How do you get something out of nothing?


It seems like an obvious question, one that drives everything from spiritual creation stories to our understanding of the Big Bang. Yet it leaves us with a sense that underneath everything lies emptiness and lack. We can phrase this question in a new way: how do we get something out of everything?

In Leap to Wholeness, physics educator Sky Nelson-Isaacs explores the science of wholeness. To understand wholeness, imagine a beautiful photograph that you want to modify. The image exists in space. Yet graphic designers are familiar with another space, called the frequency domain, or “pattern-space.” Here, changes to the patterns affect the image as a whole. We can make the entire image blurrier or sharper, for instance, with a simple filter in pattern-space. A change to one local region affects the image everywhere. This is an example of wholeness that exists right before our eyes.

We each have filters that influence what we see, hear, think, and feel. They take who we are as a whole, and they limit it to what we feel comfortable with--what we already know, rather than how we can grow. We carry models that interpret the world for us. But we can become more aware of our filters and from this awareness experience more flow, more openness, and less anxiety. When we align with circumstances rather than fighting them, we open the door to synchronicities that give us leverage in creating the change we want to see.

Following this thread from modern audio technology, to the human brain, to the very nature of time itself, Leap to Wholeness explores a paradigm of wholeness that is easy to miss. For instance, when you look at the red part of a rainbow, you may not realize that you’re really seeing white light that’s had blue and green filtered out. Or where you see blue, that means red and green are missing. Maybe creating something out of everything is not about what we do...but about what we don’t do. By removing filters--thoughts, feelings, and other reactions--that keep us weaving the same old patterns, we naturally allow ourselves to grow, heal, and adapt.