Tag: Documentaries

The Essentia Foundation’s origin story is the story of Dutch entrepreneur and humanitarian Fred Matser meeting philosopher Bernardo Kastrup. In this video, Hans Busstra narrates how the meeting of these two men stands for the connection between heart and mind. For Fred Matser, embracing the worldview of idealism has always been a journey of the heart: through profound transcendent experience he came to the insight that reality is fundamentally mental and unitary. When Fred met Bernardo Kastrup a decade ago, he immediately recognized that Bernardo had exactly the same worldview, but had arrived at it from the other direction: via the mind. He convinced Bernardo Kastrup to quit a flourishing career in high-tech to lead the Essentia Foundation. The friendship between Fred and Bernardo symbolises what the Essentia Foundation stands for: heart and mind can fully connect, without compromise. Idealism is a worldview that honors human intuition as presented in religious and philosophical traditions worldwide (the heart), as well as human rationality, on which science builds. As the latter is mistakenly associated with materialism, the Essentia Foundation specifically focuses on analytic idealism. It was due to the wisdom of the heart, namely Fred Matser’s insight that the world needs a scientific platform bringing together metaphysical idealists, that the Essentia Foundation was born.