Documentary by Frauke Sandig & Eric Black. The ending of the Mayan Calendar in 2012 is now part of our own manufactured mythology, but for the source of our demise, there is no need to look to the esoteric: The remote homelands of the present-day Maya in Mexico and Guatemala present a perfect microcosm to show how unhindered globalization is impacting the planet and indigenous peoples, now under attack for their natural resources from all sides.
The film follows six young Maya into their daily and ceremonial life, revealing their determination to resist the destruction of their culture and environment. They put forth an entirely indigenous perspective in their own words, without narration. Their cosmovision is juxtaposed with a shortsighted exploitation of the Earth.
“I found AWARE to be in many ways the most moving and beautiful depiction of deep understanding of consciousness and of who we are that I have seen depicted through film.” – Jack Kornfield, author and Buddhist teacher “
Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness is a heady experience – dare I say spiritual? – that stirs feelings of awe and wonder, humility and connection… the film creates a contemplative openness that words alone might find hard to describe. It’s a remarkable film.” – Valerie Kalfrin, Alliance of Women Film Journalists
What is consciousness? Is it in all living beings? What happens when we die? Why do we seem to be hardwired for mystical experience? In these times of existential crisis, there has been an explosion of research into consciousness. AWARE follows six brilliant researchers, approaching the greatest of all mysteries from radically different perspectives, from within and without: through high-tech brain research and Eastern meditation, by scientifically exploring inner space through psychedelic substances and by investigating the consciousness of plants.
With Richard Boothby, Monica Gagliano, Roland Griffiths, Josefa Kirvin Kulix, Christof Koch, Matthieu Ricard and Mingyur Rinpoche
For 20 years, Lynne McTaggart, an internationally bestselling and award-winning author, has been uncovering your birthright – the miraculous power of intention. In this interview, Lynne McTaggrt shares her knowledge on the importance of connection, relationships, and community.
Moss is as unlikely to fascinate philosophers as, say, cockroaches or dust. But if we scratch the surface of that indifference, something else entirely seems to be hiding just beneath it. Each in his own way, Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche tell us one and the same thing: moss is inassimilable to metaphysics. Condensing in miniature the entire kingdom Plantae, these tiny plants comprising approximately 14,000 species throw a formidable challenge to thinking based on oppositions, to linear chronologies, and to conventional theorizations of energy. From the outside, they support projects that aim to revolutionize philosophy, to convert philosophy back to life from its obsession with death. Seen through a child’s eyes, moss becomes as cognitively fresh and refreshing as it is vividly, dazzlingly green.
Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology. He is the author of many books and countless academic articles that engage with a critique of anthropocentrism in philosophy accounting for non-human types of existence especially with respect to the ontology of plants and their modes of being. His most recent publications include: Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); “The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium” (2014); “Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze” (2015); “Dust” (2016); “Grafts” (2016); with Luce Irigaray, “Through Vegetal Being” with Luce Irigaray (2016); and “Energy Dreams: Of Actuality” (2017), Political Categories: Thinking beyond Concepts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)
The Nobel Prize in physics in 2022 went the scientists who, for over 40 years, have carried out a series of experiments indicating that, contrary to materialist expectations, physical entities do not have standalone existence but are, in fact, products of observation. This result is extraordinarily relevant to our understanding of the nature of reality, and so Essentia Foundation, in collaboration with the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Vienna, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (home to Prof. Anton Zeilinger, one of this year’s Nobel Laureates in physics), organized a conference discussing the implications of this result. The conference was hosted by IQOQI-Vienna’s Dr. Markus Müller and featured seven other speakers. In this presentation, Dr. Jacques Pienaar discusses the notion of an embodied agent in the context of Quantum Bayesianism (‘QBism,’ for short). QBism is an interpretation of quantum mechanics according to which the wave function represents simply what we know about reality—a kind of betting strategy about what we will see next—as opposed to reality itself.
Emerging technologies have unprecedented potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. Among the most powerful — and controversial — is the gene-editing tech, CRISPR-Cas9, which will improve agricultural yields, cure genetic disorders, and eradicate infectious diseases like malaria. But CRISPR and other disruptive technologies, like brain-machine interfaces and artificial intelligence, also pose complex philosophical and ethical questions. Perhaps no one is better acquainted with these questions than Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation and co-founder of Singularity University and Human Longevity Inc. In this session, Peter will give a state of the union on the near future and explore the profound ethical implications we will face in the ongoing technological revolution.
Original film description: YOGI (yo-ge): An individual who has spent years in isolated retreat practicing secret self-transforming physical and mental exercises, and through these techniques has developed extraordinary control over both mind and body. The yogis in this film took unprecedented risks. Once vowed to extreme secrecy to maintain then purity of their practices, they agreed to these unique interviews and rare demonstrations to help preserve for posterity their vanishing culture.
The perceptions we observe may well be coming from an artificial source. Suppose we could take our brain out of our body and keep it alive in a glass jar. Put a computer in which all kinds of information can be recorded. Transmit the electrical signals of all the data related to a setting such as image, sound and smell into this computer. Connect this computer to the sensory centers in our brain with electrodes and send the pre-recorded data to our brain. As our brain perceives these signals it will see and live the setting correlated with these.
