Neale Talks About Consciousness...

My dear friends...

Have you noticed that virtually every week these days there is some scholarly, scientific newspaper or magazine article or book or television news segment confirming the messages in the Conversations with God series of books? This is thrilling to me not for reasons of ego, but just the opposite. Each one of these scholarly, scientific revelations makes it more and more clear to me that I had very little to do with the nature or the quality of the material in my dialogue with God. I've known that all along, of course, but these constant revelations confirm it.

They confirm it by telling me things that I could not possibly have known on my own, and showing me from a scientific viewpoint how true the words that came through me in CwG are!
I am a person of limited education (read that: no college degree), and I have little awareness of (much less understanding of) scientific thought on the nature of life and the universe. But I am finding out more and more every day, and it is thrilling me to see the words in CwG confirmed!

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.

Some time back I was reading an old cover story from U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT. The article was headlined: Science and the Soul. It was an in-depth exploration of the intersection of science and spirituality by journalist Jay Tolson --- but it might as well have been a rewrite of the basic principles of The New Spirituality as described in the CwG books The New Revelations and Tomorrow's God .

Tolson's story fascinatingly explores what he describes as an emerging new field called neurotheology -- a cross-disciplinary examination of the biochemical workings of the body and the mind as they relate to what spiritualists call "consciousness."

Some scientists, the article informs us, believe there is no such thing as a separate consciousness that directs the activities of the body and the mind, but, rather, that every one of those activities is directed through biochemical reactions that begin at the most fundamental, submicroscopic, level of cellular and molecular interplay. This is a "bottom up" theory of causality, in which human beings (and their minds) are seen as biological mechanisms reacting to exterior stimuli in an ultra-sophisticated, if nevertheless fairly primitive, survival-of-the-species response designed, simply, to serve life.

Other scientists disagree, believing that the process of making conscious choices reflects a more traditionally accepted "top down" causality, in which humans think first of what they wish to experience, then produce their responses to exterior stimuli. Still others go further, suggesting that not only does human thought produce responses to the body's exterior environment, it, in fact, impacts that environment. (In other words, thoughts create reality!)

If the first category of scientists call themselves reductionists, perhaps the last group might be called expansionists. Reductionists are believers in the proposition that all human behavior -- and every reaction in life, for that matter -- can be attributed, ultimately, to some root cause, however minute, at its basis; some chemical reaction, some initial physical propulsion. Expansionists, on the other hand, consider the possibility that root cause exists in realms that include, but are larger than , the physical. (Hence, meta physical.)

Reductionists would argue that there is no such thing as that which is larger than the physical, and that all such phenomena are but an illusion. Expansionists would argue that it is the physical which is the illusion, arising out of a process of metaphysical interactions with the environment -- interactions which both react to that environment, and create it.

And now, writer Tolson tells us, science is exploring a new view of this "top down/bottom up" debate regarding causality: the idea that both are true. Both are occurring at once! This could only occur, science is now acknowledging, if the body and the mind were one.

Now that may seem to us like a fairly obvious notion, but much of the world has for centuries embraced the Cartesian model of a mind that is separate from the body (as opposed to the brain , which is seen as the physical location within the body where the Mind resides). This idea was placed into the common culture by French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, who, as Tolson's story explains, proposed that reality consisted of two entirely different substances: material substance and thinking substance.

Christianity, too, has adopted this thinking, finding that it supports its own proposition of the existence of the Soul (as separate from the body). Now, Tolson tells us, science is seriously asking two separate questions. Reductionists are asking, What if the soul does not even exist? In fact, they are not even asking that. They are saying it. Meanwhile, expansionists are asking: What if the body and the soul are one? (This is, of course, what CwG says. It reveals that the body exists within the soul , not the other way around, and that our physical body is the same stuff as the soul, simply vibrating at a different speed.)

Now the New Science is asking, "What if the facility that scientists have been calling 'consciousness' is really the soul ? And what if 'consciousness' is both physical and nonphysical, seen and unseen?"

I find it fascinating to watch how science is responding to such questions, and to see how it is now confirming the accuracy of many CwG statements, including CwG's revelation of the true nature of Divinity. "God," says the New Spirituality, "is a process." And says the New Science? Tolson explains that the line of inquiry that science has now opened "suggests that consciousness is far more than a sophisticated survival machine..." Some members of the New Science community are now supporting the notion that consciousness "is a profoundly complex emerging system."

And if the word "consciousness" is synonymous with the word "God," then where do we stand...? This is the question that the New Spirituality asks -- and answers. To review those answers (or to visit them for the first time), you may find it fascinating to take a very close look at the dialogue in the later Conversations with God books, including those mentioned 11 paragraphs ago, as well as Home with God in a Life That Never Ends. These extraordinary revelations bring us right to the intersection of the New Science and the New Spirituality...where tomorrow begins.

With Love,

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE