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Beyond Bohm 2025
Event Series:
Beyond Bohm 2025
July 12 @ 5:59 pm – July 27 @ 10:30 pm CEST
17 people are attending Beyond Bohm 2025
Beyond Bohm 2025: Wholeness and Fragmentation
With Aja Bulla Zamastil , Richard Burg, Maria Hvidbak, Chris Marks, Melissa K. Nelson, Lee Nichol, Hester Reeve.
Curated and Chaired by Lee Nichol.
July 12-27, 2025
9am PDT / 12pm EDT / 5pm BST / 6pm CEST
6 two-hour sessions every Saturday and Sunday.
The sessions are LIVE. All participants will receive the RECORDING.
If one were to select one concept to describe the arc of David Bohm’s lifework, it would surely be wholeness. Having said that, the road splits off into many forks. Questions regarding wholeness apply in so many domains – in physics, in the social world, in the artistic domain, in the world of nature, in one’s daily life. The list could go on at great length.
In Beyond Bohm 2025, we will extend feelers to the world of nature, and into certain aspects of human creativity. We will be looking to see if we can have a concrete, rather than conceptual sense of wholeness. In the first instance – the natural world – we will explore in some detail the phenomenological engagement with nature taken by Scot author Nan Shepherd. In the second instance – the domain of human creativity – we will take up the manner in which architect- philosopher Christopher Alexander approached wholeness, as a concrete living process.
The flip side of the “wholeness coin” is, of course, fragmentation. Indeed, much of Bohm’s life was taken up with the interplay of wholeness and fragmentation. His work in physics, in philosophy, in dialogue, in aesthetics, in the nature of thought – in all these areas the wholeness/fragmentation nexus was central. In service to that, our final weekend will examine the still-evolving interplay of digital media and human consciousness, and the manner in which these media are currently amplifying certain factors that Bohm felt to be at the root of human fragmentation.
Needless to say, engaging this wholeness/fragmentation nexus is the work of lifetime, for any of us. From a “Bohmian” perspective, there is literally no end to the inquiry, for wholeness, being a living thing, is never finished. It is ever-evolving, recursive, generative. Always on the move, always in flux.
In Beyond Bohm 2025, then, we will not be attempting to come to finished conclusions or final answers. Rather, we will be aiming for a “flavor,” a “taste” of both wholeness and of fragmentation. To this end, our format will be notably different from in the past. In our first and third weekends, the entire second day will be given over to audience participation, in order to get the fullest possible feeling for the pulse of the Pari community. The second weekend will offer specific activities that can be done between the first day and the second day. We hope you will join us as we expand the Beyond Bohm format and aim to open new participatory terrain.
Program of Event
THE LIVING MOUNTAIN
With Hester Reeve, Maria Hvidbak, Chris Marks and Lee Nichol
July 12 and 13, 2025
THE QUALITY WITHOUT A NAME
With Aja Bulla Zamastil and Lee Nichol
July 19 and 20, 2025
BOHM’S HARD PROBLEM & DEVICE CULTURE
With Hester Reeve, Richard Burg, Melissa K. Nelson, Aja Bulla Zamastil and Lee Nichol
July 26 and 27, 2025
Sessions
1 of 3: The Living Mountain
Saturday and Sunday, July 12 and 13, 2025
9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST
2 two-hour sessions.
Around 1937 Scot author Nan Shepherd placed a finished manuscript in a drawer, where it sat for 40 years. Finally published in 1977 – four years before Shepherd’s death – The Living Mountain now has a cult following, and is considered a masterpiece that defies categorization. Though topically an account of Shepherd’s decades-long roamings in the Cairngorm massif of northern Scotland, the heart of The Living Mountain carries the reader deep within Shepherd’s experience, revealing ways of being that are at once place-specific and universal. She opens the reader to the forces and patterns of creation, and the manner in which these forces interpenetrate human consciousness and imagination.
In this two-day session, we will explore Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, as well as her slim volume of poetry, In the Cairngorms. The first day will consist of brief selected readings, with close examination and commentary on Shepherd’s intimate and evocative “way” of being with the mountain. We will also hear first-person accounts from people who, inspired by The Living Mountain, ventured forth and found their own “way” into the Cairngorms.
And yet… Much of the potency in Shepherd’s writing is that it is in no way limited to the Cairngorms. Once one has been infected with the spirit of engagement brought forth by Shepherd, that quality can be brought to bear anywhere – in a park, at the sea, in one’s own back yard. To that end, our second day will consist of contributions from audience-participants – a mutual sharing of experiences in which the depths of the human meet the depths of the natural world. This may take multiple forms – first-hand description of one’s own experiences in the natural world; reading to our Zoom group short passages from other writers or further readings of Shepherd; photographs of potent or numinous locations; any other means of conveying to the group the mystery, beauty, and even terror that can be encountered in the domain of nature. Our aim on this second day is to give full voice to the Pari community regarding the deep human need for conscious connection with stone and sun, wind and tree, bird and brook, sea and stars. Please join us!
2 of 3: The Quality without a Name
Saturday and Sunday, July 19 and 20, 2025
9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST
2 two-hour sessions.
With the publication in 1977 of A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander initiated a revolution in how to think about built and inhabited spaces. His emphasis on “the quality without a name” – a mysterious but graspable quality that touches the human soul – was radical and provocative. This weekend we will explore various approaches to that quality – the relation of space and form; the Chinese “heaven-earth-human” principle; Japanese flower arranging (ikebana); the aesthetics of landscape architecture; and traditional architectural forms. We will also give detailed attention to Alexander’s magnum opus on wholeness, The Nature of Order, and his remarkable work delineating the spiritual geometry and color of early Turkish carpets, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art.
Some Pari patrons may know that Alexander was an early friend of the Pari Center. He visited there around 2000 or 2001, sharing insights with David Peat and Maureen Doolan regarding the architecture and renovations of the village itself. There was also a multi-day meeting between Alexander and David Bohm in 1986, in which the two discussed their various perspectives on wholeness.
This weekend will provide the option for those attending to experiment directly with certain basic approaches to the “quality without a name.” This will include activities that can be done between the first day and second day, which can then be shared with the group on the second day. As in our first weekend, we are aiming to broaden the manner in which the Pari community can engage with the Beyond Bohm programs.
3 of 3: Bohm’s Hard Problem and Device Culture
Saturday and Sunday, July 26 and 27, 2025
9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST
2 two-hour sessions.
While our first two weekends will focus on two views of wholeness – in the natural world and in the human-made world – our final weekend will take up Bohm’s “hard problem”: that is, changing the reflexive, thought-centered nature of our everyday consciousness. Bohm pointed to the necessity of apprehending and altering our age-old engagement with what he called “thought as a system” – the tacit, culture-wide commitment to a pervasively fragmented worldview, inclusive of ourselves and our own individual consciousness.
This potential transformation is difficult under the best of circumstances – thus, a “hard problem” – and has been a perennial challenge for humanity. When Bohm began putting forward his proposals in the late 1970s and early 80s, the accelerating nature of communication media was formative in his assessment of how the subtle fragmentation of thought as a system operates. Now, in 2025, our enmeshment in this system is far more pervasive and tenacious, due in large part to our immersion in interactive digital devices.
In his original proposals, Bohm put great emphasis on the manner in which thought and feeling reflexively and repetitively sustain one another, leaving precious little opportunity for careful examination and understanding of the implications of this mechanical patterning. It is startlingly ironic then, that today we live in a digital environment that is specifically designed to amplify and exaggerate the very reflexes Bohm had hoped we could free ourselves from. In the first day of this weekend, our panel will give sustained attention to the manner in which thought as a system has become much harder to apprehend and counteract than it was when Bohm formulated his original concerns.
Our second day will open more broadly, dedicating the entire session to participant engagement with our panel. We will continue our examination of how social media – whose purveyors are Facebook-Meta, Instagram, X, TikTok, and Snapchat – intentionally create addictive behavior, ranging from existential anxiety in the formative psyches of adolescents, to the dopamine-fueled rage that has infected societies across the globe.
Questions and themes will include, but not be limited to: Are our life choices arising from intelligence and free will, or are they being more and more determined by corporate algorithms? Is technology inherently neutral – as many claim – the only question then being whether we use it for good or ill? Why does biological research have legal and ethical guardrails, whereas socio-technological research and application do not? Is the deepening fascination with the self-image and its attendant narcissism now an intractable feature of contemporary culture? What are the implications of young children spending an average of 7 hours per day in front of screens, while spending an average of less than 10 minutes per day in outdoor activities? Perhaps most importantly, what can we actually do in the face of these challenges? Do we want to do anything at all, or are we satisfied with the status quo?
Please join us to participate in this timely and important conversation.
Who's coming?
17 people are attending Beyond Bohm 2025