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whose meditations led them to have oceanic mind-to-mind feelings of oneness and love. ''Such realization may be fleeting or lasting, spontaneous or the product of religious practice, but it is an enduring feature of human life," to quote Leonard and Murphy.
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Russell once had a conversation with Margaret Mead in which he expressed disappointment about the lack of general acceptance of the existence of ESP in the scientific community. She sternly told him that he shouldn't complain, because after all, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in the sixteenth century during the Inquisition, for espousing ideas not very different from ours. Bruno believed in the unity of all things, and strongly opposed Aristotelian dualism for separating body and spirit. He exhorts us all to achieve union with the "Infinite One" in an infinite universe. Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century had a similar worldview, but he was luckily spared the Inquisition because he was Jewish. He was, however, banished from his own synagogue because of his pantheistic model of God being in all things, including himself. |
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The philosophy of a universal connection among all things was taught in the 1750s by Bishop George Berkeley, who could be considered an early Transcendentalist. He felt that the world was greatly misapprehended by our ordinary senses, and that consciousness was the fundamental ground of all existence. In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau believed in a strongly connected spiritual community, which Emerson called The Oversoul. Their Transcendentalism gave rise to many New Thought churches in the U.S., such as Christian Science, Science of Mind, and Unity. The famous Viennese psychiatrist Carl Jung described our mind-to-mind connections in terms of a collective unconscious. The coherent theme among all of these is that there is an essential part of all of us that is shared. Contemporary Judaism teaches a similar view of our interconnectedness. The revered Jewish theologian Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells us that: |
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Human beings are joined to one another and to all creation. Everything performing its intended task doing commerce with its neighbors. Drawing nourishment and sustenance from unimagined other individuals. Coming into being, growing to maturity, procreating. |
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