Nonlocality and Exceptional Experiences: A Study of Genius, Religious Epiphany, and the Psychic – Stephan Schwartz
The paper surveys some of the most important relevant research from quantum biology, physics, psychology, medicine, anthropology, and parapsychology. It proposes that more attention should be paid to the autobiographies, correspondence, and journals of men and women to whom history unequivocally accords the designation of genius, saint, or psychic, offering examples from these sources. And it presents comparisons between ethnohistorical material and spiritual traditions, suggesting they arrive at a similar worldview. Finally, it proposes that meditation research, some examples of which are cited, be seen in the context of psychophysical self-regulation, and that it offers one powerful avenue for producing these exceptional experiences.
Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality: A Brief History of the “Sursem” Project – Edward F. Kelly
The rise of modern science, accompanied by its many technological triumphs, has led to widespread acceptance among intellectual elites of a worldview that conflicts sharply both with everyday human experience and with beliefs widely shared among the world’s institutional religions.
Is the Sun Conscious? – Rupert Sheldrake
The recent panpsychist turn in philosophy opens the possibility that self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. The organismic or holistic philosophy of nature points in the same direction. Meanwhile, field theories of consciousness propose that some electromagnetic fields actually are conscious, and that these fields are by their very nature integrative. When applied to the sun, such field theories suggest a possible physical basis for the solar mind, both within the body of the sun itself and also throughout the solar system. If the sun is conscious, it may be concerned with the regulation of its own body and the entire solar system through its electromagnetic activity, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It may also communicate with other star systems within the galaxy.
The Concept of the Soul
This volume originates in a conference organised by the Science and Religion Forum in 2012, bringing both scientific and religious perspectives. The general trajectory of thinking is indicated in my title for this review, although I could have added from soul to mind to self and then even to a denial of the reality of the self, as in Susan Blackmore.
The Collapse of Materialism
In this well argued book, lawyer Philip Comella issues a fundamental challenge to this dominant worldview by asserting that the assumption of a mind independent world is flawed...
Secular Spirituality
In this brilliant and searching study, Harald Walach argues that the Enlightenment is as yet incomplete, having thrown out the baby of spirituality along with the bathwater of dogmatic Christianity (‘science freed itself and the intellectual minds not from spirituality and its essence, but the doctrinal building’).
New Concepts of Matter, Life and Mind – Ervin Laszlo
In light of the current, revolutionary advances in the natural sciences and in the study of consciousness, the
A (very) Brief History of Certainty – IIya Prigogine
The future is uncertain; this is true for the nature we describe and this is true on the level of our own existence. But this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity. Time becomes 'construction' and creativity a way to participate in this construction.
Time, Chaos and the Laws of Physics: A 1995 Dialogue – David Lorimer
One of the overall conclusions of a rich day was that we are not at the end of physics, but rather at the end of predictability and certainty, which means including novelty and creativity. And a science in which creativity and participation in the construction of the world are intrinsic is a science, which overcomes the widespread alienation associated with the traditional scientific outlook. In Prigogine's 'new rationality', probability will no longer be seen as ignorance or science as equivalent to certainty. Time is real and the future is open: we live not simply in an 'open society' but also in an open universe.
– Erwin Schrödinger
– Prof David Bohm
– Albert Einstein
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