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grey & black 1/2 cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. vg cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. approximately 7 page corner turndowns, otherwise contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. rear flap has a crease, not torn or price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition so stated. first printing (#1 in # line). xiii+205p. references. index. philosophy. religion. history of science. physics. mathematics. psychology. meditation. ~ What is the self? What happens to the self when the body dies? What is the purpose of life? Is there life after death? For millennia people have pondered these fundamental questions. Now David Darling, a preeminent explorer of the realm where science and philosophy converge, offers singularly logical, utterly convincing answers, drawn from a synthesis of the very latest scientific research and the ageless wisdom of Eastern philosophy. Darling begins by upending our most basic notions of what it means to be us. He spotlights a welter of cutting~edge clinical evidence that demonstrates how fragile and malleable our "l's" are. He explores the mysteries of multiple~personality disorders, left~brain / right~brain splits, even hydrocephaly (whose sufferers can lead normal lives despite fluid~filled heads), to unravel the greater mystery of why we evolved individual personalities in the first place, and to prove how easy it is to "change our minds." Although each individual self is the product of a certain brain and as such changes over time and eventually dies, the foct of consciousness is shared and independent of the body. It is therefore independent of death. In light of this definition, Darling reexamines the role of consciousness in the universe. The Western division of reality into objective and subjective components has left the self and consciousness out of the field of scientific inquiry. Yet, as Darling explains, recent discoveries in quantum physics have made the subjective~consciousness itself central to the study of the universe. Science has come to accept the fact that the world cannot be taken apart and analyzed~that the act of observation, necessarily subjective, is as important an element in the workings of the universe as the speed of light. This holistic vision, developed by Western scientists in the second half of the twentieth century, has been the basis of Zen and other Eastern belief system; for more than two thousand years. Both the revolutionary theories of quantum physics and the traditional tenets of Zen support the idea that everything is interconnected~the world cannot be divided into good/bad, being/not~being, or even particle/wave. As science and mysticism converge on a unified worldview, we begin to transcend the limits of the self and see "ourselves in a new light, not as frail individuals limited by small, uncertain lives, but as eternal participants in a much greater adventure that extends throughout time and space." In this myth~shattering volume, David Darling clearly and elegantly proves that death is not the end of consciousness. In the process he grants us a dramatically new understanding of the self, consciousness, life, and our place in the universe.
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