Being & Biology - Dunne Brenda

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