Physicists argue that mind is One and we are too

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey refers to arguments in The Miracle of Existence, written by Henry Margenau (1901-1997) when he was Professor Emeritus of physics and Natural Philosophy at Yale University. “For Margenau, the fact that we perceive the same world is evidence for the existence of the Universal Mind. Granted, everyone’s vision of things is not precisely identical, a fact that is amply documented by decades of experiments in perceptual psychology. Yet there is a rough equivalence between our visions that no one can doubt; we can communicate shared experiences about our world without too much difficulty. Now, what are we to make of the fact that we collectively share a coherent picture of the world? This fact is profoundly important, says Margenau. After we take in incoming stimuli, they are finally combined into a ‘physical reality, in essence the same for all.’ And this ‘oneness of the all implies the universality of mind if we remember that matter is a construct of the mind.’

“This significant possibility,” Dossey writes, “is overlooked consistently by perceptual psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers of the mind. If, as modern neuroscience agrees, we know nothing except through the senses, then why is there not a different world for each brain? Brains are not alike even in identical twins. And the same brain, from one moment to the next, can perceive the same stimuli in a different way, and make a different world picture. When we consider how radically different the pictures that our brains make could be, it is astonishing that our world pictures turn out to be as coherent as they are.

“And the reason they are coherent, Margenau implies, is not because our brains are similar or work 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 all the brains on the planet. Only the One Mind, a Universal Mind, could do such a thing. To perform in such a way it must be nonlocal in the sense of being beyond individual brains and bodies. If the One Mind were not at work shaping the vast amount of sensory data processed every moment by the sea of brains on the Earth, we might expect world pictures to be formed that are so disparate as to be incommunicable.

Dossey notes: “Some counter that the pictures we make of the world are one because there is only one world to make the picture from. This view is that of naïve realism, and Margenau and modern physics in general ask us to go beyond it, for there is really no ‘out there’ that we can regard as totally external, objective, and the same for everyone. There is an aspect of reality that is deeper than the ‘outside’ objects, and must include the mind. Ultimately this is the reality of the One, the Universal Mind, which in its most comprehensive expression is God."

Philosopher Ken Wilber concludes: “each individual is part of God or part of the Universal Mind. I use the phrase ‘part of’ with hesitation, recalling its looseness and inapplicability even in recent physics. Perhaps a better way to put the matter is to say that each of us is the Universal Mind but inflicted with limitations that obscure all but a tiny fraction of its aspects and properties.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 154-161.