Expanding the Scope of Science
How it all started…
David Lorimer introduces the Galileo Commission Report
GALILEO COMMISSION REMIT
The world today is dominated by science and by its underlying assumptions, which are seldom explicitly articulated. The Galileo Commission’s remit is to open public discourse and to find ways to expand science so that it can accommodate and explore important human experiences and questions that science, in its present form, is unable to integrate.
Following widespread consultation with 90 advisers representing 30 universities worldwide, we have published the Galileo Commission Report, written by Prof Dr Harald Walach and entitled Beyond a Materialist Worldview – Towards an Expanded Science. The report has been widely endorsed as a groundbreaking document and we encourage you to read it for yourself and spread the word among your professional network. Summaries of the argument are available in a number of languages.
Book of the month
Video of the month
Spiritual Awakenings – Marjorie Wollacott & David Lorimer (Eds)
Scholars share the experience of their own spiritual awakening and journey, including encountering challenges to their credibility in academia, if they shared these experiences. Their comments about transformation in values, beliefs, and approaches toward life are very moving, expressing a deep inner wisdom and connection, not only with humanity, but with the earth and cosmos.
Advice to my Younger Self
Recent News
Does Mystical Experience Give Access to Reality? – Paul Marshall
There are reasons for the neglect, and in the present article I consider two major theoretical obstacles to finding metaphysical significance in the experiences: a radical form of contextualism and a reductionist approach to neuroscience. With these obstacles addressed, there is room to consider how mystical experience and metaphysics can be brought into dialogue, a task facilitated by the contemporary resurgence of interest in alternatives to materialist metaphysics and a renewed interest in mystical experience encouraged by psychedelic research.
Gerard Kuiken on the Pushing Boundaries podcast – False Dualities, Space-time, Life-death
Gerard proposes that without a limitation there is no existence and that the brain is the tool for setting up limitations and controlling the consciousness of differences. In this way, 'man becomes aware of himself by limitation and experiences that as the awakening of his own world. Time is part of the form world and the formless world is timeless, a formulation corresponding to insights from near-death and mystical experience. Life and death are complementary in the sense that in life, spirit is beyond space-time and substance is in space-time.
Back to the Aether in Physics and Cosmology – Adrian Klein
The concept of a universal medium pervading everything, the aether, has been long ago rejected by mainstream science as a speculative one, especially after the famous Michelson-Morley experiment that failed to confirm the reality of a luminiferous essence invoked for the propagation of E.M. waves. Nevertheless, the concept has been re-established as a serious, experimentally proven one, by the work of Nicola Tesla, the genial physicist widely recognized in modern academic circles. His achievements are quite unparalleled in experimental physics, and recently recalled to public attention by Serbian researcher Goran Marjanovic – whose papers have been published in various academic editorial outputs of high credibility.
A Scientifically Acceptable Mechanism for the Reincarnation Process of the Self – Adrian Klein
We propose a novel paradigmatic approach to sentient reality as a whole, with specific application to Information-guided DNA dynamics, leading to a triadic genomic configuration , which accommodates besides the parental hereditary legacy, a transcendental originating highly complex guiding matrix able to control the specific way the protein-synthesis is performed.
Synchronicity and the IChing – Shantena Sabbadini
Shantena Sabbadini talks about Synchronicity and the IChing
Six Days: Reason as a Cosmic Phenomenon – Alexei Tsvelik
The book gives a popular description of the cosmogenesis as viewed by the modern science, but with a teleological twist putting homo sapiens into a cosmic perspective. The appearance of human species is considered as a final step in a long succession of events from the Big Bang to present times. Starting from a structureless state of the newborn Universe the cosmogenesis then goes through the succession of aeons (“days”) characterized by increased complexity of the emergent structures culminating in the appearance of the most complex physical objects presently known—human brains. Each “day” prepares a ground for the next breakthrough in complexity. It is demonstrated that appearance of ever more complex structures cannot be taken for granted, but is highly conditional on a very special structure of the laws of physics.
