Bohmian Poetics 2026: Opening Time

Bohmian Poetics 2026: Opening Time

Saturday and Sunday November 7 & 8, 2026

9:00am PST  | 12:00pm EST  | 5:00pm GMT  |  6:00pm CET

Hosted by Lee Nichol, with Ronald Purser and Bruce Alderman

A two-session series – each session will last two hours.

All registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

In July of 2026, the Pari Center initiated a new series of programs exploring the many different directions the metaphysics of David Bohm could take. Titled “Bohmian Poetics,” the programs are inspired by Bohm’s implicate/explicate, enfolding/unfolding framework. In that perspective, the manifest world that we experience on a daily basis is perpetually emerging from subtle, hidden orders that are not directly available to traditional sense experience.

There are many historical precedents for this perspective. In Western philosophy, there are similar themes from Aristotle through Maritn Heidegger. It was Heidegger who revived the term “poiesis” in western thought, framing it as the movement from that which is concealed to that which is manifest.

There are innumerable aspects of human experience that move through this “poiesis” from hidden to manifest – but by and large those aspects are unnoticed or downplayed. Bohmian poetics is an intentional turn toward this movement from hidden to manifest – looking for it, sensing it, attuning to it, in all its myriad manifestations. And then, communicating together what that poiesis might mean for human beings.

This second installment of Bohmian poetics will take up the question of time, from a participatory perspective. How does time arise in experience – and from where? What is involved in foregrounding our tacit assumptions about the nature of time, and what value might lie therein?

We will draw on Bohm’s views of pre-space/time, time and eternity, implicate and explicate orders, and what bearing these have on human freedom. We will also examine Henri Bergson’s notion of durée – the living experience of embodied time, and how this stands in contrast to theoretical time. And for the first time at Pari, we will open up the perspectives in Tarthang Tulku’s Time, Space, and Knowledge, an extensive exploration of these fundamental aspects of experience – and how they arise from moment to moment.

Between Saturday and Sunday, interested participants will have the opportunity to engage in overnight experiments with how time reveals itself, and what part it plays in structuring our sense of reality. Sunday will be partially given over to sharing the results of these experiments, and what they might mean.

Possible readings (not required):

• Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator, Ronald Purser
• Living in Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson, Barry Allen
• Thought as a System, David Bohm
• Into the Blue: Chasing the Spirit of David Bohm, Lee Nichol

Ronald E. Purser, Ph.D., is the Lam Larsen Distinguished Research Professor of Management at San Francisco State University, and a senior faculty member at Dharma College in Berkeley. His most recent books include Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator and McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. He has been studying and working with Tarthang Tulku’s Time, Space and Knowledge vision for over four decades. His interest in the philosophical works of David Bohm goes back to the early 1990s, when he taught an experimental course on Bohmian dialogue at Loyola University of Chicago.

Bruce Alderman is the associate director of the Blue Sky Leaders Program at California Institute of Integral Studies, a faculty with the Consciousness, Psychology, and Transformation program at National University, and author of several forthcoming books, including Feeling Fully Alive; Giving Voice to Time and Space; and Unfolding the Senses. He has followed David Bohm’s work since reading Wholeness and the Implicate Order in the early 1980s, and has been a practitioner of Tarthang Tulku’s Time Space Knowledge vision for a similar length of time.

Lee Nichol is Director of Bohmian Studies at the Pari Center. He was a friend and colleague of David Bohm, and is editor of Bohm’s On Creativity; The Essential David Bohm; and On Dialogue. He has been on the faculty of Denver University in Denver, Colorado, and the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California. His latest book is Into the Blue: Chasing the Spirit of David Bohm, his account of 50 years of experimentation with Bohm’s metaphysics. He is a founding member of the experimental Pari Center Holoflux group.