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Appendix II 275
regard in the West. In the 1981 Annual Review of Neurosciences, Nobel laureate Roger Sperry, renowned for his work in the hemispheric functioning of the brain, states:
Current concepts of the mind-brain relation involve a direct break with the long-established materialist and behaviorist doctrine that has dominated neuroscience for many decades. Instead of renouncing or ignoring consciousness, the new interpretation gives full recognition to the primacy of inner conscious awareness as a causal reality ___ Once science modifies its traditional materialist- behaviorist stance and begins to accept in theory and to encompass in practice within its causal domain the whole world of inner, conscious, subjective experience (the world of the humanities), then the very nature of science itself is changed .... Recent conceptual developments in the mind-brain sciences rejecting reductionism and mechanistic determinism on the one side, and dualisms on the other, clear the way for a rational approach to the theory and prescription of values and a natural fusion of science and religion.5
Direct awareness leads us to the one indisputable fact we maintain about the universe we inhabit — that of human consciousness. Western science now seeks to understand more about this consciousness which has for so long formed the basis of speculative systems. Many physicists like Eugene Wigner6 hold the inclusion of consciousness research essential to further expansion in scientific understanding. And, as the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington concludes: “Recognizing that the physical world is entirely abstract and without ‘actuality’ apart from its linkage to consciousness, we restore consciousness to the fundamental position instead of representing it as an inessential complication occasionally found in the midst of inorganic nature at a late stage of evolutionary history.”7
In the Australian magazine Gazette (December, 1984, p. 14), Professor Brian McCusker, professor of nuclear physics at the University of Sydney (Australia), noted researcher in cosmic radiation, states that quantum mechanics, proven by experiment to be the most accurate description of the physical universe yet available, demands that the universe be considered one, whole, indivisible and conscious entity of which the observer is an essential part. The logical implication of this, he argues, is that to properly study the universe, a scientist must study his own consciousness.


































































































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