Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism

Product Description
Building on the groundbreaking research of Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism, Edward Kelly and Paul Marshall gather a cohort of leading scholars to consider the significance of extraordinary experiences for our understanding of reality. Currently emerging as a middle ground between warring fundamentalisms of religion and science, an expanded science-based understanding of nature finally accommodates empirical realities of spiritual sorts while also rejecting rationally untenable overbeliefs.The vision sketched here provides an antidote to the prevailing postmodern disenchantment of the world and demeaning of human possibilities. It not only more accurately and fully reflects our human condition but engenders hope and encourages ego-surpassing forms of human flourishing. It offers reasons for us to believe that freedom is real, that our human choices matter, and that we have barely scratched the surface of our human potentials. It also addresses the urgent need for a greater sense of worldwide community and interdependence - a sustainable ethos - by demonstrating that under the surface we and the world are much more extensively interconnected than previously recognized.
Review
In organizing this work, psychologist Kelly and independent researcher Marshall have solicited chapters from ten scholars to assess "physicalism," the proposition that physical facts alone ultimately determine all valid descriptions of reality. Drawing on everyday experience as well as what William James called "wild facts" from anomalies studies, Eastern philosophy, Jungian psychology, parapsychology, psychedelics, quantum theory, and the neurosciences, the various chapter authors reach an opposite conclusion. In one way or another, they assert that consciousness is "unbound," that is, not "bound" by the brain because, e.g., "consciousness came first." This self-realizing nature of consciousness is argued to be the basis of free will, choice, and love but has no place in the current physicalistic world view, one that is devastating to the humanities and to spiritual perspectives.... [The] case is well made that phenomena of conscious thought rest at the foundation of existence and that humans are linked with these phenomena at the very depths of their being. Recommended.
This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the year and deserves the widest possible readership. ―
Paradigm Explorer, Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network
Properly advanced science and spirituality serve to strengthen each other, and this magnum opus leads the way! This third book in a trilogy (so far!) offers a well-supported consolidation of empirical data and theoretical frameworks to help usher our world from the bleak and paltry fiction of physicalism into a far better supported model of the universe in which mind is primordial, and human will influences the universe-at-large. This masterpiece illuminates a rational path forward that will favorably support the best of human potential. -- Eben Alexander III, MD, Neurosurgeon and author of Proof of Heaven and The Map of Heaven
In this lucid and thought-provoking text (the third volume of a series initiated under the auspices of Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research) a stellar group of scholars from a multitude of different fields not only offer compelling empirical data that underscore the urgent need to radically re-envision the taken-for-granted metaphysical stance of physicalism/materialism that currently undergirds most scientific work, but also provide a series of interrelated, and theoretically satisfying, metaphysical alternatives to “the tyranny of materialism.” Read this book if you want to discover an intellectually rigorous middle ground between the fundamentalisms of both religion and science, and believe that it is not only possible, but important, to reconcile science and spirituality in a way that is thoughtful and empirically grounded. -- G. Wi