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Nonlocal Mind

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Nonlocal Mind is the proposition, supported by a growing experimental, clinical, and experiential record, that consciousness is not confined to particular points in space (such as the brain or the body) or to particular points in time (such as the present moment), but is, in at least some of its operations, unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate — trans-spatial and trans-temporal.[1] The term "nonlocal mind" was coined by physician Larry Dossey in 1987 and introduced in his 1989 book Recovering the Soul, where it denoted mind "not localized to specific points in space... or to specific points in time," resembling the age-old concept of the soul.[2]

Concept Map

Syncretic Terms

Fabric of Consciousness >

... further results

Related LP Terms

Nonlocal Mind >


Non-LP Related Terms

Nonlocal Mind >

  • Filter Theory of Mind
  • Transmissive Function (James)
  • Reducing Valve (Huxley)
  • Quantum Entanglement
  • Distant Intentionality
  • Precognition
  • Presentiment

Overview

Nonlocal Consciousness names the condition of awareness when it is experienced or inferred to operate beyond the localizing constraints of the physical unit — unconstrained by distance in space, by the linear flow of time, and by the boundaries between individual selves. In its strong form it is identical with the claim that consciousness is fundamental and the brain instrumental: the physical unit does not generate awareness but funnels, filters, and embodies it.

The term is a modern, empirically oriented reformulation of the perennial claim that consciousness is one, unlimited, and eternal — the claim expressed in LP terminology by the Fabric of Consciousness and by connection experiences in which the individual temporarily transcends local constraint.

Ontological Features

  • Trans-spatial: Not confined to brains, bodies, or any point in space; capable of correlation and influence at arbitrary distances without mediation.
  • Trans-temporal: Not confined to the present; implicated in precognition, presentiment, and apparent retroactive influence.
  • Unmediated, unmitigated, immediate: The three marks of nonlocal correlation identified by Herbert — no connecting signal, no distance decay, no time lapse.
  • Unitary: Individual minds participate in a single field of consciousness (One Mind); individuality and unity are complementary, not exclusive.
  • Immortal in principle: Temporal nonlocality implies infinitude in time; survival of bodily death is a consequence, not an add-on.
  • Morally consequential: Nonlocal connections track empathic, compassionate relatedness — and admit of a "dark side" of harmful influence that premodern traditions acknowledged and guarded against.

Epistemic Significance

Nonlocal Consciousness is significant for the Lightning Path in several ways:

  • It supplies a theoretical frame for Connection Experiences, which present phenomenologically as temporary releases from local constraint into the Fabric of Consciousness.
  • It grounds the Strong Theory of Consciousness against materialist production models, aligning the LP view with James's transmissive function, the filter tradition, and the evidence assembled by Kelly et al. in Irreducible Mind.
  • It reframes the Physical Unit as receiver/instrument rather than generator, consistent with LP accounts of the Bodily Ego as a local, temporary organization of the enduring Spiritual Ego.
  • It gives empirical content to claims of interconnectedness relevant to the Connection-Centered Psychology framework and to LP healing and collective-coherence practices.

Notes

The concept of nonlocality originates in physics, where it describes events whose correlated descriptions cannot be explained by signals crossing space: as physicist Nick Herbert explains, "a non-local connection links up one location with another without crossing space, without decay, and without delay."[3] Such connections are identified by three characteristics — unmediated (no connecting signal), unmitigated (correlation strength does not fade with distance), and immediate (no time lapse)[4] — and physicists subdivide them into spatial (type I), temporal (type II), and spatio-temporal (type III) nonlocality. Dossey's move, however, is to insist that physics does not own nonlocality: human beings were having nonlocal experiences millennia before quantum theory existed, and the experimental evidence suggests that consciousness is both trans-spatial and trans-temporal — "not in space and time" in the way material processes are.[5]

On this view, the brain is not the producer of consciousness but its localizing instrument — a filter, reducing valve, or keyhole. The lineage is long: William James distinguished the brain's "transmissive" from its "productive" function; Henri Bergson and C. D. Broad supplied the filter image that Aldous Huxley popularized as the "reducing valve" funnelling Mind at Large into the "measly trickle" of biological survival-consciousness; psychologist Cyril Burt described the sense organs and brain as "an intricate kind of filter which limits and directs the mind's clairvoyant powers."[6] In the Indian tradition, K. Ramakrishna Rao states the same position: "the cognitive structure does not generate consciousness; it simply reflects it; and in the process limits and embellishes it."[7]

The experimental record for nonlocal consciousness is extensive. Categories of particular relevance to human function include: (1) neuron-to-neuron and brain-to-brain connections — correlated EEG patterns in spatially and sensorily isolated pairs, from Duane and Behrendt's twin studies published in Science through Grinberg-Zylberbaum's "transferred potential" experiments, Wackerman's rigorously controlled replication, and Standish's correlated fMRI studies;[8] (2) distant intentionality and healing — Achterberg's fMRI study of eleven indigenous healers, in which ten of eleven recipients showed significant brain activation during "send" periods (less than one chance in 10,000), and a corpus of over 2,200 published reports on spiritual healing and mental-intention effects catalogued by Jonas and Crawford;[9] (3) temporal nonlocality — precognitive dreams and presentiment effects, in which physiological anticipation precedes unpredictable stimuli and intentions appear to influence events already past;[10] and (4) field-like social effects — meditation coherence studies and the spread of emotional and behavioral states through social networks across three degrees of separation, which Fowler and Christakis document but cannot explain by any known mechanism.[11] Dossey also records the darker corollary: negative nonlocal intentions can inhibit cellular function and retard biochemical reactions — abilities indistinguishable from the curses and hexes of premodern cultures, which acknowledged and protected against this dimension of consciousness.[12]

If consciousness is genuinely nonlocal, individual minds cannot be wholly separate: in some dimension they form what Dossey calls the One Mind. Erwin Schrödinger — drawing on the Upanishads — held that "the overall number of minds is just one... In truth there is only one mind"; Arthur Eddington inferred a "universal Mind or Logos" from the state of physical theory; David Bohm affirmed that "deep down the consciousness of mankind is one"; and William James described a "continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences."[13] Experience of the One Mind does not extinguish individuality; the two stand in what Niels Bohr called complementarity — individuality preserved seamlessly alongside shared unity.[14]

Finally, temporal nonlocality reframes mortality itself: a temporally nonlocal consciousness is not annihilated at brain death, since "a limited nonlocality is a contradiction in terms."[15] Nonlocal consciousness thus supplies the theoretical frame within which the survival evidence — near-death experiences, children's past-life memories, terminal lucidity — becomes coherent rather than anomalous.[16] Dossey's practical corollary is a reorientation of medicine: from Temporal Medicine, premised on linear time, aging, and annihilation, to Eternity Medicine, premised on a temporally infinite consciousness for which "life, not death, is now our birthright."[17]

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Footnotes

  1. ↑ Larry Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind: A (Fairly) Brief History of the Term," EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing 11, no. 2 (2015): 89–101.
  2. ↑ Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 89; Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul (New York: Bantam, 1989).
  3. ↑ Herbert, quoted in Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 91; see Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1987).
  4. ↑ Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 91. Herbert's three characteristics derive from the analysis of Bell's theorem and the Aspect and Gisin experiments; see Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 65–82.
  5. ↑ Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 91. He cautions equally against the facile assumption that quantum nonlocality causes human nonlocal experiences: "There is no conclusive evidence that quantum nonlocality causes nonlocal human experiences. Indeed, we may be dealing with correspondences in terminology and nothing more." Ibid., 91.
  6. ↑ William James, "Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher" (1909), in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 798–99; Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954); C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925); C. Cyril Burt, "Psychology and Psychical Research," The Seventeenth Frederick W. H. Myers Memorial Lecture (London, 1968), quoted in Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 90. For the modern restatement see Larry Dossey, "The Brain as Filter: On Removing the Stuffing from the Keyhole," EXPLORE 8, no. 6 (2012): 317–22.
  7. ↑ K. Ramakrishna Rao, Cognitive Anomalies, Consciousness and Yoga, vol. 16, pt. 1 of History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed. D. P. Chattopadhyaya (New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations and Matrix Publishers, 2011), 335, quoted in Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 90.
  8. ↑ Thomas D. Duane and Thomas Behrendt, "Extrasensory Electroencephalographic Induction Between Identical Twins," Science 150, no. 3694 (1965): 367; Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., "The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential," Physics Essays 7, no. 4 (1994): 422–28; Jiri Wackerman et al., "Correlations Between Brain Electrical Activities of Two Spatially Separated Human Subjects," Neuroscience Letters 336 (2003): 60–64; Leanna Standish et al., "Evidence of Correlated Functional MRI Signals Between Distant Human Brains," Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 9 (2003): 122–28. As Wackerman conceded, "no biophysical mechanism is presently known that could be responsible for the observed correlations." Wackerman et al., "Correlations," 64.
  9. ↑ Jeanne Achterberg et al., "Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis," Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 11, no. 6 (2005): 965–71; Wayne B. Jonas and Cindy C. Crawford, eds., Healing, Intention and Energy Medicine (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 2003).
  10. ↑ Dossey, The Power of Premonitions (New York: Dutton, 2009); Julia Mossbridge, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Jessica Utts, "Predictive Physiological Anticipation Preceding Seemingly Unpredictable Stimuli: A Meta-Analysis," Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012): 390; William Braud, "Wellness Implications of Retroactive Intentional Influence: Exploring an Outrageous Hypothesis," Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 6, no. 1 (2000): 37–48.
  11. ↑ David Orme-Johnson et al., "International Peace Project in the Middle East: The Effect of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field," Journal of Conflict Resolution 32, no. 4 (1988): 776–812; James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, "Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study," BMJ 337 (2008): a2338; Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, "The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years," New England Journal of Medicine 357 (2007): 370–79.
  12. ↑ Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 95; K. Abe et al., "Effect of a Japanese Energy Healing Method Known as Johrei on Viability and Proliferation of Cultured Cancer Cells in Vitro," Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 18, no. 3 (2012): 221–28.
  13. ↑ Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? and Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 145, and My View of the World (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1983), 31–34; Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 338; David Bohm, quoted in Renée Weber, Dialogues with Scientists and Sages (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); James, "Final Impressions," 798–99.
  14. ↑ Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 96. Compare the transpsychological maxim Dossey cites: "In order to transcend the ego, you must first have one."
  15. ↑ Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 95.
  16. ↑ See Pim van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (2001): 2039–45; Edward F. Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview/Simon & Schuster, 2006).
  17. ↑ Larry Dossey, Reinventing Medicine (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999); Dossey, "Nonlocal Mind," 95–96.



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