BOOK EXCERPT

​

The Gospel of Science: Mind-Blowing New Science on Ancient Truths to Heal Our Stress, Lives, and Planet

​

by William Douglas, Jr.

​

Personal/Global Peace & Prosperity are Forming in Our Minds ... According to Cutting-Edge New Science

​

As I became aware of scientific studies on the profound nature of human consciousness and the economics of compassion, it ignited within me a raw excitement … I had new eyes … I saw the things prophets like Jesus had extolled in a new light that made incredibly practical sense for the world—far different than the blind dogmatic faith so much of religion had become. THESE PROPHETS HAD BEEN SCIENTISTS, only they didn’t have the tools and terms of science to explain things with. BUT WE DO TODAY, and this science could change the future of our planet.

The original avatars or prophets had something important to share, which had been lost. Yet today the halls of science are unveiling something extraordinarily exciting, which is that neurology, medicine, sociology, and economics are validating ancient spiritual truths. This Good News does not require religious faith to enjoy. Science is showing that the prophets’ focus on ‘consciousness and compassion’ has a deep scientific significance, and requires no blind faith to practice and enjoy. They were in fact truths, not solely religious truths, but eternal truths that go to the heart of health, economics, psychology, and sociology. Bestselling author on consciousness, Deepak Chopra,[i][i] once pointed out the obvious, once you think about it, that Christ wasn’t actually a Christian and Buddha not really a Buddhist, and Mohammed not a Mohammedan. They were seekers of truth, just as scientists are.

​

Therefore, this is a secular book of science, not an evangelical appeal to blind faith in dogmatic rules. Because years of study of the mind and body show that one does not have to be religious to practice mind-body tools which produce what is called a “meditative state.” This state of mind has in the past been most commonly produced by chanting, repetitive prayer, etc., in temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues. But today it has become a secular facet of neurological science. In schools, hospitals, prisons, senior centers, and major corporations meditative techniques are being taught as a neurological/physical practice to improve health, focus, behavior, and productivity. I know because I teach them there, as do thousands of mind-body teachers all over the planet, many of whom I know and communicate with regularly.

A profoundly important side effect of these practices is altered activity in the empathy and compassion centers of the brain.

​

It is rare to find a book that will tell you how it ends on the first page. This one does.

​

How this book ends is simple: Incorporating mind-body practices into public education worldwide would change the world on every level creating the society of humanity’s greatest dreams. This is a scientifically provable fact—but to really comprehend how indisputable this fact is, you will need to enjoy the rest of this book.

I have been on a 40-year journey around the planet studying and teaching meditative practices, which 25 years ago led me into the halls of modern medicine and science.

My journey started in a Tai Chi Meditation class at South Coast Community College in Southern California where I went to find relief from stress and depression. This sparked a sojourn that led me to a Taoist Temple in Hong Kong setting the stage for a lifetime of teaching Tai Chi and Meditation through many of the world’s largest health networks and institutions, and in some of the world’s largest corporations.

My first hospital class was at a major medical center in Johnson County Kansas, Shawnee Mission Medical Center, where several health professionals attended that first Tai Chi Meditation class out of pure curiosity. What they experienced changed their lives, and blew their minds. In 8 weeks of this class some doctors got off hypertension medications they had been on for years. A surgeon in the class regained full mobility and no longer suffered chronic pain a car accident years before had left her with.

​

These doctors then scurried to their hospital’s database to search for “Tai Chi medical research” which ultimately initiated a multi-decade exploration of emerging scientific research that showed that ancient mind-body practices could save our planet trillions of dollars in saved healthcare costs. This in itself was so profoundly exciting it kept me sailing on this course for all these many years.

​

Yet this hospital experience revealed to me an even greater potential of these practices, one of changing the consciousness and behavior of our entire planet.

Report from a meditation student in class:

“You know Bill, I’ve noticed since I started meditation, I don’t flip nearly as many people off on the freeway as I used to.”

​

My imagination was initially sparked when one of the health professionals attending that first hospital session, an ER (Emergency Room) physician, was so affected by these practices I introduced him to that he resigned from his ER position and began a private naturopathic medical practice in another city where he is very successful today. He was at first perplexed and a bit frustrated by the meditation practices taught in my class. Then a few weeks later, he told me, “Bill, I think I get the meditation now.”

​

When I asked him to expand on that, he replied, “My ER staff told me this week, ‘John, we don’t know what you’ve been doing, but you are way easier to get along with, so please keep doing it.’”

​

Years later, because of a best-selling Tai Chi book I had written, I was invited to present Tai Chi and Meditation to inmates at Folsom State Prison in California, where I discovered that they had actually had a Tai Chi Chih program for about 2 years before I arrived. One inmate in that group tracking prison statistics over those years found that not only had behavior rates improved for the meditation group, but for the entire prison. The recidivism rates (return to prison rates) which are normally as high as 70% in American prisons, had dropped to about 30% for the meditation group—and again, incident rates/behavior rates for the entire prison had improved.

​

I would later learn of Apodaca Prison in Mexico—the site of one of Mexico’s most violent prison events—which saw ZERO events of extreme violence after implementing a meditation program for 700 inmates, and prison guards and administrators, as reported by Mimi Yagoub, writing for InSight Crime, in a November 16, 2016 article entitled, “How Meditation Reduced Violence in a Mexico Prison.” [ii][ii]

​

I began to wonder ‘What the heck is going on here?’ How could a mind-body technique improve the behavior of not just meditators, but of the entire institution? This sparked my interest in not just the medical research on the physical health aspects of mind-body practices, but on the effects in the brain, nervous system, and behavior of practitioners of meditation—eventually leading me to breakthroughs in physics and chaos mathematics, as I strove to understand how changes “inside meditator’s brains” could somehow affect the people, institutions, and communities around those meditators. This multi-decade journey around the world became vast and deep—requiring great flexibility from me that meditation enabled.

​

My Tai Chi study with masters and teachers around the world and my study of the great works of Taoism—which is the philosophy of Tai Chi—complimented my past study majoring in Sociology at the University of Kansas at Fort Hays. This Taoist/Sociology training enabled me to see the profound global implications of how human behavior was changed in students in my hospital and prison classes.

​

Sociologists look at individual behavior as part of a larger social trend, and ancient Taoists saw the world this way as well. In Tai Chi’s Taoist philosophy this is called the “microcosm within the macrocosm,” and is a major tenet of Taoism. The famous Yin Yang symbol is called the Tai Chi symbol by Taoists. The white/black dots within the black/white waves of the Yin Yang symbol are actually smaller Yin Yang symbols, and within the smaller dots in those are yet smaller images of that symbol, and on and on into infinity.

​

Viewing all this with a ‘microcosm within the macrocosm’ Taoist/Sociological perspective—these revelations of improved health and behavior in these local health professionals, validated by the research they then discovered in their hospital’s data system showing this was happening on a wider scale, coupled with my Folsom Prison experience where inmates beyond the meditation classes experienced evolved consciousness and behavior—it all offered electrifying implications for the world.

​

I understood what Taoists had extolled for centuries. When they asserted that as the individual body heals, the community’s body heals, the state, nation, and world’s body heals. When the individual’s consciousness evolves, the world’s consciousness and behavior evolve—which I eventually came to see as an example of Chaos Mathematics’ self-replicating fractal nature of the universe, which came into vogue in popular publications and blockbuster films over my decades of research.

​

Such breakthroughs in physics and mathematics led me to consider: Is the aberrant behavior of war on a global scale really so different than the deviant behavior of prison inmates who fight or misbehave in prison, other than the fractal scale of it?

If mind-body practices could calm the microcosmic society of a prison, would the self-replicating fractal nature of reality not suggest they would calm the macrocosmic conflict of the world which we call war? If the conflicts within an entire prison reduced because the consciousness of a small percentage of that prison’s prisoners was changed, how would globally changing consciousness impact war?

​

​