Events

Join us at the Pari Center with world-renowned scholars as we deepen our insights into the ‘exceptional’ experiences we have all encountered.
This will be an informal meeting with presentations by experts followed by roundtable discussions.
Through presentations and informal discussions in a convivial atmosphere you will learn about and have opportunities to discuss the insights and research findings of world-renowned experts on what are called ‘exceptional’ experiences.
We at the Pari Center seek to bring together world-renowned experts from a variety of disciplines to meet together in person and deepen our insights on the workings and bases of such experiences, while also exploring creative and rigorous frameworks to integrate such a constellation into a coherent understanding. You are cordially invited to join us.

Join us for a week of living in the moment, for the moment, surrounded by the peaceful hills of the Tuscan landscape in Pari. With its beautiful palazzo, rustic bar, and numerous quiet places, the medieval village of Pari serves as an alchemical vessel for growth and personal transformation.

“The idea of bringing people in. They could be business people, they could be environmentalists, whatever, and bringing them in without any sort of fixed program, without them giving talks and powerpoint presentations. Just to sit in the room and see what emerges, because they are in a container, it’s in an alchemical vessel which allows something transformative to take place. So that was the idea of Pari as a container.”
David Peat w/ Jena Axelrod in The Absurdity of Certainty.

A gathering of world leading philosophers to explore how traditionally Eastern emphases on holism may inform the global commons.

Engendering a new chapter in East and West communication especially in relation to pressing global challenges.
The Pari Center is pleased to host the June 2023 symposium East and West Philosophy in Dialogue—From Worldview to Sustainable Order. At the eight-day symposium, leading philosophers from the East and the West will gather to explore how traditionally Eastern emphases on holism may inform the global commons. The symposium will convene in Pari at the Pari Center and conclude in Rome at the Vatican with two days of dialogue on the 17 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

The sixth conversation in this series will be on Wednesday June 28, 2023 with Jennifer Banks. Our conversation will orbit around “natality, birth, and new beginnings”.

The seventh conversation in this series will be on Wednesday July 12, 2023 with Edi Bilimoria. Our conversation will orbit around “consciousness and perennial philosophy”.

David Bohm has been described as one of the most significant and original thinkers of the twentieth century whose interests and influence extend well beyond the field of physics to include philosophy, psychology, language, religion, art, creativity, thought, and education. Underlying his innovative approach to these many different issues was the fundamental idea that beyond the visible, tangible world there lies a deeper, implicate order of undivided wholeness.

During July and August the Pari Center is offering a unique opportunity to hear and dialogue with those involved in the many aspects of David Bohm’s work and to discuss the implications of his ideas for the future. All sessions include audience participation in the form of Q&A and discussion.

Process, movement, time, flux, consciousness, memory, recurrence, relationality – these elements and more occur in mutually reflective ways in the work of David Bohm, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. What resonances emerge when we hold these three bodies of work together? What variances do we discover? In this opening session of Beyond Bohm 2023, our panel will explore these and other questions. Of particular significance is the fact that all three men intended their insights to be applied and tested in daily life, rather than remaining purely theoretical. We then pose a further question: How do we make the shift from the abstract idea to the concrete lived quality?

The recent panpsychist turn in philosophy opens the possibility that self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. The organismic or holistic philosophy of nature points in the same direction. Meanwhile, field theories of consciousness propose that some electromagnetic fields actually are conscious, and that these fields are by their very nature integrative. When applied to the sun, such field theories suggest a possible physical basis for the solar mind, both within the body of the sun itself and also throughout the solar system. If the sun is conscious, it may be concerned with the regulation of its own body and the entire solar system through its electromagnetic activity, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It may also communicate with other star systems within the galaxy. 

While Bohm’s work in physics and dialogue is well-established, new threads are emerging that attempt to take us deeper into the living substance and import of his metaphysics. What do we find when we peer beyond his foundational terms holoflux / holomovement? Is it possible to move out from the texts of Bohm’s books, and into the living world? Is there something that can be directly engaged through ongoing experimentation? In this session we will propose that there is a living actuality pointed to by Bohm, akin to what he described as “the qualitative infinity of nature.” We will explore two aspects of a multi-year holoflux inquiry — rheosoma (the flowing body) and holosoma (the body of the whole). From the outset, however, it is important to keep such terms experimental, enigmatic. What then emerges is not a model, system, or practice, but a process of open-ended embodiment in which the path is created while walking.

In late summer of 2020, through the Pari Center, a small group of people began an applied experiment into the nature of David Bohm’s holoflux (see session description for July 22, 2023). Midway through this inquiry, a number of the group formally presented some of their experiences regarding holoflux, rheosoma, and holosoma. These accounts led to the publication of a book, Holoflux: Codex (Pari Publishing, 2022), that carried the inquiry one step further. In this session, the contributors to the book will share some of that work and discuss their creative process. The conversation, however, will not be limited to an artifact (the book), but will also address the ongoing process of engaging with the holoflux experiment. What is the nature of this inquiry? What impact does it have in daily life? What has inspired people to sustain this inquiry? Where does it stand after three years?