Maybe the purpose of your life is longer than your consciousness lasts.
– Tom Chi
The idea that we’re all connected is a powerful one. For the longest time, many people have believed in the unity of all. Various spiritual and religious traditions have been teaching us about this concept.
But believing from a spiritual or religious perspective is no longer necessary. It’s been proven by modern-day science: all of us are connected, and none of us is dispensable.
Read this again if you have to. Because we don’t need mysticism or faith anymore to envision a unified world.
Tom Chi, inventor, and co-founder of Google X gave an enlightening talk on the topic during A-fest Mexico in 2016.
Not from a belief point of view, or the starting point of “if only that were true.” Not even from a place of spiritual knowledge, in the way authors like Rev. Michael Beckwith and Neale Donald Walsch approach it.
Tom Chi spoke about interconnectedness from a place of knowing entirely based on scientific research.
He taught us about the three elements that demonstrate we’re all one: Proof for interconnectedness is found in our (1) heart, (2) breath, and (3) mind.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
3 Scientific Facts That Prove We Are All Connected
1. The Iron Atom That Makes Our Hearts Pump
How could an iron atom prove anything about our interconnectedness?
On the surface, it may not seem to provide any evidence for that. But Tom Chi explained that this atom does actually prove this, as it shows we all come from the same dozen stars.
In our blood, the mammalian hemoglobin molecule can bind up to four oxygen molecules. And in the heart of this molecule, researchers found, there is a single iron atom.
Thanks to this one specific atom our hearts are capable of pumping blood through our veins. Without the iron, oxygen would not bind.
This is interesting because iron can only come from one place: the stars. And it can only be formed during supernovas and in supermassive stars, Tom Chi explained.
Our galaxy sits amongst a hundred-thousand of other galaxies that continuously expand and collide with each other in Laniakea. Which means that the earth, people, and all that lives, only exist because galaxies collide.
If galaxies did not collide, we could not have the iron, and without that no earth, and no heartbeat.
— Tom Chi
2. The Organisms That Connect Our Breaths
Another way science proves that we are all connected has everything to do with another element that keeps us alive: our breath.
As you may already know, 3 billion years ago there was no oxygen on this planet. In his talk, Tom Chi goes on to explain how oxygen once originated from a single cell organism: the cyanide bacteria, or blue-green algae.
Until the algae began the process we now call photosynthesis, converting sunlight into oxygen, breathing wasn’t possible on our planet. In fact, it took another 2 billion years before the ozone layer was formed, plants sprung on land, and multicellular life started to form in the ocean.
But the tiny bacteria that created the atmosphere in which we are now able to live and breathe never left us. In the green you see in plants today, you find the direct ancestors of those blue-green algae.
Tom Chi: “Every single time we breathe out, one of these guys is gonna take that in and breath it back to us.” They have been and always will be – at least into the foreseeable future – the other half of our lungs.
It is through this process that all of our breaths are connected.
3. The Changing Structures Of Our Brains
The changing structure of our brains is another way in which the interconnectedness of life is demonstrated.
Every single one of us is born into a world where particular things are possible. All that is possible now is based on the thoughts that people had generations before us and the thoughts that people are having today.
Tom Chi refers to this as “colors in a palette.”
What’s here and what’s possible are the colors you can work with. But what’s profound, according to Chi, is that you can add color too.
For instance, the people that invented the piano added a new color. And the people that invented the internet.
But we do not all have to invent something in order to change the palette. We can also simply be a certain way.
Through our relationships or our way of being we can give something to both living and future generations. New thoughts, new brain structures, new ways of being, which they can then continue to build upon.
In the universe at large, people may tend to feel very small from time to time. But the thought “the universe is so huge, and I am nothing,” is not only depressing, according to Chi, it is also factually not true.
Each individual affects their friends and family, which in turn affect society, which in turn affect the biosphere, and so on.
“If a little organism like the blue-green algae can create something so beautiful as the world we live in today,” Tom Chi goes on to say, “do not underestimate what you as human beings can do, with that same set of patience and dedication.”
