Resonant Field Notes

I’ve got this big, fat book sitting on my “to read” shelf. I keep wanting to open it, but it looks like a commitment, not just to read, but to carry around in the meantime. It’s the My Big TOE trilogy, by Thomas Campbell, a former NASA scientist and early collaborator with Bob Monroe (of the Gateway Tapes fame, among other things). You might’ve heard of him, but if not, the guy’s got some interesting — and pretty damn compelling — theories on the nature of consciousness, perception, and reality.

As that book continues to sit on my shelf, I was sent yet another interview with this guy from a friend of the site. It’s a recent interview with AJ from The Why Files YouTube channel, in his secondary series called “The Basement.” It’s fascinating, to say the least, from hearing about Campbell’s childhood meeting entities in meditation (which they then locked him out of so he wouldn’t grow up a weirdo), to his career in applied physics, to his time with the Monroe Institute and beyond. It’s a captivating watch, but you don’t have to take my word for it:

Certain things struck chords with me in this interview, though. I appreciated the deeper conversation about the mechanics of binaural beats. The discussion about an information-based construction of reality that operates on probability rather than determination made me think a lot about free will. I like that Campbell rejects the “loosh/prison planet” lore. The video game “No Man’s Sky” even got a shoutout. It boils down to the same thing for those who eek a purpose for this whole thing: Love. That’s how we learn, and why we learn.

For those of us who suspect that consciousness is fundamental, and that we’re all facets of the same source just trying to learn about itself/ourself, it’s all good food for thought. Campbell and AJ don’t tie it all to that thread in the interview above, but it makes me want to go back and revisit Stalking The Wild Pendulum (whose author Itzhak Bentov whose work influenced the same CIA project Bob Monroe was tied up in), the New Testament, and The Silva Method. But first, I need to get over my fear and just dive in to Cambell’s book … finally.