Fenwick had already read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception in which, based upon Buddhist and other Eastern philosophies, Huxley had proposed that Consciousness is a Universal, and instead of the brain somehow creating consciousness (which is the working hypothesis of neuroscience) the brain acts as a ‘reducing valve’ normally allowing just enough of the universal consciousness through to form an ego capable of meeting everyday practical requirements, but through meditation and/or drugs such as mescaline the brain could be ‘opened up’ to allow more of the universal consciousness to stream through. If true, this implied that our everyday state of awareness offers a very limited view of reality, rather like viewing a room through the keyhole. He read that ‘art, science, music and creativity in all its forms stemmed from this ability to connect with the transcendent reality in some way’. In 1956, aged 21 and back home spending a few weeks relaxing and reading between graduating from Cambridge and continuing his medical studies at St Thomas’s hospital he was fascinated by Colin Wilson’s The Outsider presenting the concept of an independently existent transcendent reality with which creative minds connect during times of creativity. In the prologue and first three chapters ending on page 40, Fenwick tells us that he grew up in Kenya where his parents had a coffee farm within sight of the Mount Kenya, which at 5,199m (17,051 ft) is the second highest mountain in Africa after Kilimanjaro. Following a Foreword by David Lorimer, Director of the Scientific and Medical Network, the book is divided into a Prologue and twelve chapters, headed consecutively as The Birth of a Seeker Exploring Mind and Meditation The Search A Philosopher with a Difference The Battle of the Ego The Group, Working with Dreams Light and Energy Investigating Light and Energy Examining Brain Activity during Light Giving The Proof of the Pudding, and Becoming Cosmic? With two appendices it is referenced but not indexed.
The subtitle refers to his arduous journey in his search of attaining ‘cosmic transcendence’ and is unconventional in the sense that few, if any, of his fellow neuropsychiatrists have apparently wished to accompany him on this particular journey. Now in his mid eighties Dr Peter Fenwick is a distinguished British neuropsychiatrist with a lifelong interest in the mystery of the brain-mind relationship and the nature of mind. The title of this book (blurbed by Rupert Sheldrake and Larry Dossey) refers to a sense of light experienced when in a state of mental transcendence during which the distinction between self and non self is felt to dissolve away into a sense of ineffable Oneness.