Imaginal Inspirations with David Lorimer – Kim Penberthy
Kim Penberthy is a professor of research in psychiatric medicine at the University of Virginia. Her key interests include consciousness and psychology at the end of life and research on how mindfulness can enhance the abilities and performance of humans. She is also a founding member of Be Wise, an organisation dedicated to promoting wisdom, compassion and mindfulness in medicine.
Researching Near-Death Experiences with Bruce Greyson
Bruce Greyson provides an overview of his half-century of investigation into NDEs. He describes his initial encounter with Raymond Moody as well as the creation of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. He examines the question of the evidentiality of NDEs for postmortem survival. He highlights some of the most interesting cases he has explored.
Stanislav Grof The Healing Potential of Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness
An interview with Stanislav Grof about the healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Rupert Sheldrake on the New Dawn Magazine
And that, ultimately, is the message of Science and Spiritual Practices – restore balance, heal yourself, help others, renew the world. Science relating to neuroplasticity and Sheldrake’s morphic resonance shows that our minds are malleable, even at the physical level. So-called ‘human nature’ appears more like a work in progress. This is not a road of no return; the future is what we make it. From timeless spiritual teachings to cutting-edge science, it is clear – or at least very strongly suggested – that everyone and everything is interconnected, interdependent, and from a single source. The implications of this are vast and cannot be ignored. When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.
Imaginal Inspirations with David Lorimer – Ravi Ravindra
Ravi Ravindra is a professor of Comparative Religion, Philosophy and Physics. He is the author of many books, including The Spiritual Roots of Yoga, The Gospel of St John in light of Indian Mysticism, and The Yoga of the Christ. As an international speaker, he often illuminates the common ground between Eastern and Western religions.
Article Review: Shared history of psychoanalytic and parapsychological traditions
Article Title Critically review the shared histories of the emergence of the ‘Freudian/ Kleinian psychoanalytic tradition’ and the ‘Spiritual Psychology/ Parapsychological tradition’. Can
5% have had a near-death experience — and they say it made life worth living
According to Greyson’s research, near-death experiences are fairly common. Some 10 percent to 20 percent of people who come close to death report them — about 5 percent of the population at large.
Near-Death Experiences- Dealing with Skepticism (IANDS)
How do near-death experience researchers and people who have had NDEs or similar transformative experience handle skeptics? This panel of experiencers and researchers discusses materialistic skeptics and how to handle this contrary perspective. Panelists include Dr. Eben Alexander, MD; Neal Grossman, PhD; Stephan Schwartz, and Marjorie Woollacott, PhD. The moderator is Janice Miner Holden, EdD, a leading near-death and transpersonal experience researcher, president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and editor of the "Journal of Near-Death Studies".
Imaginal Inspirations with David Lorimer – Marilyn Monk
Marilyn Monk is a molecular biologist. Studies include the mechanisms of replication and repair of DNA, cell signalling and intercellular communication, regulation of gene expression in development, deprogramming and formation of totipotent stem cells and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. She also has a longstanding interest in philosophy, psychology, religion and spirituality and is qualified as a Psychosynthesis Counsellor and Alexander Technique Teacher.
Athena Despoina Potari, DPhil
Dr Athena Despoina Potari is Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University and Lecturer at the University of Toulouse (1
Why there’s no such thing as objective reality | Greg Anderson
In the grand scheme of history, modern reality is a bizarre exception when compared to the worlds of ancient, precolonial and Indigenous civilizations, where myths ruled and gods roamed, says historian Greg Anderson. So why do Westerners today think they're right about reality and everybody else is wrong? Anderson tears into the fabric of objective reality to reveal the many universes that lie beyond -- and encourages a healthy reimagining of what other possible ways of being human could look like.
Rupert Sheldrake’s “heretical” hypothesis turns 40
The history of science is peppered with “heretics.” Galileo is a classic example, as Maddox pointed out, apparently blind to the irony. The physicist David Bohm–who was sympathetic to Sheldrake's proposal–is another: the man Einstein called his “spiritual son,” and whose ideas so perturbed Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” that he remarked “if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him”. A recent case is the astronomer Avi Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard, whose openness to entertaining evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life has become a subject of bad‐tempered dispute. Some heretics turn out to be right, others do not. The jury is still out on Sheldrake, Bohm and Loeb.
Deep Reality – Matzke & Tiller
The deep reality explored by this book combines these two ideas (QC + AI) in a conversational style between two world renowned PhD scientists. We propose that our quantum minds exist independently of and interact with our individual brains. We support this model by reviewing the research where people have directly interacted with other quantum and probabilistic systems.
Imaginal Inspirations with David Lorimer – Jeffrey Kripal
Jeffrey Kripal is an author and Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. His latest book, The Flip, synthesises neuroscience, ecology, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, philosophy of mind and comparative mysticism with his own personal experiences. Its aim is to bring humanity back into the humanities.
The Feeling of Life Itself – Christof Koch
I published a large book on consciousness, with a strikingly similar title. Consequently, and perhaps inevitably, this review will consist of a ‘compare-and-contrast’ analysis of our respective positions on this subject. We both put forward a theory as to where consciousness comes from; Koch’s is called Integrated Information Theory (IIT), mine is grounded in Process Philosophy (largely from the later work of A.N. Whitehead) combined with the ontological implications of quantum mechanics.
A Quest for Wisdom: Inspiring Purpose on the Path of Life – David Lorimer
This wide-ranging and highly-acclaimed volume brings together 25 of his essays written over the last 40 years. Among the significant thinkers featured here are many who have shone their light on his path, and which can provide enriching nourishment for readers on their own life journeys. The essays explore philosophy, meaning and spirituality; consciousness, death and transformation; and responsibility, ethics and society - all themes central to the Scientific and Medical Network, with which David has been associated for over 35 years and for whose journal, Paradigm Explorer, he has reviewed over 150 books a year. As such, these perceptive and illuminating essays explore the nature of life and death, questions of meaning and purpose, and the challenge of how we can live more harmoniously together. David hopes that readers will be inspired, as Albert Schweitzer put it, in our common task ‘to become more finely and deeply human.’
Is Consciousness the Unified Field? – John Hagelin
We show that the proposed identity between pure consciousness and the unified field may be required to account for experimentally observed 'field effects of consciousness.' We present the published results of a National Demonstration Project—in which 4,000 advanced meditators markedly reduced violent crime in Washington, DC. We briefly discuss mechanisms from quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and superstring theory that could explain the proposed link between human neurphysiology and the unified field of physics.
Imaginal Inspirations with David Lorimer – Anne Baring
Anne Baring is a Jungian analyst and author. Her most recent book, The Dream Of The Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul, is a poetic, heartfelt and spiritual quest to understand the causes of human suffering and reconnect with a deeper reality. It builds on her work on the divine feminine and dream analysis.
Revisiting Christopher Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism” – Lee Siegel
But passionate excess is often the price of original perception. The next time you close a book frustrated by the author’s “pseudo self-insight” or are taken in by someone’s “nervous, self-deprecatory humor,” the next time you find yourself repelled by the general collapse of “impulse control” and by the type of person who “sees the world as a mirror of himself,” you might want to seek solace in Lasch’s illuminations. The personality of his time, it seems, is even more the personality of ours.
David Lorimer – NEW BOOK OUT IN MARCH 2021
A Quest for Wisdom brings together 25 of David Lorimer’s highly acclaimed essays. Perceptive and illuminating, they examine the nature of life and death, questions of meaning and purpose, and the challenge of how we can live more harmoniously together. David hopes that readers will be inspired, as Dr Albert Schweitzer put it, in our common task ‘to become more finely and deeply human.’
The Soul Can Choose to Leave the Body Before a Fatal Accident
"Our soul-consciousness is very much ahead of our physical-consciousness. So, when instant death occurs through an accident, the soul is aware of what is about to happen a split second before the impact occurs and leaves the body. The soul having left, no pain is felt...These sudden transitions appear tragic and ghastly to the onlooker, but to the person who has just died, death is always wonderful."
Imaginal Inspirations with David Lorimer – Larry Dossey
Larry Dossey is a physician and author of nine books. He has become an internationally influential advocate of the role of the mind in health and the role of spirituality in healthcare.
The Economics of Biodiversity: the Dasgupta Review | The Royal Society
The Prince of Wales and Sir David Attenborough join economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta and Nobel-prize winning biologist Sir Venki Ramakrishnan to mark the publication of The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review.
Avi Loeb: ‘It would be arrogant to think we’re alone in the universe’
When Harvard professor Avi Loeb discovered possible signs of extraterrestrial activity, it caused a scandal in the research community. Is fear and conservatism stopping science from considering plausible evidence that there are aliens out there?
03/02/2021 – Tom McLeish on The Rediscovery of Contemplation Through Science
ISSR is pleased to announce that the 2021 Boyle Lecture will be given by Professor Tom McLeish, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of York, on the subject of “The Rediscovery of Contemplation Through Science”. The lecture will be given at 6.00 pm on Wednesday 3rd February 2021. However, due to the ongoing global pandemic, this year’s lecture will be available only online.