Reviewed by Robert A. Charman
This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol 78(1).
Dr Larry Dossey graduated with honours from the University of Texas and was awarded his MD degree from the Southwestern Medical School, Dallas, in 1967. During 1968–69 he was a front-line battalion surgeon in Vietnam, where he was decorated for valour after rescuing injured soldiers from an overturned fuel-drenched helicopter that could have exploded at any moment. On his return to the USA he specialised in internal medicine, becoming Chief of Staff at Medical City Dallas Hospital in 1982. A former Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, he is now Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing, and in 2013 received a Visionary Award for advancing the cause of integrating complementary therapies, with special emphasis on healers and healing, within the practice of medicine.
As recounted in a previous book (Dossey, 2009) he first experienced the reality of psi when he dreamed that Justin, the son of a colleague whom he hardly knew, was lying on his back in an examination room screaming and fighting off a white-coated technician who was trying to strap a cap to his head. Next day he shook the dream off and after medical rounds was with his colleague when Justin and his mother arrived in a state of distress. Later he heard the full story that Justin had suddenly become feverish, then had a seizure, had been brought in for EEG tests and had fought off the technician — the details dovetailing with his dream. Over the years he has experienced other premonitions, and when he started talking to medical and nursing colleagues he found that they were often far more psychically aware of their patients’ conditions and prognoses than was indicated by medical tests. Some of his colleagues somehow ‘just knew’ that they should go to their hospital to meet the urgent needs of patients not yet even admitted. The more he delved into the literature of parapsychology and interviewed leading proponents, the more he came to the conclusion that there must be a dimension to our being that transcends our localised, everyday selves, which, by analogy with the nonlocality of quantum entanglement, he has termed ‘nonlocal mind’. When we are in a certain state of mind, either intentionally or unexpectedly, we enter this non-local aspect of our being and are then in potential contact with and awareness of everyone and everything. In this, his tenth book, he explores psi phenomena and discusses their implications for the nature of mind within the concept of ‘One Mind’.
Prefaced by two pages of ringing endorsements from the likes of Wilber, Sheldrake, LeShan, Schlitz, van Lommel, de Beauregard, Krippner, Lorimer and many others, One Mind consists of twenty-nine short, well-researched and well-written chapters organised into four parts: Part One, “Glimpses of One Mind”; Part Two, “Working with One Mind”; Part Three, “Accessing the One Mind”; and Part Four, “The Way Forward”. Apart from ghosts and poltergeists, the whole spectrum of psi phenomena is explored, including telepathic/telesomatic communication, clairvoyance/remote viewing, premonition/precognition, animal ESP, psychokinesis, psychic healing, OBEs/NDEs, possible survival after death and the concept of reincarnation, plus a further five chapters on the brain–mind relationship, the strange abilities of savants, love as entry to the One Mind, expanding the present concepts of science, and the nature of transcendence. The title of each chapter indicates the ground to be covered through anecdotal/case history accounts, related research findings and discussion as to how that particular manifestation of psi or unusual mental ability or experience can be interpreted within the concept of an all-embracing One Mind.
Dossey clarifies what he means by the term ‘One Mind’ in the opening lines of his Introduction (pp.xxi–xxii):
The book is about the concept of the One Mind which, evidence suggests, is a collective, unitary domain of intelligence of which all individual minds are a part. The One Mind is a dimension in which you and I meet as we are doing now. In the 20th century we were introduced to several subdivisions of mind such as the conscious, the preconscious, the subconscious, the unconscious, the collective conscious and the collective unconscious. The One Mind is an additional perspective to our mental landscape. The difference is that the One Mind is not a subdivision. It is the overarching, inclusive dimension to which all the mental components of all individual minds belong. I capitalize the One Mind to distinguish it from the one mind possessed by each individual.
He goes on to say that he has written this book because “I believe the One Mind is a potential way out of the division, bitterness, selfishness, greed and destruction that threaten to engulf our world from which, beyond a certain point, there may be no escape” (p xxii). Everything he discusses is therefore interpreted within this concept. Is ‘One Mind’ the same as ‘God’ or an equivalent synonym? Dossey discusses this relationship in terms of ‘nested hierarchies’ and concludes that the answer is ‘No’. There are profound differences between these two dimensions in that the One Mind is of humans as compared with the Absolute. In discussion he includes animal minds as well, possibly implying the totality of mental life on Earth throughout evolution.
Dossey quotes from a wide range of sources. He has interviewed stalwarts of psychical research and practice including Dean Radin, Elizabeth Mayer, Harold McCoy, Russell Targ, Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, Stephan Schwartz and Rupert Sheldrake. Guy Lyon Playfair’s investigations into the evidence for twin telepathy are well presented and I am particularly pleased to see his review of the disgracefully overlooked Wilkins and Sherman’s (1942/2004) unique four-month telepathy experiment, which should be presented to students in the first chapter of any textbook on parapsychology. As a personal plea, when will someone do a proper statistical analysis of the hundreds of visual and verbal impressions that Sherman obtained of what Wilkins was thinking, seeing and doing during his search for the downed Soviet aircraft in the Arctic during the winter of 1937–1938 while Sherman was sitting in his New York apartment and Wilkins was flying over thousands of miles of ice (see Charman, 2007)?
Dossey acknowledges that the concept of One Mind is not new. It has been proclaimed over the centuries by seers, sages, and mystics both East and West as an interpretation of their personal experience of entering a state of undivided One-ness. Eastern philosophies are steeped in this concept. Plato, Plotinus, and later Western philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Bergson, together with many scientists including Eddington, Einstein, Schrödinger, Margenau, Wigner and Nick Herbert, have all proposed that we may be part of a Cosmic Mind, and that perhaps Cosmic Consciousness is more primary than matter. Much recent debate has been stimulated by the counter-intuitive properties of quantum physics with its concepts of wave-function superposition of all possibilities, wave-function collapse on observation, mutual entanglement and nonlocality. At its level of synaptic functioning the brain is considered by some as operating on the borderline of quantum mechanics.
Dossey considers that the evidence for psi phenomena is now beyond reasonable dispute (but not beyond unreasonable prejudice). In answer to the question suggested in the book’s subtitle, he considers that psi provides evidence for the existence of an all-encompassing One Mind as he argues that there could be no psi phenomena without it. In its absence we would live our lives as separate individuals living in localised mental isolation from each other except through information provided by the limited range of our senses. Why does the concept of One Mind matter? Because, as implied in his Introduction, if everyone accepted that at one level of our being we are as one with each other, then war, racial hatred, genocide and the individual acts of killing and cruelty as reported in the daily news and recorded by history would be seen as the pointless and senseless acts that they are. Dossey says that the horrors of Bergen-Belsen occurred because the links between humans were severed and members of a racial ‘other’ came to be considered as less than human. He is firmly convinced that “Unity, commonality, and a One-Mind consciousness are not philosophical niceties but necessities preventing our descent into depravity” (p 37).
In his chapter on “Mind beyond Brain” he discusses two opposed views as to the relationship between brain and mind. The hypothesis of the neurosciences and related neuropsychology is that the synaptic activity of billions of neurons in the brain and the resultant sweeps of brainwave frequencies ‘reverberating’ through the circuitries between brainstem and cerebral cortex, especially the frontal lobes, somehow generate the full range of mental functions including consciousness. Although consistent correlation between brain area activity and reported mental function is not proof of causation, such is the closeness of the observed correlation through experiments ranging from individual neuron stimulation to brain scanning in health, injury and illness that this is taken by most neuroscientists to be the most reasonable working hypothesis. The problem is that the ‘how’ of the ‘somehow’ remains unresolvable because the physical, biochemical properties of brain function appear to be completely different from the apparently non-physical, qualia properties of consciousness and related mental functioning. Neither predicates the existence of the other, as, for example, the interaction between electricity and magnetism. According to our present state of knowledge brain and mind differ not in degree but in kind.
The alternative view, as proposed by William James, Henri Bergson, Aldous Huxley, F. C. S. Schiller and others, is that the brain acts not as a generator but as a receiver of Universal Consciousness tuned to act in a ‘valve reducing’ capacity between the totality of One Mind and the everyday three-dimensional level of consciousness necessary for physical survival. This is termed the ‘transmission hypothesis’. To date, no one has been able to devise an experiment that could differentiate between the two theories, let alone resolve the brain– mind relationship. Dossey favours the transmission approach because “it releases consciousness from its enslavement to the brain”, but he does so with an all-important caveat: if consciousness — by quantum analogy — is non-local, then it is omnipresent, so that telepathy, for example, is not the transmission of a signal across space from a sender to a receiver, because they are in momentary non-local contact with each other as members of One Mind. As examples of One-Mind experiences, Dossey presents several stories of psi in action, including a businessman who, on 22nd December 1972, felt an overwhelming compulsion to abandon a business deal and leave Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, by plane two hours before an earthquake hit at 12:29 a.m. the following day, demolishing his hotel. Similarly, he reports the case of a woman who felt a sudden compulsion to divert from her twice-daily motorway drive home and go home by a different way, shortly before the Mississippi River bridge collapsed.
At this point I have a real problem, not with the many stories of psi that Dossey presents but with the One-Mind and its apparently arbitrary relationship to the hopes, fears and aspirations of us ordinary folk. In Managua the earthquake killed 5,000 people and left some 250,000 homeless, so it did not help them. The collapse of the bridge killed 13 people and injured 145 others, so it did not help them either. Why, as in countless other examples, did the All-Knowing One-Mind apparently decide that X or Y should experience an overwhelming presentiment that resulted in their survival, but hundreds or thousands of their fellow members of One-Mind should not? For every mother who is suddenly aware that her child is in danger and saves it there are thousands of equally devoted mothers who remain unaware until they answer the knock on the door. My problem may not be yours, so I really do urge you to read this book for the wealth of information and much wise comment that it contains.
References
Charman, R. A. (2007) Thoughts through space. Paranormal Review 42, 16–20.
Dossey, L. (1999) Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind–Body to a New Era of Healing. Shaftesbury:
Element Books.
Dossey, L. (2009) The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future can Shape our
Lives. London: Hay House UK.
Playfair, G. L. (2012) Twin Telepathy (3rd Ed). Guildford: White Crow Books.
Wilkins, H. S., & Sherman, H. (2004) Thoughts Through Space: A Remarkable Adventure in the
Realm of Mind. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. [Original work published in 1942]
Robert A. Charman can be reached at email: [email protected]