Neuro-Magica: Weaving Apophenia, Aporia & Awen

The Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness salon presents:

Neuro-Magica: Weaving Apophenia, Aporia & Awen

Dr David Luke

Tuesday, 31st January, 2017

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL

Entry £8 /£6 Concessions, Arrive 6pm for a 6:30pm Start - Wine & Beer available

Advance tickets available by Eventbrite

Neuro-Magica: Weaving Apophenia, Aporia & Awen

In a secular age where religion has all but been abandoned, but where the nihilism of materialism conflicts with a deeper search for meaning, is there room for a re-enchanted science or even some kind of spiritual atheism? Come and let your mind tightrope walk the glassy teeter totter of Neuro-Magica, and imbibe a heady fusion of empyrean empiricism with which to gaze through the cracks between temples and laboratories. Colliding neurobiology, chaos magic, anthropology, psychedelics, shamanism, parapsychology, mythology and plain old juicy intellectual anarchy, come ponder the wonder of such yonder mind plunder.

David Luke completed his PhD on the psychology of luck in 2007, and is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich where he teaches an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experience. He was President of the Parapsychological Association between 2009-2011 and as a researcher he has a special interest in transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, having published 100 academic papers in this area. He has also published 5 books, as co-editor of Neurotransmissions: Essays on Psychedelics (Strange Attractor, 2015), Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds (Daily Grail, 2014) and Breaking Convention: Essays in Psychedelic Consciousness (Strange Attractor, 2013), editor of Ecopsychology and the Psychedelic Experiences (2013), and as coauthor of the undergraduate textbook Anomalistic Psychology (2012, Palgrave Macmillan).

David is also director of the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon (and Facebook group) at the Institute of Ecotechnics, London, and is a cofounder and director of Breaking Convention: Multidisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness. He has given over 100 invited public lectures, organized numerous festivals, conferences, symposia, pilgrimages and expeditions, and has studied techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspective of scientists, shamans and Shivaites, but increasingly has more questions than answers. See:www.gre.academia.edu/DavidLuke