EXPLORING CONSCIOUSNESS by Barry Cottrell
In the first part of this website are five articles I wrote over the last ten years and which have been published in Explore: the Journal of Science & Healing. The first article reviews the landmark book One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters by the founder and former Executive Director of Explore, Larry Dossey M.D., who is also currently Emeritus Editor.
As the review explains, Dossey has led the cohort of scientists, thinkers and philosophers who have been turning the tide against the dominant cultural dogma of reductionist materialism which sees 'mind as what the brain does' towards an understanding of the One Mind – a term coined by the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961). Dossey has carried the baton of mind understood as universal, introducing his concept of 'nonlocal mind' into discussions of consciousness. Below are listed the essay titles with dates and a brief summary of contents. As each article is uploaded onto this website the heading will indicate that the page is 'live' by change of colour from black to red.
1) EXPLORE January/February 2014, Vol.10, No.1 58-59 REVIEW
One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters by Larry Dossey, MD Hay House, Carlsbad, CA, 2013
2) EXPLORE March/April 2015, Vol. 11, No. 2 pp. 127-135. HYPOTHESIS
Only One Mind: An Artist’s Exploration of Consciousness by Barry Cottrell, MA (Oxon), CFA
The aim of this article is to critique the contemporary scientific reduction of mind to brain and to explore the imaginal realm of consciousness. Through the author’s own practice as an engraver, and through the researches and discoveries of free-thinking scientists, philosophers and artists, this realm of the ‘One Mind’ is revealed to be timeless and universal.
3) EXPLORE November/December 2017, Vol. 13, No. 6 pp. 400-406. REFLECTION
Mind in Deep Time: Original Participation and Re-enchantment of the World by Barry Cottrell, MA (Oxon), CFA
This paper describes my experiences exploring consciousness as an artist-engraver, in particular the sense of reawakening the participatory primal mind which came about through the act of engraving. This ‘original participation’ is viewed as a fundamental characteristic of our early Acheuelan ancestors and evidence is presented to show that they possessed both a ‘modern’ aesthetic sense and also a prayerful, sacramental consciousness. It is suggested that this primal consciousness is a fundamental human quality which became eclipsed in the modern mind by the denial of participation and the Cartesian split between subject and object during the Scientific Revolution. It is upon this denial of participation and the illusion of objectivity that the whole methodology of natural science and the alienated outlook of contemporary culture is based. A re-enchantment of the world can take place through the re-mythologizing of consciousness and the re-apprehension of original participation.
4) EXPLORE November/December 2020, Vol. 16, No. 6 pp. 363-364. REFLECTIONS
Mind the gap: Still the conquistadors by Barry Cottrell, MA (Oxon), CFA
This essay is about the gap between two radically different ways of being and knowing in the world – the traditional earth-based spirituality of indigenous peoples and the modern behemoths of capitalism and materialism, dominant in Western civilisation, coalescing in the ‘impulse to conquer.’ Could these two ways of understanding the world ever be bridged and reconciled through reciprocal respect?
5) EXPLORE November/December 2024, Vol. 20, No. 6 pp. 363-364. REFLECTIONS
Nonlocal Mind: Curing the Fear of Death by Barry Cottrell, MA (Oxon), CFA
The aim of this article is to critique the contemporary scientific reduction of mind to brain, a dogma which is shown to be philosophically unsound and empirically unproven. The world of physical phenomena is understood to be encompassed by other subtle transphysical worlds accessed after death of the physical body.