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Morphic fields: Nature’s hidden memory?

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. ...

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They ‘told’ cancer to stop, and it did: The science and philosophical implications of bioelectric fields

‘Talking’ to cells without influencing genes or molecules: it can be done by influencing bioelectric fields. By manipulating the bioelectric fields in organisms like planaria and tadpoles, Prof. Michael Levin has shown how eyes and other organs can grow in unconventional locations, how planaria can be ‘told’ to grow two heads, and perhaps most importantly: how cancer cells can be ‘told’ to stop growing in frogs. These promising experiments might lead to groundbreaking new therapeutics. The importance of the pioneering empirical work of Prof. Michael Levin at Tufts University, on the intersection of bioelectricity, regeneration, and cognition, can hardly be overstated. Philosophically, his work has deep implications for how we think about evolution, cognition and consciousness. ...

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The beauty of bacteria: Discover the universe inside you

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. ...

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What bacteria taught me about metaphysics

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. ...

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The sky is in here, not just out there: How outdated language insulates us from reality

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. ...
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Do we really live in a fundamentally physical universe? Are we essentially material beings? Essentia Foundation is a new force in the cultural dialogue about the nature of reality. Find out more about us.

Reading

Essays

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The lost music with which the world worlds

Arthur Haswell invites us to pay attention to and, once again, like our ancestors once did, hear the rhyme and rhythm with which the world worlds. Reality, he maintains, unfolds according to a form of music that, in ages past, humans were matter-of-factly sensitive to. Granted that, if we could sense it again, we could find the codas of the modern world to be excessively depressing, frightening, and bleak. For this reason, perhaps subconsciously, we may not wish to hear them. But, he suspects, we could also find in them much beauty and harmony that enrich our lives. This is a profoundly edifying essay. ...

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The broad horizons of Ecstatic Naturalism

Dr. Walden introduces Ecstatic Naturalism, a metaphysics similar to Idealism but less committed to mind as we know it. While proposing that the archetypes—an eminently mental concept—serve as conduits to a fundamental layer of reality that is both transcendent and immanent in the so-called physical world and the human mind, it remains open to the possibility that such a layer may transcend our very understanding of what mind is. ...

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Non-dualism in ancient Greece? Dionysus as infinite, eternal conscious life

Could the mythological figure of Dionysus, in ancient Greece, represent the non-dual ground of reality, instead of the god of chaos portraid by Nietzsche? Michael Asher argues that Dionysus represents eternal, infinite conscious life as the reality that underlies all nature, in which case the inception of non-dual idealism in the West arches back to the very origins of Western civilization. ...

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If you dream of a triangle, where does the triangle exist?

When we dream of a triangle, we experience a geometric shape with the measurable characteristics—angles and lengths—of a triangle. But the neural correlates of this dream in the physical brain are not triangular. So if all that exists is physicality, where in the physical world is the dream triangle? In this essay, Arthur Haswell not only elaborates rigorously on this thought experiment, but also anticipates and addresses various possible objections. The conclusion, he claims, is that the experiment demonstrates that there is more to reality than what we colloquially call ‘the physical.’ ...

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They ‘told’ cancer to stop, and it did: The science and philosophical implications of bioelectric fields

‘Talking’ to cells without influencing genes or molecules: it can be done by influencing bioelectric fields. By manipulating the bioelectric fields in organisms like planaria and tadpoles, Prof. Michael Levin has shown how eyes and other organs can grow in unconventional locations, how planaria can be ‘told’ to grow two heads, and perhaps most importantly: how cancer cells can be ‘told’ to stop growing in frogs. These promising experiments might lead to groundbreaking new therapeutics. The importance of the pioneering empirical work of Prof. Michael Levin at Tufts University, on the intersection of bioelectricity, regeneration, and cognition, can hardly be overstated. Philosophically, his work has deep implications for how we think about evolution, cognition and consciousness. ...

Seeing

Videos

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What happens to consciousness when clocks stop?

Hans Busstra sat down with Bernard Carr and Bernardo Kastrup to discuss all presentations given at our ‘Time and Mind’ conference and elaborate further on their own ideas. For instance, both Carr and Kastrup agree that, if you take an idealist perspective, you need multiple time dimensions to account for the decomposition problem: the mechanism by which consciousness with a big ‘C’ resolves itself into consciousness with a small ‘c’. ...

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Superpowers may be real and science needs to study them

What if the humanities would open their horizon to more metaphysical possibilities? Prof. Kripal has written a book about a future in which the humanities study the full human. In these superhumanities, the weird, the psi—in short, the impossible—is taken seriously metaphysically: anomalous phenomena are not only regarded as subjective truths, but also as objective claims about reality. ...

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The amazing parallels between the Kabbalah and physics

In this interview, Natalia Vorontsova discusses consciousness and science from the perspective of Kabbalistic Panpsychism with Prof. Dr. Hyman Schipper. The parallels between quantum physics and the ancient Kabbalah are astonishing. Having studied the Kabbalah for many years, Dr Schipper also explains how this knowledge is applicable to many areas of thought and how it has impacted his life. It’s a frank and heart-warming conversation. ...

From the archives

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The end of physics as we know it?

Prof. Dr. Caslav Brukner, Prof. Dr. Renato Renner and Dr. Eric Cavalcanti just won the Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations. Their different no-go theorems make us reconsider the fundamental nature of reality. Bell’s theorem in quantum mechanics already confronted us with the fact that locality and ‘physical realism,’ in the sense that particles have predetermined physical properties prior to measurement, cannot both be true. But in certain variations of the Wigner’s Friend thought experiment an additional metaphysical assumption is now also put in question: the absoluteness of facts. In different words: can we safely assume that a measurement outcome for one observer is a measurement for all observers? ...

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The perils of smuggling metaphysics into science

The acquiescence of physicalism within the broader cultural milieu allows for the smuggling of assumptions into scientific inquiry, which are then, in a circular manner, considered to be validated by science itself. This disastrous interplay perpetuates a continued myopia in distinguishing between the ontological claims of physicalism and the assumptions of scientific inquiry, argues Adebambo Adedire. ...

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The mystery of death

Natalia Vorontsova explores the mystery of death and its relationship with non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as tukdam and NDEs, including those reported by young children. ...

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