Asia Consciousness Festival Report
To explore the powers and potentials of consciousness, a multidisciplinary team put together the first Asia Consciousness Festival (www.asiaconsciousness.org) in June, 2009, in Hong Kong. In a series of mini-conferences and events over the course of a month, leading scientists, healers, artists, spiritual teachers, and film makers provided different perspectives on the nature, experience, and study of consciousness. Through lectures, workshops, screenings, and art exhibitions, participants from throughout the world were able to experience firsthand the various dimensions of consciousness and the many ways that our thoughts and beliefs influence our experience of the world.
The “About Consciousness Conference,” for example, provided three days of workshops that inspired attendees to gain insights into their own minds and bodies. Speakers including Stuart Hameroff, myself, and Marceo Emoto offered a blend of healing and science as well as inner and outer approaches to exploring human experience. In a one-day conference called Social Dimensions of Consciousness, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, and linguists considered the ways in which the contents of consciousness are social constructs—social and cultural analyses aimed to establish universal principles of human thought, behavior, and experience. Speakers included Imants Barušs, Etzel Cardeña, Joan Chiao, Charles Whitehead, and a dozen others. The topics ranged from the social brain and social self – through art, creativity, and robotics – to discussions on the relationship between consciousness and “consensus reality.”
A one-day invitational workshop titled “Meaningful Media,” organized by Gino Yu of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, (http://www.sd.polyu.edu.hk/web/index.php) brought together filmmakers, video game producers, media technology developers, consciousness researchers, and entrepreneurs to stimulate collaboration around the development of media content and technologies that facilitate personal growth and transformation. The “Toward a Science of Consciousness” event, hosted every other year by The University of Arizona’s Center of Consciousness Studies, (http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/) brought together leading neuroscientists, philosophers, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and physicists who have been researching all aspects of conscious experience. Topics ranged from neurophysiology to the potential nonlocal nature of mind. And finally, the “Machine Consciousness” workshop focused on the development of broad human-like intelligence (“strong AI”) with immediate applications in education, relationship management, and video games. The event was organized by the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute. (www.agiri.org)
An evening of contemporary sacred world music by the Bhakti Raga Ensemble offered a devotional world music journey that touched hearts and explored the power of sound to expand consciousness. An event called “The Experience” was designed to give the audience an in-the-moment sense of different states of consciousness using traditional and modern techniques including yoga, sound meditation, and dance. A film festival (www.asiaconsciousness.org/Screening.html) offered a wide array of new films exploring consciousness, including Consciousness and Beyond, FLicKeR, and Blindsight.
A highlight of the month for me was a performance by Martha Curtis, a concert violinist who learned to co-exist with epileptic seizures even from the stage. Her love of music and determination to be seizure-free convinced a team of doctors to remove much of her right brain. It’s an amazing story… (www.marthacurtis.com)
