The Pari Center

Re-enchanting the World: Narratives of Wholeness
2019-06-13 00:00 - 2019-06-19 23:59 UTC | Pari, Italy
Narratives of Wholeness

Pari Dialogues 2019

with Richard Berengarten, Andrew Fellows, Elena Liotta, Roderick Main, Shantena Augusto Sabbadini and Yuriko Sato

Carl Jung once said that the gods we have expelled from our psyche come back to us in the guise of diseases (and, we might add, ecological disasters). Only the contact with the numinous can make us whole and enable us to navigate the tremendous challenges of the Anthropocene.

By focusing exclusively on the measurable aspects of the world modern science has gained immense technological power, but it has lost the living quality of experience and the intimate participation in the web of life.

The June 2019 Pari Dialogue will invite archetypes of wholeness to our discussions as we work toward a return of the world soul.

Poetry, Inspiration and SynchronicityRichard Berengarten

Deep Ecology: The Enchanted CompassAndrew Fellows

On the Edge of Destruction or the Border of “Renaissance”? Soul and Earth facing a global challengeElena Liotta

Jung’s Critical HolismRoderick Main

Vocatus atque non vocatusShantena Augusto Sabbadini

The Sense of Wonder: Being Connected with the Enchanted WorldYuriko Sato

For additional information, you can check the PDF.

Weekend Among Friends: Small changes making big differences
2019-04-25 00:00 - 2019-04-28 23:59 | Pari, Italy
A Tribute to the Other and Elsewhere
We are bound by the way we live and trying to change that world is difficult. It might be interesting to just try to understand how other groups organize and denote their world.It is not about knowledge.A conversation between F. David Peat and Godelieve Spaas, 2016

How often do we feel ourselves in a situation of not being understood or not being seen by the other? Equally so, we can ask ourselves how often are we able to really understand and acknowledge the other? As a dancer, scientist and entrepreneur I experience the synergy between different aspects in myself. At the same time, even after years of practice, I often fail in transferring experiences and knowledge from one of these domains to the other in my day to day work.
Making a career as a woman required being adaptive to a mainly masculine company culture. I learned how to be the other.Working in South Afrika confronted me with views and wisdom so different from mine that I had to learn to listen with my heart and soul just because my mind couldn’t understand.
We all have developed our own ways of meeting, understanding and becoming with the other and elsewhere.

If we have a wider range of ideas, knowledge and expressions to tap into, we would probably be better equipped for developing a way of living that contributes to the wellbeing of everyone in harmony with our Earth. To evolve towards a world that does justice to all people, communities, cultures and ecosystems, we need to reach out to, relate and become with the other and other places. Can we find ways to cooperate with the earth, with wisdom rooted in other worldviews then ours and with ideas born and nurtured in other communities, disciplines, cultures and places?
This year’s Weekend Among Friends will explore meeting the other and elsewhere. How can we enlarge our space to make our thinking, doing and imagining more transformative?

To be in love is to be worldly, to be in connection with significant otherness and signifying others, on many scales, in layers of locals and globals, in ramifying webs.Donna Haraway

As friends meeting in Pari we will explore our different ways of understanding the other and elsewhere. How do we move beyond our prejudices? What are our ways to stay with the trouble of bridging differences and weaving new entrepreneurial or communal fabrics out of diversity? By sharing our experiences, stories and curiosity we will use the diversity among friends to explore untrodden pathways to a more sustainable and just future.
Our special guest this year is Annet Henneman who travels through conflict areas in the Middle East and lives with the people in these areas over extended periods of time. Based on these highly personal meetings she creates performances as a way to bring the lives of those who live in oppression, war, and occupation closer to the ‘Western countries’.
We would like to invite you to the beautiful little village of Pari, Italy, April 25-28, 2019, to join us for the weekend and to meet with old and new friends. The landscape and community, the Pari Center and Pari Networks all represent a container in which one feels invited to have good conversations and to enjoy the company of our Pari friends, the excellent Italian food and wine, and of course the Tuscan sun and culture.
With love, Godelieve Spaas

eleanor@parinetworks.org godelieve@creatingchange.nl
Weekend Among Friends is an initiative of

IDEAS BEHIND WEEKEND AMONG FRIENDS
Pari, its community and the Pari Center have a special place in my heart. The landscape and the community represent a sphere in which I feel invited to explore art, literature, science, indigenous knowledge, culture, music and poetry as means to denote, understand, reflect and renew ourselves and the world we are part of. At the same time the village serves as a place to come to rest, to listen to the silence, to nature and to celebrate a holiday.
Weekend Among Friends was born out of my longing to share this experience with friends. The weekend has become an annual event at the cross over of the good life and good conversations in a beautiful and wise environment. Dialogues pay a tribute to an idea or people that might generate reflection and renewal on personal and community level.
The overarching idea: small changes making big differences towards a social, economic and ecological just future. Thinking doing and imagining are equally important. Participants are the co-creators of the weekend. Their wisdom, experiences and expressions form the base of our exploration, rethinking and creation.
I introduce the theme of the year and from there the group as whole takes it further. No specified program, just joint dedication to explore what can become. A special guest brings in another perspective to invite other lines of thoughts to the table.The weekend unfolds along dialogues, joint meals, hikes, music, dance meditation, making/experiencing art and other means of exchange as they appear, depending on who the participants are and what they share.

Pilgrimages to Emptiness: Rethinking Reality through Quantum Physics
2018-10-04 00:00 - 2018-10-08 23:59
Pilgrimages to Emptiness: Rethinking Reality through Quantum Physics

4 – 8 October, 2018

with Shantena Sabbadini

This seminar is an invitation to wonder and be grateful for the adventure of life and for the mystery of which we are part. We and the world are expressions of the same creativity of existence, waves in the ocean of consciousness. Embracing our oceanic nature is the way to find peace on an individual and a collective level.

Exploring the Mystery of Time
2018-09-06 08:00 - 2018-09-12 17:00 | Pari, Italy
Exploring the Mystery of Time

September 6 – 12, 2018

with Julian Barbour, Mauro Bergonzi, Warwick Fox, Christopher Hauke, Alison MacLeod, James Peat Barbieri, Hester Reeve, Shantena Sabbadini, David Schrum and Gordon Shippey

What is time? It is at the same time what is closest to us and the deepest mystery. So close we cannot step outside it and watch it from a distance. And actually, when we attempt to do so, the notion of time itself seems to fade away, to dissolve into timelessness, where past, present and future merge into an eternal instant.

In this Pari Dialogue we will plumb the mystery of time from different perspectives: art, science, psychology, literature, mystical experience. Our aim will not be so much to try to answer the impossible question, as to awaken to the awesome fact of the transient, terrible, marvelous, phenomenon that is life itself.

Exploring Synchronicity: Jung, Pauli and the I Ching
2018-07-12 08:00 - 2018-07-16 17:00 | Pari, Italy
Exploring Synchronicity: Jung, Pauli and the I Ching

June 12 – 16, 2018

with Shantena Augusto Sabbadini and Cruz Manas Sabbadini

The term “synchronicity” was coined by Jung and refers to those meaningful coincidences in which outer circumstances reflect in surprising ways the inner process of the person involved, sometimes with life transforming implications.

In this seminar we will investigate synchronicity both as an interpretative principle and as a psychological experience through the actual consultation of the oracle. We will use the Eranos I Ching, an innovative translation by the sinologist Rudolf Ritsema and Shantena Augusto Sabbadini, the fruit of fifty years of research by Ritsema and a decade of Round Table Sessions at the Eranos East-West study centre, which was founded under Jung’s supervision in 1933.

David Bohm Centennial Celebration
2017-09-14 08:00 - 2017-09-20 17:00
David Bohm Centennial Celebration

September 14 – 20, 2017

Join us at the Pari Center to celebrate the life and work of the multifaceted David Bohm. Considered one of the most important theoretical physicists and original thinkers of the 20th century, Bohm contributed influential ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology, philosophy of mind, language, dialogue and education.

This will be an informal meeting with presentations by experts on Bohm’s life, work and philosophy followed by roundtable discussions.

Key topics will include Quantum Theory and Relativity, the Aharonov-Bohm Effect, Implicate and Explicate Orders, Limits of Language, Dialogue, Philosophy of Mind, Creativity, Rheomode, Protomind, the Bohm/Krishnamurti relationship.

Synchronicity
2017-06-13 08:00 - 2017-06-17 17:00
A group of 10 Swedish Jungians will study Wolfgang Pauli, Synchronicity and Mind and Matter with Swedish teacher Dr Suzanne Gieser, and guest Dr Shantena Sabbadini who will talk about Consciousness.

Mind, Matter and Cosmos
2017-06-07 08:00 - 2017-06-12 08:00 | Pari, Italy
Ancient and primitive cultures conceived the whole cosmos as alive and sentient. In the West, the mainstream approach of our contemporary culture has shifted from this way of being towards an ever-greater separation of matter and mind. Today’s dominant scientific world-view is based on an essentially materialistic representation of reality. But paradoxically, as we have gone deeper into the exploration, the concept of abstract matter itself has in some sense vanished, leaving us with a universe of possibilities rather than one of solid independent objects.

This course will examine how we are now moving in this fluid context, rethinking the ways in which we represent reality and recovering a sense of oneness with other human beings and all life forms. We will use physics as an instrument of wonder, a way to contact the mystery of our existence as conscious beings in this vast universe. We will explore our place in the universe both in terms of modern cosmology and ancient sacred geometry, visiting some living traces of this in the monasteries of the region of Siena and the Maremma. We will also refer to Bach’s music as a key to participating in the cycles of the cosmos, and the harmony of the spheres.

Finally we will explore how this way of sensing our place in the world is reflected in the wisdom classics of the East, particularly in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. We will find that the language of those ancient texts sometimes comes closer to expressing the subtle nature of quantum reality than that of our own contemporary scientific jargon.

Weekend Among Friends in Tuscany: A Tribute to Uncertainty
2017-04-26 08:00 - 2017-04-29 17:00 | Pari, Italy
How can organizations and individuals transform themselves so that they can become as subtle, sensitive, intelligent and fast-responding as the world around them? (David Peat, 2010)

We are all familiar with setting goals and making action plans to realize them. We plan to move, to find a new job, to do better in our friendships or to quit our bad habits. Organisations also strive to implement certainty by setting and evaluating objectives to score success. We are accustomed to circles of planning and control and almost naturally analyse causes of failure and success to predict how to do better next time.

We all know life is not that linear, not that singular, nor that predictable. Life is subtle, sensitive and dynamic. We are related to each other and our environment in many ways. We are interdependent beings, communities, and organisations in an interconnected world. To adequately respond to the economic, ecological, social and personal trouble we face in the world around us, we need to understand and act upon its intertwined, co-creative and manifold nature. This Weekend Among Friends, we pay a tribute to uncertainty, as a basic tenet that might open pathways of organizing that are intelligent, responsible and contributing to nature, people and purpose.
