The Mystery

One of the things that I really found fascinating in your book, is the fact that we all have approximately 50 trillion cells in our body and these cells are all self-sufficient. They have their own memory, they have their own immune system. In fact, you also go on to say that for 2.75 billion years, there was only one-celled organisms alive on the planet. Yah, and the nature is, as the single cell evolved to be the most intelligent it could be, it ran into a physical limitation, because intelligence is physically tied up with the membrane, or skin of the cell.  You can only have so much membrane. So evolution apparently stopped. It was like two and a half billion years, just these single-celled organisms, then someone asked “How can you have more evolution?"  And the answer is: cells started to come together into community, because when cells come into community they share awareness. So there’s more awareness with ten cells than there is with one cell. And there’s more awareness w

Well, the first thing is this; the work shows that your mind’s perception of the world changes your biology, the chemistry of your body, which changes your cells. And I said OK, if you can control how your mind operates, then you can control your chemistry, but then here’s where the problem comes from: there’s two parts to the mind. The conscious mind, which has your personal identity, your spirit, your source attached with it – is a creative mind. The conscious mind can see into the future, it can review the past; solve problems. The subconscious mind, the other mind, is more of a habit mind. That’s when you learn how to do something; and when you learn how to do it, you don’t have to think about it, it’s automatic. Well, most of us walk around in the world thinking that we’re running our lives with our creative mind. I might say, “Emmett, what do you want out of your life?” And you would say, “Oh I want to be healthy and have great relationships” and then you would try to say that ‘I

So you eventually became a biologist. What did you actually learn then?  Well it was interesting because I became a biologist, a developmental cellular biologist, I was working on cells of course then, and in my graduate work I was cloning stem cells. And it’s interesting because a lot of people think stem cells are something brand new that just came into this world recently; and the fact was I was cloning stem cells back in 1967. Forty years ago.  And the significance was - while I was doing this research - I was also teaching medical students.  So I was teaching medical students the foundations of how cells work, the conventional story out of the text book. Genes control life, what we call the ‘genetic determinism’, the belief that genes control your traits, behavior(s), physical characteristics, et cetera.  And what my research revealed when I was studying the stem cells was this, very profound: I put one stem cell in a petri dish all by itself and it would divide every 10-12 hours.

Two elementary particles can be identically matched so that when one changes its properties, its twin responds simultaneously, no matter how far away it might be. Through a principle known as quantum entanglement, two particles separated by billions of light years can act without physical communication, thus defying the speed of light and ultimately demolishing the concept of space. This discovery mathematically speaking, as well as in real-time experiences, is the notion that the universe is a machine with tiny moving parts governed by space, time, and everyday logic is totally false. Noted physicists, including the late Stephen Hawking, declare that there is no longer a guarantee that the advanced theories of modern physics actually match reality. If the universe isn’t a giant machine, there’s every reason to drop the whole analogy of the machine, but what to put in its place? The answer advanced by more and more scientists is 'wholeness'. Since space, time, matter, energy, a

'Consciousness Unbound' is a book, like the earlier volumes, that is unashamedly metaphysical. The main purpose of 'Irreducible Mind' was to show that physicalism is completely inadequate as a way of explaining human experience and the world. The book showed that physicalism cannot account for phenomena such as consciousness and the influence of the mind over the body. It showed that there is a vast range of 'rogue' phenomena that physicalism cannot make sense of, and therefore either denies or explains away, such as psi phenomena, near-death experiences and mystical experiences.  We might say that, while the purpose of 'Irreducible Mind' was to clear the ground, the purpose of 'Beyond Physicalism' and now 'Consciousness Unbound', has been to build on that ground – that is, to find a different worldview that can adequately explain the world and human experience. In other words, the purpose of the books has been to explore the viability of