Book excerpt: Besides outlining a new plateau of wider integrative understanding both within and beyond neuroscience, the book advances a theory and model of an integrated functional unity of consciousness and brain, inclusive of freedom of will. Its scope is wide, covering topics ranging from first principles of human awareness and apprehension and the physical foundations of consciousness, through a structured integrative view of consciousness and the brain grounded and developed in neuroscience, to the outline of the ambient contextual influences of human living. Human apprehension, language, value and rational knowing are discussed, and seen to operate within contexts of imagination, holistic sensibility, circumstances, the human condition, and higher thought.