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“Perhaps the place to start is to say that non-locality is simply a fan cified word for infinitude,” Dossey told me one luminous day in July 2006.“If consciousness is non-local, then it is infinite in space and time. If something is infinite in space, it’s omnipresent. If it’s infinite in time, it’s eternal, or immortal. So you can see that from the get-go there’s theological dynamite that’s hooked up with this idea of non-local mind.”

Larry Dossey and his wife, Barbie, had invited me to their rustic home on a mountainside overlooking Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dossey, a tall, lean Texan with a mane of white hair parted in the middle, began his career as an Army battalion surgeon in Vietnam, then moved to internal medicine for fourteen years before turning to the pen. When I met him, he had already authored ten books on healing and spirituality.

When I, a stranger, wrote at the last minute requesting an interview while I was passing through New Mexico, Dossey set aside the entire afternoon before he and his wife left for vacation. It turned out to be one of his last mobile days that summer. Two weeks later, as the couple rode out of the Wind River Mountain wilderness area in Wyoming, Dossey was thrown from his horse. He broke his back, fracturing the twelfth thoracic vertebra. Because a helicopter could not land anywhere nearby, the Vietnam vet walked through the night nearly ten hours to civilization, in excruciating pain.

Dossey has taken as much incoming fire from his scientist colleagues as he did from the Viet Cong.What he proposes is a revolution in science. If non-local mind were merely the equivalent of the Divine Watchmaker, who created the universe and then let it tick away on its own, the idea would unsettle fewer of his colleagues. But Dossey’s claim is far more galling: he suggests that this non-local mind interacts—has a relationship, even—with a person’s individual, local mind, in the same way that many Christians or Jews believe that God interacts with people. According to Dossey and a growing number of scientists (along with most of the American population), this cosmic consciousness permeates our world and soaks into our human affairs.

Think of your “local” mind as your personal computer. You can keep files and write documents that no one else can access. “Non-local” mind is like the Internet: it contains enormous amounts of information, shared by billions of people (potentially by everyone on earth), and is always available for you to access with your individual mind.10

Dossey theorizes that your consciousness shares qualities with non-local mind, that the local and the infinite are “two sides of the same coin.” This may seem far-fetched until you begin reading the mystics or practicing meditation or listening to anyone who has enjoyed a profoundly spiritual experience. They witness to being “at one” with the universe and God, feeling the boundlessness of the infinite, and experiencing “the divine within.” And if there is a dialogue, so to speak, between your mind and the larger non-local mind, then it follows that your mind could do things that modern science says is impossible, such as impact other minds or know things that you simply should not know.

“One of the things that scientists have had a difficult time doing is to imagine how consciousness might behave non-locally,” Dossey observed. “That it might exert its effects beyond the individual brain and the body, as in the stuff that parapsychology deals with, like ESP, clairvoyance, this sort of thing. And, we must add, intercessory prayer, which has always been a claim of all major religions. So it has been verboten to suggest that this actually happens, that the mind can behave non-locally, because every respectable scientist is dragooned into the notion that, by definition, that can’t happen.”

Dossey leaned forward in his chair and gazed at me with his penetrating eyes. “Here’s the problem: The data hasn’t gotten the message. The data doesn’t know it’s not supposed