Extraordinary Experiences: On Our Way Home

I begin my book by relating life-transforming experiences of scientists. After struck by lightning, surgeon Tony Cicoria heard music “from Heaven” and became a pianist to play it. Biophysicist Joyce Hawkes, after her near-death experience, heard a voice calling her to be a healer, studied with indigenous teachers, and became a cell-level healer. No longer agnostic, Cicoria and Hawkes now trust in the Source of life many call God. Some scientists, such as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs, acknowledge extraordinary intuitive experiences revealing the secrets of nature. Other scientists report life-transforming healings, visions, and dreams. 
 
Stars, water, and life are natural phenomena but remain fundamental mysteries that may generate extraordinary human experiences. I explain why in chapters on Consciousness and Subjectivity, the Origin and Evolution of Life, a Creative Universe, Purpose and Meaning, Ethics and Ecology, and Nature and God.
 
These wondrous experiences offer evidence that we have come from and will return to an eternal dimension of reality, as unbounded by time and space as quantum reality. Some call it Heaven, the Other Side, or Cosmic Consciousness. Knowing this truth makes everyday life on earth extraordinary. And whether we know it or not, we are on our way home.
 
This is why I end the book by recognizing that the first line of the Lord’s Prayer is as compelling now as it was two millennia ago. Abba, may your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Abba is the Aramaic word for father that Jesus used, and Paul in his New Testament letters also refers to Abba. Source of all life and forgiving love, may we open our hearts to You during our extraordinary lives on earth. Amen.

 

Available in paperback ($8) and Kindle ($1) editions at https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Experiences-Our-Way-Home/dp/B09JDX8ZLV/.

Quantum energy and love binds the universe

A natural result of feeling the infinite love of the universe is to recognize that conscious awareness is the very same force at the core of all existence. Such oneness and dissolution of the sense of self, and complete identity with all of life and the source of all that is, is the pathway toward truth. Indeed, the deepest lesson of my journey was realizing that unconditional love was the very fabric of the spiritual realm from which the totality of reality emerges.

The binding force of love reported by the vast majority of spiritual journeyers over millennia brings to mind the concept of ‘the ether,’ a substance that scientists in the late 19th century postulated might possibly serve as the medium pervading the entire universe through which light waves travel. Light fundamentally connects our entire universe with itself, pervading every bit of the physical universe throughout time.

In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed an experiment to investigate the ether, and they proved that the ether as it was postulated (as a classical medium, like air and water) did not exist. Yet in an amazing turn of events, the most recent work in physics demonstrates that the ether is now the way most modern physicists would describe the vacuum energy, the amazingly powerful source of energy that quantum physics has revealed to exist in the very fabric of spacetime itself. Vacuum energy is a potentially endless source of energy that could revolutionize our society, if we could just determine a way to harness it for our use here on earth. Ether has not resurged as an idea in physics, but it is a relativistic ether that is fully compatible with the ideas of relativity. But the concept of ether, which many would identify as the substance that acts as the binding force of our universe, is almost identical to the infinite binding force of love.

Our concepts of a loving, merciful, and compassionate force operating in the universe (whether from the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam or from other traditions, such as Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, Hinduism, or Buddhism) have originated from human encounters in the spiritual realm. Most of those traditions emerged from individuals who had witnessed extraordinary features of the invisible realm that revealed a much deeper connection with the universe. In essence, this is the most basic definition of spirituality, that we have a connection with the universe that enables us to sense vital aspects of it and to have some influence in achieving our goals and desires.

Eben Alexander and Karen Newall, Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, 2017.

Alexander and Newall: we are cocreators with God

Experimental results in quantum physics serve as the smoking gun to indicate that consciousness is fundamental in creating the universe: All of the observable universe (and all of the rest of the cosmos that exist anywhere or anytime) appears to emerge from consciousness itself.

The mathematical precision of our world and the fine-tuning of physical parameters involved in its structure provide compelling evidence of a highly ordered consciousness underlying all of existence. I believe that this ordering intelligence, which many might see as a creative God, is actually the very source of our conscious awareness as sentient beings. There is no separation between this ultimate creative force and our conscious awareness of existing in this universe. The observer, the self-awareness of the universe for itself, is us at the deepest level.

The great psychologist William James (1842-1910) offered up what he called ‘the More,’ His concept was simply that one could not fully explain the events of human lives through interactions defined in the physical realm alone. I view ‘the More’ as a top-down organizational principle that sets the stage for true evolution on a grand scale—that is, evolution of information and understanding of the universe, aligned with a structure suggestive of meaning and purpose in human existence. In many ways, this grander evolution of consciousness is the reason the entire universe exists.

By consciousness, I mean that self-awareness, that knowing in this moment that you exist, that you are a human being alive in the here and now—the observer part of awareness—the knower of knowledge. We are all participants and cocreators in this grand evolution of consciousness itself.

Eben Alexander and Karen Newall, Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness

 

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.

"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.

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.

Only our selfless characteristics will endure

Astrophysicist David Darling writes: “Those who have come close to death have, as it were, poked their noses into this greater world beyond human life. They have felt, briefly, incompletely, what it is like to be free of self and in contact with the absolute nature of things. No hallucination or fit of delirium could generate such an experience. Rather, it is ordinary life that, by comparison, begins to take on the air of unreality.

“The message is clear: if we can learn to see through the illusion of self now, in this life, then the ‘I’ who can die no longer exists. Death is deprived of its victim, so that the basis for fear and sorrow of death is undermined. We become part of a much larger process―the totality of being―that has no start or end.

“The scientist within us may rail at this and demand, ‘How can there be any sort of life after death? How can consciousness exist without a brain?’ But we can see now that these questions stem from a failure to grasp the true nature of consciousness and the brain. Better surely to ask, ‘How can there be consciousness with a brain?’

“We see the world as being full of relatively stable objects, such as trees and rocks and ourselves. But there is no stability anywhere, not even for a microsecond. Only our minds create that illusion. There are no trees, only a tree-air-earth-sun-cosmos process that never stands still. There are no people, only a people-air-food-cosmos process that is forever breathing, digesting and growing, breaking down and healing itself. There are no objects or things at all, but just one great interconnected system that is the whole of reality. All the world is a living, dynamic movement—continuous change and impermanence its only genuine characteristics.

“It is no coincidence that behavior which people everywhere consider intrinsically good―generosity to our fellow humans, working for the benefit of others, valuing all forms of life―serves also to lessen our preoccupation with self and to encourage the realization that we are part of an undivided unity. Only when there is no self left, is there no one who can die.

“Only those aspects of us that are selfless―qualities we might put under the unifying heading of ‘love’―will endure.

“Death is to be welcomed, when in due course it draws near, for with it we shall be freed from our terrible isolation. It is the one event that draws us all together again, back into the single true mind of the universe. Death is not a failure or a finality, but a triumph and the start of an experience we can hardly begin to imagine in our present form.

“Proper, spiritual preparation for death involves a dedicated search for the true nature of reality. And that, in turn, calls for a lifelong voyage of discovery into consciousness without self.

“Each to his or her own. There are many ways to break through the illusionary world of the rational mind. Prayer, charity, music, poetry―a million different roads.

“Only by pursuing a life course that diminishes our obsession with self, with material and emotional ‘me-ness,’ can we gain the deeper insights needed to face death with equanimity. A wonderful future lies ahead of us, following the trial of death, but not as individuals. In store is nothing less than a grand reunion with reality, an expansion of consciousness that can only occasionally be glimpsed through the dim portals of our senses and brain.”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 168-187.

Consciousness is irreducible; brains build models

“We are brought up in the West today to believe that the brain is a creator of thought, a producer―or at least an agent in the production―of consciousness. We are indoctrinated into the materialist belief that the mental world is merely a superficial, almost superfluous outgrowth of the physical. But now, in the light of NDEs, we must forcefully challenge that view. From those who have skirted death comes this extraordinary new evidence suggesting that cognition may actually broaden and become more profound at exactly the time the brain stops working. How is that possible?

“It is not simply that scientists have failed to explain consciousness, they have failed (in the main) to see that such an explanation is not even possible. Today’s prevailing view that subjective experiences arise spontaneously when certain physical systems (such as brains and, perhaps, computers) get complicated enough is fundamentally misguided. It stems from our habit of seeing the world dualistically―as having separate subjective and objective aspects. But in reality there is no such separation.

“Science starts from the assumption that there is a knowable logic to the universe―which there clearly is. It then strips away all aspects of the world that logic cannot tease apart, calling these subjective. There is nothing wrong with this―science couldn’t progress in any other way. The mistake is to assume that this separation of objective from subjective, which we choose to make, reflects how things really are. It does not. And this misunderstanding is now becoming very clear as scientists go beyond their own remit and try to explain consciousness as a derivative of brain function. Their failure is no surprise.

“Consciousness is not some side-effect, or epiphenomenon, of the objective world. It is an integral, irreducible part of reality. Consciousness is the subjective aspect of all things―the ever-present ‘mind’ of the universe.

“Most, if not all, the major organs of the body are regulators. The lungs don’t manufacture the air our bodies need; the stomach and intestines are not food-producers. So, if we manufacture neither the air we breathe nor the food we eat, why assume that we make, rather than regulate, what we think?

“Seen as a reducing valve, the brain is a mixed blessing. Without it, human beings would never have evolved. The brain shields us from an awareness of every little thing, letting through only those experiences that are relevant to our survival. On the other hand, the brain prevents us from being directly in touch with reality. It is the barrier that stands between us and the limitless potential of the universe.

“We may be supremely self-conscious, but for this very reason our awareness of reality is surprisingly limited.

“All other living creatures are more conscious than us, if by this we mean they interfere less with the totality of experience available to them. With inanimate objects, the distinction between the individual―the self―and the unity of everything breaks down completely. So, the bewildering paradox emerges that inert matter can be considered more conscious than anything that lives, while human beings are the least conscious creatures of all!

“Such a conclusion seems unreasonable. But that is only because it runs counter to the completely false picture of the world we normally uphold. We are the ones who invent the myth of objects and phenomena, of separation and selfhood. None of this really exists. Everything we experience through our rationalizing minds is an illusion. So what does it mean to say that a rock is more conscious than a person? Simply that what it is like to be a rock is the same as what it is like to be the whole universe, because outside of the human mind there is no differentiation.

“Our brains, far from being prerequisites for conscious thought, reduce the ever-present torrent of total subjective experience to a carefully moderated trickle. They condense the infinite, unbroken cosmos down to an extraordinarily parochial world that seems to revolve around the individual.

“The brain builds models. Then these models are projected outward, creating the appearance of ‘things’ and ‘happenings’ beyond the senses. But these phenomena are not objectively real. We see only our own confabulations― sophisticated falsehoods that include elements of experience as fundamental as our selves, our perceptions of moving time and our anxiety at the prospect of death.

“Brains improve the survival chances of the organic structures that encase them. They assist with the four F’s―fighting, fleeing, feeding and mating. And they do this by restricting and rescripting consciousness to just that paltry form needed to maximize our chances of staying alive.

“If we can readjust to the idea that consciousness exists only outside the mental world of the brain, then death no longer appears as the ultimate tragedy.

“Death is the breaking of a spell, the waking from a dream. In this alternative paradigm, consciousness is there all the time, all around us―in the trees, the earth, the sky, and the emptiness of space. It is there, waiting for us to rejoin it.”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 156-167.

Consciousness, free will, intent

What is creating evolutionary pressure if we are no longer preoccupied with the traditional issues of survival and species propagation? We have become aware enough and capable enough that self-improvement is now our main goal. Most importantly, that means spiritual evolution, or equivalently, the improvement of the quality of our consciousness.

The central nervous system hosts our consciousness as a computer hosts an operating system and applications. It serves as a transducer, a data port and bi-directional translator between the virtual experience of the physical body and the individuated nonphysical consciousness that defines your existence and motivates your intent within the larger reality.

“Consciousness is The One, while the many, the great diversity of realities and the entities that populate those realities, are specialized subsets of consciousness within their own thought-space or dimension. Once a complex system is capable of directly programming itself (developing or modifying its original source code―which includes genetic engineering), the pace of evolution dramatically accelerates. Space-time, in this context, is a construct of consciousness. It is not a physical substance or a thing―it is not a physical construct―it is created by imposing a set of constraints upon a subset of the larger reality.

“In scientific terms, a lower entropy consciousness system has more power―more energy available to do work―a higher, more useful level of organization. In common terms, a lower entropy digital system commands more usable energy (more profitable organization) and, therefore, becomes capable of creating more profitable configurations of itself. Additionally, a lower entropy consciousness eventually develops the ability to use directed conscious intent to reduce its entropy further. Physical experience is generated when the perception of an individual consciousness (sentient being) is constrained to follow the space-time rule-set.

“The fundamental evolutionary process seems to work everywhere ―life or conscious awareness or individuated sub-systems of conscious-ness are merely the result of a purposeful, self-interacting complex system with memory, evolving its way through a large and diverse set of environmentally constrained possibilities.

“Clearly, growing up within a larger reality has much more to do with raising the quality of your consciousness than accumulating information. What matters most is the development of wisdom, understanding, and the capacity to love―which are not primarily intellectual achievements. The love I am referring to here is an attitude, a value, a way of interacting and being, and needs no specific object on which to focus. Love is the result of low entropy consciousness.

“As consciousness develops awareness, intelligence, values and personality, its entropy shrinks as its ability to organize itself effectively and profitably increases. Value based awareness, intelligence, and purpose are created, sustained, driven, animated, and motivated by the evolutionary imperative to improve the functionality of the system through better organization (entropy reduction). Absolute right and wrong (intents, motivations, choices, and actions) are defined and differentiated by the effect they have on the average entropy of the system.

“Because consciousness is an attribute of individuals, all conscious entities are vitally important in their own way: each has its own mission and purpose and is an important contributor to the whole. All are different, all have their own challenges, and none is fundamentally superior or inferior.”

“Free will requires that negative intent be a possibility, and without free will, there can be no experiment.

“Right motivation, intent, and action generally result in a decrease of entropy within your consciousness, whereas wrong motivation, intent, and action generally result in an increase of entropy within your consciousness. This is how absolute right and wrong are defined. The wrong intent or choice is evolutionarily wrong even it if temporarily results in what appears to be a constructive right action in physical-biological space. You do not evolve higher quality consciousness through right action or right result, but only through right motivation and right intent.

“Exercising free will interactions (with self or others) produces an internal result (always) and an external result (usually). The internal result immediately and most potently affects the quality of the consciousness according to the quality of the intent. The external result affects others as well as yourself and generates the appropriate feedback or reaction. Thus, it is not possible to achieve a right result if the intent is wrong. A wrong intent damages its creator despite what else happens.

“If our intent is right, we always derive some benefit, regardless of what we do as a result of that right intent. Right intent almost always drives a resultant right action. Wrong intent usually drives wrong action. For the typical being out there in the larger reality (continually choosing and doing, like you and me), intent lies primarily beneath the surface of one’s awareness. What motivates us is barely visible to our intellect. Motivations and intent are a complex mixture of many, sometimes inconsistent and incompatible, components. The choices you make (the motivations you have) are mostly not completely right or wrong.

“Every being is interested in, aware of, and cares about what it interacts with on its own local level, and in its immediate environment; everything else is invisible or inconsequential because it lies outside the being’s awareness, is hopelessly beyond its knowing (mystical), or appears to be irrelevant to its needs.

“Our local reality and everything in it is a product of consciousness evolution. We operate within our niche on the edge of an enormous consciousness ecosystem.

“Every critter, including you, has its point and its place; diversity is a natural artifact of evolution when there are few constraints. Each type of entity reflects unique potential, capacity, goals, purpose, and responsibility yet all spring from the same source and follow the same processes. One might say that they occupy different niches and habitats within the same consciousness-evolution fractal ecosystem."

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003), 223-310.

An evolving and spiritual consciousness

The About page of Thomas Campbell’s web site begins as follows: “Tom Campbell began researching altered states of consciousness with Bob Monroe (Journeys Out Of The Body, Far Journeys, and The Ultimate Journey) at Monroe Laboratories in the early 1970s where he and a few others were instrumental in getting Monroe’s laboratory for the study of consciousness up and running. These early drug-free consciousness pioneers helped design experiments, developed the technology for creating specific altered states, and were the main subjects of study (guinea pigs) all at the same time. Campbell has been experimenting with, and exploring the subjective and objective mind ever since.

Trained as a physicist, Campbell worked for twenty years on developing US missile defense systems before devoting his time to writing and speaking on consciousness. Campbell has not had an NDE, but his perspective on consciousness is based on his out-of-body experiences, which began as he worked with Bob Monroe. My Big TOE is an awesome book, which I found rich in compelling insights.

Campbell writes: “Any credible conception of reality must include subjective experience that can consistently and universally lead to a useful (measurable by anyone) functionality. The biggest picture must cover everything―everything objective, everything subjective, everything normal, and everything paranormal.

“The logic of causality can say nothing about the beginnings of its own system because those beginnings lie outside that system―beyond the reach of its own causal logic. Once we realize the causal logic that gives us science also limits our understanding of the larger reality (and its beginning), we are free to begin exploring the larger truth. Each dimension of reality has its own rules that define its objective science. Additionally, each dimension of reality experiences the next higher (less limited) dimension as subjective and mystical.

“You cannot access understanding and wisdom that is beyond what the quality of your consciousness can naturally support. Every individual unit of consciousness must develop in its own unique way, powered by the free will that drives its intent.

“The one thing most modern physicists agree on these days is that what we generally take for our local 3D time ordered causal reality is merely a perceptual illusion. Some sixty years after quantum physics destroyed the widely accepted material foundation of physical reality, what lies behind this persistent perceptual illusion remains as mysterious as ever to a traditional science trapped in the little picture by limiting beliefs.

“Real personal science requires real, verifiable, measurable, objective results. Here, the word ‘results,’ at the most basic level, refers to significant, continuing verifiable progress toward the improvement of the quality of your conscious being, the evolution of mind, the growing-up and maturing of spirit. Why? Because that is the nature of the reality we live in. You will see that the physical nature as well as the spiritual nature of our reality is straightforwardly derived from the natural process of consciousness evolution.

“Truth is absolute, but how to discover it, and express it within your being, must be personal. Spiritual growth, improving the quality of your consciousness, is about changing your attitude, expanding your awareness, outgrowing your fears, reducing your ego, and improving your capacity to love. To succeed, you must change your intent and modify your motivation.

“One method of accomplishing an assessment of subjective inner space is through meditation. Meditation lets us experience the invisible background of consciousness. Each individual will naturally extract from their meditation what they need for their next step.

“Individual consciousness is a subset of absolute consciousness. Pay careful attention to the choices you make throughout your day. Examine your motivations and intent relative to those choices. By an act of your will, modify your intents to be more giving, caring, loving, and to be less self-serving. Shift the focus from you, from what you want, need and desire, to what you can give to, and do for, others. In the same manner, change where and how you invest the energy that follows your intent in your relationships and interactions with other people.

“This is not about what I believe about reality. This is about a model of reality based upon my experience and research. If it makes you feel better, I don’t believe any of this stuff either. I either know it as fact (knowledge), or regard it as the most likely possibility or best hypothesis thus far (based on the scientific data available to me as of this writing).

“The actual differences between descriptions of the same absolute truth are―after differing language, cultural, and religious modes of expression are removed―much smaller than you would likely imagine. This is because all spiritual paths converge on the same absolute truths by means of reducing ego and fear, which are the primary generators of confusion and divisiveness.

“The most important question is: can these two assumptions (the existence of consciousness and the process of evolution) deliver the goods? Can they provide a logical foundation broad enough and solid enough to support a comprehensive model of reality?”

 

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003).

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As consciousness grows evil shrinks

Deepak Chopra writes: “The Big Bang is as inconceivable as God. We can’t envision it, since it was invisible and silent and neither hot nor cold. (All these qualities require the five senses, which didn’t exist.) Time and space emerged from the Big Bang, so we can’t ask ‘where’ or ‘when’ it occurred; both concepts depend on time and space already being here. In short, science confronts the pre-created state with no trustworthy way to cross the gap.

“The transcendent world is a field of infinite possibilities. It is the starting point, the womb of creation. The subtle world brings a possibility to mind as an image. Something real is taking shape. The material world presents the result. A new thing or event is manifested.

“The cycle that carries everything from uncreated to created occurs constantly; it is the basic rhythm of nature. The brain also processes reality through a cycle that turns off and on thousands of times per second. The key is the synapse, the gap between two neural connections. A chemical reaction jumps the gap (this is the on switch), and then the synapse is cleared for the next signal (the off switch).

“The creator behind the scenes is consciousness. It is using the brain, just as a pianist uses a piano. Whatever consciousness wants comes into existence. The piano is an instrument to satisfy the mind’s desire for music. The human eye is an instrument to satisfy the mind’s desire to view the created world. Every other qualia follows the same pattern. Consciousness created the sense of touch in order to feel the created world, the sense of hearing to hear the created world, and so on. God entered his creation in order to enjoy it.

“God matters, more than anything in creation, because God is the word we apply to the source of creation. It isn’t necessary to worship the source, although reverence is certainly deserved if we want to give it. The necessary thing is to connect. Across the gap in the transcendent world are some totally necessary things that cannot be created, not by hand, by imagination, or by thought.

“No one is bound to the same creative path. As creator, you rise up from the ocean of consciousness to create your personal reality. When you go deep inside, however, you see that you belong to the ocean of consciousness. It is creating reality through you without ever leaving the transcendent world.

“Enter the realm of all possibilities. Making them come true is a great gift. It comes directly from God. When you fully remember who you are, you become one with God. An invisible grace permeates every aspect of your life. Providence will uphold you when you are totally aligned with God, as nature upholds all simpler life forms. Alignment is the natural way; nonalignment isn’t.

“If you find yourself fighting the world’s many evils, you are immersed in them. The system of evil has claimed you. It sounds shocking, but if you believe in evil, you have forgotten who you really are. Every time you fight evil, you are reinforcing the system of evil, which would shrink away unless people paid attention to it^{. [1]}

“When you take a moment at night to revisit the good things that happened to you during the day, you reinforce every positive experience by consciously reminding yourself, you retrain your brain. A kind of filtering process is taking place. You select only the things you wish to reinforce, filtering out the mundane, irrelevant, and negative things. Once this becomes a habit, you will begin to experience a real shift in your personal reality. It will amaze you how much has been overlooked or taken for granted. Life isn’t good by itself; you must respond to it as good.^"[2]

“Once evil is exposed as an illusion, reality has a chance to convince us. Love can prove itself more powerful than fear. The greatest spiritual ideals, a world free of evil, will begin to actualize. On the other hand, if evil cannot be defeated, it will doom the spiritual path itself.

“A healthy ecosystem depends on one species eating another, which entails violence. Make all animals vegetarians, and in the absence of predators, nothing would stop insects from filling the world; they already outweigh all mammals many times over. But the need for pain applies to the mental world, too. Fear keeps you from putting your hand in the fire a second time. Guilt teaches children not to steal from the cookie jar even when their mothers aren’t watching. Mental pain is useful in all kinds of ways when it isn’t excessive.

“What we call evil is often something we can’t do without and don’t want to. Human beings thrive on contrast. Without pain there can be no pleasure, only a bland state of non-stimulation.

“Researchers into infant behavior have found that babies as young as four months old will try to pick up an object that their mothers dropped and hand it back. But the impulse to goodness is mixed in with contrary impulses. Other researchers have found that young children learn to act the way their parents tell them to; they know what ‘be good’ means in terms of getting approval at home. But when left alone without an adult in preschool, the same child may suddenly turn from Jekyll to Hyde, snatching toys from other children and showing no remorse when their victims cry.

“Pain and suffering weaken faith; God gets deposed with every new atrocity on the evening news. But what topples is only an image. God himself isn’t even touched by bad things; afflictions are part of the illusion. ‘Material existence is an illusion. Heaven is an upgrade of the illusion.’ God’s role isn’t to upgrade the illusion but to lead us out of it. Escaping evil is far more important than explaining it.

“Your real relationship with God emerges by eliminating everything that led to a false relationship. Evil is created in the misplaced desire to make ourselves worthy of God. Evil is like a vacuum, the emptiness of illusion. Fill the vacuum with reality, and evil vanishes. The fullness of God will steadily fill the vacuum. As consciousness grows, evil shrinks.

“Dharma comes down to one crucial thing: trusting Being to give you a course correction when you need it. Being provides hints about a higher reality. You feel subtly wrong when you veer into ego and selfishness. Being speaks silently, but existence is tilted in its favor.

“Consciousness naturally expands. The more you know yourself, the better your life becomes. Positive intentions are supported more than negative intentions.

“God is the place where the mind finds an answer beyond thought.^"[3]

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1 Deepak Chopra, The Future of God: A Practical Approach to Spirituality for Our Times (Harmony Books, 2014), 148-232.

2 Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi, Super Genes: Unlock the Astonishing Power of Your DNA for Optimum Health and Well-Being (Harmony, 2015), 207.

3 Chopra, The Future of God, 233-250.