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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 501
EAN num: 9781594771811
ISBN number: 1594771812
Label: Inner Traditions
Manufacturer: Inner Traditions
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 208
Printing Date: May 03, 2007
Publishing house: Inner Traditions
Release Date: May 14, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 8812
Studio: Inner Traditions
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Product Description:
Presents the unifying world-concept long sought by scientists, mystics, and sages: an Integral Theory of Everything
• Explains how modern science has rediscovered the Akashic Field of perennial philosophy
• New edition updates ongoing scientific studies, presents new research inspired by the very first edition, and includes new case studies and a section on animal telepathy
Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic Field is real and has its equivalent in science’s zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness. This zero-point Akashic Field is the constant and enduring memory of the universe. It holds the record of all that has happened on Earth and in the cosmos and relates it to all that is yet to happen.
In Science and the Akashic Field, philosopher and scientist Ervin Laszlo conveys the essential element of this information field in language that is accessible and clear. From the world of science he confirms our deepest intuitions of the oneness of creation in the Integral Theory of Everything. We discover that, as philosopher William James stated, “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
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Rated by buyers 
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This book had so many terrific reviews, albeit from questionable sources, that I thought I should read it to find out whether or not there was some recent development I was unaware of in physics. What a huge disappointment!
This book is a work of pseudoscience. The presentation is to very first review advances in physics, then to present pseudoscience such as dowsing, remote viewing, psychic healing --- you name it. The author then returns to more reviews of advances in physics, then back to pseudoscience. The main thesis is that there is some field (the "Akashic" field) that permeates the universe or the Metaverse (the *real* universe!) and informs (actually "in-forms" as "in the process of formation" --- cute, eh?) all parts of the universe of everything that happens everywhere else at all times.
Although the author claims that his thesis is "not unscientific," his presentation of the theory, presentation of evidence, etc. is definitely unscientific. This author presents a well-known logical fallacy: Scientific language does not make science. That is, merely using the terminology of, and citing results from a discipline does not make the discusion valid in that discipline. This author is obviously attempting to put his ideas in good standing by name-dropping, aligning his thesis with selected portions of modern science, and so on.
You can easily achieve the same good results by reading articles in Scientific American. You can avoid the ill effects of this book by reading Skeptical Inquirer.
Rated by buyers -
What Did I Get Out of the Read?
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This is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read for a long time. It brought together, in one theory a lot of the loose ends of "weird" science and paranormal experience and tied them with a normal science-based knot.
What Did I Think of the Book?
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This guy has so many academic degrees and awards I am barely worthy of reading his book, never mind reviewing it! False humility aside, although this book takes a scientific approach to the subject matter, is targeted to the layman.
It is remarkable as a serious, educated endeavor at a scientific framework for explanation of much of the paranormal. Laszlo is neither a scientist, nor a paranormal investigator. He has an eclectic academic career - in this book he plays the philosopher of science. He explains his theory of the Akashic field (A-Field) that causes the coherence we see at all levels of nature - from the strange non-local effects of quantum physics, up through Bose Einstein condensates, molecules and consciousness to the problem of the uniformity of the cosmos. The heavy duty maths and conceptual detail are missing. It is left to an exercise to the readers to discover the rigorous physics that underpins the speculative theory ;-). It is intellectually a very satisfying book to read because it so effectively applies Ockham's razor - so much is explained by a theory that "introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities."
This and Dean Radin's book "Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality" seem to be at the forefront of laying down a scientific foundation for the explanation of the workings of hitherto paranormal events.
Rated by buyers 
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Reading this book was a joyful experience. Of course, if you want a more profound, detailed, technical if you will, discusion you can read one of the several books by the same author on this or related subject.Or, other authors on this same matter. I enjoyed very much the previous to the last part: The Phenomenon of Coherence where Dr. Laszlo discusses the Coherence in Consciousness with such a simple approach that it made the complex subject a very understandable one. He also refers his discusion to several well known resources on the subject. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to introduce him/herself into the realm of universal consciousness phenomenon.
Rated by buyers -
In this book, Ervin Laszlo is taking us on a journey, previously attempted by many authors/thinkers, from the antiquity to the current era. Laszlo's trek is different, however, because it not only incorporates, in quite a readable format, some of the discoveries in frontier sciences such as cosmology but also uses concepts of Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory. Such an approach allows the author a high degree of conceptual integration which he aptly labels coherence. For those whose thoughts are not quite as ethereal but are still primarily matter-bound, the venture into transpersonal psychology, the mind, etc. may still feel too many conceptual light-years away. Sporadic studies of analogies in morphology, physiology, and behavior among separated but at birth identical twins, have been just as mysterious and intriguing as is the concept of nonlocal coherence and teleportation, so far proven to exist only in the quantum world. What unifies the quantum observations with those of the studied twins is that in both instances, there is an initial entanglement, a form of a special and close relationship in physical and biologic realms respectively.
The capability of biologic entities to generate magnetic waves is also touched upon by the authors as a possible medium of near instantaneous communication within the human body. The release of magnetic waves, albeit following an external magnetic jolt, is already explored in the current usage of magnetic resonance imaging, the MRI, in medicine. It is a technology which allows for unprecedented and near-real time images of the human body in health and disease.
This book literarily teleports us to another paradigm. At a time of human and climate instability, this book goes a long way toward making the existence of Universe-wide and all-encompassing connections worth deep exploration. The author utilized science-based observations, with a special focus on the paradigm of integration/coherence, to raise the plausibility of bi-directional relationships not just within esoteric quantum physics but among all of us and all that surrounds us on any scale. This book is very timely and highly recommended.
Ivo P. Janecka, MD, MBA, PhD
Janecka@post.harvard.edu
Rated by buyers 
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This book is another illustrative example of how complex, philosophic and unrealizable to direct experience a theory-of-everything (TOE) can become once you wander too far down the wrong rabbit hole. A real theory-of-everything should be so simple and run so close to your being and everyday experience that a three year child could easily understand and relate to it, it should not be something requiring multiple Phds' to decode and still find yourself having many difficulties visualizing and connecting the dots to. There are much simpler TOEs around. One simply states - "God-IS" while another says "I Am That" and you can even join these together, if you want. But the ego needs its fix of complexity, inventiveness, and ingenuity and avoids naked simplicity, which does not meets its needs for specialness.
Ervin's TOE links the Vedic notion of the Akashic Field to physical space through the notion of the quantum vacuum. He sees this vacuum, as a subtle energy sea and as a very active plenum rather than an inert space and background to the world of matter. And he uses his linkage in his endeavor to marry science with mystical insights and religion, mind with matter, consciousness with perception.
He indicates that information is encoded through the modulation of quantum state fluctuations in the energy sea of the quantum vacuum. The encoding mechanism itself, he sees as holographic in nature and arise out of the coherent interference patterns setup and created by the interpenetration (entanglement) of the waves represented by the wave functions of individual quanta. While, the reading mechanism of the stored information back into consciousness, he sees as relying on resonance and phase conjugation which can occur between the quantum-ly superimposed wavefunctions (quantum entanglement) setup by the chemicals in our brain and that of the quantum vacuum of the world around us.
His theory therefore borrows heavily on Bohm's idea of an implicate order and on the notion of a higher dimensional existence, in which the holographic fields representing all possible quantum states and therefore encodings can be stored. Bohm relied on the concept of "hidden variables" to connect this higher dimensional theoretical existence to the manifest existence that we experience. The big difference of course, is that Bohm's higher dimensional existence was not a higher order physical dimensional existence but only higher order dimensionally in terms of our understanding. It suggests a higher order evolution in our mental and psychic development than a higher order objective dimensional existence and is closer therefore to the understandings of Ouspensky and Kant. He saw the limited context imposed by the belief in 3-D space and time and the apparent separation between things as insufficient in itself to adequately explain many phenomena in the world appearing around us and saw that our real hope was only in transcending this limited context.
This newer context, which he called the implicate order he felt would help connect and explain all known/unknown phenomena in a higher and `truer' modality. He realized that most of the phenomena are not real in themselves but are artifacts imposed by our mind's limited context. Just as a sphere cutting two dimensional space would be experienced as growing circles and therefore "alive" when viewed in 2-D space would appear as being fundamentally static in a 3-D one. Bohm elucidated this idea in his example of the simultaneous video recordings of two views of a fish piped to two different TV screens. And he used this as an alternative explanation of Alain Aspect's findings on the non-local connection and 'faster-than-light' signaling between quantumly entangled particles.
In Bohm's view this apparent instantaneous communication between the two fish on two screens can be entirely understood if we drop the notions of two fish, the `faster than light' signaling as well as the belief in the space appearing to separate them as real. He indicated that all of this is also easily explainable, in an alternative explanation once we are prepared to transcend the many contextual limitations imposed by our current belief system. His explanation of these non-local phenomena is that all we are seeing is just two views of the same fish and we use our minds to project these different views through space, which has no true existence in itself. This then makes the fish appear to be separate as two different entities, yet somehow synchronised and communicating non-locally.
And so, the two fish are not instantaneously communicating with each other through space, because there is only one fish and no space. Therefore Bohm's theory is that we are only ever seeing (with quantum entanglement and non-local connections) different views of same undifferentiated oneness of ultimate reality that we then projected to different locations in space ... Read More
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