Nature Consciousness

Are you ready to elevate and expand your mind? Perhaps you are searching for ways to enter a deeper connection with the people and things around you. Maybe you are looking for ways to awaken your higher potential and ancient spiritual wisdom to manifest abundance within yourself. Or maybe you are trying to heal yourself by balancing your chakras, improving your diet, and discovering the benefits of meditation and breathwork.

Are human beings immortal? Are apples conscious? Do our legal systems make assumptions about free will that are just plain wrong? Of all the terrific books on quantum physics—from Stephen Hawking to Brian Greene—the questions they never seem to satisfy are the implications of the science. We know that quantum physics is real—our phones and computers wouldn’t work if the science wasn’t right. But what does it all mean?

The whole of Western natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change, forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory. At the same time, these findings have increased our doubt and uncertainty about traditional physical explanations of the universe's genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

Through decades of martial arts and meditation practice, Peter Ralston discovered a curious and paradoxical fact: that true awareness arises from a state of not knowing. Even the most sincere investigation of self and spirit, he says, is often sabotaged by our tendency to grab too quickly for answers and ideas as we retreat to the safety of the known.

Mushrooms and fungi will change your life—and save the planet. Paul Stamets, the world’s preeminent mushroom and fungi expert, is joined by leading ecologists, doctors, and explorers such as Michael Pollan, Dr. Andrew Weil, Eugenia Bone, Fantastic Fungi director Louie Schwartzberg, and many more. Together these luminaries show how fungi and mushrooms can restore the planet’s ecosystems, repair our physical health, and renew humanity’s symbiotic relationship with nature.

As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "theory of everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are.

Most of us live in a constant state of low-level stress… and we’ve started to feel like it’s normal. If you feel like you’re always tired and struggling to relax, or if you find yourself in constant need of a vacation, there’s something wrong – and the solution is surprisingly simple. We’ve become disconnected from the natural world. Even if you have a backyard and a pleasant enough walk to the office, you’re constantly being exposed to noise and pollution… and whether you’re aware of it or not, it affects both your mental and physical health.

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.

This small booklet explores the latest theories of consciousness as developed by Michio Kaku, Christof Koch, and Michael Shermer, with a special focus on a new form of scientific animism, where animals and other life forms are now recognized to have awareness and the capacity to feel pain and suffering. Part of a presentation for the Dayalbagh Studies on Consciousness in Agra, India.

What is Para-Consciousness: The Potential Beyond What We Know shakes the very foundations of the modern knowledge-based theories and economic models. Have you ever realized that the present reality zeros the value of experience-derived consciousness? Unless you wish to reproduce and relive your or somebody else's past, it makes no sense to use that experience. If we exclude you, the person making a decision when to use or not use the experience, then the ideal you use to create the consciousness of what you should do in the present, akin to religious fervor, is quantum gravity.