Synchronicity Summit
Oct 27-28, 2023
Synchronicity and the Nature of Consciousness
The AAPS and the Scientific and Medical Network are co-hosting a Synchronicity Summit! The agenda and speakers are below, it’s sure to be a fascinating event you won’t want to miss.
Carl Jung invented the word synchronicity, a term derived from the Greek syn (with or together) and chronos (time). Thus, synchronicity means ‘together in time’. Since Jung coined the word, he and others have adopted a multidisciplinary approach to its study. These areas of research have included physics, biology, psychology, philosophy and spirituality, and research on anomalous phenomena.
In this groundbreaking summit, our speakers will relate personal experiences and respond to the question: “What kind of universe makes synchronicity possible?” They will consider possible interpretations/explanations and implications of these synchronistic events for a deeper understanding of consciousness and the interconnected nature of reality in terms of epistemology and ontology. The Synchronicity Working Group will be producing a multi-author volume next year and you are welcome to send in some personal accounts to add to our database to MWool@uoregon.edu
AAPS is requesting donations for registration;
$20 for members, $25 for non-members, or $30 as an additional donation.
All registrants will receive links to the recordings.
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Daily Agenda
All times are shown in US Pacific Time. Check your local time zone conversion
Day 1 – Friday, Oct 27
8:00 am
Welcome and Introduction, Co-Chair Marjorie Woollacott
The Practical Uses of Synchronicity, Prof Bernard Beitman
8:45 am
Synchronicity as a Merging of Matter and Mind, Dr Joan Walton
9:25 am
General Discussion / Q and A
10:00 am
30-minute Break
10:30 am
Comments from Co-Chair, David Lorimer
10:35 am
The Significance of Synchronicity in Our Postmodern Age, Prof Richard Tarnas
11: 15 am
A panel of speakers exploring their own synchronicity experiences and how this transformed their world views and implications, Sophia Demas, Monica Bryant, Prof Marjorie Woollacott
11:45 am
Discussion / Q and A
12:30 pm Close
Day 2 – Saturday, Oct 28
8:00 am
Welcome and Introduction, C0-Chair, Dr. Edi Bilimoria
Experiencing, Interpreting, and Explaining synchronicity: Some suggestions for future research, Prof Roderick Main
8:45 am
Synchronicity, Psi, and Meditation, Dr Bethany Butzer
9:25 am
General Discussion / Q and A
10:00 am
30-minute Break
10:30 am
Comments from Co-Chair, Monica Bryant
10:35 am
Super Synchronicities, Prof Gary Schwartz
11:15 am
A second panel of speakers exploring their own synchronicity experiences and how this transformed their worldviews, Dr. Edi Bilimoria, Dr. Vasilieos Basios, Jessica Corneille
11:45
General Discussion / Q and A
12:30 pm Close
AAPS is requesting donations for registration;
$20 for members, $25 for non-members, or $30 as an additional donation.
All registrants will receive links to the recordings.
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Biographies
The panel of speakers:
Vasileios Basios PhD is a senior researcher in the field of Physics of Complex Systems. At the University of Brussels, he specializes in interdisciplinary studies focusing on self-organization and emergence in a complex matter, as well as fundamental aspects of complex systems, in particular information, agency, and time. Early in his career, he was mentored by Ilya Prigogine and Grégoire Nicolis at the Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry in Brussels. Dr. Basios is deeply interested in the historical evolution of scientific ideas and their role in challenging the dominant materialist-reductionist worldview. He advocates a qualitative shift in science, stressing the urgency that complexity studies bring. He is passionate about integrating self-reflection into science, with the aim of contributing insights from complex systems science. To this end, he envisages the promotion of a resilient network of individuals, groups, organizations, and research initiatives to steer science towards such a transformative process.
Bernard Beitman, MD is the author or editor of seven psychiatry books, recipient of two national psychiatry awards for his psychotherapy training program, and former chair of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the Founding Director and President of The Coincidence Project. His first coincidence book, Connecting with Coincidence (2016) was followed by a second, Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen (2022). He is working on a coincidence autobiography.
Edi Bilimoria was born in India and educated at the universities of London, Sussex, and Oxford. He presents an unusual blend of experience in the fields of science, the arts, and philosophy. A student of the perennial philosophy for over half a century, Edi has published extensively in the disciplines of science, engineering, and esoteric philosophy. His book The Snake and the Rope was awarded a prize by the Scientific and Medical Network on which he now serves as an Advisor to the Board, a Trustee of the SMN, and an Adviser to the Galileo Commission of the Network. Edi is also a Trustee and a Council Member of the Francis Bacon Society.
Monica Bryant, BSc (Hons), MA, has provided her leading-edge Evolutionary Consulting and Coaching since 1994, offering a transpersonal perspective to support inner and outer evolution. Her evolutionary approach is soul-based and helps to unveil deep patterns, cycles, and meaning to support wholeness and well-being. With more than 40 years of experience in archetypal psychology, Monica has a Master’s degree in Myth, Cosmology, and the Sacred based on transformative learning and transpersonal research methodologies. She is an independent researcher and writer who has a transdisciplinary approach to the evolving holistic worldview. At the University of Sussex, she taught courses such as The New Microbiology and Culture, Health and Healing. Her work draws on her life experience in the fields of human and planetary potential, natural health, and new paradigm sciences.
Bethany Butzer PhD writes, teaches, and conducts research in the fields of positive psychology and transpersonal psychology, which emphasize the development of human strength and potential. She received her MA in clinical psychology and her PhD in social psychology from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Bethany has worked in the corporate world and in academia, and she has also spent several years as an entrepreneur. From 2013 to 2015 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, where she studied the effects of yoga in school settings. Bethany currently lives in Prague, where she was a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of New York in Prague from 2016 to 2022. She is currently a Lecturer for the Alef Trust MSc program in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology and she is also the Assistant Director of the Alef Trust PhD program in Applied Transpersonal Psychology. Bethany’s research focuses on yoga and mindfulness for youth, as well as transpersonal topics such as synchronicity, parapsychology, and ecopsychology.
Jessica Corneille, MSc is a Research Psychologist specialising in Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings. Jessica has presented at a number of academic conferences, including with the British Psychological Society, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, Vice, and The Conversation among other prestigious outlets. She has written a number of articles, including a book chapter for ‘Spiritual Awakenings: Scientists and Academics Describe their Experiences’. She is currently affiliated with the Emergence Benefactors (Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium), works for the Scientific and Medical Network, is a member of the Galileo Commission steering committee, and is an advisor to the Spiritual Crisis Network. She also runs peer-support groups under the Psychedelic Society UK, is a certified Kundalini Yoga teacher, and is a trained leadership facilitator. Her greatest mission is to challenge the default pathologization of awakening experiences by helping to inform and encourage mainstream psychology to look beyond the currently designated spectrum of ‘normality’, to encompass the transpersonal as something that is intrinsic to the human experience.
Sophia Demas MA has enjoyed three diverse careers: a decade in architecture that included working with notable 20th-century visionary Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller, running her own couture fashion business, and working as a mental health therapist in private practice. She also created Living a Fearless Life, a twelve-workshop program. She is the author of two books. In The Divine Language of Coincidence, Sophia chronicles the miracles she has experienced since the age of 19. After discovering the key to turning a coincidence into a potential miracle, she was propelled to share with the world how miracles are accessible to anyone. By paying attention to divine nudging and taking action, not only did she receive, against her free will, what was best for her, but had her marriage saved from the brink of divorce, was saved from almost certain death, and many other extraordinary events that have led her to her true purpose. Her experiences related to death and after-death communications are included in her second book, Consciousness Beyond Death, recently released.
Roderick Main, PhD works at the University of Essex, UK, where he is a professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth Studies. His books include The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (Brunner-Routledge, 2004), Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (SUNY, 2007), and, most recently, Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment: Mystery, Meaning, and Metaphysics in the Work of C. G. Jung (Chiron Publications, 2022).
Gary E. Schwartz, PhD, has been a Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Surgery at the University of Arizona for more than thirty years. He was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and a tenured Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Yale University. His integrative research bridging mind-body medicine, energy medicine, and spiritual medicine has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, and numerous private foundations. He has published more than 500 scientific articles and chapters and authored or edited 25 books. He directs the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona (www.lach.arizona.edu) and served as the founding president of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences (www.AAPSglobal.com).
Richard Tarnas, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He has taught courses in the history of ideas, depth psychology, archetypal cosmology, cultural history, and the evolution of consciousness. He also frequently lectured on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western worldview from ancient Greek to the postmodern that is widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network and contains an exploration of the phenomenon of synchronicity. He is also the co-editor of Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof. Richard Tarnas is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and a member of the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
Joan Walton, PhD, received her first degree in Social Theory and Institutions (University of Bangor, North Wales). Following University, she traveled for a year in India and Southeast Asia, including working in one of Mother Teresa’s children’s homes in Calcutta. Her early professional career was in social work, mainly working with children and families in residential and community settings. In 1995 she established an independent center for action research and education, which enabled her to be involved in a wide range of staff development and research projects in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. Following the completion of her PhD in 2008, she had a career change, and entered the academic world, initially at Liverpool Hope University, and now at York St John University in the School of Education.
Marjorie Woollacott PhD is an Emeritus Professor of Human Physiology, and a member of the Institute of Neuroscience, at the University of Oregon. She is the Research Director for the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and is President of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences (AAPS). She has published more than 200 scientific articles and written or co-edited eight books. Her latest book, Infinite Awareness (2015) (winner of eight awards) her research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, she breaks open the definition of human consciousness to investigate the existence of a non-physical and infinitely powerful mind. She is Co-Chair of the Galileo Commission, co-editor of Spiritual Awakenings, and an Honorary Member of the SMN.