A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness by Itzhak Bentov, Destiny Books, Vermont, 2000
Some time or other you may have come across a book that provoked and teased you into looking closer at some habit of thinking you had or to examine things you hadn’t spent much time thinking about at all. Itzhak Bentov’s A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness is just such a one for me. A small paperback book, about 5”by 8”, 112 pages with a scattering of drawings, it purports to introduce the reader to the structure of the cosmos, singular and/or plural, as well as including the evolution of consciousness along the way.
The author, with whom I was not familiar, is presented as a scientist, an inventor of bio-medical instrumentation and an early exponent of consciousness studies among other things. Introductory notes about him in the book are enticing.
“In his search for the cosmic connection, Ben offers us a delightfully ingenious cosmic comedy on the nature and structure of ultimates. Here are traveler’s tales such as you rarely find- metaphysical jaunts from one end of the universe to the other.” page xvii, Jean Houston, Ph.D.
I settled in to be entertained. I didn’t expect to be challenged. Relaxed enough about the idea that the thoughts of all human beings were connected and in turn affected the universe, and about the vibrational nature of manifest creation, after all, Einstein had already told us that everything is energy vibrating at different rates, I got stalled and turned off by phrases like interference patterns, reference beams and coherent light. I had skeptical reactions to the notions of devas and luminous Alephs. But I soldiered on, prodded by agreeing with the notion of an ever-expanding cosmos, liking his “egg” analogy, and being somewhat impressed by the high regard his earlier and longer work, Stalking the Wild Pendulum, seemed to engender among apparently intelligent people of some repute.
So – I googled some phrases I wasn’t familiar with, coming across ideas from physics that were as wild as some of what I had read in Bentov’s work, and went back and read it again. Halfway through I stopped and ordered a copy of his earlier and longer work, and after finishing the second read, got on the computer to look for an online course in cosmology.
If you are willing to look into the apparently absurd and follow the thread of logic shining through it you may have a surprising experience reading A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness and end up studying the latest in cosmology with an MIT professor, free, online as I have just signed up for. There’s nothing like curiosity to keep life interesting.
An Imaginist 