this offer-echo quantum-physical mechanism . . . Thus I suggest that the consciousness field is the product of these two quantum waves (U*U), and this product appears as a probability field that exists everywhere, not just in the brain, but everywhere.¹³¹

Rupert Sheldrake, as he summarizes the thinking of Terence McKenna, makes the same point:

The Cosmic Mind contains all possible forms and archetypes that are way out there in the future, and it somehow interacts with what’s going on now . . . The evolutionary imagination works by a kind of spark between the divine mind, or cosmic attractor, and present situations open to creativity.¹³²

We could think of these two “principles” as “the Indian Tantric notion of Shakti as energy and Shiva as the formative principle working together to create the world.”¹³³ Gregg Braden says “the energy that does the connecting is what [physicist Max] Planck described as the ‘matrix’ of everything.”¹³⁴ Professor Thomas Görnitz of Goethe Universitat sums up this theory: there is “no need and no place for any kind of dualism.” From atoms, to quanta, to strings, “the world is only spirit,” built on structures.¹³⁵

Edgar Cayce, called “the sleeping prophet” and “the father of holistic medicine,” stresses the same idea in his readings: “An entity, or soul, is a spark—or a portion—of the Whole, the First Cause; and thus is a coworker with the First Cause, or Purpose, which is the creative influence or force that is manifested in materiality.” (2079-1)¹³⁶

Though this view is still controversial rather than mainstream, it is becoming prevalent among some physicists and metaphysicians at “the cutting edge.”