This may be your last chance to “legitimately” view Graham Hancock’s brilliant and compelling TEDx Talk – “The War on Consciousness” – since TED has now removed the talk from its TEDx YouTube channel and will likely very soon remove it altogether from the TED website. Ironically, TED’s censorship and eventual removal of the video supports Hancock’s assertion that there is a war on consciousness – being waged on many fronts, but currently being waged by material-reductionist scientists, who may sit on TED’s anonymous science board along with Richard Dawkins’s atheist intellegentsia crew, who repeatedly assert that consciousness (or essence, or spirit) is non-existent outside of the neurons synapsing in our brains nestled in our craniums housed in our homeostatic bodies. The biology of “consciousness” is now being explored at the quantum level so that it can be once and for all, explained away — nevermind that the quantum world is even more phantom, elusive and foreign to most of us than consciousness is, because at least, we all directly experience our own sovereign consciousness — whereas we are expected to put our “faith” in the scientists who inform us that the Higgs Boson (aka the “God Particle”) exists because it’s been “detected” in their data.

TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, noted that they’ve removed less than a dozen of more than 20,000+ TEDx Talks – so why this one?

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Anything that can’t be observed by neuro-imaging, dissected in autopsy, analyzed in a lab, or reduced from the data in particle acceleration and collision experiments has no value whatsoever to applied scientists — and theoretical scientists don’t have a great breadth of scope or differentiation in their respective disciplines. Scientists label any pursuit of understanding or exploring consciousness outside of their institutions as “pseudoscience” to diminish it — even though it’s not being claimed as science, but rather beyond science (aha!).  And don’t even think about mentioning psilocybin mushrooms or other ethnobotanicals like  Ayahuasca as possible cosmic or metaphysical gateways — or dare speak of out-of-body or near-death experience (OBE, NDE) as alternate reality unrelated to chemical or biological malfunction.

Those stuck in the scientific box would do well to hoist themselves onto each other’s shoulders at least once — until one is finally boosted up high enough to peer over the edge of the box and take that first look outside of it. Science and academia can exhibit extreme dogmatism when presented with alternative theories outside of their biological, chemical, physical and quantum packaging. Perhaps one will eventually climb outside, wander around the box or even stray away from it — then, maybe the others will become so curious as to form a continuous human chain until the last one stuck inside the box is willingly pulled out of it — again there’s some irony, because this is precisely what science thinks it’s doing for the religious creationist, intelligent design or non-evolutionist thinker – “rescuing” them out of the dark box of ignorance by extending their own dogmatic rosary made of data links.

You know, those scientists, they can always crawl back into their box if they don’t like it out here in open, unlimited space; their box will still be there – as geometrically limited as when they left it — and most likely bearing the name of a wealthy donor.

http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/19/the-debate-about-graham-hancocks-talk/

and, so you can find the presentation once TED removes it: