This has been a book about the new quantum paradigm that is emerging to frame our lives, work, and leadership in the twenty-first century. We have seen that our scientists tell us that we live in a quantum world. Everything we see around us and everything that we human beings are is quantum. We are quantum people living in a quantum world, now powered and connected by quantum technology. Our bodies are quantum, our minds are quantum, and everything around us is quantum. The new quantum understanding of our universe tells us that the old, Newtonian way of thinking how we, and the world, work was based on an illusion, on an oversimplification, on a crude misunderstanding of the way things actually are.

Any such new paradigmatic understanding also ushers in a new “world view,” a new overarching but largely unconscious understanding of how our own lives fit into the general scheme of things, what our lives mean, how we should behave, what we should aspire to, what we can hope for. Our world view is our general, background framework of what our lives, of what life itself, is about. It provides our lives with a theme and gives them coherence, uniting the personal, social, and spiritual dimensions of our experience. Though we may, from time to time when crises arise, stop to question certain aspects of what we believe about how our lives “hang together,” few of us ever stand back and try to describe our general world view, or question it. It is just taken for granted that “this is the way things are,” this is the world, or life, as we know it, “the only game in town.”

It is only at rare moments in history, through an accumulation of catastrophes and a sense of impending disaster that large numbers of people say to themselves, and then collectively, “this isn’t working, this game of life is no longer playable, this script no longer makes sense,” and we cry out for an entirely new edifice, a radical reconstruction of everything we think and believe and that we become ready for a new world view. And when such readiness is then accompanied by a new prophesy, a new teaching, or a new discovery that suggests some very different way of framing absolutely everything, an exhausted worldview then gives way to a new one. I argued at the very beginning of this book that we have reached such a turning point now as we feel our way through the twenty-first century.

It was at the end of the nineteenth century that the German philosopher Nietzsche pronounced, “God is dead.” Nietzsche’s meaning was that the whole framework that had guided the Western mind was now exhausted. Two decades later, as the entire world was engulfed in the first of the blood-drenched wars that defined the twentieth century as a century of catastrophic collapse and endings, William Butler Yeats added his own voice to Nietzsche’s with the opening words of his poem The Second Coming, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer, Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…” The Judeo-Christian world view that had held at least the Western world together for nearly 3000 years had largely given way by then to Newtonian science and its accompanying mechanistic world view, and as the twentieth century unfolded the social, political, and spiritual inadequacies of mechanism—its personal alienation and loneliness, its political fragmentation and constant wars, its inability to provide any place or meaning for human existence or framework for human morality, and its desecration of the natural world became all too apparent. These still haunt life in the early twenty-first century, but at the same time, as we have seen throughout this book, our new century is also seeing the emergence of something new and very different, the promise of a better way.

Everything I have written in these pages has described the new ways of living, working, and leading that arise from the discoveries of quantum physics, the achievements of quantum technology, and their accompanying philosophy. All along I have been outlining features of a quantum vision of the self, quantum social and business visions, and a new quantum world order. These in fact add up to a new quantum world view that changes the way we see ourselves, our relationships, our work, our way of living together and, indeed, the very meaning of our lives and of everything we do. Here, I would like to summarize and bring all that together as one coherent story that provides new, quantum answers to life’s five oldest questions, and thus provides the foundations of a quantum world view. These five questions, asked in some way throughout the whole of human history are: Where do I come from? Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do? Where am I going when I die?

Where Do We Come From?

Quantum physics tells us that our universe began about 14 billion years ago when an intensely compressed “singularity” suddenly exploded with a Big Bang. The first thing that was formed after the Big Bang was what scientists call “The Quantum Vacuum.” The Quantum Vacuum is a very still “sea” (field) of energy. It is felt as a Force that is everywhere throughout the universe. It is not “up there,” or “down there,” it is everywhere, inside us and outside us. It is the Force that enables the universe to exist and work as it does. It is the energy Force underlying everything. If we were looking for a “God” within quantum physics, it would be The Quantum Vacuum. The Chinese call it the unseeable source of the Tao. In quantum physics, “God” is not a person, not a man or a woman. Rather, “God” is energy and the source of all energy. “God” is a Force acting throughout the universe, a Force acting inside you and me, and inside everything that exists. A Tao, or Way of the Universe.

The Quantum Vacuum is a field of energy, and our entire universe and everything in it is made of energy. You and I are made of energy. Everything that exists—the grass, the trees, our tables and chairs, you and I and all our social constructions, including our companies—are all patterns of dynamic energy “written” on (excitations of) the Quantum Vacuum. If the Vacuum is the universal “sea” of energy, then we are “waves” upon that sea. When we touch our bodies, they feel solid, but that is just an illusion. Our bodies are in fact a pattern of energy that temporarily collects atoms of matter and forms them into the shape of our pattern. But if we are more than seven years old, then there is not a single atom in our bodies today that was part of us when we’re born. Because, within the period of seven years, every single atom in our bodies passes through the pattern of energy that we are and then passes out again, just as individual molecules of water are drawn into and expelled from the spiraling vortex we see as our bathroom washbasins empty. What remains as we grow older is our pattern, which is constantly collecting and emitting new atoms.

“The Quantum Vacuum” is badly named, in a sense. We think of a “vacuum” as something that is empty, like a vacuum flask. But the Quantum Vacuum is full. It is full of the possibility (the “potentiality”) of everything that ever was, everything that is, and everything that ever will be. 14 billion years ago, when the Vacuum was formed, you and I were there within it as possibilities. Thus, however old we think we are, each of us is really 14 billion years old. And we have been here throughout the whole history of the evolving universe. We were here when space and time and gravity were formed, we were here when the first clouds of fiery gases were formed, when the fiery clouds of gases became stars, when the stars made the planets, and when at least some of the planets gave birth to life. So you and I contain the whole history of the universe within us. Our bodies are made of stardust, and our minds obey the same laws and forces that hold the universe together.

Our bodies and our minds also contain the whole history of life on earth, the whole history of biological evolution. The emotions and instincts of our primitive forebrain are identical to those of lower mammals like rats and hamsters. The cerebral hemispheres that make up our higher brain are those of the higher mammals. We contain the heart of the lion and the aggression of the wolf. 98% of our genes are identical to those of a chimpanzee. So only 2% of us is actually human. And yet we act and feel and think with it all, and we call it “human nature”! In fact, truly “human nature” is something we have yet to achieve, something we can aspire to and work toward.

Who Am I?

In the quantum universe, everything is both “particle-like” and “wave-like.” We, too, are both “particles,” unique individuals, and “waves,” patterns on the quantum sea of energy, overlapping with all the other waves. My wave-like self is the “me” that is made by all the people and things to which I relate. The individual, particle you has characteristics like your brown, or red, or blond hair, your brown or blue eyes. The particle “you” is a man or a woman, a short person or a tall person, and has the intelligence and the talents you have inherited with your genes. The wave you is who you are because you have the family, friends, and colleagues that you do, the you that has grown up in a particular community and country, that speaks the language that you do, that works in the environment that you do. If you had grown up in a different place and had different friends, the wave you would be a different you.

We are our relationships. In quantum physics, we learn that relationships make reality. Our relationships make you “you” and me “me.”

In fact, in the quantum universe, everything and everyone is in relationship all the time. The wave aspect of who we are overlaps with the wave aspect of everything else. “I” am “you,” and “you” are “me.” In the quantum world, there is no such thing as separation. Separation is an illusion. We live in what quantum scientists call “an entangled” universe, where everything and everyone is connected to and affects everything and everyone else, a world of Zero Distance. If I snap my fingers, it is felt on the other side of the universe. If I tell a lie or do something bad, it puts bad energy out into the entire universe. If I smile, if I help someone, if I think kind thoughts, it puts good energy out into the universe.

In fact, quantum physics tells us that you and I make the world. There is a very important principle in quantum science called “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.” This principle tells us that the universe is a sea of infinite possibility, but that only some of these possibilities can become real, like the things we see in everyday life. Which possibilities become real things depends on us. When we ask a question, when we do an experiment or make a decision, it is as though we are dropping a bucket down into the sea of infinite possibility and pulling up a bucketful of reality. The questions we ask, give us the answers that we get. The more questions we ask, the more we will know. We can never ask too many questions. There are no such things as “silly questions.” Questions make reality happen.

Our questions, our decisions, the things we build, the relationships that we make, the good or bad things that we do—all these things make the world. As the Rendanheyi management model expresses it, we make our own value. And that means, also, that we are responsible for the world. If the world is full of mistakes or the world is a mess, that is because we are making mistakes or we are a mess. If we want to make the world a better place, quantum physics tells us that we must make ourselves better people. If the world is to be kind, we must be kind. If the world is to be free from war, we must be free from anger or hatred. If the world is to have space for all kinds of people, we must have space in our hearts for all kinds of people.

And just as we make the world, we also make ourselves. Like the universe itself, the human brain and the human Self are also each a sea of infinite possibility. When we were born, we had trillions of neurons (brain cells) in our brains, but only a very few of them were connected up. It is the connections between the neurons (the “wiring”) that gives our brains their many different abilities. At birth, we had just enough neural connections to allow our brain to control our most basic bodily survival functions—breathing, the beat of our heart, sucking, the ability to regulate our body temperature, etc. As we grow and learn and experience things, more neural connections are made. In the first year of our lives, we grew neural connections at a faster rate than any time since. But no matter how old we are, even if we live to be 110, we never lose our ability to grow more neural connections and to rewire our brain, our ability to make our brain “smarter.” If we continue to explore, to learn, to have new experiences, to challenge ourselves, our brain will continue to grow.

Our Self, too, can develop many possible ego personalities and forms of expression during a lifetime. In quantum physics, the Self is a wave (“a wave function”) that carries many possible ways to be expressed. Each relationship that we form, each experience that we have, each thing that we learn or job that we do has the possibility to create another “me,” another take on life. “I am a multitude.” But we needn’t worry that we will scatter off in many directions or become schizophrenic! Because everything is connected to everything in the quantum world, our many sub-selves will have the capacity to add up to one, rich, many-faceted, fulfilled and happy person: our “Quantum Self.” Our Quantum Self is like a choir with many voices, all singing in tune. The more voices that we add to our choir, the richer and more beautiful the music that we will make.

We also have the possibility to be both good and bad. The universe contains a “Good” Force (“coherence”) that is always building better relationships and creating more information, and it also contains a “Bad” Force (“entropy”) that is always destroying relationships and tearing apart things that have been built. Our Self also contains the possibilities of a “good me” and a “bad me.” Every one of us can be kind, caring, and loving, but we can also be mean, jealous, selfish, and full of anger or hatred. We can help others, and we can also hurt others. It is I who choose what kind of person I will be. And in choosing who and what I will be, I choose what kind of a world I will make. We are responsible for ourselves, and we are responsible for the world.

Why Am I Here?

There is an ancient Jewish legend of “The Vessels.” According to this, there was a world before our world, shaped as a sacred vessel because it contained the Divine Essence. This vessel collected light, but one day it became so full of light that it shattered. The fragments of the vessel, and its sparks of light, then rained down and were scattered among our world. One spark of this divine light is said to be lodged in each human being, and it is the sacred duty of humankind to gather up the sparks and restore the Unity of the original vessel, and thus the unity of the Divine Essence. The rabbis who speak of this legend say that the way we gather up the sparks is to make loving relationships. When our world is united in love, “God” will be healed, the One that it was at the beginning will be restored.

In physics, of course, most cosmologists believe that there was a universe before our universe, a Vacuum before our Quantum Vacuum. That first Vacuum contracted, as our universe will at some point contract, became condensed to a single point of light, then exploded to make the Big Bang that created us. And the fragments of the Big Bang are scattered throughout the universe. It is indeed correct to say that the universe has a purpose and that the direction of cosmic evolution is toward ever, greater complexity and ever, greater information. Both complexity and information are in essence made of relationships. So the essential drive of the universe is to make ever more relationships. And surely love is the purest of all forms of relationship.

To say that fragments of the Big Bang are scattered throughout the universe is to realize that there is such a fragment in each of us. As I said earlier, our bodies are made out of stardust, fragments of stars, fragments of light. The Self, “me,” is a pattern of energy that waves within the Quantum Vacuum. Just as the sea is within each wave, the Vacuum is within each of us. And that is essentially what gives light to the human soul.

I visit Nepal quite frequently, and in Nepal they have a greeting, “Namaste.” Every time you meet someone, you say, “Namaste” instead of “Hello” or “Nihao.” I asked a Nepali friend what Namaste means, and he said it means, “I greet the god in you.” I greet the god in you, I greet the divine spark in you, I greet the Vacuum within you. Imagine what the world would be like if we really did recognize and greet the god or the divine spark in each other. There would be no more “strangers,” no more “others,” no hatred, no wars, no “mine” vs “yours,” or “me” vs “you.” There would just be “us,” all equal and all sacred fragments of light and each capable of bringing that light into the world.

When I speak about this in my lectures, people inevitably say, “But you can’t love everyone. Some people are evil, some are monsters.” But because each of us is a quantum person and thus has within us all possibilities, the possibilities of both good and bad, good and evil, I could be one of those monsters. So could you. There is a human being, a spark, within every monster, and a monster within every human being. None of us is in any position to judge another, to exclude another from our group or from the human race. We, too, might have done whatever they have done. At the very least, if we have the courage to face what is within us, we recognize that we have had the thought, or the temptation, to do something bad, or even evil. Then, perhaps, we can replace judgment with compassion, even with love, both for ourselves and for others.

Loving others, seeing the divine spark in even the worst of them, is of course the most powerful way of serving others. But we are also here to serve the universe itself, to serve the Force or the Tao that drives the universe to unfold and give birth to all the infinite possibility contained in the Quantum Vacuum. We have seen that each of us makes the world, each of us has the power to turn possibility into reality. In this sense, each of us is a servant of the Vacuum, “a thought in the mind of God,” or “a movement in the evolving Tao.” Like the leader in a quantum company, the Vacuum is a servant leader who energizes and vitalizes us, and we in turn, can use this to serve the Earth’s community. As in the famous Taoist triad, each of us is a bridge between Heaven and Earth, between the Vacuum and those of its potentialities that we realize.

We are here to “think.” Thinking involves seeing and giving meaning to things. It involves asking deep questions, imagining things that don’t yet exist, seeing relationships between things and ideas that no one else has seen, seeing something in a flower or a situation that no one has noticed before. Thinking also means learning and dreaming and creating and aspiring to make your life matter. Each of us best serves the Vacuum, best serves the possibility latent in the universe, by doing the most and making the most of our lives that we can.

No two brains on this planet are the same. Even if I am an identical twin and my twin brother or sister has exactly the same genes as I, my brain will be unique. Our brain is “wired up” (neural connections made) by our individual relationships, thoughts, and experiences. So every one of us is not only a wave on the sea of the Quantum Vacuum, and thus a means through which the Vacuum can express itself on our level of reality, but each of us is a unique expression of it. Nobody but me can contribute to this world what only I can contribute. Nobody but me can turn the particular possibilities of the universe into a reality that I can. There are no “unimportant” people, no “invisible” people. Each of us is unique, and each of us is essential so that the future history of the universe can unfold. Only I can make the world that I can make. Only you can make yours.

What Should I Do?

So what can each of us do to make a better kind of world, to make the world a better place during our lives than we found it when we were born? We don’t have to be Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela to make a positive difference. Whoever we are, and whatever role we play in life, each of us has the power to bring love or happiness into at least someone’s life, with a smile, a helpful act, an act of compassion or forgiveness, a small gift. All these simple things make the world a better place. If we have been chosen to become business leaders in life, we can build companies that empower our employees to realize their full potential.

We all know that our planet is in great danger because of rubbish and pollution. Perhaps you are a leader who has the power to make the oil companies stop drilling or the factories cease burning coal, but if not, you can still plant a tree, you can recycle your belongings and pass them on to others who have less. Perhaps I am a leader who can clean up all the rubbish that makes our cities and streets dirty, that poisons the ground and the water, but if not I can be still careful not to throw my own rubbish out of the car window or drop it on the street. Science now tells us that little things can make a big difference.

And remember, if the world is to be a better place, I have to be a better person. If there is to be more intelligence in the world, I have to make myself more intelligent. I have to realize what a rare gift it is that I read and explore and learn things. I must seize every opportunity to read and experience and expand my mind, I must do my bit to dispel ignorance and prejudice and pettiness. I must grow my character.

Many people say that because so many of us no longer believe in religion, we don’t know how to be good, don’t know what the rules are anymore. But we don’t need a God who writes the rules on tablets of stone. We all know when we are being kind or cruel, generous or selfish, loving or hateful. The moral direction of the universe is within each one of us. The unfolding Quantum Vacuum is within each one of us, an inner “spark” or compass that naturally guides us in the right direction. This is what we call our conscience, or liangzhi, our intuition of the Tao and its Way. It is up to each one of us to have the character and the will to do what our conscience tells us to do. Building that character and summing that will is a ceaseless, lifelong project, a lifelong “spiritual practice”.

Where Am I Going?

Most of us realize by the time we are five years old that people die, and that one day, we, too, will die. And this knowledge of our finitude, the knowledge that our lives, and the lives of those we love, have a time limit, gives our existence a tragic dimension. For some, this can be a cause of terror or despair and lead to a feeling that life is ultimately without meaning. But if we fully understand the nature of the quantum universe of which we are a part, the very fact that our current life spans are limited can instead be source of focus, purpose, and meaning.

Every existing thing in our universe is a finite excitation, or manifestation, of a distinctive underlying wave function containing an infinite array of potentialities. The finite excitations exist (maintain their coherence) for only a limited time. They “come and go” in dialogue with their surrounding environments. But their underlying wave functions maintain their own coherence as larger patterns upon the background cosmic energy sea of Quantum Vacuum. These wave functions are eternal potentialities within the Vacuum, there, as we saw, from the formation of the Vacuum itself. In the case of human persons, I have referred to the temporary, manifested self as the “ego-self,” and the eternal, wave function self as the Quantum Self.

In this life that I am living now, my underlying Quantum Self has taken on a particular ego-self energy pattern with one of its many possibilities. This finite pattern, fleshed out by the atoms of which my body is composed, is what I know as “me.” When my body eventually dies, all that “dies” of my energy pattern is its temporary material form. Like a wave melting back into the sea, that “me” folds back into my underlying Quantum Self and into the Quantum Vacuum, and lives on as a carrier wave of potential, future “me’s.” Later, something in the environment will excite that underlying carrier wave to take on a new shape and emerge into the world as yet another “wave pattern” visible on the sea, another “me.” This new ego-self may manifest as a man instead of a woman, “I” may be Chinese instead of English. I may even, as Hindus and Buddhists believe, take the shape of an animal or a tree in the next life. But my essential, underlying, eternal Quantum Self, will be present within my new body. As the Indian spiritual book, The Bhagavad Gita, says, “The Self is not born, the Self does not die. The Self is eternal.”

In the quantum realm, there is no such thing as death. Only a series of new lives, cycles of existence, each born to live out its own story and destiny before returning to the sea of all existence. And, just as quantum physics teaches that both the past and the future are entangled with the present “now,” these new “me’s” will be entangled both with all the “me’s” that I once was, and the many “me’s” that I will become in my future material embodiments. The life I am living now both reaches back and affects the past, and it reaches forward, affecting the future. This is the quantum explanation of the ancient belief in karma. And because in our Zero Distance quantum universe each “I” that I am now is entangled with the “I’s” of all others and with all other existing things, my own present existence is part of the unfolding reality of this world on earth and of the evolving universe itself. Like one of the “music makers” in the O’Shaughnessy’s poem I quoted in Chapter 9, I play my role “in the [new quantum] age that is coming to birth.” Each life of mine is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth. And the greater the dream that is my life, the greater the world that I make, the greater the company or organization that I lead.

In summary, the quantum world view expresses the connectedness of everything, and stresses dynamic relationship as the basis of all that is. It tells us that our world comes about as we make ourselves, through a mutually creative dialogue between mind and body, between ourselves and the material world, between our human organizations and the natural world. It gives us a view of ourselves as persons who are free and responsible, responsive to others and to our environment, essentially related and naturally committed, and at every moment creative. We have only to realize our potential, an opportunity promised to us as employees and citizens by any organizational structure that follows the principles of Quantum Management.