I’ve recently been in correspondence with a young graduate student who has been dismayed to find out how much subjectivity can occur in her life when she is supposed to be a scientist, training in a hard, respected physical science. I think many people in general, who are overly impressed by science, as well as [...]
Continue reading about Ideal science and Real Science: Don’t You Dare Question My Objectivity!
Twenty five hundred years ago, Gautama Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, had some deep insights and created powerful techniques that would allow major reductions of human suffering. Traditionally the Buddha is said to found a total end to all suffering. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it’s not. I don’t know, but certainly Buddhist meditation techniques and related [...]
Continue reading about Meditation, Monasticism, Buddhism, Materialism – Preliminary Thoughts
A colleague of mine was inspired hearing about the Brian Green show (Nova: The Fabric of the Cosmos) this week on the universe, especially the parts about “dark matter” and “dark energy.” He tended to see it as validating religion. I’m all for validating or reinforcing the best aspects of religion and spirituality – after [...]
Continue reading about Do Mysteries in Science Point Us to God?
A colleague of mine, Jim Tucker, M.D., psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, wrote this excellent review of reincarnation. Tucker is one of the far too few scientists in the world actually looking at evidence for reincarnation, mainly studying young children who spontaneously recall another life. With his permission, I am circulating it. Charles T. [...]
I’ve been having a discussion with some spiritual people working toward a “trans-traditional spirituality,” and we’ve been talking about miracles. Do they discourage even trying to develop a science, even a partial science, of spirituality, or can we fit them in somehow. Since one of my main scientific interests, parapsychology, is about “miracles,” this is [...]
Continue reading about Miracles, Science, and “My Religion is Truer than Yours!”
There is a beautiful film in the works, scheduled to come out next February, about activities centered around Esalen Institute for building bridges between science and spirituality. I just got the info on it this morning from the producer, and it’s reproduced below. Feel free to pass it on. I found watching this trailer very [...]
Some years ago I spoke, as did a number of my friends and colleagues, at a parapsychology related conference in one of our beautiful but wild Northwest states. I was reminded this morning of an amusing incident at this conference. One of the speakers, a local and, I guess, probably politically influential Rancher, talked about [...]
I have been involved in a discussion on a professional list of “spiritual leaders” about the evidence for reincarnation and, more generally whether science has any value in casting light on spirituality and religion. One of the list members, an ordained Christian minister, wrote that he had a difficult time understanding my mentality. Where was [...]
Continue reading about Science and Spirit: Where I’m Coming From and How I’m Doing It:
A physicist friend recently wrote me how impressed he was reading about an old parapsychology experiment, the Philip Experiment, in which participants in table-rapping sessions invented their own discarnate entity, complete with biography and actually got “him” (Philip) to manifest with movements of the table and raps coming from it. The séance participants had a great [...]
Continue reading about I Didn’t Do It, The Spirits Did It! (Or maybe The Devil Made Me Do It?)
Recently my colleague Ed Kelly circulated a set of bullet points summarizing some consensus arising from the Esalen invitational Sursem conferences on the possibility of postmortem survival. The focus at these conferences had slowly widened from how do we scientifically investigate the possibility of postmortem survival per se to questions about the ultimate nature of [...]
Continue reading about What I Understand about Mind and Reality – 50 Year Perspective