In fact, according to most non-Western perspectives, the world is animate, sentient, and conscious (Harvey, 2017). Life is about negotiating partnership with other than human entities. Life is about living respectfully with those upon whom you rely for life itself.
Reexamining Consciousness
Why might it be time to reexamine the ideas that ego consciousness represents maturity and that consciousness is merely about ego-consciousness? It doesn't take much looking around to notice an epidemic of disconnection, of loneliness and isolation, enhanced by the pandemic. The increase in frustration, domination, and authoritarianism are signs that something must change.
Today, we mostly feel isolated (even before the pandemic), and the bad news does not help. We are in dire straits, with the four environmental horsemen of the apocalypse upon us: atmospheric degradation, global warming/climate instability, massive toxification of soil/air/water/food, and mass extinction (E.O. Wilson, 1991). The mass extinction may include our species unless we change our perceptions, conceptions, and behaviors.
Medical doctor Larry Dossey (2013) compiled data from across disciplines and events to argue that humans share one mind. He contends that the oceanic consciousness we sometimes feel is tapping into the greater wisdom of one mind. Dossey's book One Mind collates evidence from multiple fields to show consistent patterns that match up with the notion of One Mind, an idea that quantum mechanics theory in physics supports (Bohm, 1994; Lazlo & Tsao, 2021).
The data Dossey presents includes shared emotions, thoughts, and sensations between people, or with pets, across great distances. Systematic data have been collected on near-death experiences. In the one-mind perspective, the mind is not housed in the brain but is shared, it is nonlocal. In fact, creativity itself maybe tapping into this one mind, as some philosopher-scientists (David Bohm) have argued.
The more holistic view of consciousness understands how each individual's mind is actually part of a holistic consciousness (called "the implicate order" by Bohm). The "eureka" effect scientists report is prepared by extensive pondering and reflection, but the moment of insight "appears as if out of nowhere" (Briggs, 1990).
One-mind moments are characterized by "a hyperreal level of awareness, connection, intimacy, and communion with a greater whole, however conceived-the Absolute, God, Goddess, Allah, Universe, and so forth-all of which is marinated in an experience of intense love. There follows a profound shift in the existential premises on which one's life is based" (p. 259). The individual is transformed, ceasing to be a separate ego, "but an opening or clearing through which the Absolute can manifest" (ibid).
Dossey asks, "Must we undergo some planetary version of a heart attack before we come to our senses?" (and return to a sense of one-mind or oceanic consciousness). Let's hope not. Let's hope that we don't have to experience near-death to reinvigorate oceanic consciousness.
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