Events

The Heart Sutra, taken from ancient Buddhism, concludes with this evocation of awakening, “gone, gone, gone to the farthest shore….”

‘This shore’ and ‘the other shore’, nowadays, have become common metaphors in spiritual discourse, ‘this side’ (here) representing the field of fragmented mind with its conflict of opposing dualities; ‘the other side’ (there) reflecting wholeness; the gap between these two signifying the great divide between this and that. But, as sages and mystics also have indicated, when one reaches the other side, he/she may find that it is this side—that always it has been this side, but now is differently perceived. This journey to perception is the journey beyond duality.

This two-hour, fully interactive webinar will introduce the harmonic series and the musical intervals produced by it; the way a scale and its associated harmonic scheme and thence, the musical structures that depend upon this harmony, are derived from it; consider the significance and symbolism of the number five (quinta; cinque) and the so-called “fifth element” in the realm of music; discuss the notion of cadence and its role in Western European Art Music structures; explore the role of the Fibonacci Series in musical structure; and analyse and present in performance the music of several composers, beginning, as always, with Johann Sebastian Bach, discussing the interval relationships in Das Wohltemperierte Klavier  Vol. I Prelude in C major BWV 846.

Jon Goodbun’s research focuses on ‘ecological thinking’—both in terms of how we think about ecological systems, and how ecological systems themselves think—drawing in particular on his extensive study of the work of the ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In this talk Goodbun will introduce some of the history and thinking of this important theorist, drawing in particular upon some of the ideas contained within his first collection of essays: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, as well as his later synthesis: Mind and Nature—A Necessary Unity, and his final incomplete text, published after his death by daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, called Angels Fear—Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, and will situate these ideas in relation to more recent research, and the wider research interests of the Pari Center.

Until the advent of quantum mechanics, physical sciences had thrived on the separation between object and subject that seems to provide “a view from nowhere”. At the same time, current life and mind sciences still struggle with experiments and theories in which the primacy of felt experience does not seem to matter. In this third conversation of the series we will draw from the phenomenological tradition to explore the feasibility of a new kind of science in which human consciousness is placed at the center.

Donna’s latest book Teaching the Dinosaur to Dance provides the roadmap builders and rebuilders—of society and of enterprise—with the tools to rethink, redesign and revitalize their organizations and to remain relevant and sustainable in a new and very different future. Business as usual is extinct. Disruption and social pressure are the new norm and change is inevitable for enterprises of all kinds—businesses, governments, non-profits, community initiatives and social institutions. We’ve reached a turning point and it’s time to evolve, or we go the way of the dinosaurs. We all need to act now to survive and find new ways to thrive in a changed world. But in an age of polarized debates on complex issues (such as fairness and climate change), how can leaders find a new way forward? How can enterprises re-invent themselves to make capitalism work better for more people? These are some of the compelling and timely issues that Donna and Julie will tackle in their conversation.

A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality can be read as a sustained meditation on Locke’s characterization of time as ‘perpetual perishing.’ But he refuses to see time solely as an occasion of perishing. Colapietro will seize this occasion itself to reflect on time and tragedy. Is time by its very nature tragic, entailing the irrevocable loss of whatever emerges and, for a time, endures in its flux? Or is time a site wherein forms of ‘ immortality’ are attainable? But of even more basic concern are several different senses of time, above all, the time envisioned by the most influential physicists (including Einstein) and the conception of time implicit in the activity of physicists themselves. Are physicists in time in the same sense that they so often conceive time (specifically, time as a reversible process or even an illusory phenomenon)?

In 1978, as David Bohm was bringing forth his vision of the implicate order, he pointed out that, rather than being a new model, “I regard the implicate order as a new form of imagination.” There are many potential lines of inquiry bound up in this statement. Among those that we will take up are: What did Bohm mean by “a new form of imagination”? How might this differ from a model? We tend to think that descriptions and models are either literal or metaphorical – but are there aspects of imagination that are neither of these? Could a renewed and revitalized imagination itself the key to this inquiry?