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In this engaging conversation, Samuel Avery explores the compelling ideas in his new audiobook The Buddha and the Quantum. He takes us on a brief journey through the 100 year history of quantum physics and the 3,000 year history of Buddhist meditation to show us that the discoveries of the Buddha and physicist Max Planck were one and the same.
Written for both the layman and the professional scientist, The Dimensional Structure of Consciousnessopens an astounding world and points out that further progress of science depends upon a transcendence of the material world. Samuels Avery opens a 'Pandora's box'... and presents a 'through the looking glass' glimpse of the structure of consciousness as the basis of our human experience. Written by Samuel Avery, author of The Buddha and the Quantum.
Let There Be Light presents a simple, beautiful, and elegant view of the oneness of all life, subjective and objective. It demonstrates the unity of the physical world with conscious experience of the physical world. Consciousness is not inside space and time, space and time are within consciousness; they are a special structure of the perceptual portion of consciousness.
What is consciousness? This audiobook presents an understanding of life that transcends matter. More importantly, it transcends the difference between what you are and what I am. Despite its reliance on what is known through Western Science, it is a transcendence of the Western understanding of reality. It does not begin with a world and then try to figure out how life evolved within it; it begins with life and extrapolates where the world came from.
Setting aside the pervasive material bias of science and lifting the obscuring fog of religious sectarianism reveals a surprisingly clear unity of science and religion. The explanations of transcendent phenomena given by saints, sages, and near-death experiencers are fully congruent with scientific discoveries in the fields of relativity, quantum physics, medicine, M-theory, neuroscience, and quantum biology. The Physics of God describes the intersections of science and religion.
In trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics, the most successful theory in science and the basis of one-third of our economy. They found, to their embarrassment, that with their theory, physics encounters consciousness. Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all this in nontechnical terms with help from some fanciful stories and anecdotes about the theory's developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, emphasizing what is and what is not speculation.
In this engaging conversation, Samuel Avery explores the compelling ideas in his new audiobook The Buddha and the Quantum. He takes us on a brief journey through the 100 year history of quantum physics and the 3,000 year history of Buddhist meditation to show us that the discoveries of the Buddha and physicist Max Planck were one and the same.
Written for both the layman and the professional scientist, The Dimensional Structure of Consciousnessopens an astounding world and points out that further progress of science depends upon a transcendence of the material world. Samuels Avery opens a 'Pandora's box'... and presents a 'through the looking glass' glimpse of the structure of consciousness as the basis of our human experience. Written by Samuel Avery, author of The Buddha and the Quantum.
Let There Be Light presents a simple, beautiful, and elegant view of the oneness of all life, subjective and objective. It demonstrates the unity of the physical world with conscious experience of the physical world. Consciousness is not inside space and time, space and time are within consciousness; they are a special structure of the perceptual portion of consciousness.
What is consciousness? This audiobook presents an understanding of life that transcends matter. More importantly, it transcends the difference between what you are and what I am. Despite its reliance on what is known through Western Science, it is a transcendence of the Western understanding of reality. It does not begin with a world and then try to figure out how life evolved within it; it begins with life and extrapolates where the world came from.
Setting aside the pervasive material bias of science and lifting the obscuring fog of religious sectarianism reveals a surprisingly clear unity of science and religion. The explanations of transcendent phenomena given by saints, sages, and near-death experiencers are fully congruent with scientific discoveries in the fields of relativity, quantum physics, medicine, M-theory, neuroscience, and quantum biology. The Physics of God describes the intersections of science and religion.
In trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics, the most successful theory in science and the basis of one-third of our economy. They found, to their embarrassment, that with their theory, physics encounters consciousness. Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all this in nontechnical terms with help from some fanciful stories and anecdotes about the theory's developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, emphasizing what is and what is not speculation.
One thousand years ago in the valley of Kashmir, a great Tantric master named Ksemaraja wrote his masterpiece: the Pratyabhijna-hrdaya, which means "The Essence of the Recognition Philosophy" - recognition, that is, of oneself as a direct expression of the universal divine Consciousness. Recognition also that this Consciousness is, in truth, all that exists, and that its five fundamental powers of awareness, enjoyment, willing, knowing, and acting are the sacred endowments of every sentient being.
What is the connection between physics and consciousness? In this groundbreaking new audiobook, Samuel Avery presents the quantum screen, a paradigm-shifting model of perceptual consciousness and of the world. This model looks to the enigmas of modern physics to demonstrate the primacy of consciousness - the essential oneness of spirit and matter.
What are time and space made of? Where does matter come from? And what exactly is reality? Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. Here he explains how our image of the world has changed over the last few dozen centuries.
In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.
This treasury of essential Buddhist writings draws from the most popular Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese sources. Among the selections are some of the earliest recorded sayings of the Buddha on the practice of freedom, passages from later Indian scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, verses from Tibetan masters on the enlightened mind, and songs in praise of meditation by Zen teachers.
Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, Copenhagen endured, as Bohr's students vigorously protected his legacy, and the physics community favored practical experiments over philosophical arguments.
This Book is a Step-by-Step Guide to Manifesting Your Desires. The fastest way to manifest your desires is by implementing a Law of Attraction Action Plan. Since everything in the Universe is energy, the necessary ingredient for manifestation is the consistent mental and emotional energy that you emit in the form of thoughts, feelings, words and actions. It's very important to remember that the phrase "Law of Attraction" contains the word ACTION.
Over decades of martial arts and meditation practice, Peter Ralston discovered a curious and paradoxical fact: that true awareness arises from a state of not knowing. Even the most sincere investigation of self and spirit, he says, is often sabotaged by our tendency to grab too quickly for answers and ideas as we retreat to the safety of the known.
Dhammapada means "the path of dharma", the path of harmony and righteousness that anyone can follow to reach the highest good. This classic Buddhist scripture is a collection of vivid, practical verses gathered from direct disciples who wanted to preserve what they had heard from the Buddha himself. Easwaran's translation of this classic Buddhist text is the best-selling translation in the US.
From one of America's greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. In Why Buddhism Is True, Wright leads listeners on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age.
Written in India in the early eighth century CE, Santideva's The Bodhicaryavatara takes as its subject the profound desire to become a Buddha and save all beings from suffering. The person who enacts such a desire is a Bodhisattva. Santideva not only sets out what the Bodhisattva must do and become; he also invokes the intense feelings of aspiration which underlie such a commitment, using language which has inspired Buddhists in their religious lives from his time to the present.
Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?
Are you seeking a deeper understanding of consciousness? Are you interested in meditation or currently practicing meditation? The Buddha and the Quantum is about the connection between meditation and physics.
Many books show parallels between consciousness and physics; a few of these attempt to explain consciousness in terms of the physics of everyday experience. This is the only book that explains physics and the everyday world in terms of consciousness alone.
It is also unique in that it demonstrates why we think there is a world independent of consciousness, explained in the same structure that explains quantum mechanics and relativity theory.
Buddha and the Quantum describes how experience in the physical world is built not from objective reality, but from experience within. Avery's brilliant model of consciousness makes difficult and subtle ideas understandable, with very surprising implications.
If you could sum up The Buddha and the Quantum in three words, what would they be?
An enlightening and engaging perspective on consciousness and physics.
Any additional comments?
Few books deal well with physics and consciousness. The more spiritually oriented books tend to get the science wrong. The more scientifically oriented books can be hard for a non-scientist to follow. This book didn't have those issues. Very well done and I learned quite a bit.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
Author Samuel Avery says up front that he is neither a Buddhist nor a physicist. Turns out, neither am I, so I take this book as being transmitted from one enthusiast to another. At the same time, it would seem the author knows his stuff. I would love to hear feedback from a Buddhist quantum physicist on this.
Due to the nature of quantum physics and the explanations required for the author to get his point across, I would recommend active (mindful) listening to this audiobook. While the information presented is done so as simplistically as possible, trying to listen to this title while doing other things will only result in confusion and missed explanations. It requires your whole attention. In that manner, you have to operate like a Buddhist to get the information within. Nice touch. While listening mindfully, I did find the author's explanations to be confusing, but I can see where some might just as easily need to rewind some things and hear them a second time to ensure you really did hear something the way you thought you did. It's just the nature of the beast in this case.
All in all, I found this book interesting in the extreme, and I recommend it to the curious who like to ponder the higher questions of the cosmos. The author narrates the audio himself, and his manner comes across cool and conversational, as though speaking to a peer.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
As a quantum physicist and a meditator I found Avery's speculations delightful and eye-opening. His point, as I see it, is to draw the connection between our subjective experiences and the fundamental construction of reality as envisioned by many modern quantum physicists, such as Vlatko Vedral, Seth Lloyd, and others. Because quantum entanglement experiments seem to show that reality as we know it does not exist outside our present awareness, and the distillation of experience from the quantum wave function ("collapse of the wave function") is always associated with conscious awareness, these physicists conclude reality is a mental process, the result of our experience being a computer simulation (a view also bolstered by the recent finding that quantum theory can be recast as a type of information processing logic). Avery shares this view and proposes that we can observe the simulation in operation ourselves, if we have the perspective that our experience is that simulation (the Buddhists have the equivalent view that life is a dream). He explains that perspective in simple terms.
I would have liked to have a more detailed explanation of two things: Why he believes acceleration can be treated as a second time dimension (orthodoxy sees acceleration as a rotation of velocity between the time and space dimensions), and why he believes mass can be treated as a dimension.
Personally, I don't see why Avery's perspective wasn't extensively explored by physicists immediately upon discovering that events don't happen until we observe them, in 1925. Reality doesn't exist outside our present awareness? We have a perfectly familiar model for that: If you dream of a rock, does the rock exist when you turn your back on it? But as Copernicus showed, just because an idea is simple doesn't mean it's obvious, nor welcome.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful
I would recommend it as a book of meditation in conjunction with the audible version, as his reading carries the real teacher's punch to 'get it'.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
What would have made The Buddha and the Quantum better?
As both a Vipassana meditator and student of modern physics and cosmology through several of the excellent Audible books on these topics I was really hoping for more documented research and less new age speculation. Scientists such as Henry Stapp from Lawrence Berkely Laboratory have published scientific studies attempting to describe the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in terms of quantum processes occuring at the neuronal level. The German philosopher Thomas Mettizinger in his book, The Ego Tunnel provided a very interesting section on how long term meditation may penetrate the illusion of the self . This level of information would have better than the quasi-scientific musings of the author.
Every since Bohr and Wigner developed the Coppenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics postulating the collapse of the probability wave through an act of observation it has been exploited as the bridge between the dualest worlds of the physical and the mental. I don't believe such a bridge is actually necessary since consciousness simply emerges from the underlying physical processes that adaptively evolved in the human species. In other words its all ultimately physical. The point Buddha was trying to make was that by following his prescription you didn't have to experience the suffering that inevitably comes with the software. He didn't get bogged down in natural philosophy (what we call science) since he didn't trust what he didn't personally experience. This would probably include atomic and quantum effects that occur at scales beyond our senses. The
What could Samuel Avery have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
More real research and less pseudo-analysis.
Would you be willing to try another one of Samuel Avery’s performances?
No
10 of 15 people found this review helpful
Lots of concepts though the story did not flow or tie everything together. Went from meditation right into physics with no transition.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful
Any additional comments?
I was quite disappointed with this book I thought the same points were laboured too much; I found myself thinking 'yes I've got the point let's move on'. Perhaps I missed the point though as I lost comprehension 1/3 of the way through the book. That said I definitely think it worth listening to it again.