Events

Enlightened agriculture (with corresponding cuisine)—and the grand cause of conviviality, personal fulfilment, and a flourishing biosphere—cannot come about without an appropriate, supportive infrastructure—compounded of the government, the economy, and the law. The economy is ‘the matrix of our lives.’ It is in practice the medium through which we translate our aspirations into material reality. So it is vital to have the right aspirations—and to devise an economy that really does help us to meet our needs and fulfil our dreams (insofar as our dreams are compatible with the bedrock principles of morality and ecological reality).

In this session, we will use three films as our springboard to exploring Jung’s notion of the persona:  Wall Street (1987), The Mask (1994) and The Farewell (2019).  While each film highlights the potentially pathological relationship one can have with one’s personas, they also convey the important role played by this archetypal imperative in personality development. As with all archetypes, the persona is bipolar in nature and entering into a more integral relationship with its various qualities and characteristics is central to the project of individuation.

We find ourselves in a world in crisis. While theories abound, to some humanity is at the edge of the apocalypse. We are at a time of reckoning, a time of turning. We are both actors and spectators in the time foretold by ancient prophecy.

There has been no greater symbol of this in recent history than the global health emergency due to Covid-19. As a consequence of the virus, borders have been closed, millions of sources of livelihood have been lost, systems have been stifled, economies have suffered, and all the ills of the world have been accentuated. At the peak of the pandemic, the world was stopped in its tracks and activity—as we knew it—and was locked down. Some point out that this may just be the first such pandemic, and that it is merely a harbinger of the crises to come with climate change.

When we realise just how much hangs on our attitudes towards the various forms of crisis we are exposed to, we may come to see what our work really is. Hope has a curious story to tell. It reminds us of the wealth we carry within us, but also of how easily we are persuaded to give it all up. This talk attempts to string together disparate stories relating to, but not necessarily about, hope, and aims specifically to raise more questions than it answers. Accompanying the talk there will be breakout and plenary sessions in which participants will be able to articulate their thoughts and responses.

Two widespread current notions of consciousness are physicalism, i.e. the perspective that assumes physical reality, matter, as fundamental, and bottom-up panpsychism, i.e. the perspective that takes everything as possessing mind or consciousness and higher levels of consciousness consisting of a combination of more elementary levels. Bernardo Kastrup will argue for an idealist (consciousness only) ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (the challenge of deducing consciousness from matter) or the ‘subject combination problem,’ (the challenge of deducing higher levels of consciousness from lower levels).

This talk will focus on the unconscious patterns which run through families and generations of families, as one generation inherits, responds and reacts to the complexes and archetypal energies of the previous generation—and even of the generation before that—parents, grandparents and in some cases, great-grandparents. Drawing on mythology and other cultural experiences, the presenter will explore the symbolic nature of the genogram, or psychological genealogy tree, and its connection to the Tree of Life as a visual image for eliciting, revealing and deepening insights into family and ancestral patterning.

This seminar-series is a presentation of reflections on justice, liberation and transformation. It is a fragmented story, inspired by the presenter’s tri-continental life-journey, interpreted through a trans-disciplinary lens and motivated by finding strategies for change through epistemic disobedience.

The Covid pandemic has required us to keep a broader social distance from one another; for psychotherapists this should be less of a problem. With reliable broadband making therapy sessions (and presentations like this one) possible online, why do so many people still find the virtual session falls so far short of the ‘real’ meeting in person? Maybe our assumption that there is a ‘real’ version and there is an inferior ‘virtual’ version is wrong to begin with. Christopher Hauke will lay out three approaches to this question.

Contextuality is one particularly puzzling non-classical feature of the quantum world—but what conclusions should we draw from it? In this talk, Dr Adlam will explain what contextuality is and why the presence of contextuality in our theories needs explaining. She will describe how contextuality is manifested in the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics and compare and contrast the de Broglie-Bohm account of contextuality to various alternatives. Finally, she will discuss some interesting new mathematical approaches to contextuality and consider what these results add to our understanding.

At the very least, our brains help to shape our consciousness. Can an examination of the way in which they do so help us to reconcile different visons of ourselves and of our world?  There is nothing reductionist about asking such a question: rather, McGilchrist shall suggest, it helps us to transcend the limitations of reductionism itself.  Importantly it may, for the first time, give philosophy a basis for judging certain views on the world as worthier of acceptance than others.