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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
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Featured book
Featured podcast
Spiritual Awakenings – Marjorie Wollacott & David Lorimer (Eds)
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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.
Recent News
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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".
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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.