In his book “the scalpel and the soul” Dr Allen Hamilton, a Harvard trained brain surgeon for 30 years says the following “Theres a technique used on a handful of awkward cases. They put the patient on a heart pump and then cool down the blood. The heart flutters and stops, there is no blood flow to the brain and no electrical activity. Now you can operate on a significant blood vessel while no blood is flowing through it. Once the procedure is finished and you realise you are within the twenty minutes time limit, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Then the team gets ready to slowly warm the patient up”.
“Sometimes we find some banter amongst the staff. One nurse said she was getting engaged, they had gone to this particular restaurant, they had gotten a ring at a particular store, ect. When the patient woke up she reported the entire conversation, while her heart was stopped, while her brain had no activity, she somehow remembered that conversation and that is scientifically impossible. If the brain is essentially dead, how can it make a memory? A case like that really shakes you up, you,re getting very close to the holy grail. Is this what we mean by a soul? Is this what we mean by an entity that can exist seperate from the physical body and the brain?”.
“People think of science as rolling back the mystery of God, I see science as slowly creeping towards the mystery of God. Here i have an example of consciousness existing outside of the body and any physical parameters we assosciate with somebody being conscious. That really changes how i look at what happens when the functions that we assosciate with life disappear”.
“It seems to me pretty plain there is a third thing in the universe – consciousness – which i cannot see to be matter, force or any conceivable modification of either”.
Biologist Thomas Huxley
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
Max Planck
“We can admittedly find nothing in physics or chemistry which has even a remote bearing on consciousness, yet all of us know there is such a thing simply because we have it ourselves. Hence consciousness must be part of nature or more generally reality. Which means that quite apart from the laws laid down in quantum theory, we must also consider laws of quite a different kind”.
Nobel prize winner Niels Bohr
In 1980 a campus doctor at the University of Sheffield, England, treated one of the students for a minor ailment. Noticing his head to be slightly larger than normal, he referred him to the neurology professor Dr John Lorber. The student in question had an IQ of 126 and a PHD in mathematics, and after undergoing a cat scan, he was found, to the astonishment of Dr John Lorber, to have no brain. Instead of two hemispheres filling a cranial cavity some 4.5 centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of brain tissue covering the top of his spinal column.
In 1970 a New Yorker died at the age of 35. Most of his life he had been employed as a janitor. He was a popular figure, filling his days doing his routine chores. The autopsy to reveal the cause of his premature death revealed that he too had no brain. Professor Lorber has identified several hundred similar cases, and Dr Patrick Wall, professor of anatomy at University College London says: “There are scores of similar cases, they litter the medical journals and they go back a long, long way”.
If, according to mechanistic science, consciousness is an epi phenomenom of the brain, why was consciousness present in the lives of the student and janitor, though both of them, had no brain. If, according to materialistic science, thoughts are produced by the brain, as gastric juices are produced by the stomach, how does a student with “no detectable brain” achieve an IQ of 126 and a PHD in mathematics.
The scientists are very fond of telling us how life originated from dead matter, however, nowhere do we see this taking place. On the contrary everywhere we look we see life coming from life.
Again and again we are told we are nothing more than gross matter. However, if we carefully scrutinise what makes up a human being, or any species of life, we will see three main things: Gross energy in the form of the body, subtle energy in the form of the mind, and spiritual energy in the form of consciousness.
As sunshine emanates from the sun, consciousness emanates from the soul. In comparison with the universe the sun is less than atomic, in comparison with the body the soul is less than atomic. And just as the sun pervades the universe with sunshine, the soul pervades the body with consciousness.
If we analyse the body we will clearly see we are different from that which we are analysing. According to modern day physics, the body consists of billions of cells. Every time you move thousands of these cells die, and from the water you drink, the air you breathe and the food you eat, thousands more replace them. This is called cellular reproduction and it means the body is built completely anew every two years.
The blood is replaced once a week, we shed and replace our skin once a month, our organs are renewed every six weeks, we get a new skeleton every three months, and within two years we are the proud possessor of a new brain. So for those who believe themselves to be the body, who identify with this ever changing bundle of cells, the question being posed by modern day physics is which body are you. The body you was born with ceased to exist around the age of two, and if you say you are the body you have now, then not only does this mean you wont exist in two years time, it also means you did not exist two years ago, for two years ago there was no trace of the body you have now. The body changes, the mind changes, our desires change, but that which experiences these changes remains the same, and that which remains the same is known as consciousness which is the symptom of the soul.
How could a physical system such as a brain also be an experiencer?… Present-day scientific theories hardly touch the really difficult questions about consciousness….We are entirely in the dark about how consciousness fits into the natural order. Many books and articles on consciousness have appeared in the past few years, and one may think we are making progress. But on a closer look, most of this work leaves the hardest problems about consciousness untouched.
David Chalmers, Professor and Philosopher of science
“The question of conventional western science: where is the moment at which consciousness originates; when does matter become conscious of it self – is turned upside down. The question now becomes, how does consciousness produce the illusion of matter. You see, consciousness is seen as something primordial, which cannot be explained on the basis of any thing else; something that is just there and which, ultimately is the only reality; something that is manifest in you and me, and in everything around us.”
Fritjof Capra
I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible and I even argue for a form of dualism (consciousness is different from matter). Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined towards the materialist reductive explanation, and have no strong spiritual or religious inclinations. For a number of years, I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up this hope, it was reluctantly. It eventually seemed plain that these conclusions were forced on anyone who wants to take consciousness seriously. Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.
David Chalmers – Professor and Philosopher of science
As the sun situated in one place pervades the universe, so the small particle of spirit soul illuminates the entire body by consciousness. Consciousness is proof of the presence of the soul as sunshine is proof of the presence of the sun. On a cloudy day we may not be able to see the sun, but we know it is there by the presence of daylight. Similarly, although we cannot detect the soul by material means, we can perceive it by the presence of consciousness. When the soul is present within the body there is consciousness spread throughout, and as soon as the soul passes from the body there is no more consciousness. Consciousness, therefore, is not the product of the combination of matter, it is the symptom of the soul.
In all species of life we find consciousness present. The flower that turns towards the sun and opens its petals, does so because it is conscious of the rays of the sun. The spider reacts when the fly touches the web because it is conscious of the fly touching the web. And the man puts on extra clothing as the weather gets cold because he is conscious of the cold weather.
All of these species of life are experiencing an effect. The flower experiences the effects of the sun, the spider experiences the effects of the fly, and the man experiences the effects of the cold. And that medium within each of these different species of life which is capable of experiencing is known as consciousness. Consciousness therefore, is applicable not only to human life, but to all species of life. In fact consciousness is the very definition of life, and as explained in the Vedic scriptures, it is the symptom of the soul.
Today there is a wide measure of agreement … that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.
Mathematician-physicist-astronomer Sir James Jeans
Existence or consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking, we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep, we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it.
Ramana Maharshi
“Consciousness is part of our universe, so any physical theory which makes no proper place for it falls fundamentally short of providing a genuine description of the world. A scientific world-view which does not profoundly come to terms with the problem of conscious minds can have no serious pretensions of completeness.”
Roger Penrose