What is consciousness, and where does it go when we die?
598461
Wow!  Beautiful!  This book was given to me by a stranger (now a friend) immediately before a long flight, and I have been traveling with it ever since.  Although each interview is carefully and masterfully woven together to create a whole, each interview is also an entity in itself and short enough to lend to an interested traveler for a brief trip of the mind.

So often we pass by or purposefully ignore those deep questions about our future.  Not this book; this book spills it all out naked before you.  I love the odd collection of interviewees.  Each is a well-respected leader from a different field, giving a diverse yet surprisingly good conglomeration of thoughts.  The author is not telling you what to think, he is simply putting forth the information from many different walks of life.  I love to read such a blatant clash of viewpoints right next to each other.

Beware:  The ideas contained within these pages are sometimes encouraging, sometimes frightening, but always thought-provoking.
2060111
As a nurse who has worked for hospice, I found myself cheering for and empathizing with the author. We have concealed death behind the closed doors of the hospital and the funeral industry to the detriment of our loved ones and our own psyche. Death has become something to fear, something to be sanitized and cosmetized into submission. However, I we must ask ourselves what all this means to us as human beings and to our feeling as finite beings on our journey through this thing called life. Are we not missing a vital part of the human experience?
2568434
I have read this book with interest. The most interesting topic for me was the free will? I always thought that when we take action, we first weigh it and then act. The weighing organ should be the brain. The MRI experiments on the functions of the brain and Crick`s theory say that it is randomly decided by the brain, ie the same mechanism of quantum physics is in place that collapses the Schrodinger wave function. It is known that quantum physics is beyond classical physics and weird is expected. In fact, I would like to call it meta-physics in the sense of beyond the physics we are accustomed to.
I think then that it is not quantum physics encountering consciousness, it is just that they overlap. Thus every action one takes is just coincidences and chance. Then, are we robots?
If we are, I think this might prompt philosophers and religious circles alike to re-kindle the debate of theism vs deism and fate and free will? Consider that it does not even allow for an intermediate path that Islam accepts:ie although there is fate, the god has defined boundaries in which man can decide on his actions without crossing the defined boundaries. However,on judgement day he will be judged for his actions taken while in that path.
If our brain first acts and the action is taken automatically with no thought process involved and then that action is later recorded as preconsidered, what is the meaning of a planned life?
Thinking of how such a finding may create chaos in the law courts: Can anybody be considered guilty and  punished for any crime if what the person did is out of his mental function?
2347245
Deepak Chopra is so amazing to me.  He manages to merge spirituality, ancient folklore and science together to make a substantial book on life after death.  In fact, he really explains what life means.  He brings in Eastern religions to help drive home his ideas, and it becomes very easy to understand the likelihood of life after life.  I am someone who needs more than theories to believe something.  I need proof, at least some level of it.  As I read more and more about this subject matter, however, my mind is opening to the idea that belief is half the battle.  We need to simply experience what is around us to know--really know--that there is no out there out there.  There is virtually no materialism in the way that we believe there is.  And there is no separation between me and you.

Not being completely versed in eastern religions, this book manages to bring in the ones that discuss their very persuasive ideas that there is indeed a life beyond what we see before out eyes.  You really begin to understand just how temporary everything is anyways.  Even our thoughts!  They come and go, flitting in and out of existence as we know it.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone in need of understanding if there is more to this life than the life we live on automatic everyday.  This will make you stop and consider a grander possibility.  It will make you look larger than just with your eyes.  If you have ever lost anyone in your life, this will help bring peace in knowing that they aren't really "lost" at all.  What a great book.
3255558
An absolutely beautiful illustration of what happens after we die and where we will find ourselves in the afterlife.  Highly recommend for children and adults alike...all will learn from this beautiful journey!!!  Lisa Noland-Shalosky, Psychic Medium/Trance Channel
4825245
Reading Steves new book Simplicity of Life gives a template, a call for each one of us to answer and to awaken to the fact that we are so much more than the conditioned views which is held by society on religion, science and philosophy.

So how come we became separated from simplicity of life. Steve takes us on a journey back in time. From survival orientated behaviour to understanding life from the standpoints of creativity, intelligence and human consciousness.

by exploring and becoming aware we constantly decide which life we wish to live. In every breath pure consciousness is available and in every moment we have the choice if we want to choose engaging in human contents or let go awakening into the here and now.
1918351
While there are more books about the paranormal than a person could read in one lifetime, now there is an fascinating book, written from a scientific point of view on how our consciousness works.  Unlike religion, T. Lee Baumann doesn't ask us for blind faith, he gives us the scientific view of how our consciousness works in measurable ways.

Throughout his book Matter to Mind to Consciousness: Anatomy of E.L.F., Baumann lays out, chapter by chapter in three different sections, exactly how he came to his conclusions on God and consciousness, which, if I understood the book correctly, is God. The part of us that is conscious, the part that you see behind a person's eyes, and disappears upon death, is God.

Matter to Mind starts off under the section called Matter.  Here Baumann gives us a simple anatomy lesson, simple enough for me to understand it.  Starting with brain cells and ending with the spinal chord.

The next section explains how the mind works.  Our brains give off electrical signals which can be measured by instruments such as the Electroencephalogram. Baumann explains in great detail everything from the electrophysiology of the brain to instinct.  Pretty amazing journey, in a well-laid out way to both engage the reader and to help him understand just what the mind is all about.

The last section of the book has to do with our consciousness.  How electricity works, magnetic fields and how they affect us, to how our electrical appliances might be messing with the magnetic resonances of the Earth which we've spent millions of years adapting to.

Baumann concludes with three Near Death Experiences where the subjects saw our prayers as light shooting up into the sky. "Children . . . are excitedly outspoken about this phenomenon (prayer) . . . They saw prayers turned into beams of radiant, golden or rainbow light that would arc over from the one saying the prayer, no matter how many miles away . . . Once the prayer beam 'hit' them, they described it as being akin to feeling a 'splash' of love and an incredible 'warming'". (page 152)

Wonderful book to give the more scientific minded who need proof that God exists.  Baumann lays it out like a it's a scientific study, which I guess it is.  Baumann believes that God and light share all of the same properties, therefore, like the ancient holy books say, God is Light.  Though already a believer, it was great to know that God can be proved by science.

My conclusions after reading Matter to Mind, is that God manifests in the third dimension as electricity, and our brains are the receivers to hear what God has to say.
777219
This is a fascinating book. I would rate it better than 'consciousness explained' by Dan Dennet or Susan's other books.
1691835
I read this book after reading Consciousness Is All.  In comparison it is short and concise, making for a quick read.  I find it to be an eye opener and very helpful in my quest for pure awareness.  If you want to get to the center of it all start here.
4586581
Rational persons want to understand what the phenomenon of consciousness is all about.  Sam Harris explains this and spirituality in an easily understood way, but leaves some of the mystery of it all.  A fascinating attempt to explain a very deep subject.
1992175
If you want an alternative view of
Life After Death, the various Principals that make up
Our Being; a True synthesis of Mahayana and Advaita. True Yoga, and Ultimate Union with Reality.
What Karma & Reincarnation mean, in it's Practicality.
This Book is It.
If you are Dogmatic, Exoteric, Orthodox, and or just locked into your own beliefs...You may not get much out of it, and or feel you wasted your time and money.
If you are not locked into any Schools of Thought to the point that you need to debate, this may be of use to you. This edition fills in most of the parts are not explained in the original Manuscript.
2999253
This is a very important book.
It proves convincingly that consciousness is a matter of ... matter (the biological matter of the brain) and that it is the outcome of a long history of biological adaptations.
It also proves that the mind is not a computer or a Turing machine, that human language is not a computer language and that physics is not sufficient to explain its working. The morphology of the brain goes deep, but not as deep as to attain the quantum level.
On the contrary, Edelman explains clearly that the mind is a process that operates in a 4 dimensional world; that it doesn't have a perfect memory or doesn't order events or objects logically. It is subject to mutation in order to select and to adapt and creates itself aspects of the reality by cultural and language interaction. Into the bargain, the biological structure of the brain is different for every individual.
Edelman's theory has also far reaching philosophical implications. It is the death of essentialism (there are no 'essences', only populations with different individuals) and of idealism (the world was there before the mind).
Is Edelman's TNGS (theory of neural group selection) the end of the story? Absolutely not. It is only the beginning. It forms the basis for further investigations. But it clearly indicates which way to follow and which ways not.
I have only one reservation: Edelman's nearly unconditional admiration for Freud.
This is an essential read.
3125340
For anyone interested in the workings of the human brain this book is simply a must-read. The author provides a detailed, cohesive and extremely readable account of brain mechanisms that distinguish between unconscious information processing and conscious, aware perception. While introspection may not be a reliable means to derive scientific theories, subjective experiences derived from introspection provide essential raw data to elucidate the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. The book contains a wealth of interesting experimental data obtained from many research studies, as well as intriguing clinical observations. Clever paradigms are employed to identify neural signatures and underlying molecular and neurophysiological processes mediating conscious awareness. For example, the vital role of NMDA receptors was revealed by a disease targeting these receptors, causing normal individuals to become psychotic before losing consciousness altogether. The book describes how novel signal detection paradigms and measurements of reverberating brain activity have been used to determine whether patients are in a permanent vegetative state as opposed to being conscious without being able to communicate, i.e. locked in.

A central theme throughout the book is the global workspace theory of conscious awareness, according to which consciousness arises from long-distance communication across the brain; bidirectional pathways convey information between primary sensory regions and higher brain areas including the prefrontal and parietal cortices. After a fraction of a second, consciousness is ignited by an avalanche of sustained reverberating neural activation in distinct pathways distributed throughout the brain. This picture is enriched and elaborated upon by lucid summaries of findings from studies of comatose and locked in patients, non-human primates, and infants. The use of systematic research paradigms in healthy research volunteers is also extensively discussed, including a description of how researchers have used manipulations such as backward masking to render stimuli unconscious, in order to distinguish between conscious and unconscious stimulus processing in the brain. Among other insights, the reader will come away with a new appreciation of how much of our brains activities are unconscious.

It is difficult to criticize the abundance of fascinating information and clear writing style in this book. The only major omission, which applies to every other book on consciousness, and indeed human knowledge itself, is that it falls short of explaining the subjective nature of our experience, or qualia, e.g., the suffering accompanying painful stimuli, the experience of the redness of red, etc. The author summarily dismisses qualia as a pseudo-issue, but this is really an opinion more than established fact. No convincing justification is provided for this conclusion, which flies in the face of first-person experience suggesting that qualia are fundamentally different from information processing per se. While the physical basis of subjective experience remains elusive, one thing is certain; this book should ignite many fruitful discussions about the mechanisms underlying conscious experience and the new experimental approaches being used to unravel the mystery of human awareness.
2467873
No One Gets Out of here AliveOr do they?
After This is NOT a near-death heaven travelogue but rather a methodical examination of what comes next after the soul leaves the body.  Ms Claire Bidwell Smith is on a mission to answer her own nagging questions about what comes After This phase of existence.  She examines various ways to communicate with the dead including meditation, mediums, Native American Shamanism, and other forms of occult mysticism.  Some  appeared to be more engaging with the dead than others, but in the end it was all relative to who was the more receptive to those communing from beyond.  The main takeaway from Ms. Smiths book is there is something after death.  Just what, or more precisely who it is, is for the reader to decide.
A good read to further understanding just how we may communicate with the dead(?).  It appears from Ms Smiths book there is something after death.  The question though still lingers as to what exactly is it?
3426954
Think you are aware of your thinking? Think again!

Although we may feel like we are conscious drivers of lives, our brains actually have a heavy reliance on the unconscious forces that steer it. The truth is, much of our thinking happens outside of our conscious awareness and control, and our subliminal programming affects all aspects of our lives--from how we perceive the world, self, and others to how we think, feel, behave, and remember.

But, we can't fault our brains for this heavy subliminal reliance. If our brains actually took in all of the data we are bombarded with each moment, we'd be overwhelmed and overloaded. As the author of _Subliminal_ explains:
"To ensure our smooth functioning in both the physical and the social world, nature has dictated that many processes of perception, memory, attention, learning, and judgment are delegated to brain structures outside conscious awareness...The truth is that our unconscious minds are active, purposeful, and independent. Hidden they may be, but their effects are anything but, for they play a critical role in shaping the way our conscious minds experience and respond to the world...Our subliminal minds take incomplete data, use context or other cues to complete the picture, make educated guesses, and produce a result that is sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but always convincing." (pp. 18, 29, 152)

The reality is that much of what we believe to be true, is actually false. (How's that for a brain challenge?) Our brains are not the computers we assume them to be, but instead creative distorters of reality:
"We are not like computers that crunch data in a relatively straightforward manner and calculate results. Instead, our brains are made up of a collection of many modules that work in parallel, with complex interactions, most of which operate outside of our consciousness. As a consequence, the real reasons behind our judgments, feelings, and behaviors can surprise us...Our brains are not simply recording a taste or other experience, they are *creating* it...We believe that when we choose a laptop or a laundry detergent, plan a vacation, pick a stock, take a job, assess a sports car, make a friend, judge a stranger, and even fall in love, we understand the principal factors that influenced us. Very often nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false." (pp. 22, 25-26)

To wrap our brains around the confusing two-tiered brain processes of the conscious and the unconscious, the author presents a great metaphor explaining how subliminal forces result in our brains acting less like truth-seeking scientists and more like conclusion-driven lawyers:
"The human mind is designed to be both a scientist and an attorney, both a conscious seeker of objective truth and an unconscious, impassioned advocate for what we *want* to believe. Together these approaches create our worldview...As it turns out, the brain is a decent scientist but an absolutely *outstanding* lawyer. The result is that in the struggle to fashion a coherent, convincing view of ourselves and the rest of the world, it is the impassioned advocate that usually wins over the truth seeker...The unconscious mind is a master at using limited data to construct a version of the world that appears realistic and complete to its partner, the conscious mind." (pp. 200-201)

Appropriately enough, I found this book to be incredibly mind-blowing.  Not only is the content fascinating and engaging, but the author's writing is superb: just like the unconscious mind, he has quite the gift for synthesizing huge amounts of information into accessible and digestible slices. (But, unlike our unconscious minds, he does not distort reality!) Admittedly, I can't quite explain the reasons I chose this book from the many others on the shelf (now I realize there were a slew of subconscious processes that influenced my decision), but I can consciously stand behind my five-star recommendation for reading it.
3390652
I think that most of us would agree that consciousness remains one of the major unsolved problems in science. Though there are still some scientists and philosophers who think that it is no more than a grand illusion created by a series of neural reflexes, common sense, personal insight and observation really tell us otherwise.

So how do the feelings and sensations that make up conscious experience arise from the actions of neurons and their associated synaptic and molecular processes? Or is there enough evidence to indicate that the mind is not a product of neural activity, but is instead a universal field that is constrained by the brain?

This fine book proposes that consciousness can be understood using the insights of modern physics and other sciences.

The book is divided into 14 chapters:

1. The path ahead by Jack A. Tuszynski and Nancy Woolf

2. Consciousness and quantum physics: empirical research on the subjective reduction of the state vector by  Dick J. Bierman and Stephen Whitmarsh

3. Microtubules in the cerebral cortex: role in memory and consciousness by Nancy J. Woolf

4. Towards experimental tests of quantum effects in cytoskeletal proteins by Andreas Mershin and Hugo Sanabria and John H. Miller and Dharmakeerthna Nawarathna and Efthimios M. C. Skoulakis and Nikolaos E. Mavromatos and Alexadre A. Kolomenskii and Hans A. Schuessler and Richard F. Luduena and Dimitri V. Nanopoulos

5. Physicalism, chaos and reductionism by Alwyn Scott

6. Consciousness, neurobiology and quantum mechanics: the case for a connection by Stuart Hameroff

7. Life, catalysis and excitable media: a dynamic systems approach to metabolism and cognition by  Christopher James Davia

8. The dendritic cytoskeleton as a computational device: a hypothesis by Avner Priel and Jack A. Tuszynski and Horacion F. Cantiello

9. Recurrent quantum neural network and its applications by Laxmidhar Behera and Indrani Kar and Avshalom C. Elitzur

10. Microtubules as a quantum Hopfield network by Elizabeth C. Behrman and K. Gaddam and J. E. Steck and S.R. Skinner

11. Consciousness and quantum brain dynamics by Gordon Globus

12. The CEMI field theory: seven clues to the nature of consciousness by Johnjoe McFadden

13. Quantum cosmology and the hard problem of the conscious brain by Chris King

14. Consciousness and logic in a quantum computing universe by Paola Zizzi

Each chapter begins with a brief summary that is most valuable if any of the topics is unfamiliar. Most of the chapters contain some original research data as well as a comprehensive discussion, summary and references.

Virtually all the authors have been widely published elsewhere and this book represents their current views about consciousness. Considering the number of eminent experts in the book, there is a remarkable uniformity of style.

There is some mathematics in a few of the chapters, but nothing too complex.

The intention of the book was clearly to present many different views of the consciousness problem, and as such it succeeds extremely well. It does not come to a final answer, but is instead a summary of where we are in understanding the physics of consciousness.

The book highlights the important fact that consciousness is a highly interdisciplinary issue. We do not have all the answers, but we are asking better questions. And some world-class scientists are finding a way out of the empty impasse of trying to reduce consciousness to an epiphenomenon of neural activity.

The book needs a little understanding of mathematics and the basics of quantum mechanics. But it is otherwise not a difficult read.

If you are interested in consciousness and its interaction with the physical and biological worlds, this is an excellent book that I recommend highly.
1186578
A brief (perhaps too brief) but beautiful consideration of the place of death in our lives. Death is anthropomorphized in a gentle and sympathetic way, and I felt as much for Death as I did for the one he/it was assigned to convey to the next plane of existence. Recommended for kids maybe 7-8 or above, and for sentimental adults like me.