# What Is Consciousness?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Ervin Laszlo, Jean Houston, Larry Dossey]] - Full Title: What Is Consciousness? - Category: #books ## Highlights - Later, Peggy learned from her mother that her father did not welcome the news of her pending arrival, and greeted her birth as just another burden. Her parents were kind enough to her during her childhood, but Peggy was always aware of an underlying sadness, even distance, in her childhood. This affected her life in small and large ways especially when it came to her own self-worth. She said to me, “If only I could experience their having some moments of joy when my mother told my dad that I was ‘in the oven.’” ([Location 302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=302)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Your consciousness is a precious shoot, a green tendril of this enormous Oneness beyond-space-time. ([Location 468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=468)) - Tags: [[pink]] - James was not alone in his view of human limitations. Albert Einstein, James’s contemporary, observed, “My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.” ([Location 505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=505)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Popper predicted that, lured by periodic advances in brain science, “we shall be talking less and less about experiences, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, purposes and aims; and more and more about brain processes.. . . .”60 His prediction has come to pass. ([Location 778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=778)) - Tags: [[pink]] - he presumably believes he was using his own free will to arrive at the conclusion that free will does not exist. But physicalists never acknowledge this pretzel-like contradiction in their “logic.” Determined, robotic behavior is for others. The robotic strictures of physicalism do not apply to them. Thus they behave as if their conclusions are freely arrived at and should be taken seriously. They must exempt themselves from their physicalistic theory, for if they did not they would have no claim to truth, no compelling “arguments or reasons,” as Popper noted. They cannot acknowledge that, if physicalism is valid, they arrived at their conclusions not as a result of freely considered data, but because their atoms, molecules and brain made them do so. They are thus hoisted by their own petard. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=789)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - In the same vein, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wryly stated, “Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.”65 Sir John Eccles concurred: In the protected duchies of academic philosophy and psychology . . . professional philosophers and psychologists think up the notion that there are no thoughts, come to believe that there are no beliefs, and feel strongly that there are no feelings.66 ([Location 805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=805)) - enormous implications. A consciousness that is nonlocal with respect to space is infinite and omnipresent. A consciousness that is nonlocal with respect to time is eternal and immortal. And if individual consciousnesses are boundless and boundaryless, at some level they must come together to form a whole—a Universal or One Mind. When we therefore describe consciousness as eternal, infinite, and one, we are not speaking symbolically, metaphorically or poetically. We are invoking empirical science, in addition to human experience. ([Location 853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=853)) - George Wald, a Nobel laureate in biology, stated, “Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always . . . the source and condition of physical reality.”83 And, “I do not need spiritual enlightenment to know that I am one with the universe. That is just good physics.” ([Location 879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=879)) - Thus poet Mary Oliver’s “instructions for living a life”: “Pay attention./Be astonished./Tell about it.” ([Location 1011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1011)) - Tags: [[pink]] - We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves . . . [but] the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our “normal” consciousness is circumscribed for adaptation to our ([Location 1069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1069)) - The brain does not generate thought . . . any more than the wire generates electric current.121 —PAUL BRUNTON ([Location 1077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1077)) - Tags: [[pink]] - [E]ach one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business at all costs is to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. ([Location 1086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1086)) - Thomas Edison, America’s great inventor, who stated: People say I have created things. I have never created anything. I get impressions from the Universe at large and work them out, but I am only a plate on a record or a receiving apparatus—what you will. Thoughts are really impressions that we get from outside.129 ([Location 1128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1128)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “The knowledge of God cannot be attained by seeking, but only those who seek it find it.” ([Location 1156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1156)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - There is always a strong inclination for a body of professionals to oppose an unorthodox view. Such a group has a considerable investment in orthodoxy: they have learned to interpret a large body of data in terms of the old view, and they have prepared lectures and perhaps written books with the old background. To think the whole subject through again when one is no longer young is not easy and involves admitting a partially misspent youth. . . . Clearly it is more prudent to keep quiet, to be a moderate defender of orthodoxy, or to maintain that all is doubtful, sit on the fence, and wait in statesmanlike ambiguity for more data. . . .137 ([Location 1166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1166)) - Tags: [[pink]] - surprising. We physicians are continually assured, from premed days forward, that physicalism is valid. ([Location 1176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1176)) - Examples include Erwin Schrödinger: Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.142 Max Planck, the founder of quantum mechanics, said: I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.143 ([Location 1194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1194)) - Tags: [[pink]] - As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. ([Location 1202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1202)) - We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion. . . . Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind . . . are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later. . . ([Location 1226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1226)) - our consciousness is far more than we have recently taken it to be: that it is eternal, infinite, and one. ([Location 1239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1239)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In today’s world, the wider and deeper dimensions of consciousness are neglected and ignored. Modern people are convinced that consciousness beyond the brain is just fantasy. And because they are convinced that there cannot be consciousness beyond the brain, they do not experience consciousness beyond their brain. After all, we not only believe what we experience, we also experience what we believe—and only, or mostly, what we believe. If we are sure that something is not real and so cannot be experienced, we are not likely to experience it. ([Location 1264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1264)) - Tags: [[favorite]] [[pink]] - In Kenneth Ring’s experiments on OBEs of the blind, more than eighty percent of congenitally blind individuals described their surroundings in their OBE in vivid detail. Their visual experience often included a 360-degree vision of high acuity. According to Ring, it is not the subjects’ eyes that start to see; rather, “the mind itself sees; but more in the sense of ‘understanding’ or ‘taking in’ than of visual perception as such.”4 ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01H0825S4&location=1285)) - Tags: [[pink]]