Dr Eben Alexander's new book

Dr Eben Alexander has published his third book, "Living in a mindful universe."

Follow the link and you can read a substantial part of the introduction where he gives us more insight and information into his experience and it's ramifications.

 https://www.amazon.com/Living-Mindful-Un...1635650658

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I notice Bernardo Kastrup does one of the blurbs. Does that mean he's made the big time?

I notice Bernardo Kastrup does one of the blurbs. Does that mean he's made the big time?

Slightly off topic sorry. Not trying to start a whole thread here. but-
 
I respect Bernorado's work, mostly,,

but in his first book, when he started inferring attributes of reality, based on the actual physical attributes of a whirpool, I closed the book and went on to other things. 

I thought that was a huge stretch, and figured if that sort of thing is behind his construction of how things work, I'm taking the other pill..

Slightly off topic sorry. Not trying to start a whole thread here. but-
 
I respect Bernorado's work, mostly,,

but in his first book, when he started inferring attributes of reality, based on the actual physical attributes of a whirpool, I closed the book and went on to other things. 

I thought that was a huge stretch, and figured if that sort of thing is behind his construction of how things work, I'm taking the other pill..

I haven't read any of his books, to be honest. He seems to have a sharp mind and credentials, beyond that, personally I can't say much else of any value. I think I have an idea what he's 'campaigning' for but IMHO it won't be him that brings about the paradigm change, whatever that will amount to. Having said that it most certainly won't be the likes of me either, that's for sure

Slightly off topic sorry. Not trying to start a whole thread here. but-
 
I respect Bernorado's work, mostly,,

but in his first book, when he started inferring attributes of reality, based on the actual physical attributes of a whirpool, I closed the book and went on to other things. 

I thought that was a huge stretch, and figured if that sort of thing is behind his construction of how things work, I'm taking the other pill..

Why? That is an analogy, he uses it as an explanatory aid of sorts.

Why? That is an analogy, he uses it as an explanatory aid of sorts.

No, that's not the way I read it. You would have to read the passage to see what I mean.

It's hard enough to envision how reality might work. Choosing what I felt like was a rather arbitrary analogy to a whirlpool was even OK. But I felt like he was trying to shoehorn reality to act like the whirlpool so it would be more comprehensive analogy. Felt completed forced to me. And was enough of a distraction that I simply closed the book and put it on the shelf.

Further thoughts from Alexander:

The wonderful discoveries of science have wrought staggering and irrevocable changes upon our world, and on our understanding of that world, in the last three hundred years, and there is no reason to suspect that these discoveries are about to slow down. That’s why it’s so important to understand that beneath the “religion vs. science” debates that lead nowhere, there is another, deeper, and fantastically fruitful discussion going on.

In this discussion, a new group of participants -- people who have undergone near death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and other experiences suggestive of the survival of consciousness – are increasingly being allowed to describe the experiences they’ve undergone. And a small but select group of scientists have decided to take them seriously: to ponder, with the combination of fierce intellectual rigor and vigorous, empirical open-mindedness that all good science demands, what they might mean. In this debate, we are allowed to stay open – as all true science must – to what kind of universe we really live in.

When a person who has been clinically dead returns to life and describes traveling to other, larger worlds, we need to listen to what this person says and ask not whether what they say sounds silly to us (truly new discoveries just about always do), but whether there might just be some truth to it. We must overcome our innate tendency to deny and disbelieve, just as people in Europe had to in the great age of exploration, when travelers returned with tales of lands and peoples and ways of life entirely beyond the ken of those who had sent those explorers out to begin with.

We are right now in the process of entering a new age of exploration: one in which we will suffer shocks of disorientation every bit as great as those we suffered when the earth turned out not to be flat, when the sun turned out not to revolve around the earth, and when the mists of the Milky Way revealed themselves to be composed of billions of stars – suns like ours, some vastly larger and more powerful -- and that beyond our own galaxy lay other galaxies (more than the number of people alive on earth today!), each of them holding billions of suns of their own.

These new discoveries will be shocking, but they will also be profoundly comforting and healing. I know, because I have been to the edge of these new worlds, and returned. As a result, I know that love, beauty, and goodness are real, and that the soul is real as well. They are part of the actual geography of the cosmos within which we live and move. They are as real as rain, as real as the stick of butter on your dinner table, as real as wood, or stone, or plutonium, or the rings of Saturn, or sodium nitrate.

Nor are these worlds general, vague, or abstract. They are deeply, piercingly alive and intimate, and about as “theoretical” as a bucket of fried chicken, the glint off the hood of your friend’s new Trans-Am, or your first crush. That’s why the descriptions of these worlds brought back by those who have seen them sound so crazy, so completely and thoroughly unacceptable to those still living in the old world. There are trees and flowers in these worlds. There are fields, and there are animals. There is water too – water in abundance. It flows in rivers and descends as rain. Mists rise from the pulsing surfaces of these waters, and fish glide beneath them.

Not abstract, mathematical fish. Real ones. Every bit as real as any fish you’ve seen, and way, way more so. The objects one encounters in these worlds are similar to earthly objects, yet they’re not earthly objects. They are, to state it in a manner that falls profoundly short of the real experience but is accurate all the same,more than simply earthly. They are closer to the source, the true center of our spiritual/material cosmos. Closer, like the water higher up on a meandering river is closer to the springs from which it emerges.

The reality that binds all of these worlds together, is that most real, most un-abstract, most central thing there is: Love. Nothing is isolated in these worlds beyond our own. Nothing is alienated. Nothing is abandoned, and no one is allowed to despair. Everything is, as Martin Buber put it, a “you,” rather than an “it.” I know this sounds very hard to swallow. Again, newly discovered aspects of reality always are.

“The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose,” remarked the celebrated twentieth-century geneticist and evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, “but queerer than we can suppose.”
When the reality of these worlds beyond is full established, when people come to understand beyond all argument that they are a genuine fact, everything in our own world will change. There will still be pollution. There will still be overpopulation. There will still be evil and dishonesty and selfishness and all the terrible things that flow from them. The world will, in short, remain what it is, and all the problems we face today will still be there.

But those problems will appear in a dramatically different light. And when, on a rainy afternoon a widow sits by a window in a nursing home gazing at the image of her departed husband, there will not be that terrible, hopeless fight within her between the voice that says “he still lives,” and the one that says “he is gone forever.” She will know, with a certainty that leaves all the shallow and vitriolic arguments of our current moment behind, that the true person, the spiritual being whose eyes she gazed into on that long-ago day, lives on.

“The existing scientific concepts,” wrote German physicist Werner Heisenberg, “cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’.”

That’s exactly where we are right now. We are about to take another jump in our understanding of just how vast and profoundly strange a place the universe really is. But rather than making us feel small and insignificant in the face of this vastness and strangeness, this jump in understanding will make us feel hugely empowered and joyful. We will grasp that we are not accidental and insignificant blips in the universe, but the very heart and reason for its existence. All the arguing between “spiritual” people and “scientific” people will stop, and we will join together in mapping and understanding the true universe in ways not even dreamt of now.
It’s about time!

I really wish there would be more focus on another NDEr than Eben Alexander but I'll take what I can get when it comes to NDEs entering the public consciousness.

I really wish there would be more focus on another NDEr than Eben Alexander but I'll take what I can get when it comes to NDEs entering the public consciousness.

What... on a thread entitled Dr Eben Alexander's new book, Sci ? 

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Recent interview where they mention, and talk about, the book coming out soon:



Eben A. and Karen Newell have a channel with short videos about the book:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoT6qOz...yvWKEA34NA