An emerging view: Consciousness is not brain

THINGS TO BE THOUGHT THROUGH:  In my ongoing reading on the impact of spirituality and healing in science, technology, theology and medicine ( and other topics), I'd like to share some emerging views on ideas that Mary Baker Eddy presented decades ago.  The ideas in her classic book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures continue to break new ground today.

What Mary Baker Eddy wrote in the late 1800's:  "The belief that matter thinks, sees, or feels is not more real than the belief that matter enjoys and suffers. This mortal belief, misnamed man, is error, saying: 'Matter has intelligence and sensation. Nerves feel. Brain thinks and sins. The stomach can make a man cross. Injury can cripple and matter can kill man.' This verdict of the so-called material senses victimizes mortals, taught, as they are by physiology and pathology, to revere false testimony, even the errors that are destroyed by Truth through spiritual sense and Science." (from Science and Health, p. 294 and 295.)
....and...
    "All that is called mortal thought is made up of error. The theoretical mind is matter, named brain, or material consciousness,  the exact opposite of real Mind, or Spirit. Brainology teaches that mortals are created to suffer and die. It further teaches that when man is dead, his immortal soul is resurrected from death and mortality. Thus error theorizes that spirit is born of matter and returns to matter, and that man has a resurrection from dust; whereas Science unfolds the eternal verity, that man is the spiritual, eternal reflection of God."

---

From Dr. Larry Dossey's article on his book The Science of Premonitions released in 2009:  "As physicist Chris Clarke, of the University of Southampton, says, “On one hand, Mind is inherently non-local (aka infinite). On the other, the world is governed by a quantum physics that is inherently non-local. This is no accident, but a precise correspondence ...[Mind and the world are] aspects of the same thing...The way ahead, I believe, has to place mind first as the key aspect of the universe...We have to start exploring how we can talk about mind in terms of a quantum picture...Only then will we be able to make a genuine bridge between physics and physiology.'


"Whatever their explanation proves to be, the experiments documenting premonitions are real. They must be reckoned with. And when scientists muster the courage to face this evidence unflinchingly, the greatest superstition of our age – the notion that the brain generates consciousness or is identical with it – will topple. In its place will arise a nonlocal picture of the mind. This view will affirm that consciousness is fundamental, omnipresent and eternal ....."

---