By Michael Bernard Beckwith — 2010
Is there something woven into the fundamental fabric of our being that urges us to seek fulfillment beyond the offerings of the external world?
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In the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec...
The brain creates the images, thoughts, feelings and other experiences of which we are aware, but awareness itself is already present.
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Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
It’s a surprising answer that looks far from obvious, but space joins a long list of candidates as old as the written word.
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Taken for granted in Western culture for more than a hundred years, the dualistic view of the universe—the split between mind and matter, body and spirit, faith and reason, essentially between science and spirituality—is now being fundamentally questioned by Western science and religion alike.
One of the most famous expressions of the concept of non-duality, the Heart Sutra is but one example of an idea that humans have alternately embraced and dismissed for millennia. What is non-duality, then, and why do we find it both unsettling and desirable?
It may be that the best way to understand the world is not through science or spirituality alone – but through an approach which combines them both.
How did we get here? Where are we going? How will we get there? As individuals and on the societal level, these questions are at the heart of the human condition. The answers can provide a road map for how we live our lives.
It may be some way off, but mind uploading, the digital duplication of your mental essence, could expand human experience into a virtual afterlife.
Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology.