Everything is Connected to Everything Else
About the outer and the inner world
Some people say that everything is connected to everything else. Physics does not confirm this. But there are phenomena that suggest this is indeed the case. In the following, I’m getting to the bottom of this and offer a perspective from which one can see that everything is connected to everything else ... and also how.
The scientific world view reflects our experience of separateness. For example, we have to approach or grasp something in order to connect with it. This outer world comprises space, matter, and energy. We are part of it with our body and perceive it through our sensory organs.
But who perceives the outer world and how? Well, that happens in our inner world. Some call it consciousness. This world comprises our perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and memories; it also includes our intuitions.
We are not alone in the outer world; we share it with other people, animals, plants, stones, etc, but they are all spatially separated from us. In our inner world, we are – seemingly – alone. We can only assume that other people also have an inner world; but we cannot know.
The inner world is, therefore, more important than the outer world, because we need it in order to know about the outer world and to experience it. We sometimes feel the need to share our inner world with someone. This desire is strong when we love. Loving happens in the inner world, but relates to someone or something in the outer world. When we love a person, we usually want that person to know that we love them and how we love them. But we can only communicate ourselves to them in the outer world. We use texts, pictures, or sounds to do this; perhaps touch. But no matter how hard we try, every attempt to express our inner world with the means of the outer world is only a shadow of what is actually inside us. This is a first hint that the inner world is bigger than the outer world.
Although we are usually alone in our inner world, when we love, we feel connected to the person we love ... no matter how far away they are in the outer world. It can also happen that we know something about them we cannot know according to the findings of traditional science. And even some people who are strangers to us know things about us they cannot know according to the findings of science. So we are probably not so alone in the inner world after all ...
We know a lot about the outer world. The natural sciences, above all physics, deal with this world. We know very little about the inner world – even though it is the prerequisite for knowing and exploring the outer world at all. Psychology ventures into the inner world ... but with very modest success; there is not even a satisfactory definition, let alone an explanation, for consciousness. I reflect on this in my article “Consciousness Is Not the Same as Awareness.”
The contents of our inner world, ie perceptions, feelings, thoughts, memories, and intuitions, can be summarized under one term: knowing. When you see something, you know what you see. When you love someone, you know you love. When you think of something, you know the thought. Knowing is a state of our inner world; knowing has no physical properties; it has no length, no weight, it doesn’t move; it is not measurable and therefore cannot be physically explored. The inner world of knowing is, therefore, fundamentally different from the outer world – and so the question arises: what “fabric” is knowing and, therefore, the inner world made of?
To put it bluntly, knowing is information. However, it is a completely different type of information than information in the outer world. In the outer world, information has a form; such as text, sound, or image. This formed information is local and therefore bounded ... simply because every form has boundaries.
Knowing is boundless. When you know something, eg when you love someone, it is boundless; it encompasses and permeates your entire inner world; you cannot separate it from any other knowing – neither from your perceptions nor from your thoughts; since you cannot separate it, you cannot delete it. You cannot un-think a thought. The information of the inner world is formless. I explain this world in my article “There Is More Than Just the Universe.”
Since formless information is boundless, all is interconnected in the world of formless information – eg feelings, thoughts, and memories. Quantum physicists have named a phenomenon of connectedness that they have researched ‘entanglement.’ I therefore call the world of formless information EL; this is an acronym formed from the letters E and L; it is the abbreviation for 'entanglement at large,' which is the characteristic property of this “fabric.”
But we are not the only ones with an inner world. Plants and animals also have one; they also know; they have perceptions, feelings, and intuitions. I describe the exact difference between them and us in my article “This Is the Difference Between Humans and Animals.” And according to the common interpretation of quantum physics, the elementary building blocks of matter are abstract; and that means that they are formless information. Therefore, the world of formless information is the basis of the physical world.
The physical world, in which things are separate from each other, therefore, is made from the world in which all is interconnected. This may seem paradoxical at first, but it can be interpreted as follows: “In the outer world, things appear to be separate from each other even though, in fact, they are not.” In this sense, the outer world is an illusion, because something is an illusion when it is not what it appears to be. In my article “How and Why the Universe Is an Illusion” I explain why EL, the world of formless information, is the only reality and why the universe is made of it. In the following, I explain how EL creates the universe.
EL has no space and no form. But since we are used to thinking spatially and in forms, EL is unimaginable for us. In order to visualize the unimaginable, we give EL a form “on loan;” one that depicts its most important properties.
Imagine EL as a data cloud in the form of an infinitely long and infinitely fast fiber optic cable, where all the (formless) information it contains, ie knowings, can be retrieved instantly at any time. Being connected to this cable means that all you know is automatically fed in, ie uploaded, and you can retrieve, ie download, all information from the cloud.
Now imagine a knitting machine knitting a scarf from this cable. It is a vertical knitting machine; you are looking from above and therefore only see the last row of knitting. Every moment a new row extends the scarf.
The cable is EL.
The last row is the present universe.
The scarf below the last row is the history of the universe.
Everything is knitted from EL; ie everything comprises formless information: both the universe, ie space, matter, and energy, and the history of the universe; the latter is called the Akashic Records in some traditions.
Everything in the universe is made up of the cable ... and therefore everything is connected to everything else. The cable – and therefore the scarf – contains all that someone or something in the universe once knew or knows now. This knowing is available anywhere in the universe at any time. The French philosopher Henry Bergson had this to say about it:
„Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.“
(Henry Bergson, quoted by Aldous Huxley in ‘Doors of Perception’)
This doesn’t just apply to us humans. Everything is connected to EL: also, animals, plants, cells, water, stones, molecules, atoms, and all atomic particles. Potentially, everything in the universe knows all; practically, it knows what it needs to know in order to fulfill its purpose as part of the whole.
References to EL as the source of all are not only part of ancient traditions such as Hermeticism and Advaita Vedanta, but even in modern entertainment products. In the movie ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,’ for example, there is the following scene: Valerian asks the computer to analyze a memory that had previously reached him in a flash. The computer replies: "Someone is sending you these images. They could come from the present or the past – and from anywhere in the universe." Also, the ‘Matrix’ film trilogy and in the movie ‘Lucy’ used the above insight.
The “knitting theory” expands the traditional scientific world model by adding EL as a second world to the physical universe and describing the emergence of the universe from EL – at least metaphorically. To understand the transition from EL to the physical universe in detail, one needs quantum physics considerations. They are simple enough so that I will describe them in a future article.
A theory is the same as a perspective. The word ‘theory’ is of Greek origin, the word ‘perspective’ is of Latin origin. A theory or perspective is neither right nor wrong. It is only more or less useful, such as for explaining phenomena. This applies to the traditional scientific perspective as well as to the knitting theory. The question now is: Does the knitting theory provide better explanations than the physical perspective?
For the outer world, it provides the same explanations – with one exception. For the inner world, the knitting theory provides explanations for all known phenomena, whereas there are no explanations in the physical perspective. This is because the physical world view ignores the inner world. Therefore, the new theory is more useful.
The one exception in the outer world is the following phenomenon, which was first observed in electrons. The physical perspective includes the insight that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Therefore, information cannot be transmitted any faster. However, quantum physicists have observed an instantaneous exchange of information. Although this contradicts the laws of physics, scientists cannot help but accept their frequently confirmed measurement results and thus the phenomenon. It’s called quantum entanglement and has already been confirmed experimentally with photons, neutrinos, electrons, molecules, and even small diamonds.
There is no explanation for this phenomenon in the traditional scientific perspective. Albert Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance.” The knitting theory provides a simple explanation: objects know about each other; like everything else, they are knitted from EL and are, therefore, connected to each other via EL.
In traditional science, only the smallest things are entangled. In the knitting theory, everything is entangled – the small and the large. Therefore, I have called this world ‘entanglement at large.’
In future articles, I will discuss other phenomena that science cannot explain, but knitting theory can – such as the placebo effect, telepathy, and clairvoyance.
Further reading:
Article “Consciousness Is Not the Same as Awareness”
Article “There Is More Than Just the Universe”
Article “This Is the Difference Between Humans and Animals”
Article “How and Why the Universe Is an Illusion”
Also:
Article “Thoughts are Not Products of the Brain”
Bernhardt, I emailed this article to my friend and he said he spontaneously discovered your book on consciousness at the library several months ago.
He sent me this Utube link on awareness and consciousness.
Your voice is calm and soothing.
https://youtu.be/P5cShj2CEXQ
Appreciate your focus on origins of definitions.
Wish I had written this!
You connect every thing in nature with the abstract world.
From small particles to large bodies in space.
The end of the movie LUCY shows everything morphing into everything else.
From or with computer data or inFORMation.
Expressing total unity beyond separation.