In this wide-ranging interview with Natalia Vorontsova, Professor Marjorie Woollacott draws remarkable parallels between 9th-10th century Kashmiri Shaivism and modern idealism, pointing to the fundamental and irreducible nature of consciousness. Moreover, her study of near-death experiences empirically supports this very hypothesis of the existence of a fundamental consciousness without neurons and beyond our five senses. This is an open conversation about life, death, and who we really are as ‘points of consciousness.’

This is an involved, fairly technical, but deeply rewarding and potentially groundbreaking essay. It posits that the geometry of real (i.e., noumenal) spacetime may be exactly what our mathematical models tell us it is: a complex projective space in which there is no separation between objects and subject. If so, then the implication is that the foundation of the universe is a form of universal consciousness, that the ordinary spacetime we experience is but a perspectival model, and that the very structure of the universe is defined by mental archetypes, or universal ‘ideas.’ Right or wrong, this is one of the most daring but also most explicit and well-articulated ideas underpinning idealism with physical theory, and it surely deserves multiple careful reads.

Can morphic resonance help explain the problem of missing heritability and why memories have not been found in the brain? And are ‘morphic fields’ the same thing as Michael Levin’s bioelectric ‘cognitive glue’? In this interview, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake discusses with Natalia Vorontsova his theory of morphic fields and its implications for our understanding of the mysteries of nature. Dr. Sheldrake is often called a most original thinker, perhaps because throughout his career he has managed to combine open-mindedness with critical scientific thinking.

Inside you there is a largely unexplored universe of 100 trillion bacteria. In this documentary, we embark on a journey into this microcosmos to discover the beauty and complexity of life’s origin on the nanoscale. In 2023 Essentia Foundation’s Hans Busstra created a documentary about bacteria that depicts our common ancestor in a never-before-seen manner. With the world’s leading artists in microscopy, like micro-photographer Wim van Egmond, SEM microscopist Jan Dijksterhuis, and a molecular cell biologist and his team at Digizyme Inc., he embarked on a unique mission: to capture the first moving images of a single bacterium at the molecular scale.

Documentary filmmaker Hans Busstra shares with us, with the aid of amazing and scientifically accurate animations of the molecular world, the background story of his journey from imaging the hardcore science of molecular biology to the fundamental insights of metaphysics.

Astronomer Harriet Witt argues that it is our scientifically outdated language that leads us into thinking of the sky as a remote reality ‘up there,’ instead of a felt experience ‘in here.’ She argues for an update to the words and concepts we use daily, so the holistic reality of our existence, and of our intimate relationship with all of nature, can again be felt.