Being & Biology: Is Consciousness the Life Force?

Is consciousness actually the Life Force . . .the animating principle which underlies and unifies mind, body, and spirit in all living things, and which philosopher Henri Bergson termed the élan vital? This book offers a compendium of empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives from a broad range of scholarly disciplines, which suggest that there is an unbroken, non-local, collective aspect of consciousness that links distant individuals and events-a kind of resonant connectedness that defies separation in space and time. In the words of some of the contributors . . . "Even for the most materialistic of scientists, consciousness has a privileged position as the matrix of human knowledge, the basis of science itself." -Rupert Sheldrake "The emerging view is that consciousness is fundamental in its own right and is not produced by the physical brain; . . . consciousness may be the primordial organizing force of the universe and of life itself." -Larry Dossey "Henri Bergson . . . posited a vital impulse he called élan vital that underlies the creation of all living things, a process of self-organization that he linked closely with consciousness." - Brenda Dunne and Robert Jahn "Complementarity and Complexity, ubiquitous as they are, point to the need of a new kind of scientific endeavor that simultaneously brings forth and is brought from a deeper understanding of the workings of Consciousness." -Vasileios Basios