One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness every year. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15-24, and kills over 48,300 in the US and 800,000 people globally per year. Drug overdose kills 81,000 in the US annually. The auto-immune disorder epidemic affects 24 million people in the US alone. What is going on? The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr Gabor Maté, normal – but not in the way you might think.
Dreams. What are they? An escape from reality or reality itself? Waking Life follows the dream(s) of one man and his attempt to find and discern the absolute difference between waking life and the dreamworld. While trying to figure out a way to wake up, he runs into many people on his way; some of which offer one sentence asides on life, others delving deeply into existential questions and life’s mysteries. We become the main character. It becomes our dream and our questions being asked and answered. Can we control our dreams? What are they telling us about life? About death? About ourselves and where we come from and where we are going? The film does not answer all these for us. Instead, it inspires us to ask the questions and find the answers ourselves.
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.
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.
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
Anecdotal reports of “experiential entanglements” – spontaneous mind-to-mind and mind-to-matter interactions – can be found throughout history, in all cultures, and at all educational levels. For over a century, such experiences have stimulated controlled scientific experiments to explore whether the anecdotes were best explainable as coincidence, confabulation, or genuine anomalies. Based on analysis of thousands of experiments published in peer-reviewed journals, the cumulative evidence is now clear: mind-to-mind and some forms of mind-matter interactions have been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt.
For the most part, this evidence is ignored or denied within the academic mainstream, probably because it implies that certain long-held assumptions about the nature of brain, mind and matter – assumptions that are inculcated in universities and repeated as fact in textbooks – are in some cases wrong and in others in need of radical revision. I will review the evidence for these entanglements, the resistance to the evidence, and the implications for a more mature science of the future
Dean Radin, PhD (Psychology, University of Illinois), has been Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences since 2001. He previously held appointments at Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, Bell Labs, and SRI International. Author and co-author of over 200 technical and popular articles, he has also written several books including the bestselling The Conscious Universe (HarperOne, 1997), Entangled Minds (Simon & Schuster, 2006), and Supernormal (Random House, 2013).
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.
Believing in the afterlife is one thing… proving it is another.
This year, people from around the world competed in an essay contest providing their rationale for life after death. Nearly $2 million in prize money was awarded with Las Vegas entrepreneur Robert Bigelow putting up the prize money. Jeffrey Mishlove took home half a million dollars for the winning essay.
Dr. Eben Alexander, author of “Proof of Heaven,” does not need to be convinced–he lived it. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander was taught that although NDEs feel real, they are nothing more than fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.
Then, Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness and shut down completely. Alexander spent a week in a coma. As his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. He had come back. Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.
Mishlove and Alexander come together to tackle big questions such as, what is the best evidence for postmortem survival of human consciousness? How can we accommodate this evidence within a contemporary scientific and philosophical framework? Where is research on postmortem survival leading? Join the Vail Symposium for a program that will plumb the depths of belief on this consequential topic.
PROOF THAT EVERYTHING – IS A SIMULATION (Including God) Is this reality? Well, we’re experiencing … something right now so maybe the better question is: what is reality? Could everything we see, everything we experience, everything that exists in our entire universe — be artificial? Supporters of Simulation Theory believe that not only is it possible that we’re living in a simulation; it’s likely. And the more we look for evidence, the more we find. Philip K Dick believed deja vu was the simulation adjusting to new code. Many people experience The Mandela Effect, a or “false memory” shared by a large number of people. But the biggest clues of Simulation Theory come from science. Specifically: quantum mechanics. The only way the Double-Slit Experiment makes sense is if we live in a program. Quantum Entanglement also defies logic. Only our program would have the ability to defy the laws of physics – and the concept of time. Let’s find out why.
Brenda Dunne explains how she began to work at the PEAR Lab (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research). This institute was conducting formal research in psychokinesis (the effect of the mind over matter), and in remote viewing. It was founded Robert Jahn, former dean of the school of Engineering at Princeton University. She presents the results of their studies, and how it implies that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the reality we experience.
