num_pages: 402
description: This book is about what it means to go beyond our ordinary perception of reality and to understand why throughout human history almost all of humanity has had the concept of transcendence and connection to the other  to the spirit world to God or to the One behind it all.Drawing on the modern researchfrom neuropsychology and religion to evolutionary psychology anthropology archeology and geneticsthe authors delve deeply into what we now know about how the process of transcendence happens in the brain and the ways in which it has been sought since Paleolithic times. They begin by coalescing findings from the shamans of the Ice Age (God 1.0) to the first temples priests and gods of the Neolithic era and Mesopotamia (God 2.0) to the Axial Age prophets and the three major monotheistic religions Judaism Christianity and Islam (God 3.0).They explore in detail how verbal descriptions of a nonverbal transcendental experience were always understood to be metaphorical but that gradually became taken as literal truth. The differing interpretations of this literal view have been the cause of much conflict between religious denominations and between science and religion.The authors explain how our everyday mind works as a device for selecting just a few parts of the outside reality that are important for our survival. We dont experience the world as it is but as a virtual realitya small limited system which evolved to keep us safe and ensure our survival. This system though essential for getting us safely across a busy street is insufficient for understanding and solving the challenges of the modern world.But we are also endowed with a quiescent second network of cognition which when activated can dissolve or break through the barriers of ordinary consciousness. We all experience this activation to some degree when we suddenly see a solution to a problem or have an intuitive or creative insight  when we connect to a larger whole beyond the self.By combining ancient teachings with modern science we have a new psychology of spiritual experience  the knowledge to explore how this second network can be developed and stabilized providing the much-needed higher perceptive capacity that is humanitys next evolutionary step.The authors take care to differentiate this development from temporary trance experiences or from overloading the brain with drugs dancing drumming or other practices.Instead they emphasize the need both individually and collectively to reflect on and explicate the functional value of virtues such as generosity humility and gratitude and of service. These attituted and activities shift brain function away from the self toward an expanded consciousness an experience of the worlds greater interconnectedness and unity and an understanding of ones place in it.Neither an academic tome nor a religious treatise God 4.0 is a comprehensive thoroughly researched work addressed to inquisitive open-minded people genuinely trying to understand life and meaning. It is written for critical thinkers for readers of news history biography and science who seek more from life than is accessible through any one of these disciplines people who may find religion as theyve encountered it to be unsatisfactory.The authors neither advocate nor dismiss organized religion but contend that knowledge we have now of how higher consciousness happens in the brain allows us to move beyond faith belief and ritual to a direct experience of self-transcendence which has been called seeing God. Developing this innate second system of perception could be the first step toward finding the vital common ground that reconciles science religion and spirituality allowing us to approach our global problems from a new spiritual literacy and enter a new eraGod 4.0.
language: English
title: God 4.0: On the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience Called “God”
publisher: Malor Books