Think of an Elephant

By Paul Bailey
Watkins Publishing/Distributed by Sterling, 2007

Paul Bailey’s new book, Think of an Elephant, seeks to combine spirituality and science, acknowledging that there is room for both to create a unified universe. Below is an excerpt of Bailey’s discussion on the importance of his work best told in his own words:

Think of an Elephant is about taking our experience on every aspect of our life up to a new plane by upgrading the way we look at, think about and experience absolutely everything in our world, from the practice to the spiritual. The book achieves this by taking the reader to the frontiers of science, philosophy, environment, and studies of the mind, to answer some of the big questions we all ask.

On another level, the book explains how each of us is interconnected to literally everything else within the greater scheme of things, so the real fear most of us have — that each of has no power or influence as an individual — is gone.

Think of an Elephant dissolves our fear of disempowerment by showing that our perception has its potency, our consciousness its own charge, our awareness its own power of connection! This is the reason behind the title of the book — the discovery that observation actually does have its own power, its own energetic influence.

The ultimate value of the book is to show how, with this new way of seeing, we immediately change our own world as we too are changed and empowered in the way we have been hoping for. This welcomes us to a life of true significance, health and happiness.

Science and spirituality are usually seen as opposites, but both are about reality. They just take different directions, with science focusing on the reality since the Big Bang — i.e., created reality — while spirituality and religion focus on the reality that supported or came ‘before’ the Big Bang — infinity, eternity, ect. With its combination of science, anecdotes, and original thinking, the book throws new light on the present problems of the world, to reveal why we do everything we do and how we can do things better. Think of an Elephant takes us beyond a tunnel vision view of ourselves and what is possible.

…Recently scientists set about discovering what would happen to all of matter at the end of time — at the end of the universe — and they did this by throwing an elephant down a cosmic black hole. But when they did the test, they made the ground-breaking discovery that the elephant’s fate was completely dependent on the position of the observer. Believe it or not, what this means for us back here on Earth is that the mere act of observation — like when we look at stuff, and think about things — actually influences matter in some subtle way, and that our perception has its own potency.

– Excerpt from Q&A (Copyright: Sterling Publishing)