Beyond Words

A Film Trilogy: Giving Form to the Ineffable

with director, writer and producer Hugh Pidgeon
Roundtable Guests: Eelco de Geus, Gary Goldberg, Donna Kennedy-Glans, Jacob Raz, Yuriko Sato and David Schrum
Moderated by Lee Nichol

Saturday January 8, 2022

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

Roundtable Conversation
10:00am PST  | 1:00pm EST  | 6:00pm GMT  |  7:00pm CET

Free Online Pari Dialogue

I first heard of Hugh Pidgeon’s Beyond Words trilogy from Hugh himself, when he sent me a link to view the three films. Not realizing these were short films, I put off viewing them for some time, assuming an hour or more for each film. When I realized they were not lengthy, I opened them right away, beginning with A Moment of Clarity.

At the end of Clarity, there was a simple state of silence. Eventually I began to reflect on what I had seen, and was taken aback to realize that not once, in 15 minutes of film about David Bohm, did Bohm’s image ever appear. And yet, the very essence of Bohm was everywhere, distilled and concentrated with great artistry and a true sense of love.

As it turns out, all these qualities are to be found in The Wall within Our Minds and Negotiating with Gravity, the other two films in the trilogy. But it is from within the wholeness of the three films, seen in their original intended sequence, that the true import of Hugh’s work emerges. The overlapping, interlaced meanings of the trilogy evoke a sense of mystery and beauty that transcends any of the individual films. These qualities linger, and indeed work to rearrange one’s interiority, one’s very being.

It was with great joy to learn from Hugh – who has kept these films rather close for a number of years – that he was enthusiastic about sharing them with the larger Pari community. This prospect has now come to fruition. Please join us for this very special, one-time-only event!

Lee Nichol, Moderator

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On Saturday January 8, 2022, we are offering all our friends at the Pari Center the unique opportunity to view Hugh Pidgeon’s trilogy Beyond Words followed by a panel discussion.

Our invited guests at the table will come together to discuss the ideas, the beauty, and the overall sense of Wholeness that is portrayed throughout. They will examine the interconnections between David Bohm, Martin Buber, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of young Palestinians and Israelis, and the artist Andy Goldsworthy.

The films (with a combined running time of 32 minutes) can be viewed at leisure in a 60-minute window prior to the 90-minute roundtable discussion between our panelists. There will not be Q&A during this event.

It is essential that you get your ticket above in order to receive the necessary links.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Please get your ticket for this event at the top of the page and you will be sent the links to the films and to the roundtable conversation. 

If you have any questions or need any help just contact Eleanor Peat: eleanor@paricenter.com

Join us at the Pari Center on Saturday January 8, 2022 for a screening of Hugh Pidgeon’s trilogy Beyond Words followed by a panel conversation. This is a unique opportunity to not only view Hugh’s films but to hear a ninety-minute roundtable conversation on the ideas presented in the films.

Thanks to creator and director Hugh Pidgeon, it is our privilege to screen the Beyond Words trilogy, Hugh’s stunning short films, free of charge, for the Pari Center community.

The Beyond Words trilogy opens with The Wall in Our Minds which introduces Arab and Jewish young musicians from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, with founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim who believes the orchestra is a metaphor for what could be achieved in the Middle East.

These young people were brought together as a one-off scratch orchestra in 1999 (yet is still giving performances) by Barenboim and the philosopher and writer, the late Edward Said. The name chosen for the orchestra The West-Eastern Divan was the title of a collection of lyrical poems by Goethe. One hundred years earlier, Martin Buber prefaced two lines from the very same collection in his book I and Thou.

Negotiating With Gravity, the second film in the trilogy, was the outcome of an invitation to the director to lead a plenary at an international conference of Gestalt therapists on Martin Buber’s contribution to the core notions of dialogue that inform Gestalt psychotherapy.

For Buber the first of what he called the ‘spheres of relation’ was our life with Nature. Going beyond words, the photographic essay that became the film followed conversations with a botanist from Kew Gardens, a professor of physics at Oxford, a professor of mathematics at Warwick University, a resident ecologist at Schumacher College, and an artist whose paintings feature in the film, the better to understand the five perspectives that featured in the passage from Buber’s book and begins ‘I consider a tree.’

The third in the series A Moment of Clarity was conceived as a sister film to bring David Bohm and Martin Buber together for the first time in the same space. In Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order the physicist includes extensive reference to the Ancient Greek notions of measure in music and the visual arts.

Hugh drew his inspiration from Andy Goldsworthy, a site-specific sculptor whose work he has long admired and is featured on the cover of the Routledge edition of Bohm’s On Dialogue edited by Lee Nichol. It is Andy Goldsworthy who speaks of a moment of clarity at the close of the film.

Hugh presents an entirely new configuration of Goldsworthy’s film Rivers and Tides brought into conjunction with David Bohm’s writing on process from Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and the extraordinary Ice Music of Norwegian musician Terje Isungset.

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Hugh Pidgeon is an organisational consultant, an academic and a practicing Gestalt psychotherapist. He has been as much influenced in his work by the teaching of Martin Buber on dialogue as he has been by that of David Bohm .  Drawn by the commonality of insight they shared with each other, Hugh created the trilogy Beyond Words, several years in the making, that features the two of them for the first time in the same space.

A number of years living and working in Thailand and China and often visiting Japan have also proved a significant influence on Hugh personally.  He was first introduced to David Bohm’s work by fellow US consultants Roger Harrison and Peter Block while he was representing a Kansas City-based consultancy in Europe and was intrigued from the beginning by the interest David Bohm developed in the parallels in Buddhist teaching to his own work as a physicist.

Hugh’s primary interest is the contribution a dialogic orientation yet might make to the fractious collisions of opinion on how best to address our seemingly insatiable determination as the human race to sacrifice the ecological balance of the planet in pursuit of our own economic development – the outcome of the fragmentation in the way we think that David Bohm anticipated over 40 years ago.

Eelco de Geus met the work of David Bohm in his Dialogue Training in Germany with Freeman Dhoritiy. He is inspired by the integration of Bohm’s Thinking, the relational approaches in the works of Martin Buber, the process work of Arnold Mindell and different community building practices. Eelco applies this integration in a proces- oriented approach on dialogue,  that inquires beyond words into the essence of human connection. He is co- founder of the Dialogue Academy Vienna, which provides learning spaces for dialogue process work and systemic constellations.

Gary Goldberg received an undergraduate degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and then a Medical Degree from McMaster University.  He completed residency training in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation with subspecialty certification in Brain Injury Medicine.  In 2020, he retired from clinical practice after over 35 years working in the field of brain injury rehabilitation at academic medical centers in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Richmond in the USA.  He now is focused on drawing on this work experience to seek a means of conjoining faith and science into a coherent conceptual framework of holistic inquiry.

Gary is an energetic member of the Pari Center, actively participating in our online events and is a member of the Pari Center Advisory Board.

Donna Kennedy-Glans is a boundary-crosser. As a Canadian, she has worked on the ground to add value to enterprising projects in over thirty-five countries, in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Donna began her career as a lawyer in the energy sector, where she held several unique and pioneering roles involving corporate integrity, transparency and sustainability. She founded a non-profit to build the capacity of women in Yemen, served as an elected politician and cabinet minister in the province of Alberta, has held leading roles on boards of directors, and participates with her siblings in the stewardship of a family farm enterprise.

Donna’s book about her work with women in Yemen—Unveiling the Breath: One Woman’s Journey into Understanding Islam and Gender Equality–was published by Pari Publishing in 2009. Donna’s latest book—Teaching the Dinosaur to Dance: Moving Beyond Business as Usual—will be released in March 2022; see teachingthedinosaur.com for details. Donna blogs at https://beyondpolarity.blog and is active on several social media platforms. She is an amateur photographer and delighted grandmother to two-year-old Kennedy.

Lee Nichol is the editor of David Bohm’s On Dialogue; On Creativity; and The Essential David Bohm. From 1980-1992 he collaborated with Bohm on various aspects of dialogue, consciousness, and education.

He has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, NC; of the Oak Grove School in Ojai, CA; of the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, CA; and of Denver University in Denver, CO.

Lee has recently released – Entering Bohm’s Holoflux – which can be downloaded for free at: https://paricenter.com/product/entering-bohms-holoflux-by-lee-nichol/

Jacob Raz is Professor Emeritus, East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University. He translates and writes on Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Japanese Culture and poetry, as well as his own haiku. Raz lived many years in Japan and travelled extensively in Asia. He has long been a practitioner and teacher of Zen.

Raz has taught seminars and workshops on Martin Buber and Buddhism, and wrote the Afterword in the new translation of Martin Buber’s book I and Thou into Hebrew [2014]. He has been active in the Consciousness Laboratory, Tel Aviv University, and wrote extensively on the subject.

He is also the father of Yoni, a loving person with DS.  They speak ‘Yonish’,  a language they have been creating over a lifetime through constant, embodied dialogue. Consequently, Raz became a social activist, and has led a national movement toward a paradigmatic change in the life and dialogue with people with disabilities.

Yuriko Sato is a Japanese Jungian analyst and psychotherapist, and a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich. She studied medicine and worked as a psychiatrist in Osaka and Kyoto. She has private psychotherapy practices in Zürich and Bern, and is a training/supervising analyst at ISAPZURICH (International School of Analytical Psychology Zürich), where she teaches on topics such as the Eastern (Japanese) psyche, narcissism, and psychiatry.

David Schrum received his PhD in quantum theory at Queen’s University, following which he spent two post-doctoral years with David Bohm at Birkbeck College. Here, he entered Bohm’s world of creative and subtle philosophical approaches to physics and his enquiry into consciousness and what may lie beyond.

David Schrum continues in these explorations, in physics developing a new approach to relativistic quantum theory and, through the dialogue process, going into what it is to bring to light that which lies enfolded within our individual and collective consciousness.