Consciousness Is Part of the Cosmos – Transmitted and Displayed by the Brain

 The following is excerpted from The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciousness Beyond the Brain by Ervin Laszlo with Anthony Peake, published by Inner Traditions, Bear and Company.

Your consciousness is not your consciousness. It is the manifestation of the longing of the cosmos for itself. It comes to you through you but not from you.*

*A paraphrase of Khalil Gibran’s words about children in The Prophet:

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.

The beyond-the-brain consciousness — the consciousness we encountered in our review of near-death experiences, after-death communication, medium-conveyed and instrumental transcommunication, past-life recollections, and in experiences suggestive of reincarnation — is not a material entity in the manifest world.

It is an intrinsic element in the Akasha, the deep dimension of the cosmos.

The idea that consciousness belongs to a deeper dimension of reality is a perennial intuition. The great spiritual masters, poets, and even scientists have been telling us that consciousness is not “in” the brain and is not part of the world in which the brain exists.

It is part of the mind or intelligence that infuses the cosmos. Consciousness appears in space and time as a localized (yet nonlocal) manifestation. Erwin Schrödinger said it clearly: consciousness is one — it does not exist in the plural....<<<Read More>>>...