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that anything exists at all. However, once the miracle of our universe exists, we find lawful dynamics at work throughout.
    Sixth, scientific evidence of the existence of psychic functioning has been mounting for decades and is now so overwhelming thatthe burden of proof has shifted to those who would seek to dismiss its existence. 36 It is time to move beyond the narrow, brain-based view of consciousness because it no longer explains important scientific evidence and it severely limits our thinking about the scope and depth of our connection with the universe.
    Seventh, as interesting as psychic or intuitive functioning may be, the much more important insight is what it says about the nature of the universe—that it is connected with itself through the tissue of consciousness in non-local ways that transcend relativistic differences.
    To summarize, evidence is accumulating across many levels, from the atomic to the human, that a field of consciousness pervades the universe and is mobilized by different living systems in ways that support and sustain their functioning. While the idea of an underlying ecology of consciousness and aliveness is quite remarkable, it seems no more extraordinary than the widely accepted view among scientists that the universe emerged nearly 14 billion years ago as a “vacuum fluctuation,” where nothing pushed on nothing to create everything. 37

Freedom at the Foundations
    Another attribute of living systems is their freedom to make choices. Without some measure of freedom of choice, we exist as meaningless machines. Is our universe a mechanical system without authentic freedom at its foundations? Or is it a living system that has the freedom to grow and develop in innovative ways?
    The old Newtonian paradigm envisioned a deterministic universe where, once the laws governing things were understood, everything could be predicted. In striking contrast, findings from quantum physics tell us that uncertainty is built into the fabricof the universe. At the quantum level, where our universe comes into existence, the certainty that we find at the larger scales breaks down and, instead, we find only probabilities. At the foundation of the universe is the quantum foam seething with titanic energies, and this is where we enter a realm of likelihood, of possibilities and estimated outcomes. Freedom and uncertainty are basic to the quantum level, where the universe continuously recreates itself and provides us with an opportunity to exercise our freedom to do the same.
    Freedom permeates our lives. We are playing jazz together. The world is a collective improvisation, and we have the creative freedom to transcend the habits of nature. While uncertainty and freedom are fundamental to our universe, freedom is not without limits. Everything that exists contributes to the overall cosmic web at each moment, whether it is conscious of its participation or not. In turn, it is the interrelation of all parts of the universe that determines the condition of the whole. We, therefore, have great freedom to act, but only within the limits established by the larger web of life.

Able to Reproduce Itself
    An essential capacity for any living system is the ability to reproduce itself. How could our universe produce offspring universes? A startling insight from the frontiers of physics suggests the answer: Our universe may be able to reproduce itself through the functioning of black holes. Astrophysicist John Gribbin explains that the bursting out of our universe in the Big Bang is the time-reversed mirror image of the collapse of a massive object into a black hole. Many of the black holes that form in our universe, he reasons, may represent wormholes that lead to new universes: “Instead of a black hole representing a one-way journey to nowhere, many researchersnow believe that it is a one-way journey to somewhere—to a new expanding universe in its own set of dimensions.” 38 Gribbin’s dramatic