Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist's Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe
Autor Mona Sobhanien Limba Engleză Paperback – 28 sep 2022
• Explores evidence of past lives, intuitive knowing, and other spiritual phenomena
• Reveals the author’s own inexplicable experiences as well as her conversations with scientific colleagues, high-level experts, and government officials
Neuroscientist Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., details her transformation from diehard materialist to open-minded spiritual seeker and shares the extensive research she discovered on past lives, karma, and the complex interactions of mind and matter. She reveals her conversations about spirituality, consciousness, and anomalous occurrences with scientific colleagues as well as high-level experts and government officials, as she searched for proof of a meaningful cosmos. She discovered that psi research has been conducted on a grand scale for more than a century--by hundreds of scientists with hundreds of thousands of participants--and that there exists substantial evidence for the reality of psi. She examines meta-analyses of these experiments, such as that of the Ganzfield tests, which showed the odds against chance of 12 billion to 1--throwing our current scientific materialist paradigm into question.
Providing a deep dive into the literature of psychology, quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy, and esoteric texts, Sobhani also explores the relationship between psi phenomena, the transcendence of space and time, and spirituality. Culminating with the author’s serious reckoning with one of the foundational principles of neuroscience--scientific materialism-- this illuminating book shows that the mysteries of human experience go far beyond what the present scientific paradigm can comprehend and leaves open the possibility of a participatory, meaningful Universe.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781644114995
ISBN-10: 1644114992
Pagini: 256
Ilustrații: 18 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Colecția Park Street Press
ISBN-10: 1644114992
Pagini: 256
Ilustrații: 18 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Colecția Park Street Press
Notă biografică
Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist who holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. A former research scientist at the University of Southern California, she also was a scholar with the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, VOX, and other media outlets. She lives in Los Angeles.
Extras
PREFACE: Welcome to the Public Funeral for ‘Old Me’
I really don’t want to be writing this book. Sometimes I find myself imagining how my life would have been, had I gone on the way I was before. Sometimes I wish none of this had happened to me and I had stayed on my original path. Nevertheless, like many other things in life, it was unstoppable, it happened, and now I’m here--writing this book I don’t want to be writing.
I had a lot of trouble sitting down to write this book--a book that would irrevocably change my life. At first, I thought to myself that I could just quietly and privately accept all that I had learned. I thought I could accept both that I had profoundly changed personally and that my view of the world had changed. But, the more I learned and thought about what I learned, the more that became impossible.
And here’s the reason: At the beginning of this journey, I would have been the least likely person to tell this story. I was vehemently opposed to religion and spirituality because science was my religion. I lived and breathed the wonders of the human brain as a neuroscientist. Then, a series of life events led me down a path of investigation that transformed me from an aggressively anti-religious, anti-spiritual, strictly scientific materialist (i.e., believing only matter and energy make up the world), and agnostic neuroscientist into a neuroscientist who believes the interaction between mind and matter are more complicated than we currently understand, and that we are probably all connected through a broader consciousness. I am now someone who is open to the idea of past lives and karma, believes weird things happen all the time that our scientific framework can’t explain, and generally finds herself saying things straight out of ancient spiritual texts--and not because I needed comfort, but because that’s where the evidence led me. I followed an invisible thread of evidence into the marvelous world of mystery and mysticism, and with this book, I hope to inspire others to do the same.
While that all sounds nice now, the road to the ‘new me’ was brutal. I would read some evidence--and there was so much evidence to be read--and update my thinking, but then read something else and change my mind. Scientific materialism, which is the framework that the scientific community currently uses to model the universe that we live in, was the hammer and my new beliefs were the monkey in a never-ending monkey hammer arcade game. It took countless books, scientific studies, and conversations with colleagues and experts to update my beliefs. When I finally did open to the possibility of a different worldview--one where meaning is embedded in the Universe--in flowed a wondrous feeling of delight and serenity that I hadn’t known was missing.
So, ‘new me’ is writing this book for ‘old me,’ both to process and memorialize my path to one version of me who has space in her life for science and spirituality. I’m writing this book also to document the difficulty of altering our beliefs. But I also hope it is helpful for others who find themselves on this twisted, scary, non-materialist road. I try to look upon the older version of myself with compassion; and if you find yourself in a similar position, I hope you can do the same. I also try to apply that compassion toward fanatic scientific materialist believers because, boy, have I been there. One thing I hope to never do again is have the audacity to think that we already know all the answers to the mysteries of the Universe.
Another reason for putting the story down into writing is to add my name to the long list of scientists, philosophers, and physicists who think it is imperative that we update the scientific paradigm beyond scientific materialism for long overdue innovative breakthroughs in physics, neuroscience, and medicine. In doing that, science may incidentally come to match most people’s experience of reality. Scientists and other experts will tell you what they truly think and believe when conversations are had in confidence, but, come on! It is too disingenuous that we make one set of statements publicly and a whole different, more honest and open-minded set of statements in private cocktail hours? More scientists need to open their minds publicly. We need to take an honest look at data that doesn’t fit our current modern theories of reality, because there is a lot of it. And so, writing this book is me taking a stand, publicly.
One of the first things we learn in statistics is that you can’t just throw away outlying data points. Yet, modern scientists do that consistently with any data that doesn’t fit a scientific materialist framework. Yes, it is important for scientists to be skeptical and try to be unbiased. Yes, the human brain is built to believe, and it is a storyteller by design, so we often jump to conclusions and need to check our biases. Yes, many of the things from our past that we believed to be mystical, magical, or religious turned out to be decidedly less so when we had the appropriate ways of measuring them (think viruses and bacteria, for example). All that notwithstanding, the mainstream scientific world has taken these few reasons and turned them into dogma. Just like all religions and cults, mainstream science snuffs out opposing thoughts with stigma, ostracism, indignant condemnation, and condescension. In my opinion, it does it at its own expense. But we can change that!
Like I said, I really wish I wasn’t writing or living this. But, I am.
Welcome to the public funeral for my former self and to a plea to scientists to muster courage to embrace new ways of thinking.
I really don’t want to be writing this book. Sometimes I find myself imagining how my life would have been, had I gone on the way I was before. Sometimes I wish none of this had happened to me and I had stayed on my original path. Nevertheless, like many other things in life, it was unstoppable, it happened, and now I’m here--writing this book I don’t want to be writing.
I had a lot of trouble sitting down to write this book--a book that would irrevocably change my life. At first, I thought to myself that I could just quietly and privately accept all that I had learned. I thought I could accept both that I had profoundly changed personally and that my view of the world had changed. But, the more I learned and thought about what I learned, the more that became impossible.
And here’s the reason: At the beginning of this journey, I would have been the least likely person to tell this story. I was vehemently opposed to religion and spirituality because science was my religion. I lived and breathed the wonders of the human brain as a neuroscientist. Then, a series of life events led me down a path of investigation that transformed me from an aggressively anti-religious, anti-spiritual, strictly scientific materialist (i.e., believing only matter and energy make up the world), and agnostic neuroscientist into a neuroscientist who believes the interaction between mind and matter are more complicated than we currently understand, and that we are probably all connected through a broader consciousness. I am now someone who is open to the idea of past lives and karma, believes weird things happen all the time that our scientific framework can’t explain, and generally finds herself saying things straight out of ancient spiritual texts--and not because I needed comfort, but because that’s where the evidence led me. I followed an invisible thread of evidence into the marvelous world of mystery and mysticism, and with this book, I hope to inspire others to do the same.
While that all sounds nice now, the road to the ‘new me’ was brutal. I would read some evidence--and there was so much evidence to be read--and update my thinking, but then read something else and change my mind. Scientific materialism, which is the framework that the scientific community currently uses to model the universe that we live in, was the hammer and my new beliefs were the monkey in a never-ending monkey hammer arcade game. It took countless books, scientific studies, and conversations with colleagues and experts to update my beliefs. When I finally did open to the possibility of a different worldview--one where meaning is embedded in the Universe--in flowed a wondrous feeling of delight and serenity that I hadn’t known was missing.
So, ‘new me’ is writing this book for ‘old me,’ both to process and memorialize my path to one version of me who has space in her life for science and spirituality. I’m writing this book also to document the difficulty of altering our beliefs. But I also hope it is helpful for others who find themselves on this twisted, scary, non-materialist road. I try to look upon the older version of myself with compassion; and if you find yourself in a similar position, I hope you can do the same. I also try to apply that compassion toward fanatic scientific materialist believers because, boy, have I been there. One thing I hope to never do again is have the audacity to think that we already know all the answers to the mysteries of the Universe.
Another reason for putting the story down into writing is to add my name to the long list of scientists, philosophers, and physicists who think it is imperative that we update the scientific paradigm beyond scientific materialism for long overdue innovative breakthroughs in physics, neuroscience, and medicine. In doing that, science may incidentally come to match most people’s experience of reality. Scientists and other experts will tell you what they truly think and believe when conversations are had in confidence, but, come on! It is too disingenuous that we make one set of statements publicly and a whole different, more honest and open-minded set of statements in private cocktail hours? More scientists need to open their minds publicly. We need to take an honest look at data that doesn’t fit our current modern theories of reality, because there is a lot of it. And so, writing this book is me taking a stand, publicly.
One of the first things we learn in statistics is that you can’t just throw away outlying data points. Yet, modern scientists do that consistently with any data that doesn’t fit a scientific materialist framework. Yes, it is important for scientists to be skeptical and try to be unbiased. Yes, the human brain is built to believe, and it is a storyteller by design, so we often jump to conclusions and need to check our biases. Yes, many of the things from our past that we believed to be mystical, magical, or religious turned out to be decidedly less so when we had the appropriate ways of measuring them (think viruses and bacteria, for example). All that notwithstanding, the mainstream scientific world has taken these few reasons and turned them into dogma. Just like all religions and cults, mainstream science snuffs out opposing thoughts with stigma, ostracism, indignant condemnation, and condescension. In my opinion, it does it at its own expense. But we can change that!
Like I said, I really wish I wasn’t writing or living this. But, I am.
Welcome to the public funeral for my former self and to a plea to scientists to muster courage to embrace new ways of thinking.
Cuprins
PREFACE
Welcome to the Public Funeral for ‘Old Me’
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Bewitched by Science
2 The Untrustworthy Brain & the Religion of Science
3 The Two Events That Changed Everything
4 Chelsea Handler Becomes My Guide
5 I Can’t Live in These Conditions
6 The Project Begins
Can Science and Spirituality Coexist?
7 A Universal Pause in the Fabric of Time
8 Wait . . . People Have Studied This?
9 Bridging the Worlds
Science Meets Spirit
10 The Upside Down (Research)
11 Back to the Intuitives
12 The People Who Know
13 Neuroscience and Consciousness
14 Tying It Together . . . by Opening the Mind
15 How Could I Have Missed This?
16 Pulling Back the Curtain
Science Is Not Enough
17 Moving Toward a Meaningful Cosmos
18 Sometimes Things Need to Die
Recommended
Reads
Bibliography
Index
Welcome to the Public Funeral for ‘Old Me’
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Bewitched by Science
2 The Untrustworthy Brain & the Religion of Science
3 The Two Events That Changed Everything
4 Chelsea Handler Becomes My Guide
5 I Can’t Live in These Conditions
6 The Project Begins
Can Science and Spirituality Coexist?
7 A Universal Pause in the Fabric of Time
8 Wait . . . People Have Studied This?
9 Bridging the Worlds
Science Meets Spirit
10 The Upside Down (Research)
11 Back to the Intuitives
12 The People Who Know
13 Neuroscience and Consciousness
14 Tying It Together . . . by Opening the Mind
15 How Could I Have Missed This?
16 Pulling Back the Curtain
Science Is Not Enough
17 Moving Toward a Meaningful Cosmos
18 Sometimes Things Need to Die
Recommended
Reads
Bibliography
Index
Recenzii
“In Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, neuroscientist Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., takes the reader through her journey from being a skeptically oriented scientific materialist to realizing there’s much more to the Universe. This entertaining and easy-to-read book weaves Sobhani’s personal experiences with a diverse body of credible science to demonstrate the desperate need for a revised scientific meta-paradigm. It is this sort of courage and intellectual honesty that will be required for science—and society—to truly evolve.”
“Thank the Universe for Mona Sobhani! Is it any coincidence that neuroscientists, after looking carefully at the brain to answer age-old questions, are starting to turn to spirituality? Nope. It’s because they don’t find what they are looking for in the materialist paradigm, but they know what they’re looking for is real. Sobhani leads the pack with her brilliant and vulnerable take on what it means for her and other scientists to turn the corner from materialism to post-materialist thought--and why it’s necessary to explain human experience, including and especially human spiritual experience. By letting us into her journey, she shows us parts of ourselves that are learning a new way of knowing, and then she supports our growing knowledge with her hard-won wisdom.”
“Mona Sobhani is a ‘flipped’ scientist, a neuroscientist whose mechanical-materialist worldview was turned upside down and inside out by a series of honest life experiences that she refused to deny and instead insisted on thinking through. Her book is a page-turning journey filled with everything from coffee ground divinations, mediums, and intuitives; through past lives, secret government psychical research programs, and the new psychedelic research; to the latest scientific and philosophical visions of a conscious, intentional, and profoundly meaningful cosmos. Her message? The old order of knowledge is passing away. Let it go. The new world is taking shape in and as us. Let it be.”
“Like opening a set of nesting dolls, Sobhani takes us on her own journey through the layers of her own mind--from the outermost layer grounded in the physical and empirical world, to the intellectual mind which struggles to make sense of everything, and eventually to the innermost, blissful self, where pure consciousness and just being resides. It’s a delightful ride along where one can vicariously experience the author’s struggle to reconcile science and spirituality, as she comes to rest in knowing that it is fine to accept some things as just a mystery!”
“Proof of Spiritual Phenomena is a daring, exciting exploration of the intersection of human consciousness and the intricacies of the physical Universe.”
“With Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, you hold the key to unlocking a whole new level of experiencing and understanding, not only the world around you that you can see but also the one you can’t see. Backed up with easyto- understand science as well as mind-blowing evidence and interviews, Sobhani achieves what is, in my opinion, the first book to truly unlock the intersection point between science and soul-based spirituality. This book is so outstanding and life-changing, you will find yourself buying extra copies to give to everyone you love so that they, too, can experience the magic that is Proof of Spiritual Phenomena.”
“Thank the Universe for Mona Sobhani! Is it any coincidence that neuroscientists, after looking carefully at the brain to answer age-old questions, are starting to turn to spirituality? Nope. It’s because they don’t find what they are looking for in the materialist paradigm, but they know what they’re looking for is real. Sobhani leads the pack with her brilliant and vulnerable take on what it means for her and other scientists to turn the corner from materialism to post-materialist thought--and why it’s necessary to explain human experience, including and especially human spiritual experience. By letting us into her journey, she shows us parts of ourselves that are learning a new way of knowing, and then she supports our growing knowledge with her hard-won wisdom.”
“Mona Sobhani is a ‘flipped’ scientist, a neuroscientist whose mechanical-materialist worldview was turned upside down and inside out by a series of honest life experiences that she refused to deny and instead insisted on thinking through. Her book is a page-turning journey filled with everything from coffee ground divinations, mediums, and intuitives; through past lives, secret government psychical research programs, and the new psychedelic research; to the latest scientific and philosophical visions of a conscious, intentional, and profoundly meaningful cosmos. Her message? The old order of knowledge is passing away. Let it go. The new world is taking shape in and as us. Let it be.”
“Like opening a set of nesting dolls, Sobhani takes us on her own journey through the layers of her own mind--from the outermost layer grounded in the physical and empirical world, to the intellectual mind which struggles to make sense of everything, and eventually to the innermost, blissful self, where pure consciousness and just being resides. It’s a delightful ride along where one can vicariously experience the author’s struggle to reconcile science and spirituality, as she comes to rest in knowing that it is fine to accept some things as just a mystery!”
“Proof of Spiritual Phenomena is a daring, exciting exploration of the intersection of human consciousness and the intricacies of the physical Universe.”
“With Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, you hold the key to unlocking a whole new level of experiencing and understanding, not only the world around you that you can see but also the one you can’t see. Backed up with easyto- understand science as well as mind-blowing evidence and interviews, Sobhani achieves what is, in my opinion, the first book to truly unlock the intersection point between science and soul-based spirituality. This book is so outstanding and life-changing, you will find yourself buying extra copies to give to everyone you love so that they, too, can experience the magic that is Proof of Spiritual Phenomena.”
Descriere
The author shares extensive research on past lives, karma, and the complex interactions of mind and matter, detailing her transformation from diehard materialist to open-minded spiritual seeker.