Most neuroscientists are convinced that minds live in skull confinement — after all, their metaphysical gospel (cloaked in brain scans) insists that minds are “nothing but” what brains do. Some occasionally let their minds stroll within the body, acknowledging the importance of heart and gut, while maintaining the brain as organ king. A few conservative radicals go further and claim that minds can also protract into the world, much like the blind’s cane or everyone’s phone. Such an “extended mind” is seriously meant but often so rather metaphorically as a heterodox way to lessen the duality by spreading “mind” like butter in the bread of “matter”. I wonder if that’s sufficient, or even necessary. We are still struggling with Descartes’ forced divorce between “res cogitans” and “res extensa”; extended stuff can’t think and thinking stuff can’t enjoy extension.

Traditional Indigenous people the world over regularly employ a holistic mode of consciousness that affirms they are inseparable from the natural world. Their lives are guided by this mode. The holocentric mode is a natural feature of all human consciousness but has been suppressed in the last few thousand years by the rise of cultures organized from a second ancient mode of consciousness: the anthropocentric or human-centered mode.
Anthropocentric consciousness, which derives from perceptions that the world is made of separate things dominates the way most people living today perceive reality. By contrast, holocentric consciousness focuses on the world as a source of unity, relationships, and beauty. The holocentric mode of consciousness continues to function as a “ground state consciousness” for traditional Indigenous people and, in a different context, for creative artists.

We will explore the relationship between apparent dichotomoies through which we perceive our universe and place within it. From wave particle duality, to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, to the Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity divide that plays out in the quest to understand Dark Matter, it is becoming ever clearer that the way forward is to evolve past subjective/objective divides and come recognise the Universe as process.

The eleventh conversation in this series will be on Thursday November 30, 2023 with Melissa Nelson. Our conversation will orbit around “Indigenous ways of knowing”.

The twelfth conversation in this series will be on Wednesday December 20, 2023 with Michael Murphy. 

Rupert Sheldrake argues that the sciences are being constricted by ten assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. In this course he turns the dogmas into questions and examines them scientifically in the light of advances in the sciences themselves. For example, the dogma that nature is mechanical becomes the question “Is nature mechanical?”; the dogma that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?”; the dogma that minds are confined to brains becomes “Are minds confined to brains?”

This two-day, six-hour workshop is hands-on, and fully participatory. Each participant will need to acquire a new “found stone” (not store-bought) and work with that stone in ways specific to the workshop. In addition, each participant will give a brief report to the whole group, on Zoom, of what occurs when working with their found stone.

No places availableFacilitated by Lee NicholJanuary 27 & 28, 20249:00am PST  | 12:00pm EST  | 5:00pm GMT  |  6:00pm CETThe maximum number of 25 participants was reached, registration is closed.The price of this workshop is 30 euros for the two-days, 6 hours. If you are interested in participating, please use the form above to pre-register.This […]

The conversation will explore “a landscape of consciousness”, toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a public intellectual; he is the creator, writer, host and executive producer of Closer To Truth, the long-running PBS/public television series and leading global resource on Cosmos (cosmology/physics, philosophy of science), Consciousness (brain/mind, philosophy of mind), Life (philosophy of biology), and Meaning (theism/atheism/agnosticism, global philosophy of religion, critical thinking).