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
Interviews with Innocence featuring Dr. Bruce Greyson
Dr. Greyson has published more than a hundred scholarly articles about near-death experiences in peer-reviewed medical journals. He has received research grants from government agencies, from pharmaceutical companies, and from private, nonprofit research foundations. He has served on grant review boards and program planning workshops at the National Institutes of Health. He has addressed more than a hundred national and international professional conferences, including a symposium on consciousness at the United Nations and a dialogue between Western scientists and Buddhist monks in India convened by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Science and Roger Penrose – Liver Webinar, August 3-6
Science and Roger Penrose - Liver Webinar, August 3-6
Implications of the Near-Death Experience with Barbara Harris Whitfield
In this video from 2016, she describes her own near death experience that took place more than forty years ago, including a feeling of being embraced by the divine and also including a detailed review of her life up until that moment. That was a transformative experience that set the pattern for the rest of her life. As a result she became associated with researchers Kenneth Ring and Bruce Greyson at the University of Connecticut. There she discovered the correlation between near-death experience and early life trauma. She likens her particular path to “the hero’s journey” as described by the mythologist, Joseph Campbell.
Imaginal Inspirations with Vasileios Basios
Dr. Vasilieios Basios is a senior researcher at the Physics of Complex Systems Department of the University of Brussels, where he conducts interdisciplinary research on self-organisation and emergence in complex matter as well as on aspects of the foundations of complex systems. We first met in the early 1990s in Greece where a number of pioneering meetings on a science of consciousness were arranged by his mentor and our mutual friend Emilios Bouratinos, author of the seminal work Science, Objectivity and Consciousness.
Beyond Bohm: Science, Order And Creativity – Pari Center – July and August sessions
During July and August the Pari Center is offering a unique opportunity to hear and dialogue with those involved in the many aspects of David Bohm’s work and to discuss the implications of his ideas for the future. All sessions include audience participation in the form of Q&A and discussion.
Part II: Complementing Reductionism – AliciaLandman-Reiner
Life sciences today approach nature through a reductionist lens. A broadened methodology, known as Goethean science, complements that one-sided perspective. Building on the elements of the qualitative and the wholeness of organisms, novel examples of non-reductionist work in plant growth, animal, and specifically human organization, are described.
