Science meets Spirituality in Consciousness
From the monthly archives:
I’ve been reading a book from the Institute of Noetic Sciences – IONS – titled “Living Deeply.” It’s a study of the process of transformation in people’s lives, the kind of transformation that is life changing because it changes our consciousness, or our world view. The authors define consciousness as how we perceive the world, [...]
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Wes Hopper
We are at a very interesting tipping point in history, one that humanity has not seen for 300 or so years. That point is a substantial shift in world view from one of solely deterministic mechanical processes that create an external reality independent of ourselves, to a world view in which we realize that we are creative beings living in a participatory universe.
This tipping point has arisen because advances in science over the last 100 years, and especially recently, have made it impossible for any open minded investigator to ignore the incompleteness of the materialist model that has dominated science since Copernicus.
Monistic Idealism is designed to explore the intersection of hard science, consciousness studies and spirituality by discussing new research, publications and commentary on these issues. As in any emerging discipline there are more questions than answers, but it is encouraging that there are more and more very smart people addressing them.
I'm not a research scientist myself, I'm an electronics engineer with a deep interest in these ideas, and an active skepticism about the wild leaps taken by many New Age writers who like to attach "quantum" to everything to make it sound scientific. There is plenty of real science to be excited about without going off the deep end. Your comments are encouraged.
Here is a PDF of a paper I presented in October, 2009 at a conference on Science and Religion. I maintain that the unifying factor between those two areas is consciousness, and that there are numerous science problems that cannot be solved without somehow incorporating consciousness as a causal element.
The Emerging Importance of Consciousness in Physics
Please note that just because it was a Science and Religion conference doesn't mean that I think that materialist, deterministic science, and literalistic ancient religion can agree. I'm an optimist, not a magician. The conference attracted the open minded from both camps.
