Recovering The Soul

 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.