Events

Sight is found in the struggles of life, William Blake realised, as his own life was lived between heaven and hell, innocence and experience, vision and labour. Opposites are the energy of the imagination and bring the power to see through surfaces. Blake offers maps that chart the transformation from the narrow sight of Ulro to the full embrace of Eternity. We will also consider the role of dualities in Romantic philosophers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

After a brief discussion of the issues raised by dogmatism within mainstream materialism and accusations of heresy by orthodox institutional science, in this second conversation we will address weak points in contemporary science in areas that might be more promising for breakthroughs, accelerating a change of paradigm already under way, and leading to a more comprehensive and inclusive worldview.

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.

The recent work of the psychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, allows us to bring the role of dualities in spiritual perception right up to date. He has shown how brain lateralisation facilitates two types of perception. They are asymmetric, both required in right relation for the fullest awareness of the world, which is so often lacking in our times. In this session we will weave in insights from Carl Jung and process theology too.

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.

In his book, Two Souls Alas: Jung’s Two Personalities and the Making of Analytical Psychology (2019), Mark Saban looksinto the way Jung uses his memoir to describe the experience of having two personalities. Saban argues there that Jung’s experience of the dynamic between these two personalities informs basic principles behind the development of Jung’s psychological model and indeed Jung’s entire mature psychology. He suggests that what Jung took from this experience was the principle that psychological health required the avoidance of one-sidedness and that this was achieved through the experience of tension between what Jung described as two conflicting personalities.

What is the ultimate nature of reality? In our contemporary scientific culture reality appears to consist of a multiplicity of interacting parts. That multiplicity exhibits some fundamental dualities: being and becoming, particle and field, mind and matter.

On the other hand the main stance of non-duality (advaita in sanskrit) points to the simple fact that in reality there are endless differences, but no separation at all: reality is regarded as an indivisible whole, while the perception of isolated entities is just a mental construct without any cogent ontological foundation (including the idea of a separate ‘ego’ dwelling ‘within’ a single body/mind).

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.

This session will continue the journey we began in Music and Numbers, Part I. Having embarked upon the landscape comprised of dissonant intervals and avoidance of tonality, we will explore the music of composers working with the so-called Twelve-Tone System: Riccardo Malipiero, Anton Webern, and Luigi Dallapiccola, for whom numbers provided the pathway to their idiosyncratic musical languages. We will begin by considering the way interval relationships in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sinfonia in F minor create what we know as consonance and compare it to Riccardo Malipiero’s (1914 Milan – 2003 Milan) Invenzione #7, a dissonant work that is modelled upon it. Dr Coleman will demonstrate the way Webern created 144 possible versions of his twelve-tone row using the Magic Square.