I very recently came across this book, not from my usual sources but from somewhere that I took no note of. The title caught my attention. So I found a PDF copy1, that my software could read to me. Here are my notes.
To begin with I would define “paranormal” as a phenomenon on or event whose explanation is outside the realm of “normal” science. As an example, telekinesis, the moving of an object by force of mind alone is outside of normal physics. Dossey’s book is an in-depth and extremely broad introduction to paranormal events that have been documented in the most disciplined manner that appears possible. It is more wide-ranging than any other book that I know of and deeply researched.
To review this book, I declined to document all that he has cited. The material does not make for easy point-form extraction and is really too wide-ranging. Rather, I chose to read it as a novel and try and develop an overall grasp of his intention. For this, I recommend that you read the book. Apart from copious footnotes, it contains a large reference section of material that should be easy to obtain by the interested reader.
Dossey argues for the existence of a single, overarching dimension of consciousness that he calls the “One Mind” (OM). For him, all individual minds connect through the OM. The OM is a unitary, non-local unifying consciousness. In his Introduction section under “The One Mind: Ancient and Modern”, he lists several recent books on the Mind that might be referenced.
Thoughts on the One Mind (OM)
In The Power of Awareness, Neville Goddard begins from a unitary consciousness from which all else including our natural world is constructed. Dossey goes the other direction on this issue. He surveys all of the properties with which individual minds or local consciousnesses operate to argue for a non-local unitary consciousness underlying it all. This he calls the OM.
In the Gospel of Luke17:21, Yeshua (Jesus) says “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God [or Heaven in some translations] is within you”. In the Gospel of Thomas saying 3, he says “If those who lead you say to you, See, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will go before you; if they say to you: It is in the sea, then the fish will go before you. But the kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you.” Equate “the kingdom of God” with the OM.
In the Gnostic cosmology, they start with the Monad (this may be consciousness or that which has the property of consciousness). From this are emanated Aeons to form the Pleroma. Then are the individual emanations that are the individual spiritual entities that are us. The Gnostics are careful to use the term “emanate” rather than “create” because the notion of creation is of something apart whereas the notion of emanation is that of ‘a part of.’
The Ocean Metaphor
One can approach the same issue with the help of a metaphor of an ocean. the ocean has a myriad of waves. The waves are not separate from the ocean but perturbations of its essential material. These we see as waves, each similar to the other yet unique but essentially of the same material. A wave is not separate from the ocean but is as much ocean as the entire ocean is of itself.
We tend to see the wave as a surface phenomenon whereas it is an entire volume of the ocean moving under the surface. So are we then not some individual local fragment of consciousness but a unique perturbation within the consciousness of the OM. From our casual human perspective we know our consciousness as we know an ocean wave, as a surface phenomenon of something much deeper and larger.
Resources
Articles in This Series
Refer to the series index in Gnostic Wisdom.
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