Mind Beyond Brain
Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal
by David E. Presti
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Oct 02 2018 | Archive Date Feb 28 2019
Talking about this book? Use #MindBeyondBrain #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
In Mind Beyond Brain, the neuroscientist David E. 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. Presti describes the extensive but frequently unacknowledged history of scientific investigation into these phenomena, demonstrating its relevance to questions about consciousness and reality. 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. Mind Beyond Brain represents the next level in the science and Buddhism dialogue.
Advance Praise
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. Presti is a perfect narrator, host, and guide here. He strikes a wonderful balance between embracing and celebrating the advances of the sciences and wanting them to go further still.
-Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University
This book could open important doors for any thinking person today. 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. 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.
-Robert Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Columbia University
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780231189569 |
| PRICE | $32.00 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Lynda S, Reviewer
Until recently, the bricks-and-mortar way of understanding the world with its atoms and scientific laws seemed to be enough. But then the atom was split even further and then physics starts to get weird. Consciousness at a quantum level can actually determine things.
Psychologists and physicists may be specialists at understanding consciousness at an objective level, whilst Buddhism specialises at understading the deeper layers of subjective consciousness. The hope expressed in this book is that one day, the approaches of each will merge, then a new way of understanding reality will emerge.
Chapters here bring together the fruit of old and new research into parapsychological research first founded by William James. Empirical research carried out over a hundred years ago into such matters as the NDE (near-death experience), mediumship and children who claim to remember earlier lives. More recently, there has been the work on the latter by Ian Stephenson, for example. This kind of research, the book argues, is where the merging of Buddhism and Science will be most fruitful.
This is quite a slim volume of chapters, but sometimes more can be less. The research here is certainly being encouraged by no less that the Dalai Rama himself.
You do not need to be a Buddhist however, to enjoy this, perhaps just to have an interest in where science and mysticism - or non-dog stick spirituality - overlap. Perhaps what is most interesting is that with James, there was already a lively interest in these areas, and that somehow, this easier painstaking research was forgotten.
Reviewer 446033
Without imposing his ideas to the reader, David explains the three subjects with a neutral pace; Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal. This approach provide the reader the chance to triangulate the three subjects and correlate their own conclusions. I liked this balanced approach compared to other book where sciences or mysticism are the key or the explanations of everything.
#MindBeyondBrain #NetGalley
Angela H, Reviewer
Enjoyed this read, though I had to be in the mental mood to read it, as it took a bit of effort to get through and grasp the subject at hand. A tad fun, a bunch of science and decent enlightenment are held within the cover. Would recommend for those looking to expand their knowledge base.
Readers who liked this book also liked:
