Natural food pioneer and fractal artist Gregory Sams’ new book Sun of gOd: Discover the Self-Organizing Consciousness That Underlies Everything is simply one of the wisest, most lucid, and thoughtfully written books that I’ve ever encountered on integrating spirituality with science and other disciplines. Sams makes the outrageous and heretical proposal that “a universal consciousness pervades all matter,” and that everything in the universe is alive with consciousness and intelligence. Then, audaciously, he asks us to consider the even more radical possibility that our Sun is “a living conscious being, with an intelligence that dwarfs our own...aware of itself and its place in the universe.”

However, Sams suggests that “the invisible world of spirit, a world that science denies and religion mystifies, is perhaps more real and tangible than we have ever imagined.” Weaving together new findings from astronomy, the frontiers of chaos theory and other sciences, with the wisdom of mystics from numerous cultures--as well as his own personal insights--Sams creates an extremely compelling case for the notion that all matter in the universe is alive with consciousness and that the Sun is nothing less than a celestial deity, living in a galactic community with other stellar beings.

Sams describes a universe that is overflowing with self-organizing intelligence and creative design, but without the need for any kind of an omniscient omnipotent intelligent designer. He helped to illuminate my childhood intuition that all aspects of the universe are aware with living spirit, and he helped to clarify my mystically-inspired hunch that the entire cosmos is a single living organism. As a child, I had always assumed that everything was conscious, and that all inanimate “things” were actually “people.” I think that many children, and most primitive societies, share this intuition about the natural world, and that deep inside, on some level, we all still remember this--that the sky, the wind, the stars, and the Earth are all alive.

Sams helps us to recover this forgotten memory, and as he reviews the history of humanity’s interaction with the world of spirit, he makes it clear that it was the Christian Church that prohibited people from thinking about the Sun as a conscious being--not any discovered scientific evidence. The Christian Church was so threatened by the pagan practice of Sun-worship that they achieved their nefarious ends by burning all known early writings on the subject, and torching anyone alive at the stake who held unauthorized beliefs, including scientists and scholars.

Brimming with fascinating scientific facts, little-known historical anecdotes, and a treasure chest of wonderful quotes from mystics and other luminaries that enrich Sams’ thought-provoking ideas, I think that this book is destined to play a vital role in the elevation of global consciousness. I was really swept up by this enchanting book and had great difficulty putting it down. It’s a marvelously written, unusually insightful, and extremely well-integrated discussion about the origins of religion and the evolution of consciousness, and it radically refreshes our view of the world--by helping us to recognize that we’re always in the presence of a radiant celestial deity.

Although Sun-worshippers may be ridiculed in contemporary society, let us rejoice in our freedom to express these liberating ideas, and interact with the Sun however we choose--without the fear of being burned alive at the stake! I highly recommend this inspiring book to anyone interested in well-developed unorthodox ideas about science and religion, and especially to those who are interested in dissolving the artificial barrier that our culture has perilously constructed between the natural and the spiritual world.

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Sun of gOd: Discover the Self-Organizing Consciousness That Underlies Everything
By Gregory Sams
Foreword by Graham Hancock
Weiser Books, San Francisco, 2009
Softbound, illustrated, 236 pages, $17.95.

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David Jay Brown is the author of seven books about the future of science and consciousness, including Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse and Mavericks of Medicine. He holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University, and was responsible for the California-based research in two of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s books on unexplained phenomena in science. David’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Scientific American, Discover, and Wired, and he is periodically the Guest Editor of the MAPS Bulletin. To find out more about David’s work visit his award-winning Web site:

www.mavericksofthemind.com

http://www.sunofgod.net