Today, I’m going to focus on the world of the psychics and the book I found which most succinctly, yet comprehensively is, One Mind: How our Individual Mind is Part of a greater Consciousness and why it matters by Larry Dossey, MD.
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In this book, Dossey is trying to make the point that we are essentially all connected psychically or that there is once consciousness which pervades all things; He calls this consciousness “Kiki,” and consults with her daily on proper bowtie selection. Just kidding, wanted to make sure you’re awake.
And, one of the things I found most intriguing was how Dossey managed to pull in examples of all sorts of seemingly separate phenomena to make the point that one central consciousness pervades all things.
and the first part of his book conveys this message through a bunch of stories about people either knowing things about relatives that they had no way of knowing, other than through some sort of psychic connection. He also tells stories about interspecies connections – so for example, dogs knowing when their owners were dead, even when separated by great distances. So the dog sitter will notice the dog suddenly running around distraught, for seemingly no reason; and later will find out that the owner had died in a car crash or something.
One of the stories is about a whale and her offspring. They had basically gotten trapped in a bay, and were almost about to beach themselves. Several human rescuers were working to set them free, but nothing seemed to be working. The humans were getting exhausted, and the whales were getting exhausted, so it really looked like the end was near. But then, this dolphin came; and the dolphin had a name because apparently she had been frequently seen in the area – Mocha. She basically comes in, establishes trust with the whales, and shows them the exit out of the bay. Then, she comes back and plays with the people there.
Bottlenose dolphins are the best. There are multiple accounts of dolphins forming circles around people in water with great white sharks.
One surprising story was about a cow which attacked its owner – I didn’t even think that could happen. The cow, we’ll call her Bessie, knocked the owner to the ground, and was basically keeping her down. Apparently, the next thing which could have happened is that the other cows could have joined in. This story alone is pretty shocking, because I never knew about killer cows. Anyway, the farmer’s horse charged the cow, scaring Bessie away. In Bessie’s defense, though, we have treated cows abysmally. I’m not sure what happened to Bessie after that, but I would have been tempted to enjoy some delicious Bessie filet mignon if I were that farmer.
Here’s a crazy story about bees – apparently, they are really close to their beekeepers, and there are customs where people will go to tell the hive that the beekeeper has died when the beekeeper passes away. There was one instance in which a beekeeper died, and his kids circled the 14 hives which he maintained and they told the bees that he’d died. I’m not sure how they communicated this…perhaps they walked around making buzzing noises and hoping for the best. Then, at the beekeepers’ funeral, the bees came and just covered the grave and the gravestone. Interestingly, the author felt the need to point out that they ignored several flowers and flowering plants nearby–like we would be thinking, “well, obviously the bees covered the grave and stone because there were no flowers around.”
Side note for aspiring beekeepers – there’s an old folklore tale that you must keep your bees informed of significant family events – births, deaths, marriages, etc. If you don’t then they’ll leave you.
There was also a story of a cat which lived in a nursing home, and it would curl up on the beds of people who were about to die in the next 6 hours. It’s like, get rid of that fucking cat!
So that’s the first part of Dossey’s book, but then he transitions into Part 2. Here is where he supports the view of One Mind, but the examples get way more out there–at least as far as I am concerned, and you’ll see what I mean. This is when I really started liking the book.
But before I go into some of the stories, I want to take a quick detour – and this is something that has always sort of made me a little uncomfortable with reconciling.
This is the concept that our minds are not actually our brains; rather, our brains serve as a sort of antennae, or probably more accurate, filter between what our conscious mind perceives, and all the information which is out there. But, anyone out there who has ever taken a neuroscience course is probably thinking bullshit – we know that we can stimulate certain parts of the brain, and the person will taste cotton candy or see blue face masks; and we know that if certain parts of the brain are damaged, then the person can experience major distortions in perception or communication, or whatever – so this then makes it seem like everything–consciousness, perception, personality comes from the brain.
Here’s where Dossey makes this analogy. You know how your television receives signals from the ether, and then displays them. Well, this does not mean that the images are coming from the TV. The Images are actually coming from somewhere else and being transmitted to the TV. If you damage a part of the TV, then you’ll see distorted images. Just like, if you damage a part of the brain, then the person might have a distorted perception of the world. I thought this was a really interesting way to resolve conflicts between what neuroscience tells us about perception, and what psychedelic drugs tell us.
Dossey then goes to the year 1982 when Mellen-Thomas Benedict, in his early 30s, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. He opted out of chemo, and basically went home to die. He didn’t have health insurance, so he just had hospice come and take care of him. This went on for 18 months.
One morning, he woke up and knew it was his last day on earth, but he’d been reading something about how interesting things happen when you die, so he didn’t want his body to be disturbed for ~6 hrs. Fortunately, his hospice nurse complied with this when she indeed found him dead that day.
Suddenly, he experienced being outside his body. He had a sense of panoramic vision and saw a magnificent shining light…It seemed to be a conduit to the Source or the Higher Self. “I just went into it,” he said later, “and it was just overwhelming. It was like all the love you’ve ever wanted, and it was the kind of love that cures, heals, regenerates.” Then the light turned into an exquisitely gorgeous mandala of human souls.
Benedict felt all his negative judgement and cynical attitudes about his fellow human beings giving way toward a view that was equally hopeful and positive. He conversed with the great light he rode a stream of Consciousness through the Galaxy and glimpsed the entire universe he felt he was in pre-creation before the Big Bang his Consciousness expanded to Infinity it was revealed to him that there is no death only immortality with this assurance the entire process then reversed itself and he returned to his body.
Three days later, he was like “I think I’ll go for a walk.” He leaves hospice and is just going about his life when a friend notices Benedict’s good health and is like, “you should get that checked out.” So they do whatever scans they do, and the doctor tells him he doesn’t have any cancer. Benedict is like, “it’s a miracle!” to which the doctor replies, “no, it’s called a spontaneous remission.” Literally, Benedict had such advanced cancer, that he died a few months earlier, and the doctor is completely unimpressed. It really makes me wonder how many amazing things doctors play witness to on a regular basis, and it just completely misses their attention.
But apparently, you don’t have to die to have an NDE. Dossey talks about Nancy Clark, a cytologist in oncology research. As she was giving birth, she suffered from severe eclampsia, which is high blood pressure. I think this was back in the 60s when they must not have had an understanding or drugs for that or something. At any rate, she died. And this death was no joke. When she came back, she was in the morgue. But while she was dead, she had all the blissful experiences people discuss frequently when they die. I didn’t write down all the details because I didn’t intend this episode to be devoted to NDEs. But the reason I bring up Clark is for what happened to her later on. When she was 38, she was delivering a eulogy for a friend when, all of the sudden, the same thing happened again. She went into the heavens, experienced bliss, peace, love of all mankind. She saw that her dead friend was standing beside her, holding her hand. She wanted to stay there (as many people report), but came back because she was given a mission to share her experience. She ended up coming back to her body 15 minutes later. As nearly as I can tell from reading this, she just spoke for 15 minutes without anyone noticing that she’d completely left her body. People did, however, report a white glow all over the outline of her body.
[also, I say blissful, but there have been people who have no had such blissful experiences.]
Interestingly, as she went around telling everyone about her experience, she lost her friends, her family didn’t believe her – unbelievable. A minister told her that she needed to stop speaking about it because the devil was speaking through her. Just insane. But as Clark went around speaking about her experience, she encountered 102 other people who had “NDE’s” while completely healthy. ONe person was driving a car when it happened. I would have thought that God would try to time his interventions a little better than that. But, if you can give a 15 minute speech while experiencing death, then, I guess driving a car isn’t too far off.
The next section of the book kind of freaked me out a little, and definitely made me think twice about dabbling in the mystic arts (seances, etc). Apparently, there have been reported cases of people basically taking on new and different personalities – basically like possession. In 1785, Mary Reynolds, aged 19 at the time, went deaf and blind for weeks. When she regained her senses, she had no memory of, well, basically who she was. You, know, things like, you’re Mary Reynolds, it’s 1785. There’s no TV or internet. Life is really boring and we do work or sit in church all the time. Her family sort of brought her back, and apparently, she sort of toggled between two different personalities–Mary Reynolds and someone else, for 15 years. Then, when she was 36, the second personality basically took over, and that’s who she was until she died at age 61.
The other scarier case was of Iris Farczady. She was a well-educated Hungarian girl. It was mentioned in the book that she had dabbled in seances, and when she was 15, she underwent an abrupt personality change, but not only that, she knew who she was. She was a 41 year old spanish working class woman named Lucia. Ail of the sudden, Iris, or, the teenager formerly known as Iris, could speak Spanish, and could no longer speak Hungarian. I’m sure there were significant personality changes which she experienced as well, but the most convincing element to me is the ability to speak a language overnight. That has got to be a challenge to fake. Basically, Iris ceased to exist. It was a mystery to how this happened. A paranormal research team interviewed Lucia when she was 86 (in 1998), and they couldn’t work out how it happened. Why would an educated upper class young girl want to be a lower class working woman. The book did mention one detail – that Lucia hated the upper class. I wonder if this was some sort of dark magic she was able to put into play. Who knows. The researchers looking into this did not label it as a possession because they had no proof.
That’s it!
