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
SPR Zoom event 12th Dec – PSI and Post-materialist Science
The old-fashioned materialistic paradigm was overthrown a century ago with the advent of relativity and quantum theory and more recent developments across a variety of academic disciplines point to a new “post-materialist” paradigm which could accommodate a host of phenomena – including consciousness – previously considered beyond the domain of science. This is the theme of the recent ground-breaking Galileo Commission Report, written by Harald Walach and initiated by the Scientific and Medical Network. This (virtual) Study Day will bring together four people (including Harald himself) who have played a crucial role in advocating and promoting this new paradigm. The day will end with a general discussion and audience participation.
Bridging Science and Spirit
We arrive at a conclusion that science is a path to self-knowledge and that ‘Science and Spirit are a necessary unity.’ At the time of writing, people are coming together to meditate whereby we create a field ‘raising the symmetry of space’ and creating an atmosphere that is coherent and palpable in sacred places. In the case of advanced saints and sages like Padre Pio, this may even result in the physical body becoming incorruptible, somehow transforming the very matter normally subject to entropic decay. All this gives pause for thought, while the book as a whole points way beyond our current conceptual limits.
The Oxford Research Centre In The Humanities Discusses Iain McGilchrist’s Work – 26th November
The Oxford Research Centre In The Humanities has announced that on Thursday (26th November 2pm-3pm GMT) there will be a book reading which will focus on a discussion of the book by Commission adviser and author of the Foreword of the Galileo Commission Report Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary.
The Imaginal Inspirations Podcast – David Lorimer
Imaginal cells are responsible for the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly, the Greek symbol for the soul. These cells are dormant in the caterpillar but at a critical point of development they create the new form and structure which becomes the butterfly. In the podcast series Imaginal Inspirations, David Lorimer talks to transformational authors and scientists about the experiences, people and books that have shaped their life and work.
David Lorimer on the Conversation beyond Science and Religion podcast
But like old Procrustes, modern science continues to force the facts to fit the theory, imagining new particles, new forces, and ever more worlds to explain the features of our universe. The book, Science, Consciousness & Ultimate Reality, edited by this week’s guest, David Lorimer, contains 11 articles by prominent thinkers all pointed in the same direction: consciousness, not mind, must be fundamental to the workings of the universe. At some point, science will be unable to ignore the facts, and it too will change.
An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang – Sarah Kapton
An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics.
