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…
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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.
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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.
