I spent an amazing weekend in Cotswold where we went wakeboarding. The whole event was organised by The Wakeboard Club of The University of Plymouth, namely by Gemma Brill and her boyfriend Ali Reader who have been wakeboarding for many years now. Have a look at their videos below:

The adventure started on Friday afternoon when me my friend Jason met with Charles who came to pick us up with his van. It took around 3-4 hours to get to Cotswold including getting lost on the way. After we finally found the place we settled down in our lounge and later spent an evening with the rest of the guys watching movies and chatting.

Next morning we drove to WMSki where we registered and watched a funny health and safety video. After that, those who were experienced wakeboarders went riding and the rest of us were given kneeboards to get use to everything before we would try wakeboards. I felt quite confident trying the wakeboard straight away since I have snowboarded for many years, however, I took the advice and did few rounds on the kneeboard. My first run was a disaster and I ended up loosing balance. Next two trials were much easier and I did not want to waste anymore time with the kneeboard. I picked up a wakeboard and again I ended up in water after straight away. Second run was easy and finally I did 3 or 4 rounds the lake. I must say I find it very similar to snowboarding, perhaps little bit more slippery but that I guess also depends on a board you are using.

After familiarising with the basic control I tried some very simple tricks. Jason and another friend of mine Lydia were much more experienced and motivated me to try some of the harder obstacles. See the pictures below of Lydia, Jason and me sliding the railies (from left to right).

Other guys like Ali and Charles were doing much more sophisticated tricks and Charles even injured his ankle. My whole body still aches even though I did not do anything particularly hard. Normally I go to a gym everyday but I do not think I will be able to go for a week at least :D

It was getting late and most of the people were getting cold so we have decided to leave and finished our day going to a spa and later watching The Jungle Book:D

Excellent video inspired by numbers, geometry and nature by Cristóbal Vila.

I have produced another Q&A video of Thomas Campbell answering questions about virtual reality and perspectives in general. This video was recorded during the "Your place in the larger reality" workshop in San Jose and Costa Mesa.

I would like announce that you can now leave your comments to all the posts on this website. Registration is not required, however, it is encouraged since it will save you more time . As a registered user you will avoid filling in your email address, name and anti-spam stuff evey time you write a comment. There is also a new Guestbook section where you can leave you comments or suggestions. 

In addition, the website can now be dynamically translated to almost any language.

A short summary from The Geek Files show, the full version of which can be watched from here.

I will be presenting our new results from the experimental studies conducted in collaboration with The Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of European Space Agency (ESA) during The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN2010) this summer in Spain, Barcelona. The article is in press now but will soon be available in the Publications section on this website.

This is also the first publication of my good friend and research assistant Barry Bentley who has been of great help throughout the collaboration with ESA. 

M. Peniak, B. Bentley, D. Marocco, A. Cangelosi, C. Ampatzis, D. Izzo, F. Biscani (in press). An island-model framework for evolving neuro-controllers for planetary rover control. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2010. Barcelona, Spain, 18-23 July.
 

I have recently returned from California where I went to film the two workshops of NASA physicist, consciousness researcher and the author of the MyBigToe trilogy Thomas Campbell. Each workshop was preceded by the screening of The Path: Afterlife documentary as well as the film on Mind&Matter connection I made earlier on, which I think was received very well. First of all I need to thank the workshops organizers Keith and Donna for inviting and sponsoring my trip to California, without their assistance I would not have been able to come.

The first workshop took place in San Jose, CA and was a great event visited by notables such as the legendary remote viewing pioneer, author and physicist Russell Targ as well as the astrophysicist and author Dr. Bernard Haisch. The question and answers videos I made from the workshops can be found here. Also attending the workshop were Regina and Scott Meredith of the Conscious Media Network. They filmed two interview segments with Tom which will be up on their website in the near future. CMN do some of the best video interviews on the Internet. 

It was here where I met two great people Hanna and Michael. They are obviously both interested in Tom's theories. Hanna is 19 and Michael is 23 years old. Michael was helping me with the filming of the workshop since he has lot of experience in this field, in fact he was doing most of the work and I was only in charge of the audio. Many people have put money together and paid for Hanna's trip to San Jose since they knew she wanted to attend the workshop so much but could not afford it. This was a very nice example of how other people have the power to create opportunities for others' personal growth. These young guys are remarkable and I look forward to meeting them again. I met Bette from MyBigToe forum, who is probably the most active member there. Bette has made it to the workshop despite of very hard circumstances she was in at that time. Bette gave me a book called “Computers, pattern, chaos, and beauty” by A.Clifford, which was something I was long time looking for.

After the workshop in San Jose I went to LA where I stayed with my good friends Gerik and Beau. Gerik does promotional work for Tom, gets him interviews and stuff like that. He is also a tai chi instructor and has a very popular YouTube channel on many interesting topics such as consciousness, esp, obe, remote viewing and others. Gerik introduced me to Beau, who is a 28 years old guy interested in Tom Campbell's work. Beau works in a Hollywood audio studio that has been producing audio for many famous Hollywood movies. During my stay in LA I visited the studio where he works as well as Sony Entertainment Studios where Beau's father and his team were mixing the audio for Sex in The City movie. Apart from this I was privileged to visit other departments where the actual sounds are manufactured.

One week passed quickly and we traveled for the second workshop in Costa Mesa. The hotel was lovely and had nice swimming pool and jacuzzi that I enjoyed very much. The second workshop also started with the screening of my video as well as The Path 11 documentary. This time, there was a bigger audience and again I think most people enjoyed both videos. 

The Costa Mesa workshop also had several interesting and well known people in attendance, Dr. John Turner a neurosurgeon and author of “Medicine, Miracles, and Manifestations” and Marla Frees an interviewer from the Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland Radio radio show. I got to spend a little time with Marla, she is a very warm, intelligent and has a great sense of humour and it was a pleasure to get to know her, Marla is also an intuitive and will be doing an interview with Tom very soon. It was great that Gerik brought Marla and Consciousness Media Network to interview Tom.

The workshop was also filmed by Peace Lily Enterprises, a production company from Australia. I got to meet and work with Anna Reeves and Vivienne Somers the producers who are working on a documentary about Consciousness. They are very nice and talented people and it was great to meet them.

Saturday was the first day when Tom started to go deeply into his hypothesis that our universe is a self-evolving digital system, which may sound weird at first but the more one starts to look into this the more it seems possible. Simple look into few interesting things in quantum theory and digital physics and the whole world starts to look like a giant digital computer simulation being computed by its own potential. Tom calls this potential consciousness, which started like a system with little decision space and crude time and has evolved into the vastness of the existence where our physical reality is merely a subset out of countless others. This seems to resemble multi-verse theory where our reality is only one out of many. The difference here seems to be that since we are already part of the larger consciousness system and therefore we could experience other reality frames via our consciousness, in other words subjectively.

All this ties up into some form of holistic thinking about the world and it seems more and more scientists are moving this direction. If you are not familiar with Tom Campbell's work I would highly recommend you to watch his London lecture on YouTube, all he says is logical, no beliefs are needed just open-minded skepticism as he would say.

Sunday was the last day of the workshop where Tom finished explaining his work and finally there was time for questions. When it came to Q&A session, Tom must been really tired from standing on the same place since he could not move much because of the cameras. Despite of this discomfort I was amazed to see how nice and peaceful he was when replying to so many questions. Seriously, I have never seen anybody being asked so many different questions. I filmed all of it and will produce new videos soon so stay tuned.