THINKING BEYOND THE BRAIN

This collection of essays is culled from lectures given to 'Beyond the Brain' conferences. Apart from its intrinsic value as an intellectual stimulant, anyone who wants to know what the SMN stands for, where it is going, and what its members believe, should use this book as a useful reference. With a carefully graded sequence of contributions it starts by asking fundamental questions about the nature of scientific knowledge and its limits It goes on to consider the wider dimensions of reality beyond the physical. It ends with the search for personal integration and meaning. Almost by definition members of the SMN will agree with the starting questions.. They will then spread out in a spectrum according to the point at which they cease to be happy with the answers.

David Lorimer's lucid foreword sets the scene, and Willis Harman lays the foundations. Out of the whole of human experience modern science focuses solely on the experience of the five senses, and then from that it abstracts only those observations that can be reduced to mathematical measurement. The result is a narrow and intense searchlight of inquiry that has penetrated into the innermost recesses of sub-atomic energy and the outermost limits of the universe. This has been the supreme success of science, but of necessity what this process omits is any reference to the consciousness that directs the searchlight, and whose light is the beam itself. The consequence is that science appears to imply a naïve reductionist materialism. Consciousness is merely a by product of brain function, and is firmly locked inside the skull. Willis Harman goes back to William James and suggests a 'radical empiricism' which scientifically examines the whole of human experience. This means including "first person experience" and Brian Josephson gives a justification for this.

Once personal accounts of inner experience are admitted, then there is a mass of evidence that consciousness is not confined within the skull. Most dramatic are Out of Body Experiences, (OBEs) and Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Peter Fenwick rehearses the accumulation of evidence which shows that self-awareness can be separated from the body, and Kenneth Ring gives strange cases of 'mindsight' whereby those born blind have quasi visual experiences when apparently leaving their bodies during an NDE. If thinking can go beyond the brain, how far can it go? David Fontana points out that the traditional techniques of meditation can take consciousness beyond immediate ego-centred awareness to a level which is transpersonal. Erlandur Haraldsson surveys the evidence for rebirth to show that individual consciousness seems to exist before birth and after death. Michael Grosso brings the parapsychological evidence for psi and survival together with the reports of the mystics. United they support each other to provide evidence for a transpersonal spiritual reality. However John Beloff reminds us of how difficult it is to relate first person anecdotal accounts of the paranormal, with the sober third person observations of objective scientific inquiry. Many people have dramatic personal experience of telepathy, but proving it scientifically is frustratingly elusive.

In what ways is the reality of this wider dimension of consciousness to be grasped? Charles Tart sees a path to compassion, participation and humility leading to enlightenment. Stan Grof argues that non ordinary states of consciousness are part of the human heritage we have neglected . He links them to modern knowledge and shows how it leads to the vision of a transpersonal realm of consciousness. Roger Woolger is ambitious in his certainty that these realms can be accessed, and he points out the complexity of the various levels of consciousness and imagination that lie beyond the immediate ego.

If consciousness has these wider dimensions then the whole perspective on medicine and healing becomes transformed. Andrew Powell explains how therapeutic psychotherapy can use a belief in unseen realms of consciousness to heal mental disorder, and Marilyn Schlitz and Willis Harman show how it is possible to make sense of alternative medicine once a narrow mechanistic view of human energies is abandoned. Both acupuncture and healing by distant prayer become meaningful possibilities.

Therefore it seems that there is a dimension of consciousness that can be explored through the investigation of non-ordinary experience, the techniques of alternative medicine and the insights of the psychic, the mystic, and the seer. There seems to be a parallel with the way that scientists have investigated the dimensions of space and time, and have ended up with picture of the universe totally other than the picture of the world given by our five senses. Yet few of the contributors seem satisfied with a dualism in which consciousness is totally separate from physical existence. There must somehow be a reconciling unity beyond both. There is mention of Amit Goswami's theory that the unity of mind and matter comes about through the way observation collapses the wave equation and brings matter into existence. Mark Woodhouse suggests an energy monism in which consciousness and matter are partial aspects of a fundamental unity, and Ravi Ravindra reinterprets the Vedanta in the light of modern knowledge. The words are different, the arguments are distinct, but the meaning is the same. At some point perhaps beyond the limit of human thought, the quantum vacuum, the One of metaphysical speculation and 'raincloud of unknowable things' reached by the mystic all coincide.

Anne Baring's contribution is the most controversial and perhaps the most profound. It is controversial because she retells the story of the reintegration of the personality through the legend of Sleeping Beauty and the myth of alchemy. Myths do not go down very well in a collection partially devoted , at least, to the meaning of science, and myths are rather arbitrary things. If she had used myths from the Taoists, Hindus or Amerindians, then her story would be different. Why choose one myth rather than another? Yet if the story were different, the meaning would be the same. Once we become self-conscious about science, we become aware of the assumptions we are making and limits of the assumptions that we impose on the universe. But self-consciousness is a continuous process, we might begin to question the limits of science, but we must go on to question the limits of our own thought in questioning anything. What starts with a query about whether there are ways of knowing wider than modern science, ends with a psychological and moral inquiry into the integrity and integration of our own personality.

Most SMN members will be happy to start with Willis Harman. It would be interesting to know how many are happy to end agreeing with Anne Baring.