The 1st International Congress of Conscientiology (Consciousness Science) is IAC's next major scientific event. The ICC will take place May 22 - 24, 2015. A call for papers is coming up, with entries due by July 31, 2014.
You can get a taste of the lovely region that houses IAC Campus, the event host, with this tourism video
In previous IAC blog posts, we have discussed the hypothesis that living beings, including humans and animals, can co-create and tap into a sort of teleological field of collective consciousness or global mind, as Larry Dossey has recently called it. This hypothesis of consciousness as a driving force behind bíos, Life itself, that can co-create and change information fields is not new, but has been gaining increasing attention in the last decades due to contributions by researchers such as Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn, Roger Nelson, Dean Radin, and Rupert Sheldrake among others. Holothosenes (Waldo Vieira), morphogenetic or morphic fields (Rupert Sheldrake), Source (Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn) are new nomenclature for what theologian and anthropologist Theillard de Chardin called neosphere last century.
The use of such collective fields for the conduct and evolution of animals is what biologist and consciousness researcher Sheldrake coined theory of formative causation, whereby
individual members of a species can tap into an information "field" or
memory or map that contains memory from past experiences, how to behave,
and what to look like. This information can spread quite quickly and
across vast distances, allowing monkeys in distance islands to learn a
new way of washing sand off of potatoes; or blue tit birds "copying" new
behavior they could not have seen because they were too far away
(opening milk bottles). We elaborated on this consciential neo-lamarckean, consciousness-driven hypothesis of biological evolution in a previous blogpost. Keep an eye out for the next "Zoo- and Phyto-Consciousness" course by IAC's Nelson Abreu to learn more as well!
Global emotional events are also posited to create a condition of resonance among millions of individuals, in effect, introducing greater order or reducing the entropy or randomness in this consciousness field with a mirroring effect in the physical world, whereby otherwise random or stochastic physical systems because less so. Global Consciousness Project's network of random number or random event generators, first studied extensively at Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, monitors such events. The most recent monitors such events. The most recent event of interest for the GCP was the death of the beloved South African independence and human rights and peace advocate Nelson Mandela.
Recent articles on UK media cover the idea of this "consciousness field" in humans and other life forms. For instance:
On his blog, lucid projector and author Robert Peterson has compiled book reviews of publications on out-of-body experience or projection of the consciousness. Peterson's own book is available online.
There seems to be a range of ways in which people use the concepts of lucid
dreaming and what I call “projection of consciousness” but others may refer to
as “astral projection” or “out-of-body experience” (OBE). In this post I explain
how those terms are used from the perspective of projectiology (the study of the
projection of consciousness).
First, it is good
to be aware that there are two fundamentally different approaches to
understanding these kinds of experiences. One is the “psychological model”.
According to this model any experiences we have, whether we call them “lucid
dream” or “astral projection”, are only taking place within our own psyche.
Basically, this model has the underlying assumption that consciousness is a
product of matter and all our experiences take place in the brain. This model
dominates most mainstream scientific research into dreams and is also the
starting point for some lucid dream researchers. The other is the “projection
model”. This model assumes that we can actually leave the physical body in some
other body and experience ourselves on another dimension of manifestation.
According to this model, consciousness is something beyond matter; consciousness
is not created by matter, it simply uses matter to manifest in this
dimension.
During advanced meditative practices, unusual perceptions can arise including the sense of receiving information about unknown people who are deceased. As with meditation, this mental state of communication with the deceased involves calming mental chatter and becoming receptive to subtle feelings and sensations. Psychometric and brain electrophysiology data were collected from six individuals who had previously reported accurate information about deceased individuals under double-blind conditions. Each experimental participant performed two tasks with eyes closed. In the first task, the participant was given only the first name of a deceased person and asked 25 questions. After each question, the participant was asked to silently perceive information relevant to the question for 20 s and then respond verbally. Responses were transcribed and then scored for accuracy by individuals who knew the deceased persons. Of the four mediums whose accuracy could be evaluated, three scored significantly above chance (p < 0.03). The correlation between accuracy and brain activity during the 20 s of silent mediumship communication was significant in frontal theta for one participant (p < 0.01). In the second task, participants were asked to experience four mental states for 1 min each: (1) thinking about a known living person, (2) listening to a biography, (3) thinking about an imaginary person, and (4) interacting mentally with a known deceased person. Each mental state was repeated three times. Statistically significant differences at p < 0.01 after correction for multiple comparisons in electrocortical activity among the four conditions were obtained in all six participants, primarily in the gamma band (which might be due to muscular activity). These differences suggest that the impression of communicating with the deceased may be a distinct mental state distinct from ordinary thinking or imagination.