In this month’s edition of my Consciousness Video Series, I put together a review of a recent book by Dr. Alan Lightman called, “The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality In The Age of Science.” In a wonderful development, my review of Dr. Lightman’s book, “A Sense of the Mysterious,” apparently caught his eye, and he sent me a very gracious message thanking me for that review. I highly recommend both books!
Since I was already working on a musical section these past few weeks, I decided to add a bonus section matching up a musical offering by Frank Smith called “A Porch With A View.”
This edition in the video series represents a departure of sorts from previous episodes, but as those who visit here regularly know, all of my efforts in producing these videos are experimental in nature, and I’m still working through my shortcomings with the technology.
Hope you enjoy this latest video and thanks for your continued patience in advance.
John's Consciousness 
What a lovely video, I really enjoyed it. Loved the opening music – Telemann perhaps? Also loved the music you played while walking round the garden – it went so well and induced a dreaminess in me- a transcendent state perhaps. My position is very similar to your own. I do not think science can explain all but recognise that I might be wrong. I hope I am not but have been recently thinking that if the material world can produce transcendence, then perhaps that is all that is necessary, and of course, might lead in time to even better states. Who knows? I have just been walking in the woods too – deep in a glorious national park in Normandy-close to nature and far, far away from the overcrowded suburban sprawl which dominates the whole of the southern part of England.
Like you, the exploration and enjoyment of spirituality has become so very important to me. It puts the rest of the world into context. In a very real sense, it is all that really matters and yet few on Wall Street, or in the legislature here or at your end will want to hear about it.
Anyway John, I very much enjoyed your talk.
I’m glad you enjoyed the video, and appreciate your thoughtful comments very much, as usual. The opening music is called, “Allegro Spiritoso,” by Jean Baptiste Senaille, a French born Baroque composer, and a contemporary of Georg Philipp Telemann who was a German Baroque composer. The music during the garden video popped up on my Pandora music app during one of my long-distance highway trips and when I discovered that it was entitled, “Porch With A View,” it seemed like a good choice to accompany the video highlighting my own view from my porch! After I composed the video sequence, I was surprised by how well the music brought out the very feeling you described. It occurred to me that it is possible to discern a connection to the natural world right in our own backyard, if we are open to the idea. Our modest home is not set in a grand landscape of the sort we constantly encounter during our camping expeditions, but I still am able to feel connected to the natural world even in the meager confines of the backyard.
Whether or not the full and true nature of the transcendent experience might eventually be describable in material terms is a profoundly important philosophical question, and while our subjective experience of existence relies on our material brain and sensory input through our central nervous system to permit our awareness of it to take place, it seems to me that those capacities only provide us with a means to access a whole other dimension of awareness that won’t yield to any degree of empirical scrutiny. Even the most sophisticated understanding of neuroscience in our modern world is, thus far, utterly silent when it comes to understanding why our mental processing is accompanied by such a profound experience of awareness. This may change eventually in some future epoch, but I suspect the mystery will persist no matter what material progress may uncover.
Thanks again for your comment!