News: Infinite Awareness:
Winner, New England Book Festival, Spiritual Books, 2016
As a neuroscientist, Marjorie Woollacott had no doubts that the brain was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. When she experimented with meditation for the first time, however, her entire world changed. Woollacott’s journey through years of meditation has made her question the reality she built her career upon and has forced her to ask what human consciousness really is. Infinite Awareness pairs Woollacott’s research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, she breaks open the definition of human consciousness to investigate the existence of a non-physical and infinitely powerful mind.
This book is both a memoir and an exploration of her experience, first, as a neuroscientist and professor, but later, also as a meditator, with mystical experiences unexplained by my scientific understanding. The book describes her discoveries as she worked to meld these two parts of her life together. In the beginning of the book she recounts her first encounters that molded her into a neuroscientist, including the excitement of learning about the way the brain influences our conscious experience. And she then tells of her abrupt discovery of meditation, and finding a world of experience she never believed had existed, which led to a schizophrenic existence with one foot in the world of neuroscience and the other in the mystical experiences of meditative energy within her.
Finally, she took the time to go back and get a degree in Asian Studies, learn Sanskrit and study Asian mysticism and parapsychology in depth, so that she could integrate the two halves of her life. Later chapters in the book recount her discovery of the compelling research on meditation, near death experiences, reincarnation, energetic healing, and psi phenomena, which argues for consciousness being considered primary, rather than a product of brain activity. She also includes her interviews of the scientists who performed this research, discussing their early training and what motivated them to “think outside the scientific box.” The last chapter offers her new approach to viewing mind-brain interactions as a result of the research, both her own, and of others, that she covers throughout the book.