Comments

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  Dharmavidya November 13, 2017 13:48

  Thanks, Robert - yes, let's hope so. An opening up would be a step forward. The science-religion binary has worn a bit thin but still inhibits much creative thought on both sides.
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  Robert McCarthy November 13, 2017 0:33

  While science and Buddhism have had many places of accord this seems a very new place for science based enquiry to engage with consciousness; let alone the experience of death. I am quite elated to see this as it will open new pathways to those many people who shun religion for the more 'reality' based critical sort of enquiry that science is regarded as premised upon. Many paths.
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  Robert McCarthy November 10, 2017 20:49

  Thanks Charlene. .. I cannot recall whether that term has been used.
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  Charlene Diane Jones November 10, 2017 14:20

  Robert McCarthy thank you. I read a bit of Neuroscience and have noted none of the authors use the word Consciousness. Good to know there are areas of science interested in exploring how our perceptions weave with what we believe is "out there." Robert, do any of these authors mention the unconscious? 
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  Dharmavidya November 10, 2017 7:03

  Thanks, Robert. Very interesting. Of course, science is having its say but these are not new ideas - not to Buddhists anyway :-) . And also 'of course' we are bound to ask "How can it be like that?" - a real mind teaser.
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  Robert McCarthy November 10, 2017 5:06

  Ps the author is Robert Lanza
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  Robert McCarthy November 10, 2017 4:54

  I have been very much drawn to reading and attending conferences around recent understandings of science in relation to consciousness and notiobs of other power. I am currently a third of the way through a recent book ' Beyond Biocentrism' br David Lanza. While the language is not so technical the current understandings are deeply challenging to our lived notions of reality. Here are a few paragraphs that illustrate where science is looking.
  Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we—consciousness, the mind—create space and time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. This consciousness is co-relative with objects in that space-time realm. The conclusion seems inescapable. Suffusing the cosmos is the realm of mind, whose observations cause objects to materialize, to assume one property or another, or to jump from one position to another without passing through any intervening space. These results have been described as beyond logical comprehension. But these are real experiments that have been carried out so many times that no physicist questions them. As Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics . . . Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.” But biocentrism makes sense of it all for the first time, because the mind is not secondary to a material universe. Rather, it is one with it. We are more than our individual bodies, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.
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  Dharmavidya October 25, 2017 8:35

  Robert - yes, i think that this is an important and dreadful matter. The tools evolved to make a liberal society super comfortable can also be the means of total oppression so it is possible that we are walking like blind children into a caldron of misery waiting somewhere in the future. The road to hell is paved with such intentions and collectively we cooperate in creating the conditions for our own destruction.
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  Robert McCarthy October 25, 2017 7:38

  I am reading a book..."against the fascist creep" by Akexander Reid Ross. It studies this subject from its earliest named time around the beginning if the 20th century right through to Trump and Brexit.
  The author holds me in domething of a grim spell as I finish the chapters up to the late 1940s. It is hard to accept the power of a full on fascist government with todays technology very much including mass media.
  I was going to write a review of an earlier book I read but felt I could not do it justice and instead quoted paragraphs on facebook.
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  Robert McCarthy August 8, 2017 0:16

  Thank you David. I will be pleased to write a review of this book.