If we want to expand, whether that's our business, our skills, our minds or indeed our life, the first question we should ask is "What's my limit?" To get a sense of where our limits lie, a good place to look is the universe.
Most scientists agree that in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded into what we perceive it to be today, filled with stars, planets and galaxies. This is known as the inflation theory. Impossible for us to grasp, other than as a concept, is the proposition that this inflation continues forever, giving us multiverses coexisting according to their own rules of physics.
As a child I remember feeling uneasy whenever I tried to think about an ever-expanding universe, expanding into nothing. What was there before the universe was born? How can space go on forever? These impossible questions made me feel queasy and strange.
The mind simply can't handle these kinds of questions. Add to this the idea of multiple universes all co-existing at the same time and we go well beyond the bounds of our intellect. However, our intellectual limitation, if we grasp it, is the key to expanding our potential.
How do we manage what we cannot conceive?
Intellectually we can only manage ideas like inflation theory by conceptualising them. This is I assume how the likes of Professor Stephen Hawkins manage to work around these theories.
Interestingly, the inflation theory didn’t sit well with Professor Stephen Hawkins. The problem as he saw it was that it was unreconcilable with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Published after his death was his counter theory, developed with Professor Thomas Hertog, that the universe is like a giant hologram.
Hertog said: "It's a very precise mathematical notion of holography that has come out of string theory in the last few years which is not fully understood but is mind-boggling and changes the scene completely."
As holograms are two dimensional this renders the three-dimensional world we know an illusion.
And, if the universe is a hologram ....then so are we.
As hard as this is to conceive, this is what the mystics have known and spoken of for thousands of years.
How does all this help us?
How could the sages of the past, many thousands of years ago, across many different cultures, and at a time when the distance that separated them mattered, all come to the same conclusion? How when advanced maths and physics were not yet conceived of, could these men and women have worked this out?
The answer is that they didn't think it, they felt it.
The body can feel beyond the limits of what the intellect can conceive. The only way the intellect can handle 'infinity' or 'limitless' is to conceptualise it. A nice trick - but that's like trying to experience another country by reading about it. The body, on the other hand, can feel infinity and limitless in all its glory.
Embryonic stem cells
For those wishing to dismiss the holographic theory, it is telling that this is exactly what we find in our embryonic stem cells, which can grow into any cell type. This means that within every embryonic cell is the information of the whole body, which makes each cell a hologram of the whole. Is it so far-fetched that the universe is merely a replication of what we find within ourselves?
What happens when our mind is unleashed
In her deeply moving TED talk, brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor tells the story of the morning of 10 December 1996, when a blood vessel exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain; leaving her unable to talk, write or remember anything of her life. With the logical, ordered, left side of her brain disabled, she was reliant solely on the right side, which processes the world kinaesthetically - through our felt senses. Information that is collected by the body.
Her world had become a very different place.
"I look down at my arm and I realise I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end." Jill explained as she described how her stroke affected the way she processed everything around her.
Her harrowing yet beautifully moving story concludes with her in hospital: "I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive", "I remember thinking there is no way I would be able to shrink the enormousness of myself back into this tiny little body."
Thankfully Jill made a full discovery so that she was able to tell her story and illuminate the limitations of our logical left brain compared to the limitlessness of our right.
Processing the world as a whole
Our left brain hemisphere sees us as separate, whilst our right brain and the rest of our body process the world as a whole. Our body has no problem feeling the universe as never-ending and boundless, it's our left hemisphere brain that can't cope with it.
This is crucial in understanding that when we think, we bring only part of our intelligence to the challenges we face, creative or otherwise, and in doing so we deny ourselves the full picture.
When we feel, we complete the picture and that can set our creativity free
Our innate body wisdom works as a whole, contrary to our philosophy, which considers that our head holds all our intelligence.
When we bring only part of our intelligence to the challenges we face, we deny ourselves the full picture.
The word hologram comes from the combination of two Greek words: ‘holo” which means whole and “gamma” which means message. This of course is the purpose of working with the body. It allows us to get the whole message rather than the limited viewpoint of the intellect. And that is how the mystics of the ages were able to understand thousands of years ago what some scientists today are only just getting to grips with.
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