Craig Hogan's book of about 400 pages and well worth the read. It appears here in

391 Pages·2011·2.97 MB·English

Your Eternal Self
by R. Craig Hogan, Ph.D.
From the author's website at -
http://youreternalself.com/
Written in 2007 - Downloaded 30 June 2011
Greater Reality Publications
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If ordinary people really knew that consciousness and not
matter is the link that connects us with each other and the
world, then their views about war and peace, environmental
pollution, social justice, religious values, and all other
human endeavors would change radically.
— Dr. Amit Goswami, Theoretical Nuclear Physicist,
University of Oregon Institute of Theoretical Science
++++++++++++++
About the Author
R. Craig Hogan, Ph.D.
The author of Your Eternal Self is R. Craig Hogan, Ph.D., a writer and trainer of
writers with 38 years' experience. He is director of the Center for Spiritual
Understanding and on the boards of the Academy of Spiritual and Paranormal
Studies and Association for Evaluation and Communication of Evidence for
Survival.
Dr. Hogan is co-author of Guided Afterlife
Connections (Greater Reality Publications, 2011).
This is from the back cover: "People are having their
own connections with loved ones in the afterlife, without
mediums. The life-changing connections greatly reduce
grief and trauma."
That book contains 26 accounts of people who
have had their own afterlife connections through the
Guided Afterlife Connections procedure.
Dr. Hogan is co-author with Allan Botkin, Psy.D.,
of Induced After Death Communication: A New
Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma (Hampton
Roads, 2005).
He has Web sites devoted to spiritual topics at
30ce.com
induced-adc.com
mindstudies.com
greaterreality.com
youreternalself.com
wisesouls.com
adcguides.com
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In addition to the dozens of courses, online interactive training materials, and
print training materials he has developed, he is author or co-author of the
following publications:
Dr. Hogan's professional background is in business communications:
1. Founder and director of the Business Writing Center
2. Founder and director of BWC Publications
3. Professor of business communications, Illinois State University
4. Professor of writing, Allegheny County College
5. Professor of writing, University of Pittsburgh
6. Founder and director of Greater Reality Publications
He has owned two companies consulting with businesses in writing training and
has been a senior writer in another:
1. Owner and senior writer, Softlink (documentation-writing company)
2. Owner and general partner, Interactive Training Media
3. Senior writer, Applied Science Associates
He has been an administrator in communications and adult education:
1. Manager of communications, BankIllinois Company
2. Director of adult extension studies, Wheaton College
3. Educational development consultant, McMaster University
4. Curriculum specialist, Chicago Medical School
5. Faculty development consultant, External Studies Program, University of
Pittsburgh
Dr. Hogan has published articles about teaching writing in refereed journals:
1. College Composition and Communication
2. English Education
3. OUPID Newsletter
4. Proceedings of the National Conference on College Composition and
Communication
5. Proceedings of the Midwest Conference on English in the Two-Year College
6. Research in the Teaching of English
Thanks for reading. I really want this book to help people realize they're
eternal beings having a physical experience. Any comments, positive and
negative, will help me.
Mail to [email protected].
The book is published in paperback by Greater Reality Publications.
Thanks.
Love and peace, Craig
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Editor's note and foreword to this digital edition.
I have formatted and featured this wonderful work by Dr. Hogan because I really
like it and, like him, want as many people as possible to read it. I am slowly
converting to "e-books" without great reluctance, as they are much easier to read
as long as you adjust your laptop properly. For the moment I deny absolutely
Kindles, Nooks and other such, because they do not allow reading and editing of
RTF, MS-Office Word or other freestyle documents - only their own proprietary
formats. PDF files allow rotating 90 deg. for easy reading on the laptop of your
choice, and they can be created for free from Word documents. What more can
one need for the moment? I await the roll-up screen and keyboard. But, like the
flying car, I am still waiting.
The data was taken from Dr. Hogan's website and copied to an MS-Word doc.
Paragraph formatting closely follows the original but has been broadened. A few
typographic corrections have been made. All bold, underlining and italic
formatting have been added to my taste for emphasis and are not the author's
original. Certain "...n't"s have been expanded to "cannot" and "is not", also for
emphasis. The large text format is suitable for printing both sides on reduced size
paper and remaining legible.
When I do work of this nature it is very tempting to add comments - I usually do -
but in this case I am rendered remark-less by the excellent work of Dr. Hogan,
and hope to quote him extensively in my own writing henceforward.
Fonts - Bookman Old Style for the text body, size 15. For certain other text, size
12. Initial words of chapters are in Argor Got Scaqh size 20. Heaven knows where
I got that font from. I think the late great Robert B. Parker used something similar
in one of his marvelous novels.
I really admire the work Dr. Hogan has done. He appears to have missed nothing,
and the story is more than clear - Stop the nonsense, folks, wise up now, as you
will regret your silliness. Yes, it does all come out in the wash. And furthermore,
everyone knows if you want to keep something secret it is because you are
ashamed of it. More power to Wikileaks!
"Help Ever - Hurt Never" - Sai Baba
Giles Tomkin, NC USA Aug 2011
+++++++++++++
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Contents -
Chapter Description Page
1 Where Are You? Who am I talking to when I speak to 8
you?
2 What Are you? You aren’t in the brain. Your mind is 66
outside of the brain.
3 What Is Your Relationship We can pick up thoughts from 184
to Other People? someone else simply by intending to
know those thoughts, even over great
distances.
4 What Is the Relationship Data Show the Mind Affects the World 214
of Your Eternal Self to the Around Us
Physical Realm?
5 What Are You to Do with Our purpose is to learn and progress 233
Your Eternal Life? spiritually and help humankind
progress as a whole
6 What Is Spirituality? Unlike a tree, you have free will and 239
you can grow yourself into the tree
you want to be
7 How Do You Grow Assumptions are deeply rooted in our 245
Spiritually? minds and we don't notice them
8 Become Part of an You should be part of an intimate 278
Intimate Spiritual Group group that grows together
9 What Are the Facts About Facts, not beliefs, about life in the 286
the Afterlife? Afterlife and its vast extent
10 Recent Indications the Work continues by modern science 312
Mind Forms the Brain finding further evidence for
brain/mind separation
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ESSAYS Description Page
1 The Failure of Religion Materialism has hold of nearly all 320
and Dominance of people, even those who belong to the
Materialism world's prominent religions.
2 Science and Religion Inevitably religion will be replaced by 339
the spiritual understanding that is
the new form of science.
3 Evil Characterized by self-interest ... and 342
other signs of immature spirituality.
4 The Physics of the Mind We collapse all the possibilities into 350
what we experience
5 Abortion Absolutely does not affect the spirit 359
that was coming through the fetus
6 Yeshua ben Yosef and What he said is quite different from 363
Spiritual Growth what the church teaches
7 Suffering in the World These are all things men do to men. 370
8 The Death Penalty: Demonstrates a retarded spiritual 374
Murder by Law growth in a society that cannot forgive
9 Schools: Archaic It must teach confidence to assess 376
Institutions that novel problems and solve them
Impede Spiritual Growth
10 Materialism Results in Suppression of love and compassion 386
Unsatisfied Hygienic leaves people unsuccessfully
Needs grappling to satisfy the lower level
hygienic needs their entire lives.
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Chapter 1
Where Are You?
... but who is thinking? Who requested the thought? Yes, the brain shows
activity when there's a thought, but what caused the brain to show activity? How
does a human being have a conscious experience? This is 'the hard problem' -
Hogan
When I stand before you, talking to you, am I talking to the
skin covering your face? Humans shed and re-grow outer skin
cells about every 27 days, making almost 1,000 new skins in a
lifetime. Your skin is just a disposable covering and by the time I
finish saying a sentence to you, some of it is gone.
Each day about 50 billion cells in the body are replaced,
resulting in a new body each year. The body is just temporary. It
can't be who you are. Every second, 500,000 of your body cells
die and are replaced, so we'll have to keep this conversation short
— much of you will be gone before we finish!
Who am I talking to when I speak to you? It's certainly not
your brain. That's just a collection of fat and protein made of
85% water squeezed into the dark enclosure of your skull.
Around 50,000 to 100,000 brain cells die each day, so if some of
them had today's messages, no wonder you keep losing track of
what your spouse tells you.
You are not your body. The body changes constantly. The
body you had at age 10 when you could run like a rabbit was a
different body than you have at age 70 when you shuffle like a
turtle, and the molecules in it have been replaced 60 times! Last
year's body is different from this year's body. The body is just
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flesh and bone, made of the same atoms as a bowl of warm Irish
stew. That's not you.
So, when you talk to me, you'll insist you're not talking to any
part of my body, or even the tofu-like mush inside my skull.
You're talking to me. You know implicitly that you and I are
above and aside from the skin and the brain.
You are not the body. You’re the mind that is greater than the
body, and that means you’re greater than the brain. So if your
mind is greater than the brain, where are you? This chapter
explains where.
Science Doesn’t Know Where You Are
We’ll start by correcting a common misconception. You likely
have the belief that science knows your mind is in the three to
five pounds of fat and protein compressed inside your skull.
That’s what you were taught in school.
But the fact is that neuroscience cannot explain how people
have a conscious experience, where the mind is, what memories
are, or where memories are stored. That's pretty remarkable
considering that the brain has been carefully mapped using CTs,
MRIs, PETs, and EEGs to find out which parts of the brain are
active when a person is performing activities. In spite of all the
brain mapping that’s been done, they cannot locate the mind and
they cannot find memories.
Many neuroscientists are also saying that even if someone
could locate mind and memories in the brain, that still wouldn't
explain who has the conscious thought. In other words, yes
there's a thought, but who is thinking? Who requested the
thought? Yes, the brain shows activity when there's a thought,
but what caused the brain to show activity? How does a human
being have a conscious experience?
That’s known as the "problem of consciousness" or the "hard
problem," and all neuroscientists acknowledge it. They cannot
find a mind or memories in the brain and they do not know how
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the brain creates the mind. Statements by a sampling of
neuroscientists illustrating this problem follow. Here and
elsewhere in this book, cited writers sometimes use
"consciousness" to refer to the mind. I usually use "mind"
because that is the common term we all use to refer to the inner
part of us that thinks, feels, and decides to act.
Stephan Patt of the Institute of Pathology at Friedrich
Schiller University in Germany summarized the research on the
mind and the brain:
Nevertheless all these experiments and descriptions of brain
activation processes do not explain how neural activity is the
cause for consciousness. Likewise, all attempts which have been
undertaken to specify the neurological mechanisms of
consciousness in terms of neurobiological, information processing
and even social theories of consciousness have failed to prove this
causal relationship.1
Sir John Maddox, former editor-in-chief of the renowned
journal Nature, summed up our knowledge of consciousness in
the December 1999 issue of Scientific American:
Nobody understands how decisions are made or how
imagination is set free. What consciousness consists of, or how it
should be defined, is equally puzzling. Despite the marvelous
success of neuroscience in the past century, we seem as far from
understanding cognitive processes as we were a century ago.2
Stuart Hameroff, MD, a renowned researcher in
neuroscience in the Department of Anesthesiology, Arizona
Health Sciences Center, wrote,
Consciousness defines our existence and reality. But how does
the brain generate thoughts and feelings? Most explanations
portray the brain as a computer, with nerve cells ("neurons") and
their synaptic connections acting as simple switches, or "bits"
which interact in complex ways. In this view consciousness is said
to "emerge" as a novel property of complex interactions among
neurons, as hurricanes and candle flames emerge from complex
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