Molecular Consciousness: An Interface of Science and Spirituality

BOOK REVIEW: Molecular Consciousness: Why the Universe Is Aware of Our Presence.    Francoise Tibika, Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2010 (French), and 2013 (English translation); 133 pp. ISBN 978-159477484-3.

 

What has a small book about basic chemistry to do with “spirituality,” the realm of definably paranormal phenomena? One reasonable answer is that this particular book invites the reader’s curiosity to that still-unmapped and overlapping land where material science and non-material spirituality apparently form an interface and are One – an area where I have sought clarification and understanding for most of my eight decades. The interface of science and spirit is an interesting subject indeed.

 

Where science and spirit meet

The constant new findings of science hold great intrinsic interest and can be read about every month in popular public magazines such as Scientific American. New findings also turn up all the time in the very personal phenomena known as near-death experiences (NDEs), but reports of these do not much appear in popular magazines – they are in general rather obscured from public view. Most interesting of all are the new understandings waiting for us at the interface where science and spirituality meet – and touch each other, as two aspects of a continuum. At this interface there are almost no new “findings” – we must figure things out for ourselves.

 

Context

Substantial context is essential for this particular book review, and so I begin by citing key findings from the spiritual side of the interface. Briefly, these provide evidence that 1) there exists a non-material spiritual realm, not normally perceivable by our bodily senses, and it encompasses everything including the material universe, our minds, bodies, thoughts and infinitely more, and 2) this realm is the origin and true home of a loving creator God as well as uncountable spirits including deceased friends and relatives we knew when they were alive on Earth, and is the home of ourselves as immortal spirits who are temporarily incarnated by our own free will choice in corporeal bodies.

 

These and a dozen other evidential findings (e.g., mind separate from body; a tunnel; life review) from paranormal experiences, often described as “more real than real,” are the consolidated-and-averaged descriptions of phenomena repeatedly and consistently reported by people who encounter NDEs and other types of spiritually transformative experiences (STEs).

 

All the world’s organized religions profess core belief in some sort of non-material realm, usually called “spiritual,” but they all encrust this core with doctrines and dogma which serve as exclusion gates – i.e., an applicant to one of these religions must agree to adopt and “believe” its doctrines and dogma in order to be allowed in as a “member” of that particular sect.

 

In contrast, the things we learn from NDEs and STEs are wholly and qualitatively different from any manmade religion;  they in fact are not definable as “religion” at all. They are understood, by the people who personally experience them, as communications received directly from God and/or other residents of the spiritual realm. People who have these experiences are remarkably consistent in their insistence that this is so. Hearing their stories, some listeners believe them and accept their experiences as real, but many others – even religious believers in a spiritual “heaven” – doubt such drastic departures from life’s everyday input to our senses. Why should anyone belief such fantastic tales?

 

The veracity of NDE/STE “evidence” resides in two facts. One is the sheer quantity of such reports – now accumulated in the tens of thousands since Raymond Moody’s groundbreaking book Life After Life brought the subject from obscurity in hospital emergency rooms and cardiac wards to full public attention for the first time in 1975. The other is their nature and tone, typically told with the modest sincerity of individuals often clearly struggling to understand what happened to them and searching for words adequate to describe it. These thousands of reports come from people who are geographically widely dispersed, who don’t know each other, and certainly did not rehearse or compare notes on the remarkably consistent stories they relate. Most dramatic of all, the NDE reports originate while the experiencer was definably dead by all clinical standards. A priori, they make a great deal of sense.

 

Francoise Tibika’s book, based firmly in science, nevertheless sits astride an interface with what I describe as the unacknowledged science that gets frequently affirmed in some NDE/STEs. We are immediately reminded that the contemporary scientific establishment regards “evidence” as resulting exclusively from third-person observations and experiments which others can attempt to replicate. On this restrictive basis, inherently non-replicable first-person experiences such as NDEs, and the understandings gained from them, are denied or ignored by so-called “mainstream” (majority) science, and often are denigrated as rank superstition.

 

Such pre-judged circumstances preclude most prospects that the now-enormous database of NDE/STE reports will be widely or seriously studied beyond the handful of dedicated scholars with persistent curiosity and open minds in the tradition of William James, Frederic W.H. Myers and a few others. In a parallel that Copernicus and Galileo would have well recognized, modern science is especially dismissive of NDE/STE reports as evidence of non-material reality – even as thousands of scientists daily pursue other equally non-material great mysteries such as dark energy, quantum uncertainty and string theory. In any context other than the implicate subjectivity of first-person near-death reporting, the veracity of the massive and massively consistent NDE/STE database would be accepted with no more doubt than is routinely applied to the “normal” immaterialities science recognizes and rarely questions.

 

By their very existence, first-person NDE/STE reports convey implication that existential reality is a great deal more than the limited versions drawn by, respectively, religion and science. A significant fraction of these reports moreover address the big questions science willfully shuns. For example, while some directly address aspects of physics, others speak of  “purpose,” saying we each chose to incarnate and live this earthly lifetime in order to grow in spirit by helping others and attaining knowledge. A few (perhaps 5-10 percent, but nobody is keeping count) report that during the experience they were given detailed “total knowledge” of reality; that such total understanding felt overwhelming; and its details were blocked from memory after the experiencer “returned to normal.”

 

By indicating an absence of boundary that would separate science from spirituality, such all-knowing experiences, though temporary, suggest complete holistic integration of what we call spirituality, classical and quantum physics, cosmology, chemistry, biology and related scientific subjects. NDE reports retrospectively, and usually hazily, describe all this with a consistent sameness that emerges when considered across all the reports:

• Everything is one, a Unity. Everything in existence – every atom, ourselves and all other living things – relates to and interacts with everything else in the universe.
• The indefinable force we call “energy” is more accurately understood as light, which is actually unbounded love, and all three forms are manifestations of God.
• Modern science and organized religions mutually represent limited, incomplete understandings which, though potentially helpful as far as they go, fall far short of the true grand reality.

 

Needless to say, NDE/STE findings and understandings have not taken root in either scientific or religious soils. Established religions, though spiritually framed, are not much interested in spiritually-obtained information that lacks strict accord with their doctrines and dogma – or, worse, perceivably imply they are untrue. Similarly, our scientific establishment – up to its neck in research on immaterial things – rejects out of hand any information on non-materiality which can be perceived as reviving the long-dead medieval church’s (in)famous superstitions, or, worse, representing potential challenge to science’s modern beliefs on phenomena that are non-material but logically must be real. Most scientists treat, and believe they must treat, anything spiritual as untouchable.

 

After decades of inquiry into these matters, I regard any book that has potential to contribute to reconciling spirituality with either religion or science – though the two daily fail to reconcile themselves – as a book to be welcomed. Tibika’s book qualifies, though the title – molecular consciousness – implies a tad more than is delivered. Whether the universe is really consciously “aware of our presence” remains unclear after the book is read, but the implication that molecules might be conscious is hinted at sufficiently to satisfy, regardless whether one agrees with the premise. In several ways this book is an unexpected little gem found quite by accident (?) in our public library’s used book store.

 

Tibika’s thesis

Francoise Tibika, a professional chemist, earned her Ph.D. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she is a lead researcher at the Institute of Chemistry. I suspect her background as a student of the famed mystic and kabbalist Colette Aboulker-Muscat contributed to her motivation for writing this deeply science-based book so that she might use it to explore her own unanswered questions (she clearly has many) on science/spirit-based mysteries.

 

The author does this reasonably well, especially in her closing chapters, but readers may feel some frustration when she more than once edges up to fascinating implications at a scientific frontier’s edge – and then backs off to the “safe” territory of materialism. Overall, I found the book easy to read and richly interesting. It clearly lays out third-person scientific foundations which must be somehow accommodated by any attempts to associate them with first-person ways of knowing. On this basis alone it is worthwhile reading for anyone seeking broader understanding of reality, or simply intrigued at the deep questions raised by, respectively, NDE/STEs, quantum physics and cosmology.

 

Coffey’s thesis

My longstanding efforts to understand the interface of science and spirituality – in my acquired conviction that they are merely domains on a single continuum – address many aspects of both.  What do dark matter and dark energy consist of?  Indeed, what is energy?  Why do virtually all ancient “holy writings” describe the ultimate Unity/Deity as “light” and “love” in coincidental agreement with modern NDE/STE reports? What is truly implied when energy displays particle-wave duality and non-local entanglement? Is energy just another name for “the image of God?”

 

Where did the big bang come from? Where do subatomic particles (micro) come from, and go to, when – as science has confirmed to its great satisfaction countless times – they so constantly wink out of and into existence everywhere in the inter-galactic vacuums (macro) of the entire known universe? Doesn’t physics itself unarguably imply an “otherwhere” that we mortals may choose to call Heavan, or Valhalla, or “unknown” – or whatever we please in our vast imprecision? Or ignore altogether in our vast scientific inconsistency?

 

How does the Higgs boson, so recently confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva Switzerland, give other elementary particles their mass – and thereby enable immaterial quantum energy (microphysics) to transform itself into the apparently solid material universe (macrophysics) we think we live in? – and isn’t it just an amazing coincidence that the Higgs exists and can do this little miracle?

 

In particular, how may we clarify the circular definitions of a dozen and more vague terms such as mind, consciousness, spirit, self, ghost, entity, soul – and so on?  Intuition too compelling to ignore tells me these important unknowns may be made clearer if not explained by sustained followup on statements about reality by some of the individuals who have undergone near-death and spiritually-transformative experiences, and have shared their stories with the rest of us.

 

What Tibika’s book says

Let me briefly summarize the book’s content while encouraging the actual reading of it. After a good summary introduction, Tibika sets the book’s tone by presenting the enigma of how differently matter behaves at the macro scale, where bacteria, humans and galaxies reside, than at the sub-atomic micro scale which we can know only most indirectly. And – the first of many times – she speaks to implications: “Chemically speaking, there are no fundamental differences between living matter and inert matter.”

 

The book is written in three parts of, respectively, nine, three and five chapters. The first two parts, essentially a primer on basic physics and chemistry from the size of molecules on down, will present little that is new for readers at least passingly familiar with these topics.  For all readers they very readably explain an interesting area of science with high potential for – so far unproven – connections to the knowledge about nonmaterial realities we acquire from NDE/STEs. The straightforward scientific facts are punctuated with examples and observations subtly inviting the reader to see things in new ways, to consider broader implications, to think on things seldom thought about.

 

Implications of basic physics and chemistry

The early chapters immediately fix our minds on energy, the book’s ultimate subject. It begins with Brownian motion – i.e., the energetic “wiggle” of the atoms of a fine powder sprinkled on the surface of a glass of water, which can be seen with the naked eye. We soon encounter neutrons and protons, tiny packets of enormous energy comprising the nucleus of every atom, themselves made of still tinier energetic snippets lightheartedly named quarks. We learn how each atom’s small nucleus is “surrounded” (a misleading idea impossible to describe any better) by one or more much much tinier electrons which “orbit a great distance out” (also wrong but indescribable in words) from the nucleus.

 

Let me pause just long enough to remind that one of the most-used phrases of NDE/STE experiencers is that what they experienced is “impossible to describe in words.”

 

Pointing out that every atom is 99.99999999% empty space (though “space” is never actually “empty”), Tibika draws us to ponder how the apparently solid things we see, touch and sit on really aren’t solid at all – nor are we ourselves – and then compounds our awe by pointing out that if all the “empty” spaces were removed, the universe would shrink down to the size of the theoretical dot from which the big bang inexplicably burst forth and began creation. Knowing these facts to be scientifically quite literally true, how can we not think about it, and wonder? It all seems quite as marvelous, and mysterious, as the amazing things we learn from NDEs and STEs.

 

The book tells us  about the four basic forces of nature, three of which exist only at the micro-level of atoms, i.e., the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces (read the book to find out what they do), and then the fourth, gravity, which – reaching full across our very macro universe – commands the self-organizing dynamics and evolution of galaxies and life and everything else from the level of molecules on up. Gradually we realize that without these four forces nothing would happen, nothing would or could exist.

 

What an interesting coincidence (we may note) that these forces of nature just happen, “just are” – binding and animating all our bodily atoms, making everything in the universe work as it does. Notice: all matter is actually “just” energy, a “kind of” immaterial force in a form that is either kinetic (doing something) or potential (at rest but in readiness to do something). The four forces of nature are also just…well, forces – immaterial, nothing you can touch. Thus the forces we perceive as immaterial (not-solid) govern all forms of energy that are equally immaterial (not-solid)! We’re forced to ask: Is anything our senses perceive in fact real?

 

Tibika explains how the nuclei and electrons of atoms are variegated to make the hundred and more elements in the periodic table, such as hydrogen, oxygen, iron. After describing how two or more such atoms may bond together into the multi-atom energy combos we call “molecules,” which possess mysterious “order” and are the smallest possible form of everything we call “matter,” she notes how atoms and molecules of one element can attach themselves to atoms and molecules of other elements to create “compounds.”

 

Elements sometimes accumulate in such quantity that we humans dig into the earth’s crust to mine out and use ores such as tin and copper, and then melt them into compounded alloys such as bronze. And we’ve even figured out how to apply the fickle properties of uranium to useful ends such as converting radioactive decay into electricity, which is useful in our kitchens and lighting fixtures. Passing attention is given to the friendly element carbon – “friendly” because it so easily combines into tens of thousands of compounds, some of which exhibit odd chemical behaviors we call “alive.” How a molecule of matter first evolved from “inert” to “alive” is among the greatest scientific mysteries. There had to be a “first one,” you know, and that first one had to have an “urge” to survive and replicate – obviously, because here we are. Life is not a “probable state” for chemical reactions, the author observes, but then she asks: so how did it occur – and why?

 

As Tibika conducts the reader through chemistry’s “ordinary” marvels, more mysteries present themselves unbidden with regularity, several to the chapter. Why does the periodic table “just have” such orderly logical organization? Her style prompts my own questions: Why does the speed of light pose a limit? – does something important that our senses cannot perceive exist above 186,000 miles per second? Why do so many scientists deny the possibility of “direction” (upward) in the universe’s evolution of complex structures, while unquestionably agreeing that the universe obviously exhibits “direction” (downward) that they call entropy?

 

When these questions arise, as they naturally do, why do scientific minds snap closed in the only cultural arena that claims unfettered open mindedness as its very reason for existing? Sad but true, possible relationships of immaterial quantum dynamics with equally immaterial spirituality are unlikely to be widely explored unless and until science can hold its minds open to broader immaterial potentials, including the spiritual variety.

 

Beyond matter

Part Two speaks of “The Secrets Beyond Matter,” one of which suggests the book’s title.

 

Notice: Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine reasoned that in order for molecules, which are always in random (Brownian) motion, to spontaneously begin the coordinated actions which would produce life, they had to communicate – just as our living cells, made of molecules, constantly communicate throughout our mortal lives. Each and every one of our internally communicating bodies is rather like the big central internet servers multiplied trillions of times.

 

Notice: theorizing that molecules can “communicate” presupposes that sentience exists in what we call non-living matter. But – since seeing matter as “sentient” can be said to imply “God-like direction” in nature, most scientists today favor a different theory that life began when inert (not-alive) complex molecules “somehow” began reproducing themselves. Somehow. They cannot say how this happened. You may rightly ask:  What’s the difference? …and then answer that the only difference is the mindset.

 

Mysteries and questionings

Part Three delves a bit deeper into the author’s own questionings, as well as some of the deep mysteries which have preoccupied scientific minds for a century now, even as new mysteries keep popping up (e.g., dark energy, which is speculatively inferred to constitute a cause of accelerating universal expansion). Noting that how living organisms think and store information as memory has never been actually explained, Tibika subtly invites reader speculation on alternatives to neuroscience’s default mindset that mentation and memory reside “somewhere-somehow” in the brain’s “physical” molecules.

 

Ever ready with cautious materialist answers to her own questions, she then asks if evolution of communication can be identified in the evolutionary chain from protozoan to human. She raises the mystery of “life force” – and as quickly drops it, muttering that science ignores it because it is not measurable. Returning to quantum energy, which assures us that the universe and all matter are in fact “empty” space, Tibika affirms that science says we are all victims of “a fantastic sensory illusion.” She states: “the world as we see it has, in fact, no existence in itself” – and then asks: “How far does the illusion go.”  I loved the book – and at times ground my teeth over it.

 

My thoughts on Tibika’s interesting little book

My own mindset and suppositions being the background context wherein I interpreted Tibika’s published thoughts, fairness requires that I disclose that context. Summarily, I find the evidence in the accumulated large NDE/STE database(s), and particularly the uniquely credible nature of that evidence, convincing of the reality of the near-death experiences as they are described.

 

Two corollaries inherently follow. One is that the phenomena reported from NDE/STE experiences present no inherent conflict with the credible findings of modern science on immaterial energy, thus meeting a necessary precondition for accepting them as true.

 

The other is that these reports’ credibility reflects qualitative foundations that are simply absent from the magical god mythologies that modern religions received from the Abrahamic and other ancient primitive traditions. In common with many NDE/STE experiencers, I find the considerable baggage associated with the term “religion” unhelpful. I have long used the term spirituality when referring to evidence of a purposeful immateriality which, though beyond the scope of science as presently understood, seems undeniably real to me and to many other perfectly rational people.

 

Accordingly, and in violation of consensus-driven scientific method, I have incorporated first-person experience along with science’s customary third-person ways of knowing in my long efforts to understand science and spirituality as two aspects of one and the same continuum. I am able to assume their unity only because I find NDE/STE reports to be credible and truth bearing (it takes only one white crow to disprove that all crows are black). Thus, following are a few among many conclusions which may be reasonably derived from merging 1) observation, 2) deduction, 3) inference and 4) personal experience as ways to know science and spirit at a common interface.

 

1.  In aggregate, the tens of thousands of NDE/STE reports credibly affirm that a spiritual realm and an all-powerful universe-creating God do actually exist. As a first principle, this affirmation derives from first-person experiential reports representing quantity, credibility and consistency so extraordinary as to challenge disbelief, starting with the popular science standard of Occam’s razor. These veracious reports variously suggest, imply and overtly indicate that God is, and is the source of, everything we call energy in probably infinite material and immaterial manifestations. They imply, and we may reasonably infer, that God-as-energy-as-God is synonymous, or nearly so, with what we call “love” and “light” – and possibly also with old tribal concepts of YHWH/Yahweh-Manitou-Krishna-Allah and so on, for we should not presume that revelatory NDE/STEs did not occur thousands of years ago quite the same as they do today and generate at least some of humanity’s persistent legends, myths and longstanding religions.

 

2.  Many NDE/STE reports further suggest, indicate and declare that human minds are God-sourced spirits who have exercised free-will choice to fully integrate into earth-evolved organic bodies in order to experience the lessons and qualitative growth obtainable from a mortal lifetime. Some reports imply that in some non-understood way this also is true of rising life forms as yet less evolved than humans, a conjecture objectively supported by observation of the very real and experienced two-way love we share with our dogs, cats, chimps, parrots et al which clearly exhibit individual “self” in their personalities as real and discernable as our own.

 

In accord with a great many old spiritual writings, a significant subset of NDE/STE reports further indicate that our conscious minds are spirit “fragments” of God’s spiritual self, which God separated off in a way whereby attachment is never actually severed, and which God imbued with an irresistibly purposeful mandate to go exercise free will, encounter experiences of many kinds, grow in understanding, maturity and spirit – and eventually return “home.” Such sophisticated ideas, commonly attained by NDE/STE experiencers today, could equally have been attained by humans ten thousand years ago and there is no reason to assume they weren’t.

 

3.  Quantum dynamics, scientifically definable as behaviors of energy at the subatomic micro-level present at and since the big bang, are scientifically recognized as “real” even though it is impossible to directly observe or measure these energetic dynamics in their two most common forms – both immaterial – which appear to be an interchangeable duality of either “waves” and/or “particles.” Science fully affirms that these infinitely small bits of energetic dualism are the true and only foundation of all “reality,” while deduction and inference indicate that all the various energetic activities and odd behaviors occurring at the quantum level seem to behave always the same in all circumstances (notwithstanding circumstantial “differences” in the successive outputs of colliding protons within experimental machines such as the Large Hadron collider).

 

4.  By contrast, cosmic evolution at the macro level is never the same, though micro and macro phenomena are thought to mutually obey the laws of thermodynamics. Oddly enough, constant change in fact defines evolution. Encompassing all universal structures and biological forms above the molecular level – including living bodies complete with intrinsic instincts to survive and reproduce – the evolving universe is a macro-level manifestation of the microcosmic quantum God-energy from which it originates.

 

Notice: evolutionary realities are strongly affirmed, and accepted by all, by the subjective first-person experience of every living human (e.g., “growing up”; “aging”), as well as by third-person observation, deduction and inference as science would have it. In the self evident certainty of our own mental existence, no one questions immaterial reality.

 

5.  Cosmic macro-evolution also evidences emergent self organization with directionality toward ever-greater complexity, ranging from the original stars to contemporary organic brains and the instincts resident within our earth-evolved DNA. I have termed this directional process “The Godly Algorithm” (GA) to suggest how a creator God, so dramatically met during NDE/STEs, could achieve purposeful intent while keeping hands off a universe designed to unfold, after a big bang, purely by the chance accidents of physical and biological evolution. Encompassing the four forces of nature and the source energies called quarks, the GA presents a prospect for reconciling the micro with the macro – quantum electrodynamics with general relativity and the endless faces of immaterial energy – but only by incorporating spiritual reality along with all the other immaterial phenomena science already acknowledges in its limited, exclusionary way.

 

Be assured: The Godly Algorithm is a conceptual world apart from, and wholly unrelated to, the Christian fundamentalist contrivance known as “intelligent design.” Also note that the scientific community divides into defenders and opposers of the idea that a “self organizing” universe could somehow “emerge toward ever-greater complexity,” not to mention that such emergence could exhibit “upward directionality” – although these are precisely the findings of replicable scientific observations. Scientists opposed to the idea of emergence complain that such “nonsense” insinuates the existence of a creator God – unintentionally displaying their most unscientifically closed mindsets.

 

6.  If, as some NDE/STE reports imply, all energy derives from and/or is God, then both quantum dynamics and cosmic evolution are manifestations of God over all magnitudes from the quantum Planck level to the universal. In this case the much-disputed concept of Cartesian duality is perfectly true, though not quite the way Descartes intended, and it originates in the nature of God, not in the thoughts of Man or the parts of an atom. We may reasonably infer that a real science-spirit interface does exist, and recognizing it is prerequisite for scientific inquiry to advance beyond the self-limiting paradigm which, for a century now, continues its failure to reconcile quantum physics with general relativity.

 

7.  And if energy indeed is God, it further follows that the earth-evolved bodies into which we evolving spirits elect to incarnate, as well as the God-sourced spirits (our minds, which are our selves), are dual manifestations of God’s own duality – each mortal body derived from the big bang, each spiritual self directly from God. From this reasoning we may infer a parallel dual process wherein living bodies, evolved as “material” products of cosmic evolution in accord with accepted science, are inhabited by immaterial spirit entities aligned with immaterial quantum dynamics in ways not yet understood though suggested by NDE/STEs. Lack of attention by science or religion ensures such alignment continues to be not understood.

 

8.  Of great importance and often overlooked, many NDE/STE reports inform us that all of the above – which is concerned with attaining knowledge about the oh-so-fascinating “mechanics” of existence – is strictly subordinate to our primary purpose: to help others. The important though secondary value of attaining knowledge per se appears to lie in the expenditure of the intellectual effort that is necessary to attain it – i.e., if you don’t exert some effort and try to advance, clearly you won’t. Thus, from deep study of NDE/STEs in the aggregate, we come to recognize our enormous personal responsibility to base our life behavior on two foremost simple lessons which are, in priority order:

1) Help others             2) Attain knowledge

 

Followup and personal explorations

Readers interested in considering other scientific, spiritual and theological perspectives variously related to all the above are in good company, and may find interest in the writings of seekers such as Stuart Kaufman, Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, Robert John Russell, Pim van Lommel, David Chalmers and Dean Radin among others. Russell in particular is author of a concept he calls “non-interventionist objective divine action” (NIODA) which, unlike my Godly Algorithm, he attributes to the agency of the conventional trinitarian God of Christianity. I would emphasize that my God laughs at the very idea of manmade religions, whose proponents presume to know what God thinks and thus constantly take God’s name in vain by the hubris of presuming to tell others “what God wants them to do.” Other reading suggestions follow below. Some of my own ideas presented in this review are developed in greater detail under the Mindset section of my blog: fixypopulist.com.

 

I recommend Tibika’s book for anyone who would like better understanding of some important and very fundamental physics and chemistry which don’t require you to learn complicated math or go get a Ph.D. For any reader at any level of knowledge about these matters, especially those already familiar with near-death and spiritually-transformative experiences, the book’s questionings inevitably stimulate thinking in deeper waters. A most interesting and in-depth elaboration of Tibika’s ideas may be viewed in a recorded interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwkYeKdmd6w.

 

To this little book’s significant questions I wish to add one more. NDEs and STEs give us special knowledge about the reality of a wonderful, uplifting spiritual realm of infinite love and light which is the true home of us all. “Normally” unseen, it encompasses this lesser material universe and the earth whereon we strive through mortal incarnations blocked from memory of who we actually are. They tell us that our purpose, to learn lessons and advance ourselves spiritually before returning home, is best achieved by helping others.

 

So what, therefore, is our responsibility for how we use this very special knowledge in terms of “help that is most needed” given the unprecedented dangers present at this time in humanity’s development?

 

References

McNay, Iain (2013): interviewing Francoise Tibika on Molecular Consciousness. Viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwkYeKdmd6w

 

Suggested Reading

Barrow, John D. (2002). The Constants of Nature. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Kaufman, Stuart (et al). (2016). Article: Cosmic Mind? (and Responses to…). Theology and Science, Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2016, 36-47 (and 48-84).

Mango, Barbara. (2015). Article: Non-Local Consciousness and the Near-Death Experience. Vital Signs, Vol. 34, No. 3/4, Fall/Winter 2015, 18-19.

Morris, Simon Conway. (2015). The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self   Aware. West Conshohocken, Pa: Templeton Press.

Penrose, Roger. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and   the Laws of Physics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Silk, Joseph. (2009). Horizons of Cosmology: Exploring Worlds Seen and Unseen. West Conshohocken, Pa: Templeton Press.

Weinberg, Steven. (2001). Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wheeler, John Archibald with Kenneth Ford. (1998). Geons, Black Holes and Quantum

   Foam: A Life in Physics. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and company.