A selection of talks (more to come)
Transcending the Seven Limitations: Does Mind Extend into the World at Large?—The Evidence of Nature Mystical Experience (click to access)
Scientific and Medical Network, Manchester, 2007
It is commonly believed that consciousness is generated by the brain (Generation Postulate) and limited to the brain (Limitation Postulate). In this talk, I take a look at seven limitations on consciousness that follow from these assumptions and raise two kinds of evidence, parapsychological and especially mystical, that undermine them.
Mystical Experiences of the Natural World (click to access)
Manchester Metropolitan University, 2006
The phenomenology, occurrence, circumstances, consequences, and explanation of nature mystical (‘extrovertive’) experiences.
Space for Psi: A Philosophical Perspective (click to access)
Society for Psychical Research, London, 2004
Four puzzles – psi phenomena (e.g., telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis), mystical experiences, modern physics, and consciousness – find some resolution in an idealist, neo-Leibnizian philosophy.
Jewish Mysticism and Modern Cosmology (click to access)
University of Manchester, 2000
Parallels have sometimes been drawn between the theories of modern physics and the teachings of Eastern mystical philosophy. More recently, Jewish mysticism – which has much to say about ‘beginnings’ – has been linked with modern cosmology, in particular with the widely accepted cosmological model that traces the origin of the universe to a primordial Big Bang. How seriously should we take comparisons between such disparate bodies of thought, and what contributions might the comparisons make to the broader field of science–religion relations?
MYSTICAL ENCOUNTERS 