Beyond the Looking-Glass – The Tao of Emotional Sentience

The Tao of Emotional Sentience

with Katherine Peil Kauffman

Sunday, March 16, 2025
10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Beyond the Looking-Glass, Session 6 of 6

This event is LIVE. All participants will receive the RECORDING.

Building upon Bohmian (and Kauffmanian) physics, the Eastern metaphor of The Tao is employed to introduce the new emotion science. In this context, emotional sentience—from its simple binary evaluations to its complex informational content—is not only central to the ‘self-regulatory’ behavioral hardware and learning software of living systems but may be integral to the in-forming and trans-forming process of reality creation itself. To distinguish emotion as a separate and more ancient system than ‘cognition’ proper, is to honor the ‘agent in the machine,’ to discover the untold wonders embodied in the physical organism, and to reclaim the divine attributes of human being and becoming.

Katherine T. Peil Kauffman is the founding Director of non-profit EFS International, whose mission is fostering global emotional wisdom. From a background in Pantheistic spirituality and clinical and social psychology, her lengthy interdisciplinary inquiry into the biophysical substrates of emotion led to the identification of its previously mysterious biological function: as an ancient ‘self-regulatory sense’—an evaluative perceptual mechanism through which living systems directly participate in self-organizing and evolutionary processes, and one that invites deeper inquiries into the physics of consciousness. This new science also casts light upon innate ‘biovalues,’ which scientific methodology has long avoided, as well as vital processes that in-form common spiritual experiences, and the healthy development of empathic moral conscience. It provides a biophysically informed vision of ‘naturalistic spiritualty,’ one that echoes the common wisdom across the great religious traditions, while challenging such time honored assumptions as ‘sin’ and the ‘good and evil’ dichotomy.

A former affiliate of Northeastern University and the Harvard Divinity School, Ms. Kauffman has spoken internationally on the function, evolution, physio-chemical, and informational nature of emotion, as well as its central role in optimal health, human development, moral reasoning, universal spiritual experiences, and its informative value toward creating nonviolence in a global village.