Category: Talks

Time, Space, and Consciousness, Part One: The Nature of Light, with Fred Alan Wolf

Fred Alan Wolf, PhD, is a theoretical physicist who left academia and has spent his career exploring the mystical realms where consciousness and physics interface. He received the National Book Award for Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Non-Scientists. His other books include The Spiritual Universe: How Quantum Physics Proves the Existence of the Soul, The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet, Parallel Universes: The Search for Other Worlds, The Eagle’s Quest: A Physicist Find Scientific Truth at the Heart of the Shamanic World, Space Time and Beyond, Mind Into Matter: A New Alchemy of Science and Spirit, Matter Into Feeling, Dr. Quantum’s Little Book of Big Ideas, The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time, and Time Loops and Space Twists: How God Created the Universe.

Here he discusses Einstein’s thought experiment, imagining what it would be like riding on a photon at the speed of light. He notes that many experiments have now shown conclusively that time actually slows down as one’s speed approaches the speed of light. This phenomena is related to the lifespan of pi meson sub-atomic particles as their speed approaches that of light. At the speed of light, itself, time stops completely and space also disappears. Thus, one might say that a photon is located everywhere in time and space at once. He also points out that Einstein developed the notion of “space-time” as a single concept or “block” of measurement. In addition, the “now” moment is relative to each observer and not necessarily simultaneous for everyone.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). His master’s degree is in criminology. He teaches parapsychology for ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living through the Holmes Institute. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities. His American Indian name, chosen at age eight, is Soaring Eagle.

Brian Keating & Garrett Lisi on E8 & String Theory – Theory of Every0ne Live 5.24.22

Tonight we look at a discussion between Brian Keating, professor of physics at UCSD and creator of the “Into the Impossible” podcast, and Garrett Lisi, theoretical physicist and founder of the Pacific Science institute. Garrett Lisi is known for his attempt to unify physics using the beautiful geometric structure of E8.

AI-Generated Philosophy Is Weirdly Profound

 

Sources: Zizek’s Ontology by Johnston

Transgressing the Boundary by Sokal

What the Sokal Affair Does and Does Not Prove by Sokal

The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel

Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit by Kojeve

2001: A Space Odyssey

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Ellison

Lectures on The Philosophy of History by Hegel

The Sublime Object of Ideology by Zizek

The Other Side of Psychoanalysis by Lacan

The Desire of Psychoanalysis by Tupinambá

 

 

Dr. Ruth Kastner and the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics

In this episode I am looking forward to exploring more about alternate interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. In previous episodes exploring consciousness, I’ve encountered several people who believe that Quantum Mechanics is at the root of consciousness. My current thinking is that it replaces one mystery with another one without really providing an explanation for consciousness. We are still stuck with the options of consciousness being a pre-existing property of the universe or some aspect of it, vs. it being an emergent feature of a processing network. Either way, quantum mechanics is an often misunderstood brilliant theory at the root of physics. It tells us that basic particles don’t exist at a specific position and momentum—they are, however, represented very accurately as a smooth wavefunction that can be used to calculate the distribution of a set of measurements on identical particles. The process of observation seems to cause the wavefunction to randomly collapse to a localized spot. Nobody knows for certain what causes this collapse. This is known as the measurement problem. The many worlds theorem says the wavefunction doesn’t collapse. It claims that the wavefunction describes all the possible universes that exist and the process of measurement just tells us which universe we are living in.

My guest is a leading proponent of transactional quantum mechanics.

TDr. Ruth E. Kastner earned her M.S. in Physics and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Maryland. Since that time, she has taught widely and conducted research in Foundations of Physics, particularly in interpretations of quantum theory. She was one of three winners of the 2021 Alumni Research Award at the University of Maryland, College Park (https://tinyurl.com/2t56yrp2). She is the author of 3 books: The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Theory: The Reality of Possibility (Cambridge University Press, 2012; 2nd edition just published, 2022), Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles (Imperial College Press, 2015); and Adventures In Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality (World Scientific, 2019). She has presented talks and interviews throughout the world and in video recordings on the interpretational challenges of quantum theory, and has a blog at transactionalinterpretation.org. She is also a dedicated yoga practitioner and received her 200-Hour Yoga Alliance Instructor Certification in February, 2020.

Imagination as the ground of reality, with Patrick Harpur

In this wide-ranging interview, one of our favorite scholars, Patrick Harpur, discusses the fundamental role of the imagination in human history, the human mind, and reality at large. He also discusses the daimons, those elusive, contradictory figures who inhabit minds and the world, but who appear only to those with the eyes to see. Harpur’s extensive, extraordinary, life-transforming body of work is one of the most criminally underrated in modern scholarship.

This video has human-created English subtitles, so don’t forget to click on the ‘CC’ button below the video to enable them.

Books by Patrick Harpur:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=patrick+harpur&i=stripbooks-intl-ship&crid=189YQ79HZX76L&sprefix=patrick+harpur%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C352&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

Iain McGilchrist: The Coincidence of Opposites

Ralston College presents a lecture by Dr Iain McGilchrist followed by a discussion with Dr Stephen Blackwood and questions from the audience. In his lecture Dr McGilchrist deals with certain themes that are treated at greater length in his recent book The Matter With Things. He focuses especially upon the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), which he explores (providing an extraordinary range of illustrative examples) in such a way as to make manifest both its universality and its particular relevance to our present historical moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh – Oprah Winfrey | Full Length Interview

This is the full-length version of a truly insightful, deep and powerful Interview. Oprah Winfrey talks to Thich Nhat Hanh about becoming a monk, meeting Martin Luther King Jr; The powers of mindfulness, insight, concentration and compassion, how to transform warring parties and how to deeply transform relationships.

The Afterlife and the Unconscious Mind with Betty Kovács: New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove

Betty J. Kovács, PhD, taught symbolic/mythic language for twenty-five years. She has served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Jung Society of Claremont, California, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of Forever Family Foundation. Dr. Kovacs is author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, winner of The Scientific and Medical Network 2019 Book Prize and a Nautilus Silver Award. She has also written The Miracle of Death: There Is Nothing But Life. Her website is www.kamlak.com.

Here she explains that consciousness is infinite and that, ultimately, there is no real separation between our waking consciousness, our subconscious mind, and the afterlife. It is all one. However, that realization is difficult to maintain in the face of daily life’s necessities. She describes several powerful examples of both archetypal, visionary experiences and after-death communications. They blend into each other. She closes with a riveting prophetic vision.