Cosmoconsciousness, or cosmic consciousness, is a term used to characterize a transcendence of the limits of self-consciousness. As an ultra-state of illumination of the mind, the roots of the conception are embodied in the quest for a spiritual connection with multi-dimensional cosmos. This quest searches for spiritual development as a pathway to human excellence, and can be associated with the mystics of ancient wisdom, as well as contemporary psycho-spiritual analysts. After its emergence in the late 19th century, cosmic consciousness rapidly became a source of inspiration for transpersonal psychology, moral therapy, and a thoughtful link to mystical quantum physics. By encouraging a spiritual way of perceiving the real world, cosmic consciousness also provides a source of inspiration for human excellence as the central idea of global ethics. In this perspective, the world cannot be changed for the better without changing individual consciousness. Global concerns, including ecological issues, violence and acts of terrorism, materialistic gratification and hedonism, could not be addressed effectively unless people’s consciousness is changed. Cosmic consciousness, by the very perception of the inner life, has the potential to struggle with global concerns, and hence, it holds a promise of human excellence. This book discusses cosmic consciousness against the backdrop of the emergence of the rational and autonomous conception of the self, and the modern psychological depiction of selfhood. It places the idea of cosmic consciousness at the centre of contemporary arguments on the nature of consciousness.

Scientists have constructed a vast and wonderful objective universe by building on the "quantitative" features of their experience. That universe cannot support cosmic purpose because it is without consciousness--it is completely inert. However, the "qualitative" features of human experience suggest the existence of an equally vast and wonderful subjective universe that complements the objective universe in scope and in reality. This edifice can and, I believe, does support a form of cosmic purpose that is determined by its structure, and by its relationship to human consciousness. Every experience of yours is an amalgam of quantitative and qualitative parts that comprise your own objective and subjective worlds. Each one is as real a part of your life as the other; and each is as real a part of the wider universe as the other. There is no reason to assign reality to one and illusory to the other. Using a minimal construction based on qualitative experience, the subjective universe is found to have a cosmic purpose that is consequential for humans. We look for and find evidence of that purpose in human history.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Deepak Chopra joins forces with leading physicist Menas Kafatos to explore some of the most important and baffling questions about our place in the world. "A riveting and absolutely fascinating adventure that will blow your mind wide open!" —Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi What happens when modern science reaches a crucial turning point that challenges everything we know about reality? In this brilliant, timely, and practical work, Chopra and Kafatos tell us that we've reached just such a point. In the coming era, the universe will be completely redefined as a "human universe" radically unlike the cold, empty void where human life is barely a speck in the cosmos. You Are the Universe literally means what it says--each of us is a co-creator of reality extending to the vastest reaches of time and space. This seemingly impossible proposition follows from the current state of science, where outside the public eye, some key mysteries cannot be solved, even though they are the very issues that define reality itself: • What Came Before the Big Bang? • Why Does the Universe Fit Together So Perfectly? • Where Did Time Come From? • What Is the Universe Made Of? • Is the Quantum World Linked to Everyday Life? • Do We Live in a Conscious Universe? • How Did Life First Begin? “The shift into a new paradigm is happening,” the authors write. “The answers offered in this book are not our invention or eccentric flights of fancy. All of us live in a participatory universe. Once you decide that you want to participate fully with mind, body, and soul, the paradigm shift becomes personal. The reality you inhabit will be yours either to embrace or to change.” What these two great minds offer is a bold, new understanding of who we are and how we can transform the world for the better while reaching our greatest potential.

This stimulating book offers candid reflections on the question of cosmic purpose written both by prominent scientists and by scholars representing the world's religious traditions. Examining the issue from a wide variety of perspectives, this is the only current book to deal with cosmic purpose from an interreligious and interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions address the question of whether a religiously-based notion of a purposeful cosmos is consistent with the latest scientific understanding of nature, and whether theology can affirm the presence of divine action without contradicting science.

On Christmas Eve in 1909, twenty-one-year-old Kagawa Toyohiko (1888-1960) rented a room in K?be's worst slum where, apart from two years of study in the United States, he remained with his wife and co-worker Haru for more than ten years. They engaged in pastoral work, evangelism, social reform movements, and literary activities, founding numerous institutions that are still in operation today. After publishing a best-selling novel in 1920, Kagawa began to draw the attention of people from around Japan and the world. His literary output was prodigious, amounting to more than 300 books. Often compared with his contemporaries Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer, Kagawa was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1947, 1948) and three times for the Nobel Peace Prize (1954, 1955, 1956). Challenging the materialism of Charles Darwin and the claim of H. G. Wells that "we must give up any idea that evolution is purposeful," Cosmic Purpose draws on research in physics, chemistry, astrophysics, mineralogy, genetics, and biology to offer evidence of purpose in the vast span of evolutionary history from the atom to human consciousness. In his attempt to renew our sense of wonder at this process, Kagawa proposes a "logic of finality" that links life to purpose.

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.