In his new book, One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness, Dr. Tony Nader has attempted something very difficult and achieved it very well. He overcomes the conceptual gap separating matter from mind, science from spirituality, the human from the divine and takes us beneath these superficial dualities into a fundamental synthesis establishing the wholeness of life. He conveys the unity underlying all diversity, and he deftly and convincingly resolves the apparent contradiction between free will and determinism. Nader writes in a clear, step-by-step manner that makes this knowledge understandable and shows how it can benefit us as individuals.
His chapter on time is so deep and so different from any ideas I’ve previously encountered that I’ll need to read it several times over a long period of time to fully grasp it. But the vision it gives is so inspiring that I’m eager to do that. It’s a glimpse of how a fully enlightened person experiences the world.
Nader brings the ideas of Advaita Vedanta, the philosophy of nonduality, to a new level of breadth and clarity without the abstruse semantic gymnastics that characterize much of the Western writings on the topic. As a neuroscientist, he makes them concrete by showing how they manifest in our nervous system and how we can apply them to enrich our lives. Most importantly, he presents a practical method to experience higher states of consciousness and to eventually live in enlightenment.
The book is a bit slow going at first. I would have preferred more emphasis at the beginning about the benefits of this knowledge, why it is important to us. Also, Nader sometimes slips into long, rambling sentences laden with parenthetical phrases that could have benefited from sharper editing. But those are minor quibbles. On the whole the book is superb.
Chapters are posted on Amazon.
William T. Hathaway’s novel of the climate change, Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness, tells of an old woman and a young man healing nature through techniques of higher consciousness. Chapters are posted here. His peace novel, Summer Snow, is the story of an American warrior falling in love with a Sufi Muslim and learning from her that higher consciousness is more effective than violence. Chapters are posted here.
