The One Mind

Larry Dossey, MD 1

Silvia and Marta Landa were four-year-old identical twins who lived in the village
of Murillo de Río Leza in northern Spain. One day in 1976 their father took Silvia to
visit grandparents, who lived several miles away. Marta, the other twin, insisted on
staying home and helping her mother with household chores. In doing so, Marta burned
her hand on a hot clothes iron, causing a large red blister, a second-degree burn, to erupt.
At the same time, miles away, an identical blister formed on Silvia’s hand. Silvia was
taken to the doctor, unaware of what had happened to her sister Marta. When the two
little girls were united, their parents saw that the blisters were the same size and on the
same part of the same hand. The twins became local celebrities after being featured in
their local newspaper. Word spread, and a team of nine psychologists, psychiatrists, and
physicians from Madrid thoroughly investigated the happening, with the consent of the
twins and their parents.1

Research suggests that only around twenty percent of identical twins respond in
this way, and most such cases occur in non-twins. The prerequisite seems to be profound
emotional closeness between the individuals involved — most often mothers and
children, bonded spouses, lovers, and close friends.

THE PEDIGREE OF THE IDEA:

Since time immemorial reports have surfaced suggesting a link between distant
individuals who are beyond the reach of sensory-based communication. Such a
connection might permit the sharing of not only physical phenomena, such as the above
example in identical twins, but the commingling of thoughts and emotions in general.
This channel might take the form of a universal, One Mind
that subsumes and unites all individual minds. This possibility is threaded from
antiquity through the present. As Plato wrote, “[H]uman nature was originally One and
we were a whole.”2

1 Copyright by CCRI and Dr. Larry Dossey. Written with the express written permission of the author Dr. Larry Dossey

1 Guy Lyon Playfair. Twin Telepathy: The Psychic Connection. London, UK: Vega; 2002: 11-35.

2 Plato. Quoted in: Wilber K. Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday; 1983: 234

1
 Hippocrates stated, “There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things
are in sympathy.”3 Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance philosopher, believed that the
world is governed by a “unity whereby one creature is united with the others and all parts
of the world constitute one world.”4 In the 19th century, the German philosopher G. W.
F. Hegel called distant mental exchanges between humans “the magic tie.” He believed
that “the intuitive spirit oversteps the confines of time and space; it beholds things
remote; things long past, and things to come.”5

Arthur Schopenhauer, also in 19th-century Germany, suggested that a single event

could figure in two or more different chains of circumstance, linking the fates of different
individuals in profound ways. He believed in a form of communication that took place
between humans during dreams.6 Walt Whitman, America’s nineteenth-century bard,
proclaimed, “All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and link’d
together… Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more….”7 His
contemporary, philosopher-essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, “There is one mind
common to all individual men…[a] universal mind….” Emerson called this universal
mind the Over-soul which, he said, is “that unity…within which every man’s particular
being is contained and made one with all other….[W]ithin man is the soul of the
whole…the eternal ONE.”8

Among the poets in Emerson’s camp was William Butler Yeats: “[T]he borders of
our minds are ever shifting, and … many minds can flow into one another… and create
or reveal a single mind, a single energy…. [T]he borders of our memories are … shifting,
and… our memories are part of one great memory….”9

Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and the
collective conscious paralleled the views of Emerson and Yeats. These various observers
seem to be saying that everything is connected, including minds.

3 Hippocrates. Quoted in: Watson L. Dreams of Dragons. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books; 1992: 27.

4 della Mirandola P. Quoted in: Watson L. Dreams of Dragons. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books; 1992: 27.

5 G. W. F. Hegel. Quoted in: Inglis B. Natural and Supernatural. Bridport, Dorset, UK. Prism Press; 1992: 158.

6 Lyall Watson. Dreams of Dragons. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books; 1992: 27.

7Walt Whitman. Passage to India. Quoted in: Nicholson DHS, Lee AHE, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse.
Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1917. Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/236/. Accessed 10 June, 2015.

8Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Illustrated, reprint, revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press; 1987. 160.

9 W.B. Yeats. Quoted in: D. Pierce (ed). Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press; 2000: 62.

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WHAT PHYSICISTS HAVE SAID

It is not widely known that some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century
were aligned with the concept of a single, collective form of consciousness.
Astrophysicist Sir James Jeans observed, “When we view ourselves in space and time,
our consciousnesses are obviously the separate individuals of a particle-picture, but when
we pass beyond space and time, they may perhaps form ingredients of a single
continuous stream of life. As it is with light and electricity, so it may be with life; the
phenomena may be individuals carrying on separate existences in space and time, while
in the deeper reality beyond space and time we may be all members of one body.”10

Erwin Schrödinger, whose wave equations lie at the heart of quantum physics and
who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, wrote, “To divide or multiply
consciousness is something meaningless. In all the world, there is no kind of framework
within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we
construct because of the spatio-temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false
construction…. The category of number, of whole and of parts are then simply not
applicable to it.11 …The overall number of minds is just one…. In truth there is only one
mind.12 [I]nconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious
beings as such — are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not
merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole
is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.”13

The eminent physicist David Bohm agreed, observing, “If we don’t establish these
absolute boundaries between minds, then it’s possible they could…unite as one
mind….Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty…
and if we don’t see this it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.”14 Bohm and his
colleague Basil Hiley further stated, “The notion of a separate organism is clearly an
abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even
though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the
separation into parts.”15

10 Sir James Jeans. Physics and Philosophy. New York, NY: Dover; 1981: 204.

11 Erwin Schrödinger. My View of the World. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press; 1983: 31-34

12 Erwin Schrödinger. What is Life? and Mind and Matter. London, UK: Cambridge University Press; 1969: 139, 145.

13Erwin Schrödinger. My View of the World. (Cecily Hastings, trans.) Reprint edition. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press; 1983:
21-22.

14David Bohm. Quoted in: Renée Weber. Dialogues with Scientists and Sages. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul;
1986: 41.

15 David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley. The Undivided Universe. Reprint edition. London, UK: Routledge; 1995: 389.

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EXPERIMENTS AND EXPERIENCES

Why take seriously the possibility of the One Mind? There are two main reasons.
First, people have experiences in which minds interact and share information at great
distances and outside the present. They could not do this if minds were isolated. If these
experiences are valid, minds must in some way be connected for them to occur. Second,
there are hundreds of actual experiments that confirm these interactions. So: experience
and experiments show that our minds are connected in ways that transcend separateness.

In recent decades, experimentalists have subjected to rigorous testing the idea that
minds might communicate as if they are united. Consciousness researcher Stephan A.
Schwartz describes six areas of research whose findings have been replicated in labs
around the world, each area of research giving odds against chance of around a billion to
one, or combined odds against chance of 1054 to one, an astronomical number. These
bodies of research, too complex to describe in detail here, include remote viewing (the
synchrony of distant individual minds); mental influence on the output of random number
generators; the Global Consciousness Project, which tracks the behavior of globally
distributed random number generators in response to specific events; presentiment
(unconscious physiological responses to future stimuli); precognition (the knowledge of
future happenings); and Ganzfeld (a type of information sharing between two individuals,
one of whom is sensory deprived). Why aren’t these replicated findings uniformly
embraced in contemporary science? Schwartz: “The objection is fundamentally cultural,
not scientific. …[T]he data will not be denied forever, and a new paradigm is
emerging.”16

“BEATS THE HECK OUT OF ME”

The materialistic concept of consciousness that currently is widely accepted

prohibits One-Mind phenomena. Materialism asserts that consciousness is somehow
produced by the brain and is confined to the brain, the body, and the present. This view of
consciousness has become so hegemonic that it is almost heretical in some circles to
question it. However, this view of consciousness suffers from two severe defects: the
sheer poverty of evidence that brains produce consciousness, and the enormous human
costs of a world that is sanitized of a spiritual outlook, which the materialist dogma
forbids.

16Stephan A. Schwartz. Six Protocols, Neuroscience, and Near Death: An Emerging Paradigm Incorporating Nonlocal
Consciousness. Explore. 2015; 11 (4): 252-260. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307(15)00076-2/pdf.

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 No human has ever seen a brain or anything else produce consciousness, and there
is no accepted theory as to how this could happen. The link between a brain and
consciousness is as mysterious today as it was when Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in
1886: "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as
a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn
when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story."17 The weakness of the brain-makes-
consciousness dogma has become obvious to an increasing number of top-tier scientists,
as the following comments demonstrate. In a genuine test of your patience, I now include
several examples from scholars. I wish to emphasize that these are not rare, isolated
opinions, and that the materialist view of consciousness is empirically bankrupt.

Steven A. Pinker, experimental psychologist at Harvard University, on how

consciousness might arise from something physical, such as the brain, stated, “Beats the
heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a
defensible answer. And neither does anyone else.”18

Donald D. Hoffman, cognitive scientist at University of California, Irvine: “The

scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific
theory of consciousness.”19 Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist and complex-
systems researcher: “Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is…. I don’t have
any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind.”20 Roger W.
Sperry, Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist: “Those centermost processes of the brain
with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are
so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to
imagine their nature.”21 Eugene P. Wigner, Nobel Prize winner in physics: “We have at
present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the
state of mind.”22

17 T. H. Huxley. Quoted in: McGinn C. The Mysterious Flame. New York, NY: Basic Books; 1999:16.

18 Steven Pinker. How the Mind Works. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 1997: 146

19 Donald Hoffman. Consciousness and the mind-body problem. Mind & Matter. 2008; 6(1): 87-121.

20Stuart Kauffman. God enough. Interview of Stuart Kauffman by Steve Paulson. Salon.com.
http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2008/11/19/stuart_kauffman/index1.html. November 19, 2008. Accessed January 30,
2010.

21
Roger Sperry. Quoted in: Denis Brian, Genius Talk: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries. Amsterdam,
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers; 1995: 367.

22Eugene P. Wigner. Are We Machines? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 1969; 113 (2): 95-101. Jstor.org.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/985959. Accessed February 2, 2010.

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 Physicist Nick Herbert, an expert in nonlocality: “Science’s biggest mystery is the
nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human
awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about
consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”23
Theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman J. Dyson: “The origin of life is a total
mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the
electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings
and desires and actions.”24

Philosopher Jerry A. Fodor, of Rutgers University: “Nobody has the slightest idea
how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to
have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the
philosophy of consciousness.”25

Philosopher John R. Searle, of the University of California, Berkeley: “At the

present state of the investigation of consciousness we don’t know how it works and we
need to try all kinds of different ideas.”26

Theoretical and mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: “My position [on
consciousness] demands a major revolution in physics…. I’ve come to believe that there
is something very fundamental missing from current science…. Our understanding at this
time is not adequate and we’re going to have to move to new regions of science….”27
Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, one of the patriarchs of quantum physics: “We can admittedly
find nothing in physics or chemistry that has even a remote bearing on consciousness….
[Q]uite apart from the laws of physics and chemistry, as laid down in quantum theory, we
must also consider laws of quite a different kind.”28 Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate
in physics and Bohr’s contemporary, similarly observed: “There can be no doubt that
‘consciousness’ does not occur in physics and chemistry, and I cannot see how it could
possibly result from quantum mechanics.”29

23 Nick Herbert. Quantum Reality. New York, NY: Anchor/Doubleday; 1987: 249

24 Freeman Dyson. How we know. The New York Review of Books. March 10, 2011; LVIII (4): 8-12.

25 Jerry Fodor. The big idea: Can there be a science of mind? Times Literary Supplement. July 3, 1992: 5-7.

26
John Searle. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 1995;2(1): Quotation on front cover.

27Roger Penrose. Quoted in: Giberson K. The man who fell to earth. Interview with Roger Penrose. Science & Spirit.
March/April 2003; 34-41. Available at: uits.arizona.edu.
http://quantum.webhost.uits.arizona.edu/prod/sites/default/files/The%20Man%20Who%20Fell%20to%20Earth.pdf.
Accessed 7 April, 2015.

28 Niels Bohr. Quoted in Heisenberg W. Physics and Beyond. (A.J. Pomerans, trans.) New York: Harper and Row;1971:88-91.

29 Werner Heisenberg. Physics and Beyond. A. J. Pomerans, trans. New York, NY: Harper and Row;1971:114.

6
 Sir John C. Eccles, the Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist: "I maintain that
the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim to
account for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief
must be classed as a superstition. We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with
souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains
existing in a material world."30

Pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield: “It will always be quite impossible to

explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain.... Although the content
of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does
not…. To me, it seems more and more reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a
distinct and different essence.”31

Physicist Charles H. Townes, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with
laser devices: “[T]here seems to be no justification for the dogmatic position taken by
some that the remarkable phenomenon of individual human personality can be expressed
completely in terms of the known laws governing the behavior of atoms and
molecules.”32 Neurophysiologist William H. Calvin, of the University of Washington:
“Consciousness, in any of its varied connotations, certainly isn’t located down in the
basement of chemistry or the subbasement of physics…. [These] consciousness
physicists use mathematical concepts to dazzle rather than enlighten…. Such theorists
usually avoid the word ‘spirit’ and say something about quantum fields…. All that the
consciousness physicists have accomplished is the replacement of one mystery with
another.”33

Sir John Maddox, the editor for 22 years of the prestigious journal Nature: “What
consciousness consists of ... is ... a puzzle. Despite the marvelous successes of
neuroscience in the past century... we seem as far from understanding cognitive process
as we were a century ago.”34

30
John C. Eccles. Evolution of the Brain, Creation of the Self. New York, NY: Routledge; 1991: 241.

31
Wilder Penfield. The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press; 1975: 79-81.

32 Charles Townes. Gathering of the realms: the convergence of science and religion. Science & Spirit. 1999;10(1):18-19

33 W. H. Calvin. How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996: 36.

34 John Maddox. The unexpected science to come. Scientific American. 1999;281(6):62-7.

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WHY THE CONNECTIONS?

If you made it through the previous section, congratulations! Now let’s ask: Why
would humans have developed a unitary, collective form of consciousness that permits
the sharing of experiences and information as if the barriers of space and time do not
exist? What is the evolutionary benefit of having no fundamental
boundaries or limits to consciousness? Are we better off if individual minds can merge
with all other minds to form a One Mind? If thoughts, emotions, feelings, and cognition
can be shared? If we are literally of One Mind?

An obvious advantage is that the sharing of information frequently warns another

of impending danger. This ability imparts a decided survival advantage to the individuals
possessing it. I explored this aspect of consciousness at length in my book The Power of
Premonitions.35

Another approach to these questions is to ask, What is the experience of the One
Mind like? The overwhelming answer from those who learn to traverse this domain is
that the experience of the One Mind involves a direct apprehension of the universe and
all in it as being One, with no fundamental dividing lines or divisions in it. Everything
seems connected with everything else. Partition and separation are illusions. This
experience carries with it the sense that one has apprehended Truth, the way things really
are, and is accompanied by a feeling of joy, compassion and love. A sense of being
connected with all others and with all sentient life has been recognized throughout human
history as a source of immense joy and fulfillment. Solitary mystics notwithstanding,
unity and connectedness with others have generally been a highly prized goal of the great
wisdom traditions. Abundant contemporary evidence shows that rich social networks and
interaction are good for our health, and that protracted, continual isolation is terrible for
health, happiness, and longevity. We are not designed to be alone. Perhaps that is why
people who tune in to the One Mind are more likely to be happier, healthier, wiser, and
more creative. These patterns are evidenced in the research of social epidemiologist Jeff
Levin, who pioneered the field called the epidemiology of religion, and his colleagues.36
37

35 Larry Dossey. The Power of Premonitions. New York, NY: Dutton; 2009.

36 Jeffrey S. Levin J. God, Faith, and Health. New York, NY. John Wiley & Sons; 2001.

37Jeffrey S. Levin. God, love, and health: findings from a clinical study." Review of Religious Research. March 2001;42(3):277-
293.

8
IMMORTALITY

Yet, there is an even greater advantage associated with the One Mind. As a
physician, I believe that the terror of annihilation with physical death has caused more
suffering in human history than all the physical diseases combined. The One Mind
involves a form of unitary consciousness that is nonlocal — that is, a consciousness that
is boundless in space, therefore omnipresent, and infinite in time, therefore immortal and
eternal. The nonlocal One Mind, then, is a potential cure for the greatest of all diseases,
the dread of total annihilation with physical death.

Total destruction of personhood with physical death is an inescapable part of the

materialism package. Therefore, the doctrine of materialism, which insists that
consciousness is produced by the brain and dies with it, comes with enormous human
costs that are vastly underestimated by the cheerleaders of materialism. Jung viewed this
as a calamitous situation, saying, “The decisive question for man is: Is he related to
something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life.”38 If consciousness is
produced by the brain and vanishes with physical death, as materialists insist, then any
meaningful relationship to “something infinite” is a chimera. Novelist George Orwell
also decried this morbid outlook, saying, “The major problem of our time is the decay of
belief in personal immortality.”39 Jung felt so strongly about this issue that he made it a
principle in therapy with his patients. “As a doctor,” he said, “I make every effort to
strengthen the belief in immortality....”40

Immortality for the mind was a key feature of physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s
vision. He wrote, “I venture to call it [the mind] indestructible since it has a peculiar
time-table, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for the mind.
There is only now that includes memories and expectations.41
We may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests
the indestructibility of Mind by Time.”42

38
C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York, NY: Random House; 1965:325.

39 George Orwell. Quoted in: Banville J. Good man, bad world. The New York Review. November 6, 2003; L(17): 62-65.

40C. G. Jung. The Symbolic Life. Collected Works. R.F.C. Hull (trans.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1976; Vol.
13, paragraph. 68.

41 Erwin Schrödinger. What is Life? and Mind and Matter. London, UK: Cambridge University Press; 1969: 145.

42 Ibid., p. 165.

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 Some spiritual teachers insist that the belief in survival beyond physical death is
linked to planetary survival. Buddhist scholar Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan
Book of Living and Dying: “Believing fundamentally that this life is the only one, modern
people have developed no long-term vision…So there is nothing to restrain them from
plundering the planet for their own immediate ends and from living in a selfish way that
could prove fatal for the future.”43 Simply put, materialism, mindless consumerism, and
environmental debauchery are exacerbated by a denial of immortality, a key feature of a
temporally nonlocal One Mind.

SPIRITUALITY

The concept of the One Mind helps restore to life a sense of spirituality, the sense
that we are connected with something higher than the individual self and ego, however
named. Sir John Eccles, the Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist, expressed this
importance:

Science has gone too far in breaking down man’s belief in his spiritual
greatness… and has given him the belief that he is merely an insignificant animal
that has arisen by chance and necessity in an insignificant planet lost in the great
cosmic immensity…. The principal trouble with mankind today is that the
intellectual leaders are too arrogant in their self-sufficiency. We must realize the
great unknowns in the material makeup and operation of our brains, in the
relationship of brain to mind, in our creative imagination, and in the uniqueness
of the psyche. When we think of these unknowns as well as the unknown of how
we come to be in the first place, we should be much more humble.44

CREATIVITY

The One Mind can be a source of great wisdom and creativity, because it implies
an infinite pool of information that we can learn to access. Many famous artists and
scientists have apparently done this throughout history. Physicalistic, brain-bound models
of the mind fail to explain, for example, the mind-boggling feats of savants, who are
often severely mentally impaired and unable to read or acquire information in
conventional ways. But if all individual minds are connected with one another and to a
domain of consciousness that transcends personal limits, an individual might have access
to all conceivable knowledge, past, present, and future. As Emerson expressed this
possibility:

43 Sogyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Harper San Franciso; 1992: 8.

44John Eccles and Daniel N. Robinson. The Wonder of being Human: Our Brain & Our Mind. Boston: Shambhala; 1984:
178.

10
There is one mind common to all individual men…. What Plato has thought, he may
think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can
understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a
party to all that is or can be done….45

The eminent twentieth-century quantum physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

echoed Emerson: “[In any great discovery] we find the often disturbing and happy
experience: ‘It is not I; I have not done this.’ Still, in a certain way it is I — yet not the ego
…but…a more comprehensive self.”46

This access to deep knowing is particularly dramatic when it occurs in children.

Developmental psychologist Joseph Chilton Pearce reports a striking example of creativity
in his five-year-old son, which suggests that childhood wisdom may come from the
“outside.” When he was in his early thirties, teaching humanities in a college, he was
engrossed in theology and the psychology of Carl Jung. Pearce describes himself as
“obsessed” by the nature of the God-human relationship, and his reading on the subject
was extensive. One morning as he was preparing for an early class, his five-year-old son
came into his room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and launched into a twenty-minute
discourse on the nature of God and man. Pearce was astonished. He states: “He spoke in
perfect, publishable sentences, without pause or haste, and in a flat monotone. He used
complex theological terminology and told me, it seemed, everything there was to know.
As I listened, astonished, the hair rose on my neck; I felt goose bumps, and, finally, tears
streamed down my face. I was in the midst of the uncanny, the inexplicable. My son’s
ride to kindergarten arrived, horn blowing, and he got up and left. I was unnerved and
arrived late to my class. What I had heard was awesome, but too vast and far beyond any
concept I had had to that point. The gap was so great I could remember almost no details
and little of the broad panorama he had presented…. He wasn’t picking up his materials
from me. I hadn’t acquired anything like what he described and would, in fact, be in my
mid-fifties and involved in meditation before I did…. My son had no recollection of the
event.”47

We get additional glimpses of this process from famous exemplars who claim to
have intentionally employed it. An example is Thomas Edison, America’s great inventor,
who stated: “People say I have created things. I have never created anything. I get
impressions from the Universe at large and work them out, but I am only a plate on a

45 Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson: Essays and Lectures. New York, NY: Literary Classics of the United States; 1841: 227.

46C. F. von Weizsäcker. Introduction to Gopi Krishna. The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius. New York, NY: Harper
and Row; 1972: 35-36.

47 Joseph Chilton Pearce. Evolution’s End. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco; 1992: 8-9.

11
record or a receiving apparatus — what you will. Thoughts are really impressions that
we get from outside.”48

SWALLOWED UP?

A common objection to the One Mind is the fear of being swallowed up and
homogenized in a vast, featureless sea of consciousness in which a sense of individuality
and personhood is obliterated. This objection fails on close examination. Those who
learn to navigate the One-Mind experience typically describe the opposite reaction:
individualism is not destroyed, but it is enhanced, amplified, augmented, intensified, and
paradoxically balanced with a complementary experience of belongingness. Instead of
losing one’s sense of self, there is the joy of belonging to a greater whole, and a sense of
rightness in being connected with everything that exists. Here’s how British psychologist
David Fontana described this experience: “[It is] an expansion which is not annihilation,
not a loss of individuality, but a reality in which the distinction between individuality and
unity, as between all opposites, not only disappears but is seen to never truly to have
existed.”49

And as author Philip Goldberg states in his book American Veda: “[O]ne’s sense
of ‘I’ and ‘we’ opens out from the narrow identification with family, tribe, race, political
affiliation, religion, and so on, to encompass a broader swath of humanity. With that
comes a corresponding expansion of the moral compass. This is not a fanciful imagining
of ‘we are the world’ harmony but a living experience of unity with other humans, with
nature, and ultimately with the cosmos.”50

A related form of resistance to unitary, One-Mind consciousness comes from

materialistic science itself. Classical science, in its insistence on objectivity, requires
individuality and the ability to stand apart from what’s being observed. Without intrinsic
separateness, scientific objectivity would not be possible. The Harvard social scientist
Philip Slater described some of the problems that flow from this stance in his seminal
book The Wayward Gate, which I quote at length:

The Tinkertoy habit of pulling the world apart in our heads also creates a sense of
eeriness and strangeness when we run into evidence that it’s still working as a
whole. Just as if we had chopped an enemy into little pieces and then saw him
walking around….
48 Thomas Alva Edison. Quoted in: Baldwin N. Edison: Inventing the Century. NY: Hyperion; 1995:376.

49David Fontana. The Meditator’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Eastern and Western Meditation Techniques.
Rockport, MA: Element, Inc; 1992: 213.

50 Philip Goldberg. American Veda. New York, NY: Harmony; 2010: 346.

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 All these [unitary] phenomena violate our Tinkertoy notions of reality because
what happens is independent of the particles themselves. They suggest a larger
unity that seems slightly spooky to us because we lack the ability to see ourselves
as a part of that unity. Since we like to think of ourselves as separate beings the
unification of all other life seems rather overwhelming — a huge conspiracy.
Because we leave ourselves out of that conspiracy, we imagine that it must be
directed against us.

Paranoia is nothing more than that: an incomplete perception of the unity of life
— a half-baked vision in which we become aware of everything outside ourselves,
moving together, but are blinded by our narcissism from the realization that we’re
in on the secret. This is completely voluntary: the ego clings to its sense of
isolation, willing to scare itself to pieces rather than acknowledge that it’s part of
a whole. It blinds itself to that awareness in order to indulge its dreams of
glorious detachment. Hence whenever awareness of unity of life breaks through,
the ego panics and sees the event as weird, horrifying, “occult….”

The eeriness and uncanniness … disappear when we accept the unity of life.51

THE DARK SIDE

Synchronized thinking and shared emotions can be practical and valuable, as with
members of an orchestra, a sports team, or a surgical group. Yet there are other situations
in which unified thought processes can be disastrous. In 1841 Scottish journalist Charles
Mackay’s remarkable book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds, still in print, provided a warning of this ominous process. Nazi Germany raised
this phenomenon to horrid heights, infecting an entire nation with homicidal madness.
Japan’s warmongers whipped their nation into a military frenzy in the run-up to World
War II with their unspeakably cruel invasion of China prior to Pearl Harbor.

Does the One Mind make these events more likely? I would argue the opposite.
The “madness of crowds,” when closely examined, is a repudiation of the central One-
Mind experience: a focus on unity, compassion, empathy, and caring toward the whole
of creation; an awareness of the primacy of love for the planet and its creatures; an
impulse toward wellness and health for all. The dangerous, destructive, Trumpian
nightmare that currently threatens us comes about not because of the One-Mind
experience, but in spite of it.

51 Philip Slater. The Wayward Gate: Science and the Supernatural. Boston: Beacon Press; 1977: 159-161.

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 The same can be said of the objection that the One Mind destroys individual
initiative and free will, that it leads to helplessness, apathy, and ennui. One reason this
objection finds traction in our society is that we have become besotted with the cult of the
individual and the belief that we must raise our self up by our own bootstraps, and that
anyone who objects to personal initiative is a lay-about and “moocher” or “taker.”
Healthy individuality and a sense of personhood are necessary and valuable aspects of the
personality coin, but they are only one side of that coin. If individuality is not balanced
by a sense of connectivity with others, degradation follows —of society, culture,
environment, and life itself. As Philip Slater put it, “Most philosophical and political
conflict results from individualistic thinking…. Awareness of the whole is the first
necessity, for it’s what we have most deeply lost.”52 And as physicist David Bohm
stated, “Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.”53

SURVIVAL

That long and bedrock certainty of thoughtful men that regardless of the race’s
disasters the natural world would go on and on is no longer a certainty.54
~ John Graves, Goodbye to a River

The realization of our essential unity is our best hope for our survival on Earth.
Only by sensing, at the deepest emotional-psychological level, our connections with one
another and the Earth itself can we summon the courage necessary to make the tough
choices that are required to survive. This realization is about staying alive — saving the
Earth and our own skins.

The sense of oneness that accompanies the One-Mind experience suggests that we
revise the Golden Rule from the customary “Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you,” to “Be kind to others because in some sense they are you.”

Novelist Alice Walker said, “Anything we love can be saved” — including the
earth and its creatures, our children, and generations yet unborn. And as W. H. Auden
said in the 1930s, as if peering into the present, “We must love one another or die.”55

52
Philip Slater. The Wayward Gate: Science and the Supernatural. Boston: Beacon Press; 1977: 230.

53
David Bohm. Quoted in: Brainyquote.com. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/david_bohm_388399. Accessed 8
August, 2018

54 John Graves. Goodbye to a River. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 1974: 296

55Auden WH. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939.
(Edward Mendelson, ed.) XLI, “September 1, 1939,” Line 88. (London, 1977: p. 246)
In: Anthony Storr. Solitude. Citation on p. 208, #6.

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 Love is an accompaniment of One-Mind participation. Love helps us re-sacralize
the world. The love-suffused One-Mind experience offers us a way out of hell — the hell
of this particular moment in history where we confront threats to our existence our
forebears never imagined — an earth that is being degraded by the sheer fact of our
existence, our short-sighted choices, and our materialistic mania. This is a hell from
which, beyond a certain point, experts say, there may be no escape. The evidence for our
global predicament is based in abundant science, not on some sidewalk lunatic wearing a
sandwich board yelling, “The end is near!” Only through willful blindness can one not
be aware of the challenges we face — global climate change, polluted air and water,
mindless consumerism, exploding populations, habitat and species loss, water scarcity,
desertification, murderous ideologies, resource depletion, grinding poverty, endless wars
of choice, ethnic and religious hatreds, on and on, all abetted by the “I’ve got mine/every
man for himself” philosophy with which our society is currently septic.

There is a way of recalibrating our collective response to all of these problems, a

move that permits a cascade of solutions to fall into place. This approach requires
rebooting our ethical and moral stance toward the earth and one another. It is about
changing channels, redialing our basic concepts of who we are and how we are related to
one another and to the terrestrial crucible that sustains us. I believe the concept of the
unitary, collective One Mind, a level of intelligence of which the individual minds of all
sentient creatures are a part, is a vision that is powerful enough to make a difference in
how we approach all the challenges we face — not as a mere intellectual concept, but as
something we feel in the deepest way possible. As Hesse said in the prologue to Demian,
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I no longer seek in stars and books; I have begun
to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.”56

We cannot compel the universal One Mind to do our bidding on command. Still,
we are not helpless. Although the One Mind cannot be commanded, it can be invited.
We can set the stage for the revelation, the breakthrough. This seeming paradox has been
emphasized repeatedly in the world’s great spiritual traditions. As historian of religions
Huston Smith says from the Christian tradition, “Everything is a gift, but nothing is
free.”57 Vivekananda, from the Hindu perspective, agreed: “The wind of God’s grace is
always blowing, but you must raise your sail.”58 The message from mystical Islam is the
same. As the Sufi mystic Bastami said, “The knowledge of God cannot be attained by
seeking, but only those who seek it find it.”59 And Hafiz, the 14-century Persian poet:

56 Herman Hesse. Demian. Berlin; S. Fischer Verlag; 1919: prologue.

57 Huston Smith. Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition. New York, NY: Harper Colophon; 1976: 113.

58Vivekananda. Quoted in: Smith H. Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition. New York, NY: Harper Colophon; 1976:
113-114.

59 Bastami. Quoted in: Smith H. Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition. New York, NY: Harper Colophon; 1976: 114.

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 Let’s go deeper,
Go deeper.
For, if we do,
Our spirits will embrace
And interweave.
Our union will be so glorious
That even God
Will not be able to tell us apart….60

In the same spirit, Uri Zvi Greenberg, the Israeli poet and journalist said, “Unity of
God, unity of the universe and unity of mankind are the spirit which moves Judaism.”61

During the 20th century we took the mind apart. Now we must put it back
together. We’ve been taught that our mind is fragmented, that it is divided into the
conscious, the pre-conscious, the sub-conscious, the unconscious, the ego, the superego,
id, and so on. We are divided not just from within, but also from without, from one
another. The One Mind looks through the other end of the telescope. It reveals that our
individual minds are part of a greater whole, a dimension of consciousness that
encompasses all minds — past, present, and future, human and non-human. On this
realization our future may depend.

60 Hafiz. Quoted in: Daniel Ladinsky. I Heard God Laughing. Renderings of Hafiz. Oakland, CA: Mobius Press; 1996.

61Uri Zvi Greenberg. Quoted in: Steven Leonard Jacobs. The Jewish Experience: An Introduction to Jewish History and Jewish
Life. Fortress Press; 2010: 3.

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Bio: Dr. Larry Dossey is a licensed Medical Doctor in the United States. Larry is
the author of thirteen books and is best known for his book One Mind: How Our
Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. Dr.
Dossey is the former Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Alternative
Therapies in Health and Medicine. He is currently Executive Editor of the peer-
reviewed journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. This distinguished
Texas physician, deeply rooted in the scientific world, has become an
internationally influential advocate of the role of the mind in health and the role of
spirituality in healthcare. Bringing the experience of a practicing internist and the
soul of a poet to the discourse, Dr. Larry Dossey offers panoramic insight into the
nature and the future of medicine. An education steeped in traditional Western
medicine did not prepare Dr. Dossey for patients who were blessed with "miracle
cures," remissions that clinical medicine could not explain. "Almost all physicians
possess a lavish list of strange happenings unexplainable by normal science," says
Dr. Dossey. "A tally of these events would demonstrate, I am convinced, that
medical science not only has not had the last word, it has hardly had the first word
on how the world works, especially when the mind is involved."

Website: https://www.dosseydossey.com/larry-dossey-md

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