9781439157954

For centuries, Western science and many Western cultures have taught us to think of ourselves as individuals. But today, a revolutionary new understanding is emerging from the laboratories of the most cutting-edge physicists, biologists, and psychologists: What matters is not the isolated entity, but the space between things, the relationship of things. The Bond. By international bestselling author Lynne McTaggart , The Bond is the culmination of her groundbreaking work. It offers a completely new, scientific story of life and the human experience, one that challenges the very way we conceive of ourselves and our world. The Bond shows that the essential impulse of all life is a will to connect rather than a drive to compete. In fact, we are inescapably connected, hardwired to each other at our most elemental levelfrom cells to whole societies. The desire to help others is so necessary that we experience it as one of our chief pleasures, as essential as eating and having sex, and we succeed and prosper only when we see ourselves as part of a greater whole. Every conflict that occurswhether between husband and wife, social or racial groups, or nationsis resolved only when we can fully see and embrace the spacethe bondbetween us. McTaggart offers detailed recommendations to help foster more holistic thinking, more cooperative relationships, and more unified social groups. Blending interviews and human stories into an absorbing narrative, she shows how: " A simple daily practice conditions the brain to enable you to become more empathetic toward others " A new way of speaking and listening can overcome polarization, helping the staunchest of enemies to become close friends " People who fire together wire together: Whenever a group works together for a common goal, the brains of all parties begin to get on the same wavelength, strengthening the bond within the group " Fairness is more powerful than unfairness: A small group of individuals committed to strong reciprocity can â€œinvadeâ€ a population of self-interested individuals and create a fairer society The Bond offers a breathtaking, visionary plan for a new way to live, in harmony with our true nature and with each other, and a new way to heal our relationships, our neighborhoods, and our world.

Lynne McTaggart is an internationally recognized spokesperson on the science of consciousness and the award-winning author of five books, including The Intention Experiment and The Field. She lives in London.

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INTRODUCTION

We sense that we have reached the end of something. Since the millennium, commentators of every variety have been trying to get a handle on the collective significance of the continuous crises besetting us in modern times: banking crises, terrorist crises, sovereign debt crises, climate change crises, energy crises, food crises, ecological crises, man-made and otherwise.

“The world as we know it is going down,” a Wall Street broker told reporters in September 2008, after Lehman Brothers collapsed and Morgan Stanley threatened to follow suit. It is the “end of capitalism as we know it,” declared the filmmaker Michael Moore when the American auto giant General Motors filed for bankruptcy. It is the end of our dependence on fossil fuel, announced President Barack Obama, about the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. It is the end of nature, wrote Bill McKibben in his book of the same name. It is the end of oil, wrote the journalist Paul Roberts in his book of the same name. It is the end of food because it is the end of oil, declared Roberts in his follow-up book. For those who take stock in the Mayan Long Count calendar and the apocalyptic significance of 2012, it is the beginning of the end of the world.

But the crises we face on many fronts are symptomatic of a deeper problem, with more potential repercussions than those of any single cataclysmic event. They are simply a measure of the vast disparity between our definition of ourselves and our truest essence. For hundreds of years we have acted against nature by ignoring our essential connectedness and defining ourselves as separate from our world. We’ve reached the point where we can no longer live according to this false view of who we really are. What’s ending is the story we’ve been told up until now about who we are and how we’re supposed to live—and in this ending lies the only path to a better future.

In this book, I have an audacious mission: to revolutionize the way you live your life. This book is going to rewrite the scientific story you’ve been told about who you are, because the current version has reduced us to our lowest common denominator. At this very moment you live contrary to your truest nature. I hope to help you to recapture your birthright, which has been sabotaged not only by modern society but, more fundamentally, by modern science. I wish to wake you up to who you really are, to do nothing less than to return to you your authentic self.

The leitmotif of our present story is the hero up against it all. We take it for granted that our life’s journey is meant to be a struggle. Consequently we remain constantly vigilant, poised to wrestle with every behemoth—at home, at work, among our acquaintances and friends—that strays across our path. No matter how pleasant our lives, the vast majority of us maintain a stance of operating contra mundi, with every encounter some sort of battle to be fought: against the coworkers who seek to usurp our jobs or promotions, or the students who raise the bell curve against which we are judged; against the people who take our subway seat, the shops that overcharge us, the neighbors who have a Mercedes when we drive a Volvo, and even the husband or wife who has the temerity to insist on maintaining an opinion that is different from ours.

This idea that we operate against the world has its origin in our basic understanding that this self of ours, the thing we call I, exists as a separate entity, a unique creation of genetic code that lives apart from everything else out there.

The most enduring statement we make about the human condition, the central fact of our existence, is our solitude, our sense of separation from the world. We regard as self-evident that we exist as self-contained, isolated beings, living out our individual dramas, while everything else—other atoms and other cells, other living things, the land masses, the planets, even the air we breathe—exists as something distinct and wholly separate.

Although we begin life from the uniting of two entities, from there on in, science tells us, we are essentially on our own. The world is the irrefutable other, carrying on impassively with or without us. Our hearts, we believe, beat finally and painfully alone.

This paradigm of competitive individualism offers us a view of life as a heroic struggle for dominion over hostile elements and a share of strictly limited resources. There’s not enough out there, and others may be fitter than we, so we have to do our damnedest to get hold of it first.

A multitude of influences—religious, political, economic, scientific, and philosophical—writes the story that we live by. Nevertheless most of the big ideas we have about the universe and what it is to be human derive from three revolutions: the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment, and the two Industrial Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which transformed the cultural and socioeconomic conditions of the West into our modern developed world. These movements largely created the modern sense of our own individuality by drastically altering our vision of the universe from a harmonious, benevolent, and interconnected whole to an amalgam of separate and unrelated things, competing with each other for survival.

The Scientific Revolution launched a relentless march toward atomization, as scientists believed they could understand the whole of the universe by studying its individual components.