By Richard Smoley For most of us, the dream world is the most immediate and pressing of all alternative realities. Its bizarreness, its sheer otherness, which presents itself to us every night, constantly reminds us that reality is multifaceted and malleable, and our experience of it very likely illusory. There seems to be nothing more solid and irrefutable than the fact that we see what we see and we hear…
New research shows that we don’t actually access and use all available memories when creating personal narratives like the “real you.” We all want other people to “get us” and appreciate us for who we really are. In striving to achieve such relationships, we typically assume that there is a “real me”. But how do we actually know who we are? It may seem simple – we are a product of our…
Using the combined power of multiple astronomical observatories across the world, astronomers have discovered a stunning set of 39 massive galaxies that had previously been invisible. The multiple discovery is the first of its kind, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature, and is set to forever change the way in which scientists look at how galaxies are formed. The galaxies, which are located billions of light-years away, are intimately connected…
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world”. These are the words of the Buddha spoken over 2,500 years ago. What this statement declares is the idea that our consciousness creates our reality. Take some time to think about this, because the implications are staggering. This understanding concerning the nature of consciousness fully empowers us to essentially be…
By Nick Polizzi, Sacred Science Okay, I have to admit—it took me a while to get on board with my chakras. First of all, they don’t teach us about our energy systems in science class. Second, we can’t see them, so they’re not obvious parts of our bodies like, say, our hands. But the more I learned about chakras, and the more I got in tune with my body, the…
The greatest question of all time may very well be, ‘what happens to us when we die?’ While many, individuals, religions and spiritual traditions have come to their own conclusions about the ever-lasting nature of the soul, it takes a great deal of faith to be certain about the after life. To the scientific mind, this won’t do, and the question looks a little more like, ‘what happens to human consciousness after…
By Len Kasten I had trouble with calculus in college. The concept of mathematics describing geometric shapes just did not resonate in my brain. Yes, I knew the formula for the circumference of a circle, and some Pythagorean stuff about triangles, but I never realised it could all get so complicated. Over the course of the semester, the basic premise slowly penetrated, and I began to speculate that perhaps God is…
Time travel has enchanted and intrigued us since the earliest days of fiction, when authors such as H.G. Wells, Samuel Madden, Charles Dickens and Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau stretched and challenged our imaginations with images and tales of men and women who invented amazing machines and devices that could take them back in time, or forward into the future. Because of the restrictions of light speed, and the paradoxes of…
Honeybees are a high value model for exploring questions about neuroscience. In our latest study we decided to test if they could learn to perform simple arithmetical operations such as addition and subtraction. Addition and subtraction operations As children, we learn that a plus symbol (+) means we have to add two or more quantities, while a minus symbol (-) means we have to subtract quantities from each other. To…