An Atheist's Journey to Spirituality

^{Photo by NASA}

 The following is a condensed excerpt from Second Life: An Atheist's Journey to Spirituality by Anne Cooper.

 After my session with Melissa [in which Melissa connected with my dead son Todd], I remained in a state of suspended disbelief. The experience made my ideas about life, death, and how the world works obsolete. Like old maps depicting some other time and place, they no longer corresponded to where I lived. I let go and wandered into unknown territory, full of strange ideas I would have dismissed in my first life with a snide, patronizing comment. 

Science, not religion, was my point of departure. I had read a couple books on Einstein’s theory of relativity and, with a lot of reading and re reading, grasped the basic concept, that time and space were relative to the position and speed of the observer. Quantum physics, the study of subatomic particles and forces, was where I disconnected from modern science. I was completely ignorant. All I knew was that Einstein had problems with quantum theory, which postulated that subatomic particles, the basic building blocks of the universe, were fundamentally indeterminate. We can know a particle’s position or its speed, but not both. Probabilities, not cause and effect, more accurately described how subatomic particles behaved. Einstein objected: “I, at any rate, am convinced that he [God] does not throw dice.”¹

So I perused the science section of my favorite bookstore for a book on quantum physics that was accessible to a layperson like myself. There I found a book, published in 2002, just a year earlier, called The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, by Lynne McTaggart. As I read it I realized that very little of the science McTaggart illuminated in it, some of it nearly one hundred years old, had ever been integrated into our Western worldview. 

The Field prompted me to examine the framework within which I thought. Simply reading the prologue, I saw that my everyday way of looking at the world—like that of everyone I knew—was bounded by a three-hundred year old paradigm based on the work of Newton, Descartes, and Darwin. I thought in terms of cause and effect, of a material world constrained by space and time, operating predictably and mechanistically according to certain basic, inviolable scientific laws. 

My second life was not of that world. Todd and my experience with Melissa had cut me loose. But what world was it? I was living in a state of perpetual wonder. In my small, quiet life, a miracle had occurred; I had found love that survived even death. I couldn’t explain it, and I wanted an explanation. 

Reading The Field, I learned that a contingent of scientists was applying quantum principles and processes to the world as we know it, not simply to subatomic particles. These principles seem to contradict common sense and even our experience of reality. 

As the pioneers of quantum physics peered into the very heart of matter, they were astounded by what they saw. The tiniest bits of matter weren’t even matter, as we know it, not even a set something. … And even stranger, they were often many possible things all at the same time. But most significantly, these subatomic particles had no meaning in isolation, but only in relationship with everything else. … You could only understand the universe as a dynamic web of interconnection. Things once in contact remained always in contact through all space and all time.² 

But even if everything in the universe is interconnected, how did Melissa discover that Todd remained connected to me after he died? This line I read hinted at an explanation avoided: “A coherent theory of the spiritual implications of quantum physics remained beyond their [the pioneer physicists’] grasp. Niels Bohr hung a sign on his door saying ‘Philosophers keep out. Work in progress.’”³ 

As I read and reflected on what I was learning, my worldview began to shift...

Why does it matter? Because we, too, are energy—not mere flesh and blood! And finally, what happened to the energy, the life force that was Todd? I could almost hear the words I’d read in Myss’s book Anatomy of the Spirit: “Clearly, there’s another form of energy that we have not yet understood. For example, there’s a form of energy that appears to leave the body when the body dies.” Let there be light indeed! 

^Footnotes: 

1. ^{McTaggart, Lynn, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), XXV.} 

2. ^{McTaggart, The Field, XXVI.} 

3. ^{McTaggart, The Field, XVIII.} 

Anne C. Cooper

Anne C. Cooper has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from William Paterson University in New Jersey and an MBA from the University of Georgia, where she served as Director of MBA Admissions and Director of MBA Student Experience for the Terry College of Business’s Full-time MBA program. She is now retired and living in Athens, Georgia.
Signed copies of Second Life may be purchased on Anne’s website.
You can connect with her on Facebook at: anne.d.cooper1