I can happily recommend this work as a wonderful Christmas gift – it is a thought provoking read for anyone who is questioning the meaning of life and its origins with an open mind and heart. I have to come clean here and say how much I learned from this book, subtitled “Connecting through the space between us”. The publisher’s blurb on the back suggests that “We are living a lie. We believe we flourish because we compete and fight – personally, as a nation, and as the dominant species. But we succeed only because we share, we care and we’re fair.”

This is meaty stuff and it gets meatier, I promise. Darwin’s ideas of evolution are examined in some detail, together with the fact that he did not coin the phrase “the survival of the fittest” so beloved of Richard Dawkins in his work “The Selfish Gene”. It was in fact British Philosopher Herbert Spencer who persuaded Darwin to adopt the phrase, which it is said, he did somewhat reluctantly. The latest discoveries in quantum physics demonstrate how differently things work at the cell level and below. They show that contrary Darwin’s idea of struggle for existence, cells must come together and bond in order to create life – not fight to the death in order to be top dog. In fact, if they did that, we would not have any “life as we know it, Captain.”

In a small aside here, I must leap in with my astrologer’s hat on and bang on about an old theme of mine: namely that we see and experience life through our own individual cosmic lens. According to Wikipedia, Professor Dawkins was born under Aries, the sign of “Me first” “I will win” and other selfish gene type statements.

The book is divided into three sections: Part One – the science stuff, which gets somewhat repetitious, to be honest, half a dozen experiments would have sufficed for me, although some of them were stunning; Part Two – The Pull To Wholeness, the real thrust of her argument and the most gripping section; Part Three – Recovering the Bond, the where next with all these ideas, both politically and personally?

The Bond is what glues us together, that ensues that we survive through sharing, caring and developing our empathy and supporting rather than dividing each other. In the West there has long been the philosophy of individuality, uniqueness; whereas in the East there the exact opposite, a philosophy of us/we. These two very different models to live by – separation and togetherness are at the heart of McTaggart’s book.

That we are all connected with each other and everything in the Universe is a thrilling thought- and yet, didn’t we know this already? McTaggart’s book lends weight to the way I see the world through my astrologer’s eye: we are each a unique blend of Universal energies that ebb and flow, bond and work together to enable us to be who and how we are in this world.

Lynne McTaggart is an American science journalist, domiciled in London. She is well known for her Newsletters “What Doctors Don’t Tell You” in which she explodes the many myths around current medical practices and research on drugs, etc. She also wrote “The Field” and “The Intention Experiment”.

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