Society for Psychical Research

Society for Psychical Research

Founded in 1882, the SPR was the first organisation to conduct scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models.

The Scientific and Medical Network

50 years connecting spirituality and science through education; where evidence-based reasoning meets deep inner wisdom.

For fifty years, the Scientific and Medical Network has been bringing together individuals – including professionals with a background in science, medicine, engineering, psychology, philosophy and complementary practices – who accept the existence of a fundamental, unifying and transcendent reality.

Given the current divisive and disconnected state of the world, we maintain that there is a pressing need for a worldview that goes beyond the prevailing materialist ethos and provides the rising generation with an orienting sense of meaning and purpose.

We thus feel it more important than ever to affirm our original transformative aim of promoting humanity’s spiritual essence as compatible with enlightened scientific thinking.

Through our extensive educational programme, featuring internationally renowned speakers and visionaries in their respective fields, we provide a creative forum for exploring frontier issues at the interfaces between science, spirituality, consciousness and well-being.

In a spirit of open and critical enquiry, we seek to integrate ‘heart’ and ‘head’ – connecting intuitive insights with evidence-based reason.

Institute of Noetic sciences

Bridging Science and Spirituality

The way we understand ourselves and our world is always evolving. From instinct to intuition to intellect, part of being human is using multiple ways to gather and utilize information. Noetic sciences are one of many frameworks we can use to engage with our daily reality.

On his way back to Earth after his pioneering moonwalk, Apollo 14 astronaut and IONS founder Dr. Edgar Mitchell had the profound experience of feeling interconnected to everything he was observing from the window of his space capsule: the stars, the moon, our blue planet, and the vastness of the cosmos. He realized quickly that in order to explain such an extraordinary experience (and others like it), there would need to be a rapprochement between the scientific and spiritual interpretations of reality.

As a scientist and visionary, Dr. Mitchell saw a need to reconcile his training as an engineer and astrophysicist with the wisdom of the ages to transcend the limitations of what he saw as an outdated materialist worldview. A new framework would be needed: one that could help explain the unexplainable—and spark transformation.

He called this framework noetic sciences.

[Noetic refers to] states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority…William James, philosopher