I’m honored to bring you the thinking of New York Times best-selling author Dr. Larry Dossey, on issues he has championed for nearly 40 years. Larry and I will be discussing a range of topics, such as the nature of consciousness, our inherent connectivity and unity with all other life, and the role suffering plays in helping us elaborate and expand our worldview.
His long career as a physician, researcher, writer and public speaker has given him deep insights into these topics that you won’t want to miss. It’s remarkable how consistently and passionately Larry has been the champion for the idea of a collective, unitary consciousness in the face of an initially skeptical scientific community.
You can listen to my full conversation with Dr. Larry Dossey by clicking ‘play’ below, or on the following podcast platforms:
We Are All One
The following is just a taste of Larry’s thought-provoking insights.
Q: How do we access the One Mind?
Larry: You really don’t have to do anything to access the One Mind, if you just turn off your rational mind.
Q: How can suffering help us in our journey toward greater wholeness?
Larry: Ernest Hemingway said, “Life breaks everyone. Some people grow stronger at the break points. Other people just continue to be broken.” In my own life, I grew stronger at the break points, and probably without some sort of suffering, some sort of dramatic breakage, I would not have made the transitions in my own life and thinking that I did.
Q: Have we progressed as a society in our understanding and acceptance of the One Mind?
Larry: Absolutely. About three-quarters of the medical schools in the United States now have courses in their curriculum on the impact of healing intentions and consciousness-mediated healing.
Q: What has the One Mind been called in various spiritual traditions?
Larry: You can trace it back 3,000 years to the Hindu tradition, where it was known as the Akashic records. In Zen, it’s called Satori. In the tradition of Yoga, it’s called Somati. In Sufism it’s known as Fanaa. And in Christianity it’s often referred to as Christ Consciousness.
When asked if there’s one last thing he’d like our listeners to hear, Larry says, “Don’t be so serious about the nature of consciousness and what the future holds. Simply allow your unconscious wisdom to bubble up and you’ll be happier, more creative and healthier.”
Dr. Larry Dossey’s latest book, One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters, provides compelling data for the existence and power of a collective consciousness. It stretches us to re-imagine the power of our true selves.
About Dr. Larry Dossey, MD
The author of numerous best-selling books and articles, distinguished physician Dr. Larry Dossey has become an internationally influential advocate of the role of the mind in health and the role of spirituality in healthcare. The impact of his work has been remarkable. Before his book Healing Words was published in 1993, only three U.S. medical schools had courses devoted to exploring the role of spirituality in health; currently, nearly 80 medical schools have instituted such courses, many of which utilize Dr. Dossey’s works as textbooks. In his 1989 book Recovering the Soul, he introduced the concept of “nonlocal mind” — mind unconfined to the brain and body, mind spread infinitely throughout space and time. Since then, “nonlocal mind” has been adopted by many leading scientists as an emerging image of consciousness. Dr. Dossey’s ever-deepening explication of nonlocal mind provides a legitimate foundation for the merging of spirit and medicine. The ramifications of such a union are radical and call for no less than the reinvention of medicine…and the way each of us thinks about ourself.
Find Larry on Social Media:
http://larrydosseymd.com/ (Website)
https://twitter.com/larrydosseymd (Twitter)
https://www.facebook.com/larrydosseymd/ (Facebook)
Larry’s Books:
One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters
Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search
Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine
Books Mentioned in the Interview:
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr
Love Is Complicated: A True Story of Brokenness and Healing, by Marlena Fiol, to be released summer 2020
About Marlena Fiol, PhD
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.
You can find Marlena in the following places:
https://marlenafiol.com
Facebook
Twitter: @marlenafiol
Podcast Transcript
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above.
I’m very excited to introduce today’s guest, Dr. Larry Dossey.
Larry is an internal medicine physician who’s deeply rooted in the scientific world. He has become an international advocate of the role of the mind in health and the role of spirituality in healthcare.
He’s a New York Times bestselling author of Healing Words and also The Power of Premonitions, along with 10 other books that have been translated and published around the world. His latest book is One Mind, which we’ll talk about today.
The theme running through all of our episodes for this podcast season, which is titled Becoming Who You Truly Are, is that going through adversity sometimes leads us to more fully understand who we are and what’s possible for us. Larry’s message about One Mind certainly stretches us to re-imagine the power of our true selves.
Welcome, Larry.
…..
ONE MIND
So let’s begin with the most basic questions: Will you briefly describe for our listeners what you’re calling One Mind, and how do we know that it exists?
The best way to describe it is to contrast it with our ordinary mind, which amounts to the mental content, the thoughts and emotions that are part of our mental life on a daily basis. The One Mind includes that output, but it goes further. One Mind is what I call consciousness, the sort of thing that makes our mental experience of the daily stuff possible. Consciousness, and this is a view that has percolated from mystics as long ago as we have any records. Consciousness is what makes our mental stuff possible. It is the background, the umbrella under which the mental processes of a daily basis fit. So consciousness is something very difficult to describe. I’m not sure anyone has ever come up with a totally adequate description of consciousness, but it’s something we’ve all experienced. But I want to contrast it with the daily stuff of the mind, which as I’ve already said are the emotions, attitudes and thoughts that we all experience on a daily basis. Consciousness is deep. It is what lies behind it.
SO WHAT?
Larry, why would our listeners want to know about this One Mind? Why is it important?
I think it’s one of the most important things in our existence, because the evidence shows that people who are in tune with their deeper consciousness, are happier, healthier, more creative. They are wiser. They just seem to be in touch with what matters. And I think it’s healthy to look at the way nature designed us from the get-go. We’re not designed to be alone. Solitary humans don’t do very well. A lot of the lessons I learned from being in medicine is that social contact is absolutely important for people’s health. And when you try to disturb that and live apart, people begin to fall apart. They don’t operate well on a physical basis. One of the factors that has become recognized in recent years, is contact with other people. People who live a solitary existence don’t live as long and they’re not as healthy in the process. So I think there’s every reason for us to be cordial to the idea that at some deeper level, we’re all connected with one another through the One Mind. It’s one of the greatest gifts I think that nature has bestowed upon us.
Experiencing the One Mind carries with it a feeling of joy, compassion and love. People who tune in to the One Mind are more likely to be happier, healthier, wiser, and more creative.
The One Mind is a source of great wisdom and creativity, because it makes available an infinite pool of information that we can learn to access.
HOW TO ACCESS?
So our listeners may be thinking – this sounds like a wonderful thing – but how do we access the One Mind? Can you speak to that?
Of course, every major mystical, spiritual tradition has had a place in their philosophy for the idea of the One Mind. You can trace it back 3,000 years to the Hindu tradition, where it was known as the Akashic records. In Zen, it’s called Satori. In the tradition of Yoga it’s called Somati. In Sufism it’s known as Fanaa. And in Christianity it’s often referred to as Christ Consciousness.
In terms of how to access it, the methods that have come down through history, have to do with running off the rational mind. Our rational mind is filled with logic and reason. It wants to give all the credit to our personality and our sense of individuality. And certainly that’s important. But the key to accessing the One Mind is to turn off the rational mind. There are a million ways to do that. One way that’s become extremely popular in American and western culture in general in recent years, is meditation. And Lord knows there are many schools of thought about how to do that. But I think there are other ways as well. One that my wife and I have had for decades is simply exposure to nature. We find that back-packing in wilderness areas in the U.S., like somewhere in the Rocky Mountains in the summertime is one of the great ways of opening up to something deeper than your everyday sense of consciousness. Exposure to great art and great music is an avenue that works for a lot of people. I think that basically, one way of accessing this deeper level of consciousness is to simply sit down, turn off your cell phone and be quiet., and simply allow whatever comes up in your sense of awareness to be given a proper place and an honor. Most of think that unless we fill up our days with access to FB and other social media that we’re really sort of incomplete. Studies have shown that for people who fill up their minds with FB and other social media tend to be lonelier than people who don’t do that. So in one sense, although I’m a great fan of social media, I think that it’s a way of shooting ourselves in the foot. It’s filling up all the emptiness, and the space where this deeper awareness has of entering our being, and the last thing we should be doing is shutting those avenues off.
You really don’t have to do anything to access the One Mind, if we just clear our daily minds and start opening up instead of filling it up. I think the One Mind “does us,” by which I mean that it is the natural state of things, if we simply stop impeding the natural flow of this wisdom, I think it arrives automatically. It’s not that we have to do anything to access it.
IDENTITY
Larry, you talk about letting go of the rational mind, letting go of our ego identity… which then allows us to embrace an expanded notion of who we are.
I’ve been fascinated with identity as long as I can remember.
As I describe in my new book, I grew up on a leprosy compound that my dad founded the year I was born in a Low German Mennonite community in Paraguay, South America. I experienced so many identities that I never really understood who I was growing up.
Later…as an academic, I argued that strong personal and social identities are important because they satisfy basic psychological needs for belonging, self-esteem and locus of control.
But your book, Larry, leads me to wonder if a strong sense of self, although it’s clearly important in so many ways, also has the disadvantage of creating the individualization that essentially becomes a barrier to experiencing One Mind?
What I think what we’re talking about here is that we need both sides. We do profit from a sense of self, a sense of individuality, but that’s just one side of the coin. The other side is a deeper unconscious complementary, unitary sense of unity with all other living things. I’m not just talking about other people. I’m talking about all of sentient life on earth. You know, there’s an old saying in trans-personal psychology that if you want to transcend the self, you first have to be one. This is a way of saying that we need both sides. You know, people who don’t have a sense of personality and self, do not do well in life. Half their time is spent on psychiatrists’ couches trying to understand and develop and give permission for the self to come forward and take its proper place. If people try to transcend the ego without first having one, disaster generally is the result. So what I’m saying is that we’re not trying to deny one side of ourselves in favor of another. We’re talking about what physicists call complementarity. This is where apparently opposite forces are necessary to explain the whole. So a lot of people, I think, embark on their self-discovery journey, and they think they have to suppress the ego totally, and unless they do that their sense of trans-personality isn’t going to flower. I don’t think that’s right. I think we need both sides. If you think about it, in the course of evolution, the sense of self was extremely important for survival. If you try to cross a modern expressway and you do not have a sense of individuality, you’re probably going to get run over. This sense of individuality, sense of who we are is absolutely crucial for the survival of the species.
But the problem arises when it becomes absolutely dominant, and we lose our sense of participation and connectivity and unity with all other life, past and present. So I’m just here to stand up for both sides, and not to say that one should dominate the other.
ROLE OF SUFFERING
Letting go of our strong ego selves is challenging, to say the least. Which takes us to the core topic of this podcast season – that we must sometimes suffer in order to find wholeness.
My own story is like that. The journey toward wholeness I describe in my book grew out of a gradual recognition of my own brokenness and imperfection.
Larry, do you believe that some of us with – let’s say – an overblown ego must suffer some form of brokenness before we can let go enough to connect with the One Mind?
Absolutely. One of the people that was fairly clear about this was the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Ernest Hemingway, who in his prize-winning speech said, Life breaks everyone. Some people grow stronger at the break points. Other people just continue to be broken.” What you’re describing and what I experienced in my own life is that I grew stronger at the break points, and probably without some sort of suffering, some sort of dramatic breakage, I probably would not have made the transitions in my own life and thinking that I did.
I’ll tell you something I don’t usually discuss. Growing up as a child, I had one desire in life: To become a Baptist minister. You can use your imagination to see that breaking out of that narrow fundamentalist role was extremely difficult for me. It was agonizing. I did not really successfully break out of the mold until I was in college. I had another talent. I played the piano for church. I actually made money in summers as a gospel piano player for religious revivals in central Texas, and so on. So I was deeply embedded in the Protestant idea of narrowness and exclusivity. So the religious bias I had to overcome was really a struggle for me and it went on into my 20s. Finally, as I said, it came to a head in medical school. I found out that I had to shift or die. I was really suffering tremendously from this narrowness. So I made the transition. I’m not sure this has much meaning for anybody besides me, but it bears on your point that suffering can be a great assist in progress in our understanding, in the elaboration of our worldview.
On the contrary – it’s extremely meaningful. I too experienced those kinds of break points in my own life, and as I describe in my new book, Love is Complicated, I too probably would not have made the transitions I did without some sort of suffering.
I bumped into another form of narrowness after rejecting religious fundamentalism. I found that there was a tradition within science that could be just as narrow and dogmatic as anything I’d experienced in religion growing up. And it’s the philosophy of materialism, which I bumped into in medical school and even after that. And this has to do with the fact that consciousness and mind are just fancy elaborations of what the atoms and molecules in your brain happen to be doing. This point of view makes it impossible to be open to things like intercessory prayer, pre-cognition, retro-causation, and the odd phenomena that have been demonstrated conclusively in thousands of experiments in parapsychology and in the healing research. So, my struggles did not after graduating from religious narrowness. I found that scientists could be just as narrow in their own way as religious authorities could be.
During the last few decades of my dad’s life, we said “Doa ess nuscht tsweschen ons” to each other in our native Plautdietsch every time we said goodbye. It means there’s nothing bad between us. But the literal translation is “Nothing Between Us” – I think that might be the Low-German definition of One Mind!
Ed and I often wish we could find healing and growth without the pain. Don’t we all? We all seem to love the status quo and prefer just about anything to failing or losing, even if the status quo isn’t working so well for us. But like the late great Leonard Cohen wrote, cracks are how the light gets in.
OK, to ask my next question, I’m going to lean on the wise Franciscan teacher Father Richard Rohr. In his book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Rohr says “You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego.”
Basically, he argues that we need the first half of life process of building up our ego – doing all of the stuff of material life – to understand, somewhere during the second half of life, that having one more material thing won’t fill our longing…and this knowing finally allows us to let go, and fall upward into connectedness with all.
So Larry, do you believe we’re more likely to access One Mind when we’ve first established a strong – even over-blown ego – and then realize that it doesn’t get us what we really want?
So consistent with what you just said, Larry.
This lesson did not come easy for me. In my scientific education, going through my undergraduate, coming out with a degree in pharmacy and then going to medical school, and being inundated with the usual way of seeing brain and consciousness, was a tough barrier for me to overcome. I was absolutely shocked during medical school that many of the greatest scientist in western history have stood up for this idea of a collective, unitary consciousness. I didn’t know this literature existed. But some of the great scientists, physicists, including Erwin Schrödinger and David Bohm, whom I got to know in his later years, stood for this idea of the One Mind. Schrödinger won a Nobel Prize in 1933. He’s on record for saying “There is only One Mind.” This was a shocking statement for a Nobel Prize winning physicist. I was certainly shocked by it. But I found out that it was not just Schrödinger who had this idea. If you look in the western literature, you can find that Karl Jung certainly believed this with his idea of the “collective unconscious.” William James, who founded American psychology, was a strong proponent of a single collective unitary mind. And so was Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s great transcendentalist philosopher. He called the One Mind the “over-soul.” We could make a long list of some of the brilliant people who are stand-outs in western philosophy and science who have stood up for this idea. It has become common for people who are trained in the scientific tradition to ascribe this idea to Eastern mysticism, to say that’s it’s just southern California woo-woo. Actually, it’s firmly rooted in the western scientific tradition. So that’s one of the things I’ve tried to do in my work, is to re-position this idea and say, “If you want to go with the insights of some of our greatest scientists, this is a place to start with respect to consciousness.”
REACTIONS FROM SKEPTICS
Larry, your book provides so many data to back up your theory of the ONE MIND. But much of the scientific world remains skeptical. It reminds me of Dr. Semmelweis, the physician who in the mid-1800s, championed handwashing as a way to save patients. He also had data to back up his handwashing theory, but no one in the medical community wanted to hear what he had to say – probably because they felt threatened? Anyway, he ended up being ousted from the profession.
You’ve gone WAY out on a limb, writing and speaking about the power of prayer and One Mind in the face of a highly skeptical medical community. When you began so many years ago, did it frighten you?
Yeah, I was really hesitant to come forward at medical conferences and other speaking engagements in a full-throated, enthusiastic way about this idea because I knew that the tide was firmly against these issues. But I’m happy to say that it’s never been easier than it is right now to talk about these issues. Because there’s been a tremendous transition in our medical schools toward the idea that consciousness can exist in a non-local way, which is to say outside the brain, consciousness isn’t made by the brain. It can do things that the brain is incapable of doing. It can act at a distance. It can acquire information from a distance. Brains can’t do this. This is an idiot’s way of saying that consciousness must be more than the brain. So, three decades ago, it was hard to get traction about these ideas. Since then, however, about three-quarters of the medical schools in the United States have courses in their curriculum for the impact of healing intentions, consciousness-mediated healing. They at least put on the table the double-blind randomized controlled studies showing that we’re not making this stuff up. It can be demonstrated in some of the best-known scientific traditions that exist today.
Yes, we have made a lot of progress, but 30 years ago, what propelled you to move in this direction.
Personal experience. There were experiments that had been conducted for decades that showed that consciousness can operate outside the brain and body, and outside the present. But I was not fully aware of those. And I sort of had my come-uppance. In the first year I was in medical practice, I had what you’d call pre-cognitive dreams about events that would happen in the future. In my own experience, this had to do with seeing patients and seeing in detail what would be played out the next day, before these events ever happened. I knew in a heartbeat that I had a choice: I could either deny the reality of these dreams, which I found impossible to do, or I could allow them to make a difference in how I perceived consciousness and how the world worked. This was hard going back in the 1070s. But I began to write about these very difficult issues, and I found that I was joined in short order by colleagues who found out that I was open to this sort of thing. And they began to flood me with their own experiences. Of particular help was the interaction with nurses in the hospital environment. They began to tell me experiences I didn’t even know they were having. This was parallel to my own experience. These nurses, in particular, would tell me about events they dreamed about that would play out the next day or the next few days, and I began over the years to write about these things and to receive encouragement from colleagues.
I’ll never forget – I was giving a talk about new developments in internal medicine to a group of doctors in Santa Fe, where I live. This was sponsored by Harvard Medical School and the University of New Mexico, so it doesn’t get more scientific that a Harvard conference, I guess. I thought that I would just go out on a limb and share my own experiences, and in the Q&A session, this group of doctors – about 300 in the audience – they began to shock me by telling me their experiences. They would all begin their revelations with something like, “You know, I’ve never told anybody this in my life, but…” And then they would tell me about their experience. One female internist stood up and said, “I get dreams. I dream about my patients’ laboratory tests. I see the results before I even order the test. And it went from there.
And I thought afterward, what went on in this lecture? Why did these doctors come forward and share these things they’d never shared with anyone in their lives? And I concluded that they needed to feel safe. They knew I wasn’t going to criticize them. I’d already made a fool of myself talking about my pre-cognitive dreams. So they didn’t have anything to lose. It was a seminal moment in my unfoldment and willingness to go public. I decided that this issue of non-local consciousness – where we can see things outside of the present and have healing effects on other people at a distance – was one of the best-kept secrets in modern medicine. I really got my courage up after that and began to write brazenly – and some of my colleagues would say foolishly – about these sorts of things.
I’ve never regretted any of it. I wouldn’t take any of it back. And I’ve lived long enough to see that’s it’s made a difference in what’s taught in medical schools and what’s acceptable in scientific medicine.
Thank you for that. It’s an example of the huge power of vulnerability.
In fact, you’ve made huge leaps several times in your life, from a conservative religious childhood, (probably not unlike my own) to I think complete rejection of prayer, and then to becoming a champion of prayer as a powerful healing force.
It seems to me, Larry, that major life transitions like that don’t just happen – they’re often accompanied by a good deal of struggle and anguish. How would you say that you as a person are different as a result of going through those challenges?
There are several answers I can give you. One is that I’m more tolerant of scientific data that don’t fit the mold. I’ve been a proponent for 40 years of randomized double-blind studies that show that prayer works, not just in people, but in things that you might not think about, such as the growth rates of bacteria in test tubes, the germination rate of seeds, and all of that. That’s easy. That stuff you can defend as objective, scientific data.
The tougher thing for me was early on, when I had to break out of the fundamentalist Protestant atmosphere and world view that I’d grown up with, which said that there is a narrow band of legitimate religion and if you don’t belong in this little narrowness, you’ll go to hell and suffer damnation forever. That‘s the tradition I grew up with. I’ll just tell you that my immersion in the prayer studies just exploded that narrow, fundamentalist view because I saw clearly that the prayers for healing were not limited to just one particular religious tradition. They spanned just about every religion you can point to on the face of the earth. So to me, it was quite obvious that no religion had cornered the market on prayer, and that a great challenge for me was going to be, was I courageous enough to expand the narrow band of religiosity that I had grown up with. And I’m pretty sure that you and I shared that challenge early in our life. It’s not easy to abandon what you‘ve been raised with as a child. So that was the severest challenge I had, but once that change had settled in, I found it was much easier to engage the scientific data. So one step led to another.
Thank you for sharing those experiences.
ALONE TIME
You – like many others – have said that we were not designed to be alone – we are meant to be connected.
I feel like we have somewhat of a paradox regarding “alone time.”
On one hand, Ed and I have found a lot of value in daily meditations and even 10-day silent meditation retreats where we’re completely isolated from others and silent during that period of time – at the end of these retreats, the joyous sense of deep connection to everything and everyone is almost palpable. So in isolation, we find a sense of connectedness.
On the other hand, there’s lots of evidence that long periods of isolation are terrible for health, happiness and even longevity, because – as I believe you’ve also said – we’re not designed to be alone.
How do you think about this seeming paradox?
One way I have of entering this paradox and trying to make sense of it is through the portal of love. I don’t know of a healing tradition or a spiritual tradition that doesn’t emphasize the importance of love, and I like to tease apart what might be going on here. I think the experience of love is the most non-local experience that human beings are capable of. In the immersion into deep love, one does not separate oneself from other human beings. There is an erasure of boundaries and limits, and you can see this in people who experience love. For example, a mother and her infant. There’s really no dividing line, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally between the two. When people are in love, there’s no real distinction between one and the other. I think love is a human experience that shows the value of unity and connectivity between people. I think that this has approached global significance. Because the notion that we can separate ourselves from the rest of nature- by which I mean falling out of love with other creatures – is at the center of our problems today as a species. I think Alice Walker, the great novelist, was right when she said “Anything we love, can be saved.” If you look at the other side of that, it’s “Unless we love something, we’re not going to be able to save it.” So I think this issue of love, which transcends spiritual traditions, is an arrow pointing to connectivity, unity and a lack of separation.
The greatest problems we have on earth right now are spawned by greed and selfishness. That’s exactly the opposite of love. Greed and selfishness have to do with building boundaries between yourself and other people, and appropriating them for your own use. This is a dead end. It may be literally a dead end, if we don’t reverse this trend and our way of dealing with the rest of creation. So I think there’s a lot at stake here between just healthy personality growth and transcendental awareness. I think it has to do with our own survival. So, I want to raise the ante a bit here, that we’re not just talking about spiritual development. We’re talking about whether or not we’re going to be survivors on this planet by virtue of permitting other living things to enter our sphere of love.
Why does it feel joyous to be alone in meditation because we are actually connected?
We can experience oneness to the extent that we turn off our rational minds.
Meditation is an arrow pointing in the direction of love. I don’t know anybody who experiences the depth of meditation who comes out thinking they’re more isolated and alone. It’s a way of experiencing our connectivity. Meditation leads to a deepening of a sense of unity, which I would also call love.
One of the ways I try to honor being a physician is to try to understand the processes of helping people connect. Health science is a potential way of spiritual growth and understanding. It’s a journey straight up the mountain – it doesn’t meander. You either understand the virtues of empathy, or you’re just a technician.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Larry, let’s talk a bit about consciousness
It’s somewhat of a mysterious phenomenon – you write that we have no scientific theory of consciousness – it remains a mystery, and yet:
On the cover of your book “One Mind” Eben Alexander says “your excellent book lays the groundwork for the coming global awakening of consciousness and helps map out of the path toward it.”
What does that mysterious phenomenon look like to you? Do you believe that there is a coming global consciousness? What are the signs in a chaotic world that it is occurring?
A-number one questions all concerned global citizens should be asking. What is the future. Do we even have a future?
Asked David Bohm, one of our greatest physicists, “Are we gonna make it?” After thinking about it, he said, “Yes, we will make it, but just barely.”
Barely is not good enough. We are better than this. I believe the evolutionary drift is in a positive direction.
Scientific evidence about the science of consciousness. Moving away from a material view. Based upon evidence.
DEATH
You’ve said that One Mind redefines death. With the One Mind, immortality is back on the table.
So what happens to us after death?
Our consciousness meshes with other consciousnesses in ways we don’t understand in our everyday lives. 15 million Americans have had near-death experiences. Themes emerge – quite similar – experience a form of connectivity and unity we’d call an epiphany. Breakthrough to a way of knowing – relatedness is profound. Mediated by empathy compassion and love. Combine with the scientific studies, come up with an inevitable view of immortality. Not restricted to existence in the present in the physical body.
LAST THING
Larry, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to hear, what would it be?
Don’t be so serious about the nature of consciousness and what the future holds, even after this life. Evidence tells us we are non-local, infinite. So work hard, don’t be too serious, enjoy nature and spend time doing nothing. Let your understanding do you. Do not try so hard to do it. Allow your unconscious wisdom to bubble up and you’ll be happier, more creative and healthier.
This has been truly fascinating. But unfortunately, we’re out of time and must end our conversation. It’s been an honor, Larry. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us.
I’ve been speaking with Dr. Larry Dossey, author of numerous books, including his latest titled One Mind. Details about how to purchase the book can be found on the show notes.
And thank you, our listeners, for joining us today. We are together on this journey.