The content here is adapted from The Grail Conspiracies, a spiritual
thriller by Michael McGaulley, and is based on his research for that
book. Keep in mind that The Grail Conspiracies is a work of fiction,
and some of the content has been adapted to fit the narrative.
For additional sources, see the links at the bottom of this page, or to
hyperlinks embedded within the body of the text.
Excerpt from The Grail Conspiracies
Dad took back the phone.
“Where are you, Greg?”
I’d just told him, but I told him again, anyway. “In a little town in Austria.”
“No, I mean, where are you at this moment?”
“In a phone booth in a hotel lobby.”
“Are you standing or sitting?”
What was he getting at? Or were the pain-killers getting to him? “I’m
sitting on a little wooden bench inside the phone booth.”
“That wooden bench---is the wood solid?”
“Sure, of course. Solid enough to hold me.”
“What’s the floor like?”
I looked down. Better to go along with him than to dwell on what had
become of his mind. “It’s tile, and it’s solid.”
“But it’s not solid, not solid at all,” he said. “Nor is that wooden bench
solid. Didn’t you take physics in college? These things seem solid, but
the deeper reality is that they’re all made up of atoms, and atoms are
something like 99.99% empty space. So that solid floor is an illusion. A
usefulillusion, to be sure, but still an illusion.”
Where do you go from something like that? “Yeah, I took physics, and
they did get into that.”
“But if things are 99.99% empty space, then why do we see them and
feel them as solid? Because something in the nature of our
consciousness and our physical apparatus, brain, eyes, senses, work
together to create this useful fiction, that all is fixed and solid. Given
who we are, we humans, we couldn’t function if we didn’t have that
illusion to help us make sense of things.”
He paused, apparently waiting for my response. “I suppose not,” I finally
said.
“We couldn’t function without that illusion. Trouble is, we tend to forget
that it is just an illusion. We get caught up in that fiction and come to
believe that is the reality, and not just the illusion of solidity that our
minds have constructed. We forget it’s only the reality as we perceive it,
not the true reality.”
I didn’t know what to say. He was talking what seemed to be quantum
physics—not an area that had ever been one of his topics of
conversation before.
“Once we grasp that the true reality is different than what we’ve come to
accept in that useful illusion, then a whole new paradigm opens up to
us. A new paradigm, and with it some incredible opportunities.”
“Paradigm?,” I echoed. That wasn’t a word I’d ever heard my father use.
“Paradigm, or ‘perception,’ if that’s more comfortable. Basically a new
way of looking at things, a new framework for making sense of reality.
But don’t get hung up on the words. My point is that once we break out
and look at reality via this new paradigm, then everything becomes
different. We have a new vantage point, and hence incredible new
opportunities in how we can shape our lives.”
I was flummoxed. I had no idea what he was getting at. Was this a
reaction to the drugs they were giving him? But what drug infuses the
patient with a passion for quantum physics?
❏
“And Moses and the rod that turned into a snake—how did Moses fit
in?,” I asked. I was intrigued by what Dad was getting at, and had to
recognize that there might not be another chance to talk again.
He laughed. “You caught me, I was rambling, drifted off the point. The
skeptics say that since it doesn’t seem possible to them for Moses’ stick
to have turned into a snake, well, then it just couldn’t be. Narrow-minded
dim-bulbs, no matter how many degrees they have.”
He broke off into a coughing spell. Then he said, “But you understand,
don’t you?”
“Can’t say I do, Dad.” Better to let him tell me.
The explanation is as plain as the nose on their faces. All alternative
tracks exist, so maybe in the blink of an eye Moses side-slipped from a
universe where he was throwing a stick, into a different version of the
universe, where, in that version of reality, it happened to be a snake.”
“That is . . . uh . . . an interesting explanation.”
“It follows on what we were talking about the other day, the different
paradigm. We take for granted that there’s only one way of viewing
things, which is the way we’ve always viewed them. Then something
happens to force us to look in a different way, and from that different
vantage point we see things in a completely different way—reframe
things in a totally different context.”
“Umm,” I replied.
“I probably told you, there’s a saying among the folks who’re working in
this field, ‘Shut up and compute.’ Meaning, nobody understands why
these things work. But they do work, they doyield useful results. So it’s
best to shut up, to quit asking why they work, and just use them. Maybe
someday we’ll understand why, but in the meantime, we need to make
use of them. If it weren’t for quantum physics and these kinds of
discoveries we wouldn’t have transistors, or computer chips, or lasers,
or CAT scans or MRIs or a lot of the other stuff we use every day
without asking why it works. Like other things, it’s best to just take it on
faith. Try it, see if it works for you.”
“All this is from that little book, Joining Miracles?”
“You have read it by now, haven't you?”