Whatever form the new, historically dynamic mystical experiment might take, he declared, it might be "embodied in naturalistic and secular forms of consciousness" that found their core Scriptures in the natural world rather than in any traditional religious concepts.
Konner's ability to accommodate ancient memory and modern consciousness, religious identity and secular peoplehood, serves him well in his treatment of Israel.
Rather than organize a political network, the teachers often introduced their students more informally to the Brotherhood's precepts of Islamic activism, political consciousness, and violent jihad against Christian occupiers or secular leaders.
The supposedly secular west still clings to the Abrahamic notion that only humans possess consciousness – or souls – and that this gives us the right, or the duty, to run the world.
Despite decades of social upheaval and rapacious expansion, Pamuk's Istanbul remains haunted by its own "eternal past"; indeed, Mevlut himself personifies this divided consciousness, drifting amiably between old world and new, traditional and secular values.
The leaders rejected the soft meliorism of more secular activists, the idea that significant progress could be made through consciousness-raising and education campaigns, through consensus and gradual reform.
The works of Shakespeare, he argues, constitute a secular Bible as well as the only map that we possess to a supremely gifted human consciousness.
His previous non-fiction books were Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era (1998) on the impacts of technological advances on humanism, The Secular Grail: Paradigms of Perception (1993) regarding the human psyche, and The Immaculate Perception (1986) on his views of consciousness, language and dreams.
He grew up, secular, in Tucson, then Santa Barbara, and characterizes himself as a "psychedelic Bolshevik" in his younger years, "into revolution, into altered consciousness".
