Olive, a bright young woman, commented on the tendency of privileged Westerners to romanticize poverty. I think this is likely because the struggle to survive can make people feel a lot more “fulfilled” than the struggle of waiting in traffic or dealing with your in-laws. Various “first-world problems” like your cell phone dying or getting a computer virus seem big, but really in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big of a deal. We can try to be grateful just for having food on our table, which is the origin of Thanksgiving. But really, we’re still dealing with an obesity epidemic rather than problems with hunger.

A lot of people who were born and raised upper middle class don’t really appreciate what they have because they’ve never known anything else. Even when they travel to remote places, they know they can get back to the comfort of civilization. They’ve never had to, for instance, live in 40 degree celsius heat (over 100 degrees F) without air conditioning while undergoing a drought. They’ve also probably never really faced death.

I grew up in China pre-development, and lived in what would be considered by American standards to be dire poverty. My mother and I also survived on very little when I was younger. My husband volunteered in a developing country in Africa, lived alone for over a year, lost like 60lbs and had to be hospitalized. Those early life experiences make us feel less inclined to go “discover ourselves in another country.” We’ve already sought out spirituality and gone through a lot of hardships. We also know there are people who have gone through way worse, and it gives us perspective.

These issues run quite deep, and I don’t think they can be solved by a mere return to “traditional values.” Without traditional conditions like brutal hardships, close-knit families and communities, constant threat of disease, starvation, and death, those values are merely lip service. We don’t really want to give up our modern conveniences and goods, throw out our microwaves, electronics and automobiles, or move out of large metropolitan centers back to small huts in villages. So what next?

The other day I listened to an NPR radio program about a guy who was a huge Apple fan, loved Apple products and bought the newest and latest gadget every time. Then one day he heard about some pictures taken by Chinese factory workers who put together these Apple products, and decided to see the factories in person. What he found was quite astonishing. There are people who work like slaves to produce our electronics. They work crazy hours and live in squalor.

Suppose that people boycott Foxconn, which is even reputed to be one of the better Chinese factories for working conditions, and stop buying electronics. Is this realistic? Can it even happen on a widescale basis? If it does, won’t that hamper China’s economic development, which is now tied to the world’s economy, fiat currency and economic models of constant growth? And who are we to say they can’t modernize just like the West has done? So on, and so on.

The situation is quite complicated, and there are no easy solutions. So we keep on doing what we have been doing until something derails these tracks. If you ask me, I think the real problem is not material poverty, but spiritual poverty.

I have always loved ideas and theories, new and old. Science aspires to uncover via observation, experimentation, and applying the scientific method in a systematic and logical fashion. When reading the Law of One and other texts of a similar nature, I mentally search for ways to connect the material back to scientific knowledge. For instance, the colors of the seven chakras or energy centers correspond to the colors of the visible spectrum, which also change depending on the amount or level of energy:

Adding continuously to the total energy of some radiating body would make it radiate red light, orange light, yellow light, green light, blue light, violet light, and so on in that order. But that is not so for otherwise larger suns and larger pieces of iron in a forge would glow with colours more toward the violet end of the spectrum. To change the color of such a radiating body it is necessary to change its temperature, and increasing its temperature changes the quanta of energy that are available to excite individual atoms to higher levels and permit them to emit photons of higher frequencies.

In 1924, a French physicist named Louis de Broglie proposed the idea that all matter exhibits properties of both particles and waves. A quantum particle will act as a wave when an experiment is performed to measure its wave-like properties, and like a particle when examining its particle-like properties.

It is a paradox in our common scheme of understanding, but this paradox is resolved by seeing the universe as a holographic projection. The NOVA series on PBS, The Fabric of the Cosmos, explains the holographic principle, the theory that the universe itself might be a hologram.

In 1982, another French physicist, Alain Aspect, discovered that under certain circumstances, subatomic particles are able to communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. Renowned British-American physicist David Bohm, who had worked alongside Einstein and contributed to the Manhattan Project, proposed that this experiment shows the holographic nature of the universe.

According to Bohm, subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another, not because they are sending a mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. Thus, particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. As Michael Talbot wrote in The Holographic Universe, explaining the principle behind the hologram:

A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

If the universe is holographic, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are interconnected. The various phenomena of the universe that we observe on the macro level are informed by the subatomic particles at the microcosmic level. The human brain itself may be a part of a continuum, connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the universe, it may be occasionally make forays into the larger consciousness and have transpersonal experiences.

In the 1950s, Stansilov Grof, a Czech psychologist, conducted research with LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool. One female patient of his suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsulated in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, Grof later had a conversation with a zoologist who confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman’s experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree. Grof also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. Some individuals also gave accounts of out-of-body journeys, precognitions, and regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

Synthesizing all of this and applying it to the Law of One material, the following passages begin to make some sense:

You are not part of a material universe. You are part of a thought. You are dancing in a ballroom in which there is no material. You are dancing thoughts. You move your body, your mind, and your spirit in somewhat eccentric patterns for you have not completely grasped the concept that you are part of the original thought.

Consider, if you will, that the universe is infinite. This has yet to be proven or disproven, but we can assure you that there is no end to your selves, your understanding, what you would call your journey of seeking, or your perceptions of the creation. That which is infinite cannot be many, for many-ness is a finite concept. To have infinity you must identify or define that infinity as unity; otherwise, the term does not have any referent or meaning. In an Infinite Creator there is only unity.

The next step is an infinite reaction to the creative principle following the Law of One in one of its primal distortions, freedom of will. Thus many, many dimensions, infinite in number, are possible. The energy moves from the intelligent infinity due first to the outpouring of randomized creative force, this then creating patterns which in holographic style appear as the entire creation no matter which direction or energy is explored. These patterns of energy begin then to regularize their own local, shall we say, rhythms and fields of energy, thus creating dimensions and universes.

The galaxy and all other things of material of which you are aware are products of individualized portions of intelligent infinity. As each exploration began, it, in turn, found its focus and became co-Creator. Using intelligent infinity each portion created an universe and allowing the rhythms of free choice to flow, playing with the infinite spectrum of possibilities, each individualized portion channeled the love/light into what you might call intelligent energy, thus creating the so-called Natural Laws of any particular universe.

Each universe, in turn, individualized to a focus becoming, in turn, co-Creator and allowing further diversity, thus creating further intelligent energies regularizing or causing Natural Laws to appear in the vibrational patterns of what you would call a solar system. Thus, each solar system has its own, shall we say, local coordinate system of illusory Natural Laws. It shall be understood that any portion, no matter how small, of any density or illusory pattern contains, as in an holographic picture, the One Creator which is infinity. Thus all begins and ends in mystery.

Each time we make a choice, we create new possibilities, new distortion in the cosmic oneness. Since “all are one,” all possibilities come into being and are explored infinitely.  As Brian Greene said in the last part of the NOVA series, Universe or Multiverse, “If there are an infinite number of universes in the multiverse, somewhere there’s a place where almost everything is identical to ours, except for the slightest details.”

Thus, there are no paradoxes. All possibilities exist.