Our Consciousness is Nonlocal—The Power of the One Mind
One Mind is a collective, unitary domain of intelligence, of which all individual minds are a part. One Mind is nonlocal — it is a spatially and temporally infinite aspect of our consciousness.
The globally renowned physician and author Larry Dossey has compiled significant evidence for the existence of One Mind—a unifying, nonlocal, universal form of consciousness. The concept of One Mind challenges the default dogmatic scientific view that the brain creates consciousness and that the consciousness is confined to the body. Many scientists have embraced this concept, accepting the nonlocal aspect of the mind. In the following set of excerpts from the book “One Mind,” Larry Dossey explains the idea of the One Mind and why it is important for each of us.
One Mind—Inclusive Dimension of the Mental Landscape
In the 20th century, we were introduced to several subdivisions of the mind, such as the conscious, the preconscious, the subconscious, the unconscious, the collective conscious, and the collective unconscious. The One Mind is an additional perspective on our mental landscape. The difference is that the One Mind is not a subdivision. It is the overarching, inclusive dimension to which all the mental components of all individual minds belong. I capitalize the One Mind to distinguish it from the one mind that is possessed by each individual.
Individual minds turn out to be not just individuals. They are not confined or localized to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, nor to specific points in time, such as the present. Minds, rather, are nonlocal concerning space and time. This means that the separateness of minds is an illusion because individual minds cannot be put in a box (or brain) and walled off from one another. In some sense, all minds come together to form a single mind. Throughout history, many individuals, including eminent scientists, have glimpsed this fact. This includes Nobel physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who proclaimed, “There is only one mind,” and the distinguished physicist David Bohm, who asserted, “Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one.”
One Mind Carries Us Beyond the Isolation and Frustration of the Feeling of Separateness
If all individual minds are united via the One Mind, for which there is impressive evidence, it follows that at some level we are intimately connected with all sentient life. This realization makes possible a recalibration of the self-oriented Golden Rule, from “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to “Be kind to others because in some sense they are you.” The task of the great wisdom traditions throughout history has been to transform this awareness from an intellectual concept into a felt certainty that is so real that it makes a difference in how we conduct our lives.
The realization of the One Mind carries us beyond the isolation and frustration of the separate individual struggling against impossible odds. Life becomes more than a wearisome journey from the cradle to the crematorium. A felt unity with all other minds conveys renewed meaning, purpose, and possibility and a sense of the sacredness of all things.
Einstein saw that our very survival depends on a transition from the sense of the isolated self to an expanded level of awareness that includes all sentient beings. He said, “A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and the affection of a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The Exponential Power of One Mind
Enter the One Mind. Its power is revealed when we realize that our combined action within it is not merely additive but exponential. In the One Mind, one plus one no longer makes two, but many. This realization diminishes the “slow-motion relentless sorrow” of individual activities. This understanding led Margaret Mead to observe, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.
As members of the One Mind, we continue to act individually; but as we become more aware of our communal selves, an alchemical process kicks in, in the form of heightened imagination and creativity. We enter a field of knowing that is greater than that of any group member and greater than the sum of a group’s members. The result is what Marc Barasch, founder and CEO of Green World Campaign, calls a “collaboratory.” Solutions to problems surface that we did not anticipate. We become more imaginative, inventive, inspired, productive, resourceful, and innovative. In the One Mind, pooled neurons outperform individual brains.
The power of the One Mind resides in the fact that it does not need to be created. The collective One Mind does not need to be tweeted or Facebooked into being. It already is—an overarching dimension of consciousness of which we are already a part. We have simply forgotten our belongingness, trading our oneness for the illusion of isolated individuality, that insidious, erroneous belief that personhood is all we are. Once we cease believing that we are a coin with only one side, we shall wonder how we could have deceived ourselves so thoroughly for so long. And we can begin to act accordingly.
One Mind Has Been Honored by Many Traditions
The concept of the One Mind is ancient, and it remains an honored belief in many wisdom traditions. The esoteric sides of all the major religions recognize that our consciousness is subsumed and nourished by an infinite, absolute, divine, or cosmic source and is ultimately one with it. Samkhya, one of the oldest philosophical systems of India, promoted the concept of the Akashic records, a compendium of information and knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence, which later interpreters likened to the Mind of God. The Upanishads, India’s sacred scriptures that date to the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., proclaim tat tvam asi, “thou art that”: the human and the divine are one. Similarly to the Christian tradition, the words of Jesus: “The kingdom of God is within you,” and Jesus’s words, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” As the eponymous sage Hermes Trismegistus said centuries earlier, “There is nothing more divine than the mind, nothing more potent in its operation, nothing more apt to unite men to gods, and gods to men.”
Our Consciousness in Nonlocal
The dominant view in science is that the brain somehow makes consciousness like the liver makes bile. But this is an unproven assumption that has never been explained, can hardly be imagined, and has never been directly observed. The status of this belief is neuro mythology, not science. Still, the belief persists, just as many mythologies have persisted for long periods in the history of science, such as the belief in the ether; phlogiston; and the absoluteness of matter, energy, space, and time. Our current neuro mythology insists that a brain is necessary for consciousness to exist and that consciousness cannot exist outside the brain. Since brains are individual, minds must also be individual, one per person. For a One Mind to exist, there would have to be One Brain, which is absurd.
The nature of consciousness, however, remains a mystery. As cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman of the University of California at Irvine wrote, “The scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness.” As to how consciousness might arise from a physical system such as the brain—if indeed it does—Harvard University experimental psychologist Steven Pinker confessed, “Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else.” Recognizing our ignorance about the origins of consciousness is important because this opens the door to possibilities such as the One Mind, which a strictly material viewpoint prohibits.
In many areas of science, however, the admission of ignorance has been overshadowed by arrogance. And arrogance—the certainty that we know more than we do—has created a serious obstacle in our understanding of consciousness. It has prevented a fair hearing for a huge body of research pointing to a nonlocal, beyond-the-body aspect of the mind, out of the haughty insistence that such phenomena simply cannot happen, much like rocks falling from the sky; and since they cannot happen, they don’t happen—damn the evidence, case closed.
In science, we often know that something works before we have a clue about how it works. This is particularly true in medicine, my field. Examples are numerous, including aspirin for inflammation and pain, penicillin for infection, cinchona for malaria, colchicine for gout, general anesthetics, and so on. Explanations often come later. While we await them, we do not ignore the efficacy of these interventions out of some pigheaded demand for an explanation of the mechanism involved. I have never seen a patient who needed major surgery refuse a general anesthetic because the anesthesiologist could not explain precisely how it works.
In the same spirit, I believe that the hypothesis of the One Mind must be taken seriously. The concept of the One Mind works not because we know the mechanism, but because it models certain observations as well as or better than other hypotheses about how the mind behaves.
Future generations may one day explain the operations of the One Mind—or maybe not, for the problems are formidable. At present, we cannot even explain the individual mind, let alone the One Mind. But, as mentioned, our ignorance is also an opportunity. Knowing so little about consciousness, we can be bold in exploring the possibility of a universal domain of mind.
Source
~Excerpts from the book “One Mind: How Our Mind Is Part Of A Greater Consciousness And Why It Matters” by Larry Dossey, M.D. Hay House, Inc., 2013~