Stephan A. Schwartz presents an anthropological assessment of religions and spiritual practices stripped of their sectarian dogmas. He discusses them not on the basis of faith, but as systems of empirical observational science, developed over generations, for the purpose of allowing followers the opportunity to open to nonlocal consciousness. Schwartz describes how religions begin as the result of a single individual having a nonlocal, or a series of nonlocal, consciousness experiences, laying out the steps by which that single personal experience becomes a religion, and then examines and explains why the spiritual rituals and practices common to religions across time, geography, and culture grow from the experiences of the founder. It describes all of this using scientific experimental research from many different disciplines to show how the empirical sciences of religions, and the spiritual practices they engender are, in fact, supported by a myriad of studies, showing in the process: why water and wine are so often a part of religious rituals; why healing is so common across religions; why sacred spaces are significant, and how they are created; and why scriptures, and even the manner in which they are written, matter in these empirical systems.

Bio: Stephan A. Schwartz is a Distinguished Consulting Faculty of Saybrook University, a Fellow of the William James Center for Consciousness Studies, Sofia University, and a Research Associate of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research. He is the columnist for the journal Explore, and editor of the daily web publication Schwartzreport.net in both of which he covers trends that are affecting the future.

Recorded at the Society for Scientific Exploration Conference in Broomfield, Colorado 2019.

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