Gross National Happiness Conference Panel One: How do you govern for Happiness?

How do you measure and govern for happiness? Harvard Divinity School hosted an international conference on April 13, 2019, inspired by the Gross National Happiness policies of the Kingdom of Bhutan. During this conference, academics, practitioners, politicians, corporate leaders and spiritual leaders sought answers to the question of universal happiness. This panel covered the Bhutanese statecraft on Economics and the Spirit of GNH. Panelists included Dasho Karma Tshiteem, Professor Sophus Reinert, Professor Wolfgang Drechsler, and Professor John Helliwell.

What’s eating the universe? – with Paul Davies

What are the unexplained riddles of the universe? Award-winning physicist Paul Davies talks you through the strange enigmas that have preoccupied cosmologists from ancient Greece to the present day.

Laying bare the audacious research that has led us to mind-bending solutions, Paul will tell you how we might begin to approach the greatest outstanding enigmas of all. Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and best-selling science author. He has published about 30 books and hundreds of research papers and review articles across a range of scientific fields. He is also well-known as a media personality and science populariser in several countries. His research interests have focused mainly on quantum gravity, early universe cosmology, the theory of quantum black holes and the nature of time. He has also made important contributions to the field of astrobiology, and was an early advocate of the theory that life on Earth may have originated on Mars. For several years he has also been running a major cancer research project, and developed a new theory of cancer based on tracing its deep evolutionary origins. Among his many awards are the 1995 Templeton Prize, the Faraday Prize from The Royal Society, the Kelvin Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics, the Robinson Cosmology Prize and the Bicentenary Medal of Chile. He was made a member of the Order of Australia in the 2007 Queen’s birthday honours list and the asteroid 6870 Pauldavies is named after him.

This talk was filmed at the Royal Institution on 21 September 2021.

Decoding the Brain

How does the brain retrieve memories, articulate words, and focus attention? Recent advances have provided a newfound ability to decipher, sharpen, and adjust electrical signals relevant to speech, attention, memory and emotion. Join Brian Greene and leading neuroscientists György Buzsáki, Edward Chang, Michael Halassa, Michael Kahana and Helen Mayberg for a thrilling exploration of how we’re learning to read and manipulate the mind. The Kavli Prize recognizes scientists for their seminal advances in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience – topics covered in the series “The Big, the Small, and the Complex.” This series is sponsored by The Kavli Foundation and The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

THE INCONCEIVABLE REALM A visual introduction to Mahayana Buddhist Cosmology, with MC Owens

Buddhist cosmology is typically divided into two traditions, an early, abhidharma system, which has many similarities to traditional Indian cosmology, and a later Mahayana system that, while in dialogue with both those systems, is a unique tradition unto itself, with a truly inconceivable cosmology.

On January 31, 2020, M.C. Owens gave a visual presentation for the SFDC called Escape from Samsara ( • Escape from Samsa… ), introducing the original Buddhist view of the cosmos and general understandings about Time & Space within the Buddhist tradition. The Inconceivable Realm expands upon these ideas and goes into depth exploring one of the primary concepts of Mahayana Buddhist cosmology, the Trisāhasra-mahāsāhasra-lokadhātu (‘Three Thousand, Great Thousand World-System’) – the billion-fold holographic multiverse

Cellular Immortality, a New Theory of Senescence and Rejuvenation

Rupert proposed a new hypothesis of cellular rejuvenation in an article in Nature in 1974, and in 2023 published a review article entitled ‘Cellular Senescence, Rejuvenation and Potential Immortality’ in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, summarising results of recent research, which support his hypothesis. In this talk he gives an overview of this hypothesis, which applies to cells of all kinds, including bacteria and yeasts as well as plants and animals, and he shows how it sheds new light on the nature of stem cells. In mammals, embryonic stem cells have a special property that enables them to divide indefinitely without senescing and Rupert suggests that cancerous transformations involve the hijacking of this embryonic stem cell system. He suggests ways in which this hypothesis could be tested, and shows how it could lead to new approaches in cancer therapy – by blocking the rejuvenative system that cancers have acquired. If this system were inhibited, then cancer cells might senesce like most other somatic cells and become less virulent.

This is one of six talks on potential breakthroughs in the sciences. The full series, together with course materials, including relevant chapters from Rupert’s books and scientific papers, are available for a reduced price of £35 (as of June 30, 2023).

Graham Hancock: Consciousness and the Limits of the Materialist Paradigm

 

A dialogue from Beyond The Brain 2021 – Further Reaches of Consciousness Research, with host David Lorimer, organzied by the Department of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, the Scientific and Medical Network, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and the Alef Trust.

Graham Hancock is the NY Times best-selling author of a series of controversial books, notably Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), Heaven’s Mirror (1998), Underworld (2002), Magicians of the Gods (2015) and America Before (2019), investigating the possibility of a lost advanced civilization of the Ice Age. He is also known for his work on the role of altered states of consciousness in the origins of art and religion — an interest explored in his 2005 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Man.

A Joyful Mind | Meditation and Mindfulness Documentary

Today, the accelerating pace of life poses real challenges to our wellbeing. At the same time, new understandings about meditation are shedding light on how its transformative powers can improve our daily lives. A Joyful Mind pulls back the curtain on what it means to meditate, on what modern science reveals about its benefits, and on how meditation and mindfulness can be used in workplaces and schools. This groundbreaking film serves to clear up the confusion around meditation perpetuated by the media. It features the experiences of both novice and master meditators, highlighting Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, whose teachings have touched people around the world with their clarity, wit and personal insight into how meditation can have a positive impact on our daily lives.

http://www.ajoyfulmind.com

Exploring Ball Lightning related to Cold Fusion, UFOs, Crop Circles, and Bigfoot | Simeon Hein

Research from John Hutchinson, Kenneth Shoulders, and more recently the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project, building on the discoveries and ideas of inventor Nikola Tesla, have shown how large amounts of energy can be emitted from superconducting Exotic Vacuum Objects; tightly bound, coherent electron clusters whose behavior is described by fluid vortex dynamics. Such tightly compressed energy entities are regularly produced by Cold Fusion and LENR systems. These EVOs can create “strange radiation”, antigravity, and have been called micro Ball Lightning by scientists such as Takaaki Matsumoto and Russian researchers. This presentation suggests that electric anomalies like cars stalling and batteries draining as repeatedly experienced by witnesses around non-ordinary phenomena like UFOs, orbs, and related encounters are, in fact, related to this previously unrecognized type of coherent matter and its ability to tunnel through solid surfaces, transmute chemical elements, and create sudden, high-energy discharges when these energy wave clusters collapse.