Larry Dossey, MD on the One Mind and Unity Consciousness

Interview with Larry Dossey by Phil Bolsta

Watch Larry Dossey’s interview:

Welcome, Larry. Thank you for joining us.

Phil, thanks for the invitation. It's a pleasure.
 

Allow me to introduce you. Larry Dossey, MD is the author of 13 books and the executive editor of EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing, a peer-reviewed bimonthly publication. He has become an internationally influential advocate of the mind's role in health and the role of spirituality in healthcare. And we're here to talk about your book, One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. What is your book about?

It's about an idea, which sounds radical. The idea that our consciousness is not just individual the way we ordinarily experience it, but there's a domain in a dimension where all of our minds come together to form what people in the past have called the “Universal Mind,” what I'm calling the “One Mind,” and you can trace this idea, Phil, back 3,000 years to Hindu literature. It pops up in Plato, and you can trace this idea that our minds are connected. Even in modern science, people like David Bohm, the great physicist, and Erwin Schrödinger, who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1933, and many other outstanding scientists have adopted this idea that at some dimension, our minds connect in an indissoluble way. Of course, this is not what we experience on a daily basis.

We think our minds are private and personal and cut off from everybody else, but there's a substantial body of evidence that suggests that that's just not fundamental. And in the book, I explore all of the reasons to go in this direction of the unified mind, and these have to do with people's experiences, and also experiments, which show that you have to come up with this idea in order to make sense of the happenings in the laboratory. So it's been a fun book to put together because a lot of people turn on to this idea almost intuitively after having, let's say a paranormal experience, such as telepathy or clairvoyance, or an epiphany where they just feel connected with all there is. So putting these together, these different threads, has been a real fun work for me.
 

Carl Jung

You wrote that "consciousness is what makes awareness possible.” What is the difference between consciousness and awareness?

Well, awareness is things that we experience in our everyday life. They are, as we say, “conscious,” but there's a level of consciousness which is below the surface, and it's been called the “unconscious,” the “preconscious,” the “subconscious,” and so on. Those are things that operate in our mental life which we're not really aware of. Of course, Carl Jung was the great explicator in modern psychology about this idea that there's a level below our awareness which influences us tremendously, which we aren't in touch with. I have the idea... this is drawn from ancient wisdom... that there is a domain which includes all of those things.

That's what I'm calling “Consciousness” with a capital C. It includes all of these substrata that psychologists have talked about, ad infinitum, such as awareness, the unconscious, preconscious, and all of that, and all of this is united. It's sort of like an iceberg. You only see part of it, a minor amount of it, above the surface of the ocean, but beneath there’s this juggernaut of ice which is not seen, but it cannot be ignored if we want to have a full understanding of how our minds operate.
 

You mentioned Consciousness with a capital C, and I've seen in your writing that you also use Truth with a capital T. What is the difference between Truth with a capital T and truth with a small-case T?

I think Truth with a capital T has been considered to be simply the way things are. We get in touch with that sometimes in mystical states. When people meditate at a very deep level, I think that they often apprehend a sense of awareness, which carries a sensation with it that this is just the way the world works. People develop this sense of apprehending Truth with a capital T through many, many paths. Epiphanies are often one avenue toward this where people just have an awareness that they're connected with everything in the universe, there are no fundamental boundaries, separation is not fundamental, and so on. And this puts us in touch with that Truth with A capital T.
 

Niels Bohr

That's really fascinating as far as the unity consciousness that you're talking about. What's the connection between our underlying unity, the illusion of separateness, and our social needs?

I think we, in our mental life, experience what Niels Bohr got famous in physics for. He came up with the idea of complementarity, and this is a situation in which things that seemed opposite from each other are necessary to come together to explain what we experience, and even what we demonstrated in the laboratory sometimes in terms of physics. This idea that we are individuals is part of the picture.

I'm not against individuality. I mean, it's handy to get through life. It has survival value to think that you're an individual. I mean, if you're crossing a freeway, it's not nice to want to unite with a 16-wheeler. I mean, individuality helps us stay alive on the planet. But beyond that... this is where we get into the complementarity aspect of it… there is a database which suggests that the fundamental aspect of who we are is one of unity and connectedness with other people. This is something that people apprehend in mystical states, in meditation, and so on, and spiritual pursuits, so it's not one or the other.

We are composite creatures. We're complementary creatures. We're made up of a coin with two sides. One side is individuality, the other is unity and connectedness. And in order to account for our experiences, we have to bring these together.

Now, this is not often easy in Western culture because we have become obsessed with the cult of the individual. We have emphasized this to the detriment of our unity side, and I think this has had pathological consequences for us. We tell each other that we have to perfect our individuality, people are obsessed now with their brand, everybody wants to stand out on social media, and so on. But this has been really destructive as far as the way we get on in the world. I think most people would have no difficulty understanding how this has become a kind of cultural sickness. We have separated ourselves as individuals from the living world.

We have separated ourselves from responsibility to the environment, we have separated ourselves in terms of responsibility to other sentient creatures on this earth, and we're paying a price for it. I think that unless we recover our sense of unity and oneness and connectivity with the environment and with the rest of the living world, we are going to have a very difficult time surviving as a human species. I think that in terms of the great problems we face in terms of global warming, pollution, destruction of the natural environment, the eradication of species, our best hope of reversing that is to reconnect, to discover at a very deep heart level that we are not separate from nature. We cannot secede from nature.

We are linked in unity and connectedness with the rest of the world whether we want to realize that or not. I just think that an enormous amount of mischief and destructiveness comes because we have denied our unity with one another and with the rest of the world.
 

You've written that individuals, human beings are not designed to be alone, and how does that tie into the social needs of that?

In my career as a physician, I have followed the literature pretty closely about what constitutes factors for longevity and good health and wellness and so on. And people do not do well in terms of longevity and physical health in isolation. You take almost any species, and you isolate individual members, they die earlier, they develop illnesses. This is particularly true with human beings. People who have rich social connectedness live longer, and in the process, they have a lower instance of all the major illnesses you want to look at. So this being alone, taking individuality and separateness to its extreme, causes us to pay a huge price.

You see this also in social media data now. We know that the longer kids spend on social media, it isn't the case that they feel more connected with their peers. They feel less connected. The experience of loneliness goes up. It increases the more time kids spend on social media. This is not supposed to work that way. You have a rich life on Facebook; you're supposed to have thousands of friends. I have 5,000 friends on Facebook. Now they won't let me have any more friends. I don't feel particularly connected with 5,000 friends on Facebook. As a matter of fact, I want to run in the other direction in terms of getting swamped with request for responses, and likes, and thumbs up, and thumbs down, all of that. That doesn't give me a warm, fuzzy feeling of being connected with people.

I like to have face time with people. I like to go out to dinner and intercommunicate and share our physical being in terms of community with people. I mean, for me, that's where it's at. And some people have told me, "You're just chasing the wrong thing here. You don't realize that we're connected more than we've ever been in the history of humanity." My response is, "Well, what's the quality of that?" I'm not talking about digital connectedness with the One Mind. I'm talking about something entirely different. It isn't electronic. I just think that we’ve become significantly deceived about what needs to be done to actually connect with one another.

I think this idea that we're all connected and that this idea goes back for several thousand years is something that we really ought to pay attention to, particularly since we can illustrate connectedness in various laboratory experiences, which tells us that we're not hallucinating this idea of oneness and unity, and so on. So it's an idea that may sound radical and modern, but it's really ancient, and I think this is a part of the strength of the idea of the One Mind. It goes back in terms of ancient wisdom of long time ago.
 

I agree that face-to-face communication is a lost art, but actually, we're having the best of both worlds. We're dealing face to face, and we're also digital at the same time here, so that’s great, we won.

I know your history in terms of sharing ideas with people, and I think that your and my communication, such as we're doing now, transcends the casual time that most people spend with their smartphones.
 

I agree. Getting back to the book, you wrote that the greater mind is boundless in time. What exactly does that mean?

I think that this is one of the key characteristics about the One Mind that, for which there’s a huge dividend and a payoff for this particular aspect. The term that I like to use to describe the One Mind is that it is nonlocal. It's not localized to particular points in time, and it's not even localized to particular brains and individuals. Nonlocal is just a fancy word for infinite, and if something is infinite in time, it's immortal and it's eternal. It's forever.

This gets us back to the old concept of the soul, something that isn't born, it doesn't die. It can't die even if it tried; it's immortal and eternal. So this temporal time-related nonlocality or this temporal infinitude, it's hugely productive in terms of giving us a sense of satisfaction, by which I mean we now understand because our minds are nonlocal in time; they're eternal. There is life after death. It's not at all over with annihilation of the brain and body. Consciousness endures because of this temporal infinitude, its temporal nonlocality. Nonlocal has another aspect. People can be nonlocal not just with respect to time, but also with space.

This means that although our brains are localized... they don’t run off and join other brains... but our consciousness does exactly that. We know this because people can convey information to a distant individual who may be even on the other side of the earth in terms of clairvoyance or remote viewing or telepathy, that sort of thing, which has been confirmed by thousands of experiments. So we can share information nonlocally with people who are way off. Now, we couldn't do that unless there was some unity or connectedness between minds or consciousness. So here we have a tie-in with neurophysiology and paranormal phenomena, and this information is increasing daily, practically. It's no longer possible just to do a hand-waving thing and say, "Oh, I don't believe in that. There's no proof for it."

Those days are over. The information is too solid. It's been replicated. The odds against giving a chance explanation to these distant forms of communication between minds is just overwhelming. And IONS and Shift to have been at the forefront of some of this information. Dean Radin, who is the senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is one of the most productive scientists on the planet as far as demonstrating these nonlocal connections between people at a distance.

Dean has a book I'm sure you're familiar with. It's called Entangled Minds, which expresses this idea that we're all tangled up, even though we're at a distance. Space doesn't matter when we start talking about these connections. Time doesn't matter. People can apprehend information before it happens, and so we see from these experiments a new model of consciousness emerging, and it's a nonlocal one.

I'm happy to say that I introduced this concept of nonlocal mind back in the early ’80s, so if people want to find somebody to blame for this idea, I guess I'm the person. But I'm happy to claim that because this is an emerging model of consciousness for which there's just an enormous amount of evidence.
 

Dean Radin

Right. I actually saw Dean Radin speak at IONS about this very topic, and I asked a question during the presentation referencing your thoughts on it. What he said was, "Yes, Larry is absolutely right, but that's really vanilla,” in terms of it's so accepted, just as you were saying. He was complimenting you on that it's such an accepted part of science now that you cannot not believe it… which I love the example you gave of a skeptical scientist who said about nonlocal, unbounded consciousness. This is the sort of thing I would not believe even if it were true.”

That's right. That's right. You and I have talked about the love of collecting quotations. I have a pile of quotations from skeptics, and this is one of my favorites: “This is a sort of thing I wouldn't believe even if it were true.” That's a conversation-stopper. If somebody has that point of view, they can't be open to evidence, so there's no place to go with that sort of discussion.

I have to say that those people, although 20 or 30 years ago they were extremely vocal, they're on the defensive now. The reason is, the strength of the evidence showing a nonlocal aspect of consciousness is just as I have already said, it's overwhelming.
 

Yes, you laid that out brilliantly in your article, All Tangled Up, in EXPLORE, which I will link to in the transcript of this interview because it's beautiful. Everybody should read that, and it explains in detail what you're referencing to. And I remember reading many stories of the research conducted as you said about nonlocal consciousness being beyond space and time in your book, Reinventing Medicine, and also in a number of other books about the power of prayer. What other scientific research has validated the existence of unity consciousness?

There are several aspects, and actually, I think there are about six different areas where we could say the evidence is just overwhelming. And remove viewing, which people apprehend seeing even at global distances in great detail, is one area. Random number generator influences, where people can affect the production of ones and zeroes from these electronic gadgets that are programmed to spit out ones and zeroes at an equal statistical production, is another area. There's another area that's come out of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Laboratory, through the work of Dr. Roger Nelson called “The Global Consciousness Project,” where you have different, random number generators at various places all around the earth. And when there's a global event that synchronizes people’s thoughts all over the world, such as in the World Cup, or another example was the death of Princess Diana, these random number generators begin to synchronize with one another at different points in the earth, which shows that there seems to be something about consciousness that has the ability to influence digital devices, which is a sobering thought. Then, there's an area called “Presentiment,” which has been pioneered by Dr. Dean Radin, which shows that people can have an unconscious autonomic response in their body physiologically about an upcoming event before the event even happens. This is some of the best evidence that consciousness is somehow nonlocal with respect to time that exists.

There's enormous data affirming the existence also with precognition, which often occurs in dreams, in which people have detailed descriptions of events which have yet to happen. I experienced some of these premonitions and precognitive experiences in my early life as a physician. This is especially meaningful to me because of personal experiences. I would have dreams of complex clinical events with patients that would play out the day after I had the dream. And then there's a field called “Ganzfeld,” which is an old standby experiment in which people with sensory deprivation can apprehend thoughts that are conveyed to them from a distance.

You lump all of these six categories of experiments together, and you come out with odds against chance of something like 10 to the 54th power. There are not that many atoms in the universe if you do a collective statistical analysis here. So this is why many of us say, "It's just time to bite the bullet and just acknowledge the reality of these nonlocal expressions of consciousness,” this entangled web of consciousness that unites us all no matter where we are. There might have been a time a hundred years ago when this kind of evidence could be dismissed with a hand wave. We’ve passed that time. And if we deny the connectivity of our minds, I think we, as I've already said, we're going to pay a… we already are paying a huge price for that, because this is one of the powers that we now have as humans that we don't have to do everything alone.

For example, my ability to influence environmental issues as an individual is very limited, but because of our unity consciousness, we don't have to do these things by ourselves. There's enormous power with the apprehension, the awareness, that we are linked together. Margaret Mead said, "Could a small group of individuals change the course of civilization and make a huge difference?" She said, "Of course. That's the only way it's ever happened.” So there are practical implications of all of these ideas about unity consciousness, and it's time we, I think, put this to work in practical ways.
 

There are movements now gaining traction to leverage the power of nonlocal mind, like we had a course here at The Shift Network from David Nicol, and his course on building group subtle fields just for that effect: to effect change globally through the consciousness efforts of a number of people.

Yes. Yes. I'm happy to hear that. We need more of these in order to shift.
 

Absolutely. Well said. I love the way you said that during the 20th century, we took the mind apart, and you're putting it back together. Could you just speak to that a little bit?

In medical school, I was schooled in psychology, and there seemed to be no end of how fine you could split the mind up. There's consciousness, superconsciousness, the unconscious, the preconscious, the subconscious, and all of that, And I just felt that that was excessive. Of course, that was the vogue with Freud and Jung, and I think that that missed something really important.

It fragmented their consciousness; it put certain aspects of our consciousness off the table by declaring that you cannot possibly be in touch with any of that in your awareness. Actually, Jung tried to say that the goal of human development was to make the unconscious conscious, to drag the unconscious up into awareness. That was a noble thought, but most people are not able to do that easily. I mean, that could be the task of a lifetime according to the Jungian way of thinking. I think what was neglected was this idea that there is a fundamental domain of consciousness where our minds connect with one another.

You cannot honor the experimental data and come up with any other viable model of the mind, it seems to me. It's the tendency to split the mind up, which has forced people to deny this generous database showing that consciousness can get it together through space and time. So I think that we don't want to diminish the contributions of modern psychiatry. Individuality and conscious awareness are beautiful things as I've already described, but that's only one side of the coin. The part of the consolation for me in this model of connected mental faculties is the idea that this is traceable back for millennia. I mean, this is one of the earliest understandings in spiritual traditions.

If you go back into Hinduism, you bump into something in 3000 B.C., called the “Akashic records,” and this some domain where consciousness has come together, and nothing is lost. All information that people have ever had consciously is in the records and under certain aspects you can experience that and relive it and retrieve that information.

Now this comes in pretty handy in certain modern puzzles, such as what are called savants, who usually are mentally defective. In serious savant syndromes, the savant cannot even read. There's no way they could acquire easily information that they come out with. But in spite of their mental inabilities, their mental deformities, so to speak, these people can perform mathematical feats that defy computers. They can come up with information that is so trivial that there's no way that they could have acquired it rationally. There's no explanation neurophysiologically about how they can do this. I think the One Mind gives us a possibility — they're retrieving this information from another domain, another source, and the source is the commonality of consciousness, which somehow they tap into.

There are people who have been hugely creative and hugely brilliant who have also demonstrated their ability to retrieve information from somewhere else. The classic example is Thomas Edison, who many of us think was America's greatest inventor. He gave us the light bulb, moving pictures, the phonograph, and many other inventions. He's on the record of saying, "I never invented anything. I never created anything."

Edison said, "I get ideas from the Universe.” He said, "My ideas come to me from the outside.” I think this is what we're talking about when we're talking about the rich source of information that is constituted in the One Mind. These statements by Edison were something of an embarrassment to other scientists who wanted to dress this up in terms of just sheer cleverness and mathematical abilities and logic and reason, but Edison said, "No, that's not how my mind operates."

Erwin Schrödinger

There are people who have endorsed this idea of the One Mind, which should be pointed out. One was Erwin Schrödinger, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933. He's on record as saying that "Mind is a singular entity; there is only one mind." Now this is not a saffron-robed mystic hallucinating about common consciousness. This is one of the most fabulously acclaimed physics professionals of the 20th century. He wasn't alone. This was not a one-off.

David Bohm

David Bohm also asserted the commonality of consciousness and he said that "if we don't see that there is one mind, we're just blinding ourselves to it.” So it's nice to be in good company of some of the smartest scientists of the 20th century who have stood up for this idea.
 

And this is actually, as you said, very commonly accepted now. I know that many musicians, artists, writers... I know I feel this way... that the best ideas do not come from me, but through me, as Edison was saying. You had suggested that our oneness, this unity consciousness, suggests that we should revise or upgrade the Golden Rule from "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" to "Be kind to others because in some sense, they are you,” So if people understood how deeply we in all life are connected, how would that impact the challenges and conflicts we face in the world today?

Well, I think that the implications are immense. The Golden Rule as it's commonly stated has also seemed very selfish to me: "I'll be nice to you because I want you to be nice to me.” "I give you something, you give me something.” Upgrading the Golden Rule really bootstraps that idea to something I think that’s much more generous and much more spiritual if you will. We are compassionate and empathic to one another because we are not that separate to begin with. What I do for you, to you, I do to me, and this is a different way of looking at the Golden Rule.

Alice Walker

It also expresses the willingness for empathy and compassion and love for someone else. I happen to believe that Alice Walker, the great novelist, was right on target when she said, "Anything we love can be saved," and she was talking about the environment. How on earth are we going to survive all of the challenges that we face? Well, unless we identify with them as part of ourselves, I doubt that we will make it as a species.

I think it is through love and through identification with “the other,” so to speak, that we will find the courage and the generosity and the energy to meet the problems that are really seriously threatening our existence on this planet. So I think in the end, we're not talking about a hopelessly philosophical concept here that has to be defended by those six categories of experiments I've mentioned. I think we're talking about saving our own butt and having a future that's meaningful for our children and grandchildren and so on. So I think this idea is extremely, extremely practical. It has to do with our own survival.
 

Paramahansa Yogananda and the Self- Realization Fellowship lineage of gurus in samadhi (courtesy of Jonah West Art)

You've mentioned that happenings like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition are ways that we can experience the One Mind, and I know in Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda popularized the concept of striving for samadhi through meditation on God. What are some other ways that humans can experience the One Mind? You touched on love. I am assuming that there's more to that.

Yes, I think the evidence that we're all connected in some center of common unity at a certain domain of consciousness... I think the evidence is so ubiquitous that you'd have to really try hard to evade it and say, "This isn't true.” I think there are always reminders that this is the way consciousness operates. If you look at the data, for example, around 70 to 80 percent of Americans say they have had precognitive experiences, premonitions, apprehension of things before they happened. This is an experience of temporal nonlocality that was very common in my life as a physician.

Also, people can expose themselves to experiences of great beauty, and this idea of oneness and unity can bubble up from the unconscious and become real to people. I think exposure to nature is one of the most common ways of tapping into this oneness with all there is. My wife and I, Barbara, had a practice for 30 years of taking time off in August and retreating into high-altitude, mountainous wilderness areas in the Sawtooth Range in Central Idaho or the Wind River Mountains in western Wyoming, and living in a tent for two weeks. If you do that and you're exposed to the bears and the wildlife, you can really get your consciousness altered and get in touch with things that are totally obscure as long as you try to exist in our technological complex world. And so there are ways of apprehending this idea of oneness, and this has never been more vivid to me than out in wilderness for an extended period of time. Also, probably the most general way worldwide of experiencing One Mind is simply to meditate, where you sit down and lower your sensory input to a point where awareness and information can just bubble up from your unconscious into conscious awareness.

Angeles Arrien

I have for a long time admired what Angeles Arrien, the social psychologist, called the “Four Rules of Life,” and basically, this was a way of making the unconscious conscious and apprehending this idea of unity consciousness. She said, "The first rule of life is just to show up. The second rule of life is to pay attention. The third rule is to tell the truth, and the fourth rule of life is simply don't be too attached to results."

I translated that into a cruder version. It's not as elegant as Angie's Four Rules of Life, but my version of that is to one, turn off your smartphone, two is to sit down, three is to shut up, and four is to listen. I sincerely believe that our technology is interfering with our ability to access this kind of wisdom. So I'm serious about the smartphone. It's a handy tool, but it can also dominate.
 

I think that's rather eloquent in its own way.

Thank you, Phil.
 

You mentioned that there are two ways to apprehend the existence of the One Mind — either experimental or experiential. I imagine both are necessary?

I think it depends on how you're put together. I bump into people who are deeply spiritual and who have an exquisite apprehension of this idea of common consciousness who wouldn't get close to a laboratory or read a scientific paper if their life depended on it. They just are not put together that way. There are other people who see it differently. I am well aware of individuals who have used science and experiments as essentially a spiritual path to greater wisdom.

Elisabeth Targ

One of the people I admire most about this was Elisabeth Targ, who died [in 2002]. She was one of the great experimenters in healing using prayer and healing intentions to influence clinical courses and people, and to alter the physiology of animal models. Once she told me, “Here's why I love experiments. When I go to into the laboratory, it's like opening a window so that the universe can enter this laboratory and reveal something to human beings in the outcome of this study.” She said, "For me, science is a spiritual, sacred path.” So people's sensitivities are geared in different ways, but I would not want to denigrate the experimental scientific approach to understanding these lessons. It's been a tremendous impact in my own life, but I'd be willing to admit that there are many paths up the mountain, and others certainly don't have to go the experimental scientific route. But for some people, it's a path pretty straight up the mountain.
 

About 10 years ago, I interviewed you for a story for my book, Sixty Seconds, and you told me about the precognitive dream that you referenced earlier in this interview. You were very early in your medical practice, and you said that when you told your colleague about the dream that involved the medical care of his son, he was extremely disturbed and wanted to hear no more of it. And you said, and I love this, you said, "He knew in an instant, as did I, that if we took this dream seriously, we would have to revise our idea of reality of the very nature of how the world worked.” So you didn't speak of it again. And you already touched on this in this interview, that there are so many people who are not willing to give up their preconceived notions of reality to the point where they can't even hear what you're saying.

No, that's true. But you know, that experience of my precognitive dreams was several decades ago, and I'm happy to say that we're not in the same place currently. There's an increasing openness toward these things in the medical field. Just to give you an example, back when I had that experience with those precognitive dreams, there were three medical schools in the entire country who had any formal coursework looking at the role of consciousness and spirituality in healing. Now, the vast majority, something like 90 to 95 medical schools out of 130, have formal coursework exploring these outcomes.

One of the major factors in this has been the entry into medicine of women. The majority of medical school enrollment nationwide now is made up of young women, and nurses have played an enormous role in terms of opening the profession to these issues. The fact is that women, nurses and doctors, women simply don't struggle with these phenomena like we men do. I'm married to a nationally influential nurse; Barbara has written 23 something books looking at the role of holistic nursing and healing. And so I've had my finger on the pulse of what's going on with the attitude of females in healing, and it's been quite wonderful. They in many instances have been our teachers in health and healing, and so hats off to women. They have helped to bring this way of thinking around.
 

Max Planck

Speaking of how we're advancing in awareness over the decades, please share the Max Planck quote about how scientific understanding advances.

I'll paraphrase. He said that science changes funeral by funeral. And for those who don't know this, Max Planck is the founder of modern quantum physics. He bumped into obstructions in bigotry and prejudice from day one. He knew that he would face a lot of opposition and he held on to his breakthrough for a full year before he even published it, and so he knew what he was talking about with that opposition. I think there's still an element in medical science and in science in general made up of people who are so opposed to these consciousness-related ideas that they will not ever be convinced by data, so I don't think that there's any reason to spend a lot of time arguing with those folks. Science is progressing. I hate that it has to come funeral by funeral, but that's better than no progress at all.
 

Finally, the last question I have for you is, speaking of advancing funeral by funeral, how can the reality of One Mind change our notions about death itself?

I think, Phil, that this is the greatest contribution that this idea of One Mind makes to human welfare. As a physician, I think that fear of death and total annihilation with the death of the brain and body has caused more suffering for human beings than probably all the physical diseases put together. I mean, it is the great fear and it's what I call the “great disease.” Now, I happen to be convinced that this idea of the One Mind, being nonlocal in space and time, that is infinite or eternal and immortal, is a cure for this fear of annihilation and death because it holds hope for this old ancient idea of the soul, something that works through the brain and body but isn't confined to them, and survives the death of the brain and body. If people really got this in their heart — this understanding of the nonlocal nature of consciousness — it would go a long way toward laying to rest this enormous fear of death that exists in our culture.

I think that this is the most marvelous contribution — this idea of nonlocal consciousness, entangled minds, nonlocal awareness — that I can imagine. It is also true that one can use spiritual interventions to live longer and be healthier in the process. That's affirmed by an enormous body of data, but that's not the biggest benefit from this point of view in my judgment. The biggest benefit is this idea of immortality.
 

Thank you so much for sharing so much time with us today, Larry. It's a joy to talk to you, and again, thank you for being such a source of kindness and wise counsel to me over the years.

Well, bless you. Thank you, Phil.

Larry Dossey, MD is a leader in bringing scientific understanding to spirituality, and rigorous proof to complementary/integrative medicine. He lectures at leading medical schools and hospitals around the country. His 13 books have been translated and published all over the world. Click here to visit Larry Dossey’s website.