Friday, September 19, 2008

Life After Death

Several weeks ago I finished a library book by Deepak Chopra called Life After Death: The Burden of Proof. There were a lot of interesting ideas in this book, but I've finally accepted that I'm not going to end up having the time to do a big blog post about them. I did want to share one of the ideas from it that really stuck with me (I'm actually paraphrasing here): "Saying the mind is in the brain, is like saying the music is in the radio." (or that the footprint in the sand is the same as the foot.)

This book really explored all kinds of things about consciousness, the nature of reality, the nature of the mind/brain/soul, physics, quantum physics, cognition, neurobiology, neurology, Indian mysticism/religions, etc., etc. It was kind of heavy read and took me a while to get through it, but it was very interesting. One of the ideas was that the universe and its patterns/fields of energy could be looked at as the mind/consciousness of God. (Another effective analogy he used in the book was of someone studying a TV screen at an extreme close up (like atomic level) and how you would only see random photons firing randomly, but as you move out and out and out, you start to form a theory that perhaps the photons *aren't* firing randomly, but perhaps there is a pattern. Then, you start to discern colors, and then images, and then realize is video of people performing a story, and so on. The analogy being that perhaps as little humans we can't get far enough away from "the picture" to see the whole of reality and the patterns of the universe/God/consciousness...)