Recovering the Soul : A Scientific and Spiritual Approach

Author: Larry Dossey
List Price: $15.95
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ISBN: 055334790X
Publisher: Bantam (01 November, 1989)
Sales Rank: 59,894
Average Customer Rating: 4.86 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
An excellent book!
Dossey, who is an accomplished scientist and knowledgable expert on this topic, melds spirituality and science like no other. Although there are many books that attempt to integrate modern science and spirituality, this book is one of the most well-written and most convincing. The only other book that is just as good as this on this topic is Toru Sato's absolutely amazing book called "Ever-Transcending Spirit". These are books that positively transform your understanding of life!


Rating: 5 out of 5
A terrific book along the lines of "The Holographic Universe
Another great book by Dossey. This book is on my top tep list. Dossey does a great job of offering evidence for the non-locality of consciousness. Much like the Holographic Universe (above).


Rating: 4 out of 5
Speculative but sound
This is a fine book and it's held up well since its initial publication in 1989. In fact I suspect it's probably Larry Dossey's best, although I haven't read _all_ of his books.

What Dossey sets out to do in this volume is very straightforward: he wants to show the reader that there is reason to believe reality consists at bottom of a single "nonlocal" Mind that deserves to be identified as God. (By "nonlocal" he means "unlimited by ordinary space and time.") That claim probably sounds a little strange to modern ears, but by the time Dossey is through, it will be a very closed-minded reader who still thinks there is nothing to be said for it.

For Dossey is pretty thorough. He takes a largely empirical approach and invokes experimental results from a broad range of specializations --- medicine, psychology, biology, physics. And while his exposition isn't always as complete as I might like (he gets a lot of mileage, for example, out of Bell's theorem, but he never actually explains what it _is_), he still provides a well-rounded overview of all the stuff scientists have said that supports the nonlocality of mind. The reader will get short overviews of (the relevant portions of) the thought of, e.g., Erwin Schrodinger, Kurt Godel, Henry Margenau, David Bohm, and Rupert Sheldrake.

By way of wrapping it all up, Dossey devotes his closing chapters to outlining just what all of this suggests about religion and theology. In some ways this is the real meat of his book and it's probably the strongest portion of his work. There will be few surprises in it for the reader who is already familiar with the philosophical/spiritual literature in this area, but Dossey is as good an introduction to it as any.

What sets Dossey's book apart is not so much its conclusions -- which are properly tentative and at any rate common to pretty much the entire range of mystical/idealistic tradition and "perennial philosophy" -- but its broad overview of the support these conclusions receive from (some) science and scientists. Lots of other books focus in on this or that area (quantum theory, say, or parapsychology); Dossey tries to cover the whole spectrum. As a result his presentation is a little thin in some areas, but after eleven years this is still one of the very few books one can consult to get introductory information on _all_ of them.

Good stuff. And if you've read any of Dossey's other books, this one will give you the theoretical/speculative underpinnings of his other work on e.g. the medical benefits of prayer.



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