What is consciousness? Recently I listened to Dr. Larry Dossey's opus, The Power of Premonitions (Brilliance Audio, 2009.) He discusses intuition and reports on a wide array of clearly documented premonitions about everything from a specific personal warning to move a baby out of harm's way to premonitions of public disasters, and reports some scientific views on the nature of consciousness.
British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has developed the theory of morphic resonance. In fact, I cited his work in my paper Roadside Shrines. Presenting this paper in Cambridge, UK in 2005, I learned that shrine building for road accident victims is happening in many places.
Dossey also quotes the physicist Erwin Schrodinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, as saying that "In truth, there is only one mind...indestructible...now." According to Dr. Dossey, Neils Bohr called consciousness "part of nature, or of reality," and the great mathematician Sir James Jeans considered the universe "more like a great thought than a great machine."
Dossey believes we use our brains to tune in to a pervasive consciousness. He questions the spurious "evidence" of brain-generated consciousness, loss of function in brain-injured patients: "If the radio stops working, do we assume the radio station is no longer transmitting?" hes sensibly asks.
Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that at the atomic level, the act of observation changes what is seen. The most astonishing recent scientific experiments reported by Dossey are the those that have demonstrated effect preceding cause. Perhaps the bon mot of my title, which I have used lightly for so many years, is literally true.
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