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How different spiritual traditions and science relate to consciousness
John Ambrosiano
I would like to talk about how different spiritual traditions relate to consciousness and compare what is said to what science has to say about it from time to time. In science, consciousness is a perennial holy grail problem that’s so abstruse most scientists ignore it, or just call it an “emergent property” of the brain. But, with a resurgent interest in the topic by neuroscientists (who don’t know either), various “scientific” explanations are making their way into the literature. On the faith end of things, eastern mystics have been talking about it for about 4000 years. And Judeo-Christian mystics have gotten a word or two in occasionally, mostly in ecstatic poetry in which what’s sometimes called “unity consciousness” is compared to oneness with God.
John Ambrosiano, PhD, is a retired physicist who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1997 until his retirement in 2019. In 2003, having become curious about Buddhism, he visited several centers in the Santa Fe area, including one in Los Alamos guided by Henry Finney, an artist and Zen teacher affiliated with the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos. In Santa Fe, he met Buddhist teacher and author Matthew Flickstein, and became his student in 2008. A few years later, he began training as a teacher himself, and has been teaching Buddhism and meditation at the Unitarian Church since that time. The group, called Los Alamos Dharma Friends, meets online and at UULA Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings.
