Science and Spirituality

In this subdomain of Science and Spirituality, we contemplate our basic reality as Consciousness and behold this manifest Cosmos arising out of Consciousness. We'll especially consider the many uncanny, "miraculous" anomalies of this dream-like Cosmos and the Consciousness which subsumes it.

We start with an excerpt on Consciousness as the basic, essential reality underlying all appearances and experiences. This essay comes from my upcoming book, Spirit, Science and Deep Wonder.

Here is an old handout I've given students for many years on Cosmic Miracles, the stupendously "uncanny"—many scientists would openly say "miraculous"—fine-tunings inherent in the appearance and unfolding evolution of our physical universe, without which there would simply be no universe. Such serendipitous miracles can give anyone evidential basis for a spiritual faith that this earthly situation of ours is not some existential nightmare of absurd meaninglessness, an entirely-by-chance "accident," but rather a wondrously beautiful and meaningful drama lit up at every turn by some kind of Divine Superintelligence.

And here is a useful short paper on learning how to discern fact from fiction, along a ranging continuum from mere conjecture or fantasy to plausible possibility to some degree of likelihood (based on stronger and stronger evidence) to what we can as a society agree upon as "fact."

On a very popular, controversial topic, here is an essay on Miracles, an excerpt from the first part of the Appendix, "Miracles and Other Unusual Phenomena" taken from my book Women of Power and Grace: Nine Astonishing, Inspiring Luminaries of Our Time [Wake Up Press, 1995]. The reader will also find in the endnotes to this essay an especially useful set of bibliographies on physics, cosmology, parapsychology, etc.

In case you think such paranormal powers are the stuff of mere fantasy and over-zealous reporting by cognitively-challenged "flakes" and "crackpots," here is an impressive report on the psi power of Remote Viewing, which was thoroughly studied and applied by the U.S. government at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) from 1972 to 1986, and then at the U.S. Army's Fort Meade from 1978 to 1995, with many satisfied customers, including the CIA, NSA, NRO, and other federal agencies. I include with my essay here on Remote Viewing an appendix reproducing a significant press release from the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which first revealed the phenomenon of remote viewing to the scientific world in a special 1996 issue devoted to the subject.

The bottom line: our universe and the powers of Consciousness (in both its "normal" and "paranormal"/nonlocal aspects) are far more interesting than we have been led to believe.