Through the years many have pondered the Mind-Body problem. Varying opinions, debate and arguments arise contemplating whether the mind and consciousness are not merely brain processes and may in fact survive and continue after death. Science and religion are often at loggerheads but there are those that resonate to evidence that there is for sure something at hand that we don’t understand. Naturally psychical research fits within this quandary.
An excellent new book has just been published, CONSCIOUSNESS UNBOUND, edited by Edward F. Kelly, long time grantee and friend to Parapsychology Foundation, and Paul Marshall. PF is proud to have published within our Scholarly Monograph Series ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND PSI: An Historical Survey and Research Prospectus written by Ed Kelly and Rafael Locke which is still available for purchase. I am also recommending newly published SILICON –from the Invention of the microprocessor to the new science of consciousness, by Federico Faggin. I got my hands onto SILICON reading it first and was then not surprised to see a chapter penned by Federico Faggin within CONSCIOUSNESS UNBOUND, entitled “Consciousness Comes First”.
PF’S founder, and trance medium, Eileen J. Garrett also struggled with the meaning of consciousness and its ramifications. I thought I might share with you some of her conjecture written back in 1943 in her book which is still available in paperback and in DVD format, AWARENESS, that stands the test of time, certainly speaking to this age old question. .
“An affinity exists between the individual man and the universe of so strange and subtle a nature that now, for the most part, we are able to grasp a vague impression of it only by going deep into the subconscious. But as these present years go by, the ancient content of the subconscious is being rapidly buried more and more deeply under an agglomeration of the artificial symbols of civilization. Unless psychology makes haste to fulfill its undertaken task of discovering the true psychic nature of mankind, we may have an actual split in the human race, with a new racial type following a developmental path of freedom for the mind, in supersensory fields, while the rest of mankind remains to perfect the physical field of substance and the senses.
In fact, there are evidences which indicate that such a division is at the very root of the present world-conflict. We may find that through pain and suffering and death we have come to a clearer realization of humanity’s super-physical sources in the past and humanity’s super-physical destiny in the future. If this turns out to be so in any immediate sense, the foundations of a finer future will already have been laid—in which case we shall have been led forward toward a wider comprehension of the space-time continuum and the unity and continuity of the consciousness continuum also. And these objective factors, which transcend our dependence on the five senses, as they are now conceived, may very well prove to be the beginning of a new freedom in the vast fields of consciousness, for humanity as a whole.
Science with all its undeniable splendors of achievement, is restricted by its self-imposed limitations to the field of after-the-fact. It deals with the “given,” but excludes the source of the gift. Yet only in the psychological capacities of mankind can the actual significance of events by conceived, accepted, and lived by; and it is out of this same area that the capacities of science—its curiosity, its persistence, its judgment, and its inspiration—emerge. Humanity is itself the laboratory and testing ground of all possible events in the universe… Curiosity courage, experience, understanding—these are the steps in the ever-rising development of individual lives and of the human consciousness as a whole. Science seeks to discover the established, the repeatedly demonstrable, and religion seeks to serve and sustain the basic laws and truths of being, even those which are incomprehensible to our finite abilities. And between these two broad racial highways the individual follows a middle path, each one according to his ability and his talent, seeking and finding his own measure of truth, receiving and reflecting the light of life according to his capacity and his need. My fate, my life, have largely consisted in experiencing the tenuous, the rare, the unique event in awareness. Of my own volition I have pressed consciousness toward the limits of its present phase…There are no known limits to the field of human consciousness; its capacities transcend both the phase of substance and the reach of the senses; it has affinities with the universal. Ever and always, the human consciousness possesses its own standards and measures of reality.”
Please check out the aforementioned volumes and consider where you stand in the debate. I know where I stand which probably is not too difficult to discern. Till next month…