Recovering The Soul
by Larry Dossey MD
The over arching theme Dossey is what he refers to as the non local mind. A concept whereby you mind is not fully resident inside your head but draws from a nonlocal source, the Universe/God. The structure of the book is very academic where he introduces his thesis statement in the first third of the book. The second third of the book provides the science behind the thesis statement. In the last third he delves into the spiritual aspect, which actually make it real/true. The book resonated with me as I once wrote the poem below.
Specifically: Suppose for the moment then we could show that the human mind is non local: that it is ultimately independent of the physical brain and body and that, as a correlate, it transcends time and space. Yet They (people in opposition) feel safer when things are closed in, finite and local – such as the mind enclosed in the brain .. We need not recoil from the idea of a God-permeated nature so long as we apply the concept of hierarchy – a multi-tiered world in which there are degrees of divinity…One way to come about this is through the essentially spiritual act of recovering our own soul - of waking up to our non local self. Hence; Indeed today, no one would deny the exitance of a profound relationship between the brains chemistry and our mental processes. But the fact that such a relationship exists may not mean the mind completely confinable in the brain.
The W’holy Instant
W’holy instant; merely an extreme moment
Of which every moment of time should be,
Its meaning discovers the truth in Oneness.
Mankind, all integral pieces of the whole.
Let truth be just that, as a blooming rose.
Willfully accepting truth as the goal
In relationship with your fellow man,
You emerge as a giver of peace then
Know the universe provides in kind.
This is your only blooming purpose.
Give as you shall receive, radiant
In inspiration in the nature of Us
Transcending earthly perceptions,
With their accompanying illusions
That hold one in ultimate fear.
The truth is not of your mind
But of the universe unfolding
Of which you are One with.
With this knowledge, yours
At peace, complete, Whole
The following are excerpts from the books that support this.
1.
Page 28: Love and patriotism are some of the
most potent forces known to to humanity, yet they have never been seen,
measured of described by differential equations.
2.
Page 29: The soul is a holistic concept. It is
no made of stuff at all. Where is the
soul located? Nowhere.
3.
Page 31:
The ability ro know reality via precognition, telepathy, or clairvoyance
was a common trait ….We are not – even
though we might prefer to be – the slaves of chronological time.
4.
Page 33: language can become the screen which
stands between thee thinker and reality.
5.
Page 35: The greatest creators do not think or
reason so much as the simply “see”.
Perhaps then, it is not coincidental that we have always referred to our
greatest scientists, writers, and painters as “visionaries” and “seers”.
6.
Page 36: Intuition is explained as a nonverbal,
non logical process that is difficult to communicate in words in contrast with
the linier, discursive, logical/rational mode of thinking that take place
primarily in the left side of the brain.
7.
Page 106:
Shamans as a group are surely among the most talented and highest human
who hav walked the earth…..Maybe they were collectively deluded or their notion
that the entire world of animals, plants and things was enchanted and alive with
mind holdover from days before man’s consciousness had total disassociate from
its identification and fusion with he world around him, when his ego and
concept of self was so fragile that have a developed sense of “I”.
8.
Page 118:
Saint Francesi’s belief in virtue of humility, which made possible his
intimate discourse with the creature, is a prerequisite for entertaining the
possibility of non-local mind.
9.
Page 119:
I think that may well be a flow of patterns or instruction which crosses
species lines and allows even radically different organisms to borrow eachother’s
ideas.
10. Page
127: Prior to that time there is only variety
there is only a variety of possible outcomes for each subsequent event, each
with its own probability of actually being realized once the observation is
made. The observer or a measuring device
acting as an agent, according to some physicists – performs the pivotal
act of collapsing all the co-existent
possibilities into a single coherent outcome that can only then be called an
event.
11. Page 127: Only by combining the observer and
what is onserved into a single whole does the current picture of the world make
sense.
12. Page
128: what is important in our discussion
is current atomic science – …has gone beyond the notion of a fixed reality
existing “out there”.
13. Page
129: ‘What is the true nature of reality?’
The answere given is that Ultimate Reality on seeks is the same as the
individual self. In the Mundaka
Upanishad:
a.
Invisible, incomprehensible, without genealogy,
colrless, without eye or ear, without hands or feet unending, pervading all
omnipresent, that is unchangeable one whom the regard as the source of all
things
b.
Thus the individual self (Atman) and the
ultimate reality (Brahman) one wishes to find constitutes and indivisible whole.
c.
In the Chandogya Upanishad Brahmanm= is regarded
as the source of everything.
14. Page
130: Influenced by both physics and ancient teachingsm Schridinger came to
believe that the mind could not be separated from the world and put in a box,
the brain. Neither could the self be put
in a body.
15. Page
133: Ther is simply no external,
objective world in which n external, objective time could be.
16. Page
134: Oue everyday minds, of course, is not adapted to thinking in the “now”
mode that so impressed Schodinger. That
is one reason we prefer the linear, progressive, chronological descriptions of
classical science to the atemporal descriptions of modern physics.
17. Page
143: No one can read accounts of his life and not be struck bu the sense of
holiness with which he regarded all of creation. Physics was for him no dull affair; it was an
attempt to understand God’s work.
Einsteins theology and his science were tied hand-in-glove that they
could exist separately seemed unthinkable.
18. Page
144: Take the case of Newton. I believed
in God with a fervor. Newton spent mush
of his energy investigating alchemy and he was convinced that his reputation
would eventually rest more on his alchemical than on his physics.
19. Page
148: Man can still do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
Physics does not consist of
events; it consists of observations, and between the events and who observe it
there must be a signal – perhaps a ray of light, a wave or an impulse – which simply
cannot be taken out of the observation … Event, signal, observer: that is the
relationship which Einstein saw as the fundamental unit of physics.
20. Page
155: Alternate Realities … The task is
always to choose the way of looking at the world that best fits the situation.
21. Page
156: When we find this sameness and
unity in the macroscopic, everyday world – for example, the fact that coins and paper bills are of the same value,
that automobiles are of the same make … we at once assme tht they were designed
by man and therefore reflect the underlying mind of man. Should we not make a similar assumption, and
are not compelled to make it with respect the fundamental entities of atomic
and nuclear physics … though th intelligence behind was not that of man?
22. Page
157: Consider the behavior of neutrons
and protons. When they are separated in
space and therefore not interacting, one is neutral and the other carries a
positive charge. But when the come sufficiently
clos together “their identities disappear, their properties merge, and a
distinction between them becomes impossible, But they are still two onta.
23. Page
158: Should the denial of separability
into part also be necessary for consciousness, for mind so that the question of
separate minds making up or adding to the universal mind could become
meaningful?
24. Page
159: Margenau implies is not because our
brains are similar or the same, but because our minds are one. It takes a single consciousness to make a
single picture of the world, especially when that world picture is being assembled by
some 5 billion brains. Only the One Mind,
a Universal Mind, could do such a thing.
25. Page
163: Consciousness cannot be fully accounted for by the physical sciences as is
currently understood … Emergence essentially
allows biology to slip back in to materialism through the back door.
26. Page
165: Thus the answer to the perennial
puzzle of how the nonmaterial mind furnishes
energy to affect the material brain of body may be: It doesn’t.
The energy can come from the brain.
27. Page
167: Thus two elements are required to make human freedom a reality: choice, acting
on chance.
28. Page
169: The unexpected confrontation with non local reality can be utterly
shocking and overwhelming. Perhaps the
most tumultuous expression is through the use of mind-altering drugs.
29. Page
173: Bohm proposes that the universe is
constructed on the same principles as the hologram, and supports his theory by
concepts from modern physics. In the
modern physical view, the world id not assembled from individual bits, but is
seen as an indivisible whole of pattern, process and interrelatedness.
30. Page
174: In order to illustrate how order can be hidden or enfolded unapparent eye. Bohm use a simple example. Imagine two concentric glass cylinders with
fiscus fluid such as a glycerin in the
space between them. The apparatus can be
rotated mechanically very slowly.
Suppose you put a droplet of insoluble black into the glycerin then if you begin to rotate that apparatus in
reverse direction, the droplet of black ink would gradually reconstitute itself,
becoming visible again from the invisible black thread.
31. Page
185: Why not a different world for each min?
The propose there may be some ultimate Observer who in the end responsible
for coordinating the separate observations of the lessor observers and is this
responsible for bringing the entire Universe into existence ‘ and argument for
God.
32. Page
185: But there is really no end to the expression of these field, For once any individual person or any other living
thing is affected by them, they in turn affect the fields themselves. All things, thoughts, and behaviors are
plowed back in the great forward sweep of morphogenic fields.
33. Page
201: There is a two-way process linking
present and past, thoughts influencing presets thoughts adding to or modifying
the fields. The present does not come
into being only to die; it is preserved
in an invisible morphogenetic record that thereafter makes a contribution to
future events.
34. Page
201: The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of
nature … seems in my mind to be the structure of pure thought … the universe
begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
35. Page
201: This is a view that sets the stage for nonlocal mind – mind unrestrained
by space and time, mind not confined to the brains of single person.
36. Page
206: The presence of morphographic fields provides a way for all thoughts to
become linked across space and time. This
is a picture of nonlocal and transpersonal mind, and a way for individual minds
to communicate.
37. Page
213: I believe the view of mas as a nonlocal being offers something of a new
vision. …… The nonlocal view of man places mind and consciousness outside the
person, the brain, and the body, and leads a theory of One Mind, which is boundless
nin space and time. … Because nonlocal
is boundless and timeless, and because these are precisely qualities of Godhead. To some degree the boarders of God and man
overlap.
38. Page
219: The nonlocal vision of the universe
is not an invitation to blasphemy. It
requires an expanded temporal and spatial sense, and a broader sense of the
nature of human being.
39. Page228:
Heaven is man and man is heaven, and all men together are one heaven, and heaven
is nothing but one man. …. The questions ultimately resolve into how true
the nonlocal way of beingis for the person who uncontaminated by the biases of
the great faith, examines his own place in the world.
40. Page
236 [on illness] We must help him
realize that he is a process in spacetime not an entity who is fragmented from
the world of the healthy
41. Page
239: Through is respiratory rhythm the yogi repeats or simulates “Great Rhythm
of Time” which contains the periodic creations and destructions of the universe
revealed in Hindu thought.
42. Eastern
hold that ib the highest Realization there is no distinction between the
individual, the world, and Brahman or the Divine Reality.
43. Page
248: This theological pull, Huxley said,
is the pull from Divine Ground of things acting
upon that part of timeless now which a finite must regard as the future …
to continue wit Huxley’s metaphor, one realizes that cure and longevity are concerns
of the flesh not of Eternity but of Time.
44. Page
250: The whole point of nonlocal reality is that there is literally nothing to
lose and no time to lose it in.
45. Page
255: …death must remain, why it should remain…Thee
can never be any certainty of immortality without it. As long as death is denied, the experiential fact
of immortality can never flower in our lives.
46. Page
260: the results seem to show incontrovertibly that something like Group Mind
is at work, that is when a group of persons intentionally enter into a sate of consciousness
in which the sense of Unbounded Self is experienced, the word changes for the
better. …Classical science cannot explain
the Masharishi effect. … But some scientists have begun to speculate that
possible explanations do exist for these phenomena.
47. Page
265: …minds are spread through space and time …health and healing are not just
a personal but a collective affair.
48. Page
266: When observers “put use various measurements [observations] at the quantum
level of nature “the joint product of meaning arises…the joint product of all
evidence that is available to those who communicate. Meaning also demands the freedom to ask, to
chose the question(s) to be put, to decide … phrases immediately suggesting the
importance of mind.
49. Page
267: As philosopher William puts it,
consciousness - not matter was here
first.
50. Page
269: Era III medicine denies this possibility in principle, for it recognizes that
God, and the Universe Mind are a whole, from which nothing is excluded.
51. Page
270: But let us recall that in the entire history of science, no experiment has
ever been done that shows that time flows.
Ourfixation on the rigid divisions of time, then, may be illusory. What if the walls separating the past,
present, and future are not impenetrable?
What if medical actions could exist “for all time ”and influence each
other, violating the temporal barriers just as mind has been shown to do? What
would be the implications for modern medicine be?
52. Page
270: … According to Sheldrake, each new event in nature creates a morphogenic
field, which makes a similar event more to occur.
53. Page
270: These subsequent events would also add to the strength of the field tha
shaped them, creating a therapeutic habit.
54. Page
271: These tools involved a certain way of being. And beginning with the first use of these
being therapies, their morphogenetic fields had their infant beginnings and
were strengthened with each subsequent success.
55. Page
279: (1.) any dream, taken literally, is
likely to be destructive. (2) what was say we want is not what we want, and (3)
we know this at some deep unconscious level.
56. Page
281: The entire program is kept alive by the urge for profits and by any
presumption that the pharmaceutical chemists will always have one more trick up
their sleeves.
57. Page
281: It has been shown that some of the best
hospitals in the country, one-third of all admissions to critical care units is
a consequence of iatrogenic disease – disease cause by acts of physicians.
