This timely book places the issue within the ongoing dialogue between science and Buddhism and reinstates the spirit of open-minded, radical empiricism that has always characterized science and Buddhism at their best. Robert Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Columbia University Mind Beyond Brain explores the implications of empirical evidence challenging the prevailing view that the mind is simply a function of the brain. It is a compelling read for anyone who realizes that the acknowledgement of the active role of 'mind' (whatever it is, we all have one, and we need to get to know it better!) in nature is indispensable for the revolutionary paradigm shift that science requires to break through its current deadlock, presiding over the great extinction facing our planet and our sentient selves. It courageously provides important philosophical critiques of the dominant physical materialist worldview along with a great deal of well-documented, challenging counter-evidence drawn from all-too-neglected fields of psychological research. This book could open important doors for any thinking person today. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University He strikes a wonderful balance between embracing and celebrating the advances of the sciences and wanting them to go further still. Presti is a perfect narrator, host, and guide here. Rich Ivry, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley Mind Beyond Brain embraces and celebrates the natural sciences and their materialist frameworks but also suggests that our understanding of the natural almost certainly needs to be expanded, greatly, and that the physicalist frameworks may not be the final answer to our deepest and most difficult questions about subjectivity, mind, or consciousness. An engaging read, sure to give a healthy intellectual prod to even the most committed physical materialist. Mind Beyond Brain represents the next level in the science and Buddhism dialogue.īeginning with the unsettling title and continuing through chapters that take an empirical approach to exploring near-death experiences, reincarnation, mediums, and apparitions, Mind Beyond Brain asks the reader to set aside preconceptions and deeply-held assumptions in order to understand the depths of human consciousness. The new perspectives opened up, if we are willing to take evidence of such often off-limits topics seriously, offer significant challenges to dominant explanatory paradigms and raise the prospect that we may be poised for truly revolutionary developments in the scientific investigation of mind. Presti describes the extensive but frequently unacknowledged history of scientific investigation into these phenomena, demonstrating its relevance to questions about consciousness and reality. Presti, with the assistance of other distinguished researchers, explores how evidence for anomalous phenomena-such as near-death experiences, apparent memories of past lives, apparitions, experiences associated with death, and other so-called psi or paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition-can influence the Buddhism-science conversation. In Mind Beyond Brain, the neuroscientist David E. The encounter between these two worldviews has spurred ongoing conversations about what science and Buddhism can teach each other about mind and reality. For millennia, philosophers, scientists, and religious thinkers have attempted answers, perhaps none more meaningful today than those offered by neuroscience and by Buddhism. Among the most profound questions we confront are the nature of what and who we are as conscious beings, and how the human mind relates to the rest of what we consider reality.
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