Consciousness

Hello everyone! It's been a while. I got back from London, worked for a couple of days, and then caught a flu that lasted until today basically. It was my body's way of telling me that I needed rest. And I think I deserved some rest too, after all my dissertation stress. But now I'm here and the first thing I'll write about is an idea I had yesterday. I decided that every week we could introduce something here that has inspired us to a healthier life, or opened our eyes to a more truthful view of health. It could be a book, a film, a website, a blog, a lecture, or anything else really. And it can be about physical, mental, or spiritual health, as our intention here is to focus on all of these aspects.

So, to begin with I want to introduce a 3-part film called The secret power of the mind that I watched yesterday. Unfortunately, I saw it online through the Finnish tv, and although the original documentary is Danish, I couldn't find another version online. But for those of you who can't watch it, I'll try to write a summary of what it's all about.

Watch it here (the first part is only available for 10 more days so be quick).

This documentary shows how science is actually doing a lot towards understanding consciousness, even if these studies are often kept from us by the media. Consciousness is an aspect of the human that is probably the least understood by science, and it has widely been believed that our consciousness is in our physical brain, and therefore in our physical body. However, since time immemorial many people, who have often been stigmatised as lunatics or psychotic, have understood that we are much more than our physical bodies. Religions also share this belief, which can be seen in the different ideas about afterlife, and no religion states that the life of the soul ends when the body dies. Now science (or the people who ask the questions that science tries to answer) has evolved to a point where it is becoming increasingly clear that our consciousness is not restricted to our body. In the film, many different such studies are demonstrated, from the power of meditation to telepathy to near-death experiences. These studies all show that such phenomena can no longer be explained through conventional scientific ideas, but a complete change in the way we understand ourselves as humans needs to occur. In other words, we have a body, but we are not our body. Now, many people are already very familiar with these things, and for them this is nothing new, but I think what is so extraordinary about the film is that people who are confined to conventional ideas will soon have to open their eyes because they can no longer use science as a comforting ground for their scepticism.

Where I wanted to arrive with this is the idea that the more we understand that we are not our bodies (or our brains, or even our minds), the lighter we will feel and the happier we will become. I have a lot more to say about this but I'll leave it to another post soon to follow.

Emma