International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL) and The Pari Center present: Experiencing Consciousness: Storytelling and Consciousness with Robin Rice Sunday April 12, 202610:00AM PDT | 1:00PM EDT | 6:00PM BST | 7:00PM CEST This event is restricted to 40 participants. There will be no recording. How we tell our stories – to ourselves and others – […]
This creative workshop will guide participants through a series of Clean Language questions to facilitate an imaginative process that will allow each person to create (by drawing, annotating and speaking in response to the questions) a personal metaphor, grounded in their own physical, cultural and creative experience.
The starting point will be to imagine a vessel, as an invitation to connect to individual and shared meaning and experience of what it means to be in participatory and reciprocal relationship with other humans and the more-than-human world.
Exploring Einstein’s theory of gravity has lead physicists to imagine some weird consequences. These days black holes have become part of mainstream physics, but the theory also contains the possibility of wormholes and warp drives. Science fiction has not been slow to run with these ideas, but they are also being talked about in the context of UAPs. Kirill is professional physicist working on these ideas and in this talk will help us separate the Sci_Fi from the serious physics.
In this series of conversations and workshops with Prof Carr, we will explore the bounds of current physics from M-theory in the microscopic domain to the multiverse on the macroscopic domain, probe the nature of space and time, push into the esoteric worlds of cosmology and black holes, and ask whether some final theory which amalgamates relativity and quantum mechanics can accommodate consciousness and associated anomalous phenomena. We speculate that physics will need to take a broader view of reality if it is ever going to complete its mission.
The exploration of consciousness, as a direct goal or as reflected in our desire to understand the natural universe, is central to every cultural throughout history. In this event we consider how this quest has been pursued through both modern western intellectualism and the older indigenous paths of experiential knowing, and ultimately ask whether such approaches can be complementary.
For decades, David Bohm’s oeuvre has largely been presented in three categories – his work in physics, in philosophy, and in social dialogue. In Beyond Bohm 2026, we will shift that emphasis, looking further afield for new perspectives on Bohm’s multifaceted vision. Initially we will explore Bohm’s organicist metaphysics from an experiential perspective – in what ways can his radical views on the nature of the human be put to the test in daily life? This will be followed by an introduction to Bohmian poetics – a new, multi-disciplinary theme in Bohmian Studies at the Pari Center. Finally, we will examine how the groundbreaking work of cosmologist Brian Swimme and philosopher John Vervaeke complement and extend Bohm’s diverse perspectives.
Over the course of this weekend, we will inquire into these themes, and how anyone can pursue these questions in real-life ways. Of particular focus, we will outline new ways of understanding Bohm’s emphasis on somatic experience. Among these are rheosoma (the flowing body) and the open organism, an exploratory mode of recovering the innate depth of human being.
This weekend we will take up three questions. First, in what ways can we think of David Bohm’s framework of implicate and explicate orders as poiesis, as revealing the coming-into-being of the human and natural worlds? Second, in what ways are human beings participants in this implicate/explicate movement of poiesis? And finally, the poetics: how can we think about and embody these questions – what can literature, song, painting, conversation, philosophy, and contemplative arts reveal about unfolding meaning?
Our final weekend explores how the sensibility cultivated across the first two weekends — the felt encounter with rheosoma and organismic being — might extend into the domains of perception, cosmology, and the renewal of meaning. Bruce Alderman, drawing from his forthcoming book Unfolding the Senses, will introduce the territory where Bohm’s vision meets the phenomenology of the senses, inviting participants to explore felt sense, motility, and vision as concrete pathways into embodied wholeness.
We will investigate what ‘being human’ and ‘being creative’ might have meant in the past, what it means in our time. We will look at creativity in science, in the arts and humanities and in spiritual traditions, paying particular attention to women’s voices, those heard and those not. We will, for example, hear from speakers on Hildegarde of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, as well mystical traditions from South American cultures.