From Science to God: A Physicist's Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness - Hardcover

Russell, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1577314093 ISBN 13: 9781577314097

Publisher: New World Library, 2003

Synopsis

A former student of Stephen Hawking integrates his knowledge of science with his experience of meditation, tracing the integral links between the two and explaining how they can transform our perspective on ourselves, the universe, spiritual practice, and God.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Russell, the widely acclaimed author of the bestseller The Global Brain and other pioneering works, earned an honors degree in theoretical physics and experimental psychology and a master degree in computer science at the University of Cambridge, England. Increasingly fascinated by the nature of human consciousness, he went to India to explore meditation and Eastern philosophy. Since then his primary focus has been the exploration and development of consciousness, and he's been a consultant to major corporations on managing change, creativity, and personal development. In this, his tenth book, he brings together thirty years of study laying the seeds for a revolution in consciousness.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

It was the Spring of 1996; I had been invited to a small seminar, deep
in the Californian redwoods, to discuss the evolution of
consciousness. As I sat there, listening to various debates about the
nature of mind, recent discoveries in neurochemistry, and theories on
the origins of consciousness, I felt an increasing frustration. I
wanted to say, "We've got it all backwards", or words to that
effect. But I couldn't express my misgivings in a coherent,
well-reasoned manner-which you need to do in those settings if you
want people to take you seriously. So I bit my lip and sat with my
frustration.

A few weeks later, on a plane from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I
opened a book I had recently picked up in a used-book store. The
author, a Dutchman writing in the 1920's, was not saying anything that
was new to me, but he did remind me of the processes of perception and
the way we construct our experience of reality. My readings in
philosophy, particularly the writings of Immanuel Kant, came flooding
back; so did my studies in physics on the nature of light, and my
explorations into Eastern philosophy and meditation. Suddenly the root
of my frustration became clear. We need more than a new theory of
consciousness. We must reconsider some of our fundamental assumptions
about the nature of reality. That was the bit I had been missing; that
was the insight that was trying to break through at the seminar. I
started scribbling, and by the time the plane landed, the picture was
clear. Our whole worldview needed to be turned inside-out.

Over the following months, I worked on an essay pulling together the
various pieces of a model of reality in which consciousness played a
primary role. In the process, I discovered that the implications were
even deeper than I had supposed. The new worldview not only changed
the way science looked at consciousness, it also led to a new view of
spirituality-and, most surprisingly, to a new concept of God. The
seeds sown on that plane flight have now grown into this book. As with
any exploration of such profound issues, the ideas are not complete,
and may never be complete. They represent my current thinking on the
key ingredients of a new worldview, and how consciousness could be the
long-awaited bridge between science and spirit.

As much as the book is a journey of ideas that starts with science and
arrives at God, it is also my own personal journey from a physicist
with little interest in spiritual matters to an explorer of
consciousness who now begins to appreciate what the great spiritual
teachings have been trying to show us for thousands of years.

About this edition

• Publisher: New World Library
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1577314093
• ISBN 13: 9781577314097
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 129