Events

We are living in a time of anxiety and uncertainty. As more environmental damage is done, the means to repair it seems to be getting less. It is increasingly difficult to know what to trust in politics and the media. Spiritual traditions survive, but the authority they once had has passed to science and so it might seem that the idea of ‘The Sacred’ has disappeared.

But as science reveals more and more about the place of the earth in the cosmos there is a growing awareness of how precious our living world is and of how inter-dependent we are with it. Perhaps this is not only a scientific discovery but also the re-appearance of the sacred in a form fit for our times.

Our dominant worldview tells us we’re split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world. This worldview has passed its expiration date: it’s based on a series of flawed assumptions that have been superseded by modern scientific findings. In this talk, based on themes from his recent book, The Web of Meaning, author Jeremy Lent will discuss how another worldview is possible—recognizing our deep interrelatedness with all of life.

In this final instalment of The Future Scientist series we will be in conversation with the former director of The Pari Center, Dr. Shantena Augusto Sabbadini. We will discuss the I Ching, also known as The Book of Changes, which Dr. Sabbadini translated to English together with Rudolf Ritsema, the former director of the Eranos Foundation. The I Ching is a divination system, a formidable three-thousand years old manual, whose language defies Western rationality. It is not a philosophical text, nor a prediction machine. Rather than guessing the future, the I Ching allows us to read into the present moment, weaving together context and chance as an organic whole at the moment of observation.

To celebrate the release of his new book Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, we have invited Mark Vernon, to talk about his new work. Mark’s book will be out in time for Christmas (December 9) and would make an excellent gift. He will be in conversation with Beth Macy followed by Q&A and discussion from the audience. 

We will inaugurate the series on Wednesday 15th of February of 2023 with Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal. Our conversation will orbit around “The Superhumanities”.

In this talk I will explore the theoretical aspects of entanglement, keeping the technicalities to a minimum but providing an adequate grounding for the other presentations to come. The work of John Bell will be discussed, as he provided a means of experimentally showing exactly how counter to classical expectations quantum entangled systems really are. The experiments that have been carried out based on Bell’s work will also be covered in outline.

In January 2013 Rupert Sheldrake gave a talk at TEDx Whitechapel entitled “The Science Delusion” where he questioned ten fundamental beliefs of mainstream science. The event was called “Visions for Transition: Challenging existing paradigms and redefining values (for a more beautiful world)”. After protests from two militant materialists, P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne, and in consultation with an undisclosed Scientific Board, TED declared: “we feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience.” 

In his recently published book, Nexus, Jeff brings unites three decades of scientific experience with four decades of pursuits in philosophy and metaphysics to weave a story that introduces the principle of syntropy and its importance of finding balance at every scale – personal, societal, and global.  Jeff’s driving passion is to help transform our world such that materialism gives way to the recognition of the crucial role that consciousness plays in the formation of reality.

Plants can be knocked out using the very same drug that your vet might use to put your pet to sleep. Although demonstrations of “plants under anaesthesia” provides the perfect blank slate from which to begin to view plants in an entirely new way, this just the beginning. Take sleep; do plants sleep? Or can plants suffer from jet lag? Most people would assume I am talking metaphorically in my hot off the press Planta Sapiens. And yet, planta sapiens is not unlike Harari’s Sapiens, if you see what I mean.

People half our age will someday soon confront us with two questions: when you were my age, did you know what was happening (or what could happen)? And so, what did you do?
The most bearable answer: we had no idea. The state of the world would then seem more tolerable if failure by naive ignorance was actually the case. But was it? If it wasn’t, this would entail a kind of intolerable inheritance. We’d quickly become the ancestral monsters no one would claim as their own. It’ll be a psychic DNA whose indelible stain won’t be amenable to cosmetic fixes.