Expanding the Scope of Science
ORIGINS
David Lorimer introduces the Galileo Commission Report
REMIT
The Galileo Commission was founded in 2017 with a view to expanding the worldview of science beyond its limiting materialistic assumptions, which are seldom explicitly examined. A central and widely held assumption is that the brain generates consciousness and is therefore extinguished at death.
Following widespread consultation in 2018 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, so we encourage you to support our movement by joining the Galileo Commission either as a Professional Affiliate or a Friend. There is also a Summary Report and a Layman’s Report, and a brief summary of the argument is available in a number of languages. We encourage you to read and support Dr Athena Potari’s Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities and to read our edited book Spiritual Awakenings, which documents the transformative experiences of 57 scientists and academics.
A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities
The “Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities”, written by Dr Athena D. Potari, is a pioneering project aiming to raise awareness regarding how the prevailing paradigm of materialism affects the ways in which knowledge is approached within the context of the Humanities. In line with the Galileo Report, which discusses the importance of liberating the positive sciences from the limitations of the paradigm of scientific materialism, this Call aims at making the case for the Humanities as well. The Call explores how recent developments in scientific studies on consciousness, and the ensuing understanding that consciousness is primary and unified, can inform our understanding of what it means to be “human” with correspondingly appropriate epistemologies, as well as how we approach key areas of human activity, including ethics, politics and the environment.What people say…
Featured book
Featured podcast
The Playful Universe – Marjorie Woollacott, David Lorimer and Gary Schwartz (Eds)
This volume consists of essays by scientists and academics describing their own experiences of synchronicity and how these experiences transformed both their worldview and the way they lived their lives. We truly believe that this is a fundamentally intelligent, benevolent, creative and playful universe in which we, as individual expressions of the one Universal Mind, co-create our reality.
Recent News
Imaginal Inspirations with Diane Hennacy Powell
David Lorimer's Guest today is Dr Diane Hennacy Powell, who is a Johns Hopkins-trained neuropsychiatrist and neuroscientist, former Harvard faculty member, and an award-winning author and clinician. She began studying autism in 1987, when she spent six months with Sir Michael Rutter at the Institute for Psychiatry in London. She has served as a member of a think tank on the evolution of human consciousness at the Salk Institute, and as the Director of Research for the John E. Mack Institute. Her experimental research focuses on investigating reports of telepathy in autistic children and has been presented at international science conferences in the US and abroad. She is a polymath whose theoretical work bridges multiple scientific disciplines in its analysis of case studies in neuropsychiatry that challenge materialism’s neuro-centric model. Her 2008 book, The ESP Enigma: A Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena, presents a rational argument for a new paradigm, which is elaborated upon further in her chapter entitled Beyond Materialism and Madness in the first volume published by the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences: Is Consciousness Primary?
Archives of the Impossible: March 3-6, 2022
Rice University will be hosting a major international conference on the academic study of the paranormal on March 3-6, 2022.
Britain’s unethical Covid messaging must never be repeated – Dr Gary Sidley
Denying individuals rational choices, and an over-reliance upon subliminal influence, is both unethical and undemocratic. Transparency regarding how government departments use ‘nudge’ techniques is now long overdue.
The Case Against Vaccine Passports and Mandates – Oliver Robinson
In summary, arguments at all four levels analysed here point in the same direction: vaccine passports and mandates must be dropped immediately by any country or state that has adopted them. Vaccines have protected the elderly and vulnerable from COVID-19 since being rolled out, but that does not by any means equate to becoming a requirement for participation in society and the economy. Liberal democracies must trust the foundational principles of informed consent, bodily autonomy and equality of opportunity. We must respect those who draw different conclusions from what remains an inconclusive situation in relation to vaccine side-effects and benefits. The story is still unfolding.
Marilyn Monk on how science connects the whole world
The inability of individuals and society to perceive spiritual reality has, today, become critical. But could our crisis itself be significant? Might it be valuable, even necessary for the evolution of human consciousness?
Axiology of Nature-Consciousness Reality – Mukhopadhyay, AK
Perception cannot change the fundamentals. The fundamentals of the reality across the nature-consciousness spectrum have been described without any filter, and use of any methodological reduction orchestrated or otherwise. Consciousness-as-such, consciousness-as-experienced, and consciousness-as-articulated have been laid bare to accommodate respectively the spirit, humanities, and science. The Multiversity-inspired proposed Worldview takes care of multiple universe(s), our universe, and the four-dimensional world respectively in terms of nondual reality, biological reality and material reality, and in the process constructs an unbroken wholeness of the Akhanda reality. The relevance of the Worldview in consciousness study and the impacts on psychology and psychiatry has been discussed.
