"Nonlocal time” in quantum physics is “eternity”

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey writes: “I shall follow physicist and philosopher Henry Margenau and regard mind and consciousness as ‘primitives’—things indefinable in terms of empirical facts. This choice, Margenau contents, ‘is justified not only by the rules of logic but is made cogent by the fact that consciousness is at once the most immediate personal experience and the source form which all knowledge springs.’1 For Margenau and this inquiry, mind equal consciousness. Furthermore, for reasons to be given, these entities are considered nonmaterial, infinite in space, eternal, unconfined to brains and bodies, and capable of exerting change in the physical world. Sometimes, when ‘mind’ is used in this larger sense, I will refer to it as Mind.

“Although Mind is neither confined to the brain nor a produce of it, Mind may nonetheless work thorough the brain. The result is the appearance of individual minds, derivative of the larger Mind, which we refer to as the individual self, the ego, the person, and the sense of I. The primary characteristics of minds are content and some level of conscious awareness: the myriad thoughts, emotions, and sensations that flood us daily. Individual minds are highly susceptible to changes in the physical body: moods, emotions, and even thoughts can be modified by changes in the brain and body.

“There are many levels of consciousness . . . that includes those levels commonly acknowledged in the West such as the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. In addition, there are higher levels that have long been recognized in the elegant typologies of the East, but which are rarely spoken of in our culture. . . . I will frequently refer to the latter state of ultimate oneness as the highest Self, the Soul, and the One Mind, which contain attributes of the Divine. As this principle is frequently stated in in western religions, the ‘home’ of the soul is God; in the East, Atman (the individual soul) and Brahman (the Ultimate) are one.”

Dossey in Recovering Soul will refer to two types of time: (1) the time of common sense (linear, flowing, external time; the time of progress, development, and history), and (2) the time that is alluded to in modern physics (nonflowing, nonlinear time; the ‘time of eternity’; the time in which things do not happen, but simply ‘are’). . . . [T]here is a greater reason to explore the nonlocal nature of the mind than simply to ‘be accurate’ in some logical or scientific sense. This reason is conveyed by the Nobel neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles:

[S]cience has gone too far in breaking down man’s belief in his spiritual greatness . . . and has given him the belief that he is merely an insignificant animal that has arisen by chance and necessity in an insignificant planet lost in the great cosmic immensity. . . . We must realize the great unknowns in the material makeup and operation of our brains, and in the relationship of brain to mind and in our creative imagination.2

“The main reason to establish the nonlocal nature of the mind is, then, spiritual. Local theories of the mind are not only incomplete, they are destructive. . . . For if the mind is nonlocal, it must in some sense be independent of the strictly local brain and body. This opens up the possibility, at least, for some measure of freedom of the will, since the mind could escape the determinative constraints of the physical laws governing the physical body. And if the mind is nonlocal, unconfined to brains and bodies and thus not entirely dependent on the physical organism, the possibility for survival of bodily death is opened.”

1 Henry Morgenau, The Miracle of Existence (Ox Box Press, 1984), 72.

2 John C. Eccles, The Human Psyche (Springer International, 1980), 25.

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 3-7.