The Dimensions of Experience

Author's Summary. Evolutionary theory is recognized as one of the most powerful approaches we have for understanding ourselves. But it is only beginning to be applied to our most essential feature consciousness. This book tells a plausible story of how consciousness evolved beginning with the simplest forms of existence. Citing recent studies in animal learning perception and behavior together with molecular biology cell biology and neurophysiology the book shows how dimensions of experienced space and time together with increasing awareness of self and other emerged in association with hierarchical complexity of information processing entities. This is the first complete history of consciousness ever written. . Review by Kirkus Discoveries. A lucid thought-provoking and wide-ranging metaphysical treatise by novelist scientific researcher and Stanford Ph.D. Smith.Heralded as “the first complete history of consciousness ever written” The Dimensions of Experience covers an astonishing amount of ground from evolutionary theory to postmodern linguistics physics and even obscure Victorian literature. Smith’s central contention is that ‘the miraculous is much closer to home” than many human beings understand. By this he does not mean a hidden realm of elves and dragons—or any sort of religious transcendence at least as understood in the biblical sense—but a miracle of dimensions. “However many dimensions there are in the universe we—all of us all forms of life—exist in all of them” Smith argues. “They are all within our reach. What we lack—some species more than others but again all of us to some extent—is the ability to experience all of these dimensions.” Over 11 tightly written and edited chapters Smith goes on to explicate the evolution of consciousness and how we came to understand the world as we do today. He discusses transcendental meditation and the benefits and fallacies therein; he ventures bravely into the world of coral reefs worm colonies and bacteria showing how even the simplest of organisms experience life in a range of dimensions. “According to science” he writes “the three major dimensions of space are a condition of all existence within which the entire evolutionary history of earth has played out.” Not so he counters. The Dimensions of Experience makes the case for a more dynamic form of evolution where beings evolve through time and space but also through dimensions we do not yet properly understand. Smith’s great accomplishment is verisimilitude; he holds forth with equal skill on both the biology of proto-organisms and the knottiest work of post-structuralists like Derrida and he weaves every chapter deftly into a convincing narrative.An engaging supple scientific text blessedly free of weighty academic jargon.. Review from Clarion Foreword (edited for space reasons). The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness presents the ideas of Andrew P. Smith a longtime practitioner of meditation and a trained neuroscientist. He endeavors to link his knowledge of science with the intimations of universal consciousness he has perceived through meditation. His exploration reflective of the ancient concept of panpsychism supposes that all forms of life experience consciousness... The author writes in a lucid style that makes the book accessible to nonscientists and his wry humor brings alive the scientific detail he describes… Neither all scientists nor every spiritual seeker will agree with the premises presented in this book. However it offers people of both disciplines as well as lay readers some challenging ideas to consider as they contemplate a possible connection between the material and spiritual worlds.