Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Recovering soul: a reenchantment of the world

Larry Dossey writes in Recovering the Soul: “If the mind is nonlocal in space and time, our interaction with each other seems a foregone conclusion. Nonlocal minds are merging minds, since they are not ‘things’ that can be walled off and confined to moments in time or point-positions in space.

 

“If nonlocal mind is a reality, the world becomes a place of interaction and connection, not one of isolation and disjunction. And if humanity really believed that nonlocal mind were real, an entirely new foundation for ethical and moral behavior would enter, which would hold at least the possibility of a radical departure from the in same ways human beings and nation-states have chronically behaved toward each other. And, further, the entire existential premise of human life might shift toward the moral and the ethical, toward the spiritual and the holy. Nonlocal mind potentially leads, to borrow historian and sociologist Morris Berman’s provocative phrase, to a reenchantment of the world.

“Suppose for the moment that we could show that the human mind is nonlocal; that it is ultimately independent of the physical brain and body and that, as a correlate, it transcends time and space. This, I believe, would rank in importance far beyond anything ever discovered, past or present, about the human organism. This discovery would strike a chord of hope about our inner nature that has been silenced in an age of science; it would stir a new vision of the human as triumphant over flesh and blood: It would anchor the human spirit once a gain on the side of God instead of randomness, chance, and decay.

It would spur the human will to greatness instead of expediency and self-service; it would assuage the bad conscience modern men and women feel when they dream of innate purposes and goals of life, to say nothing of immortality. With one sweep, this discovery would redirect the imperatives of medicine. No longer would it be the ultimate goal of the modern healer to forestall death and decay, for these would lose their absolute status if the mind were ultimately transcendent over the physical body. The mad, frenzied, life-at-any-cost dictum that prevails today could be modulated in its intensity, along with the despair that dying men and women feel.

“And once again we might recover something that has been notably absent in our experience of late: the human soul.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 7-8.

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