Spirit and the Mind

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In this book 'Spirit and the Mind', author Dr. Samuel Sandweiss discusses the mind and the pure Universal Consciousness likening them to the bubble and the ocean. As a psychiatrist the author discovered that the science of psychiatry was incomplete in itself and it needed to accept the wisdom of ancient spiritual awareness. The author tells us about the Avatar, Sri Sathya Sai Baba, His mission and message and how His life and teachings represent the most compelling living proof of Universal Consciousness. This ultimately helps hel to understand the relationship of the spirit to mind and spirituality to science. Based on his experiences with Sathya Sai Baba the author emphasises that the concepts of consciousness, duality, love and the primacy of the Spirit have meaning even to the hardcore behavioral scientists. He explains how spiritual insight relates to the personal growth of a psychiatrist. This book focuses attention on the nature of the awakening touch of God and its stirrings in man. It investigates spiritual reality with relevance to psychiatry. Part 1 deals with the growing need to integrate spiritual and mystical insights about the dynamics of consciousness into western psychology. Part II offers suggestions on the type of education and training necessary for the development of New-Age therapists of consciousness. In part III the author looks at Sathya Sai Baba as a world teacher, and explains the meaning of 'miracles'. The final part consists of appendices referring to therapists, spiritually oriented trends in psychology, neurosciences and physics. There is a comparison of western scientific concepts about mind and consciousness with eastern spiritual concepts.

A Spiritual Saga Here is an inspired and inspiring poem by an ardent seeker of the divine - a humble American housewife who ended her search for God at the Feet of Bhagawan Sathya Sai Baba. The inspiration was derived from her authentic spiritual experience in a series of pilgrimages to the abode of Bhagawan Baba at Prasanthi Nilayam. The spiritual saga is inspiring because it relates in "profuse strains of unpremeditated art," the ecstatic experiences she had in her encounters with Bhagawan Baba. Jeannette Caruth tells the story of her transformation in fluent poetry which occasionally rises to the heights of spiritual revelation. Her poem reminded me of three great authors: John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress, S. T. Coleridge, well known for his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. After her sixth visit to Bhagawan she experienced a "taste of timelessness. These are historical times. A major transformation is taking place in the mind of man. Old ideas are dying and new ideas are being born. We are beginning to realize that our basic identity is not mind or body, bound by birth and death, time and space but. more fundamentally, it is a spirit: an infinite consciousness which is universal and eternal. Dawning is the awareness that consciousness is not a function of the mind, centered in the physical brain. No, quite the opposite; infinite consciousness, our real self, created mind and the cosmos as well. Consciousness is beyond time and is unaffected by death. Today there is growing scientific confirmation that consciousness is fundamentally infinite and eternal and that our minds deceive us into believing otherwise. Findings from such diverse sources as Jungian psychology and dream analysis, experimental ESP phenomena in the field of parapsychology, age and past-life regression during hypnosis, reports of out-of-the body and near-death experiences as well as particle physics have done much to show the thinking world that consciousness is not limited by time and space. Generally accepted now are the phenomena of clairvoyance and telepathy, of prophetic dreams and unusual knowing at a distance such as described in the life of Edgar Cayce. He, for instance, could diagnose and successfully treat a person's illness often at a distance, sometimes by phone, sometimes by just holding an object once worn by the individual. And Carl Jung showed through his work that people in intensive analytic therapy could retrieve information through their dreams and intuitions of a dimension beyond their own personal experience could be in touch with what he called the collective unconscious, a dimension in which all of mankind's experience from the beginning of our species' time on earth and covering the entire breadth and width of our existence since, is recorded. Add to this the very convincing evidence of people's vivid recollections of past lives, their detailing of specific events, names, dates and places with uncanny accuracy material they would seemingly have no way of knowing other than having been there and lived through that time themselves and we have a growing body of experience which can no longer be discounted as mere fancies of imagination. Even the hard sciences like physics are drawing closer realizing the fundamental laws of spirituality. The leading edge of physics is discovering that the planet is not a separate piece of dead material in an indifferent, unloving, unconscious universe. The cosmos and all in it are coming to be recognized as one entity; inseparable, whole and alive with consciousness, a manifestation of the one, Universal Consciousness permeated with love. The oneness of the universe is being recognized as the material expression of the oneness of consciousness which is experienced in the heart as love. In his book The Tao of Physics research physicist Fritjof Capra explores the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. He relates the world- view emerging from the theories of subatomic physics, relativity and astrophysics, to the mystical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen and the I Ching. What emerges is a picture of the Universe of the modern physicist likened to that of the Eastern mystic, or as the book's dust jacket says so well: "a universe engaged in a continuous cosmic dance a system of inseparable, inter-relating and ever-moving components of which the observer is, himself, an integral part." More and more scientists, like Einstein, are awed by the grandeur of creation and are coming to realize an underlying unity and wholeness which they recognized as holy.? As duality seeing reality as composed of separate and distinct entities as opposed to one unified whole crumbles, so do the differences between peoples and religions. A nondenominational science of consciousness is developing which is defining universal laws and principles governing the expansion of consciousness, thereby bringing science closer to spirituality and the great spiritual systems closer to another. We are coming to recognize that all the great world religions emerge from a common universal reality, and although they use different symbols, ceremonies and forms, they all express the nature and dynamics of one universal and eternal consciousness, or God, from which all matter and energy arise. If all this is indeed true, if all regions are fundamentally one. if the entire cosmos is a manifestation of Universal Consciousness and if in fact we ourselves are Universal Consciousness beyond any limit; if our real self is, in fact, infinite and eternal why are we not aware of this? Science is beginning to look to spirituality for answers to this timeless question to the great world religions which have from the start declared that the material world is a manifestation of spirit or infinite consciousness. The ancient wisdom of sages and saints tells us that the crux of the problem lies in the mind, which deceives man into believing himself separate and limited. Although the eternal ocean of spirit is oneness without a second, infinite consciousness wills a mysterious spell upon itself by creating the mind. So attracted by the mind's powerful forces, by the dual world of pleasures and pains, desires and impulses, ego and the senses, infinite consciousness mistakenly perceives differences and limitations separate names and forms the appearance that it is separate from itself-duality. Why the limitless willed this delusion upon itself is creation's greatest mystery.