Overview: What Lies Beyond answers two questions: What’s beyond the functional, mechanistic, and materialistic conceptions of life and consciousness? And why does that matter today?

Verdict: From an overview of paranormal and mystical experiences - in the context of the prevailing mechanistic, materialist view of mind and life - to exploring why the mystery of consciousness remains hard and the reasons for doubting that this mystery will be resolved in mechanistic terms, this book aims to encourage open enquiry.

For the reader who feels a bit lost, alienated, or disturbed by today’s aggressive scientism and technology worship, these pages offer alternative, more open approaches that reject neither science nor technology but rather insist upon a more humanistic outlook that’s sensitive to the vast but often hidden range of human experience.

For me, I have always been overtly curious about any and all things that relate to paranormal and mystical experiences, but here in What Lies Beyond: Consciousness, Science, the Paranormal, and the Post-Material Future by author Matt Colborn, the subject matter is deep dived into from a varying amount of angles and therein brings forth an incredibly thoughtful, dutifully designed book for us all to ourselves to, well, deep dive into.

As we all know, paranormal experiences encompass events or occurrences that seem to defy scientific explanation and are often attributed to supernatural or magical forces. Mystical experiences, on the other hand, are deeply personal and subjective encounters that involve a profound sense of connection to a higher power or a transcendent reality. While both involve experiences beyond everyday perception, they differ in their nature and interpretation.

Thus what Matt expertly does here is ask us to pay dedicated attention to both of these when seeking alternative worldviews to blinkered scientific materialism, for they not only have the potential to help and guide us with what life has planned but grant us an instructively grounded understanding of the world and its workings, as a whole.

About the Author - Matt Colborn is an author, lecturer, broadcaster and artist with an academic background in cognitive science and consciousness studies. He lives in Bourne, UK.

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