The Pari Center

The Role of Philosophy in Bohm and Hiley’s Research in Physics
2022-08-20 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Rome) | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/hJ2RTsloqlQ?si=MvxMGl1CVxUqCs1i

The Role of Philosophy in Bohm and Hiley’s Research in Physics

with Basil Hiley interviewed by Petteri Limnell

Saturday August 20, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Basil Hiley worked with David Bohm for over 30 years. While their research focused on physics, philosophy played an important role in the discussions. What was this role? In this session Petteri Limnell interviews Basil Hiley to find out.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

Basil J. Hiley is a British quantum physicist and professor emeritus of the University of London. He received the Majorana Prize ‘Best Person in Physics’ in 2012. A long-time co-worker of David Bohm, Hiley is known for his work with Bohm on the implicate order and for his work on algebraic descriptions of quantum physics in terms of underlying symplectic and orthogonal Clifford algebras. Hiley co-authored the book The Undivided Universe with David Bohm, which is considered the main reference for Bohm’s interpretation of quantum theory.

The work of Bohm and Hiley has been characterized as primarily addressing the question ‘whether we can have an adequate conception of the reality of a quantum system, be this causal or be it stochastic or be it of any other nature’ and meeting the scientific challenge of providing a mathematical description of quantum systems that matches the idea of an implicate order.

In 1961 Hiley was appointed assistant lecturer at Birkbeck College, where Bohm had taken the chair of Theoretical Physics shortly before. Hiley wanted to investigate how physics could be based on a notion of process, and he found that David Bohm held similar ideas. He reports that during the seminars he held together with Roger Penrose he was particularly fascinated by John Wheeler’s ‘sum over three geometries’ ideas that he was using to quantize gravity.

Hiley worked with David Bohm for many years on fundamental problems of theoretical physics. Initially Bohm’s model of 1952 did not feature in their discussions; this changed when Hiley asked himself whether the ‘Einstein-Schrödinger equation,’ as Wheeler called it, might be found by studying the full implications of that model. They worked together closely for three decades. Together they wrote many publications, including the book The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory, published 1993, which is now considered the major reference for Bohm’s interpretation of quantum theory.

In 1995, Basil Hiley was appointed to the chair in physics at Birkbeck College at the University of London. He was awarded the 2012 Majorana Prize in the category The Best Person in Physics for the algebraic approach to quantum mechanics and furthermore in recognition of ‘his paramount importance as natural philosopher, his critical and open minded attitude towards the role of science in contemporary culture.’

Petteri Limnell lives in Pori, Finland. He was awarded his Master’s in philosophy in 2008, from the University of Tampere, Finland. The subject of his thesis was about the moment NOW—the ‘Analysis of the present Moment from the Perspectives of Physics, Metaphysics and Consciousness Studies.’ His BA thesis was about creativity: ‘Paul Feyerabend’sFarewell to Personal Creativity.’ Limnell teaches two ongoing courses at the Pori municipality Center, and has worked as a consultant, teacher, tutor and in-house philosopher at the Pori Art Museum. He also works for the Critical College of Finland and runs the Satakunta Critical College in Pori. I have been President of the Pori Philosophical Society for 11 years, since the very beginning. His main interests in philosophy relate to three of Popper’s ‘emergent’ worlds. Why and how do the universe, life and human beings and consciousness exist? It all ultimately culminates in Kant’s three questions: ‘What can I know?,’ ‘What should I do?,’ and ‘What can I hope for?’

Creativity and the Generative Order
2022-08-07 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/JGI7HOnaXC8?si=1t3V7bNPNAAHwy-T

Creativity and the Generative Order

with Petteri Limnell interviewed by Paavo Pylkkänen

Sunday August 7, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

One issue that David Bohm was concerned with was creativity. In physics some of his models appeared deterministic, raising the question of how genuine creativity is possible if everything is pre-determined. In this discussion Limnell and Pylkkänen explore how creativity and freedom can be understood in the Bohmian physical universe.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

Petteri Limnell lives in Pori, Finland. He was awarded his Master’s in philosophy in 2008, from the University of Tampere, Finland. The subject of his thesis was about the moment NOW—the ‘Analysis of the present Moment from the Perspectives of Physics, Metaphysics and Consciousness Studies.’ His BA thesis was about creativity: ‘Paul Feyerabend’sFarewell to Personal Creativity.’ Limnell teaches two ongoing courses at the Pori municipality Center, and has worked as a consultant, teacher, tutor and in-house philosopher at the Pori Art Museum. He also works for the Critical College of Finland and runs the Satakunta Critical College in Pori. I have been President of the Pori Philosophical Society for 11 years, since the very beginning. His main interests in philosophy relate to three of Popper’s ‘emergent’ worlds. Why and how do the universe, life and human beings and consciousness exist? It all ultimately culminates in Kant’s three questions: ‘What can I know?,’ ‘What should I do?,’ and ‘What can I hope for?’

Paavo Pylkkänen, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor’s Program in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is also Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (currently on leave) at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Skövde, Sweden, where he initiated a Consciousness Studies Programme. His main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and their intersection. In his book Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (Springer) he proposed that new notions emerging from quantum physics (especially Bohm and Hiley’s interpretation) provide new ways of approaching key problems in philosophy of mind, such as mental causation and time consciousness. In 2018-2020 working as the Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Arts he had the main responsibility for developing the new profiling area Mind and Matter for the University of Helsinki https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/mind-and-matter. Paavo Pylkkänen has been a visiting researcher in Stanford University, Oxford University, London University, Charles University Prague and Gothenburg University and was a member of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT). https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/paavo-pylkkänen/publications/

Bohm and Philosophy: An Introduction
2022-08-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/FlW7_cQmPNo?si=kUSEgshFmyGySUbj

Bohm and Philosophy: An Introduction

with Paavo Pylkkänen

Saturday August 6, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

This introductory talk will provide an overview of the topic of Bohm and philosophy. Bohm worked on many topics and from different points of view over the years. Are there some themes and views which persisted? What might contemporary philosophers learn from Bohm?

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

Paavo Pylkkänen, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor’s Program in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is also Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (currently on leave) at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Skövde, Sweden, where he initiated a Consciousness Studies Programme. His main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and their intersection. In his book Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (Springer) he proposed that new notions emerging from quantum physics (especially Bohm and Hiley’s interpretation) provide new ways of approaching key problems in philosophy of mind, such as mental causation and time consciousness. In 2018-2020 working as the Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Arts he had the main responsibility for developing the new profiling area Mind and Matter for the University of Helsinki https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/mind-and-matter. Paavo Pylkkänen has been a visiting researcher in Stanford University, Oxford University, London University, Charles University Prague and Gothenburg University and was a member of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT). https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/paavo-pylkkänen/publications/

Indigenous Dialogue: Walk in Beauty
2022-07-24 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/PNhCLFrgXK8?si=pcMbssGQtAznkEUA

Indigenous Dialogue: Walk in Beauty

with Leroy Little Bear, Jeannette Armstrong, Greg Cajete, Amethyst First Rider, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Melissa Nelson, John Briggs, Harvey Locke and Lee Nichol

Facilitated by Leroy Little Bear

Sunday July 24, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

In Memory of Rose Imai

The concept of “ecological niche” has gained much traction since the early 20th century, with many hundreds of plant and animal species now thoroughly assessed, analyzed, and categorized under this rubric. But what is the ecological niche of homo sapiens – of us, human beings? We know that, like any other species, humans exist in a very narrow band of specific conditions within which we can live and flourish. With the onset of the Anthropocene – the “new human” era – those specific conditions have increasingly come under assault, threatening the well-being not only of homo sapiens, but of all life, of the entire planet.

In this dialogue we will question whether utilitarian conservation – an approach that subtly or overtly emphasizes the benefit of conservation for humans – is sufficient to address the many implications of life in the Anthropocene. We will consider the prospect of relational conservation, which is innate to indigenous worldviews. In relational conservation, all of existence is considered animate, and the intricate web of connections between “all my relations” is not a metaphor – it is the fundamental reality that must be steadily held in view.

While exploring the implications of these different approaches to conservation, our dialogue will also examine the tacit infrastructures of the currently dominant “western paradigm.” Through such examination, we may come to a clearer understanding of wholeness and fragmentation, and perhaps see a way forward to fundamental shifts in our underlying metaphysics. We may begin to see glimmerings of what our Navajo brothers and sisters mean when they say, “May you walk in beauty.”

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

The Panel

Leroy Little Bear, PhD. Blackfoot Native—Professor Emeritus University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Leroy Little Bear was born and raised on the Blood Indian Reserve (Kainai First Nation), approximately 70 km west of Lethbridge, Alberta. One of the first Native students to complete a program of study at the University of Lethbridge, Little Bear graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1971. He continued his education at the College of Law, University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, completing a Juris Doctor Degree in 1975.

Following his graduation, Little Bear returned to his alma mater as a founding member of Canada’s first Native American Studies Department. He remained at the University of Lethbridge as a researcher, faculty member and department chair until his official retirement in 1997.

In recent years Little Bear has continued his influential work as an advocate for First Nations education. From January 1998 to June 1999 he served as Director of the Harvard University Native American Program. Upon his return to Canada, he was instrumental in the creation of a Bachelor of Management in First Nations Governance at the University of Lethbridge—the only program of its kind in the country.

In the spring of 2003, Little Bear was awarded the prestigious National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Education, the highest honour bestowed by Canada’s First Nations community. Little Bear is the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Lethbridge and the University of Northern British Columbia. Along with his wife, Amethyst First Rider, Little Bear brought about the historic Buffalo Treaty between First Nations on both sides of the USA-Canada border in 2014. Little Bear was inducted into the Alberta Order Excellence and the Order of Canada in 2016 and 2019 respectively.

After a lifetime of educational service, Little Bear remains a dedicated and dynamic teacher and mentor to students and faculty at the University of Lethbridge. He continues to pursue new research interests including North American Indian science and Western physics, and the exploration of Blackfoot knowledge through songs, stories and landscape.

While his educational achievements are remarkable, Little Bear’s contribution to the First Nations community extends well beyond the classroom. He has served as a consultant to local and national organizations including the Blood Tribe, Indian Association of Alberta and the Assembly of First Nations of Canada. His notable reputation has also earned him a place on numerous government commissions and boards including the Task Force on the Criminal Justice and Its Impact on the Indian and Metis Peoples of Alberta (1990-91). Little Bear’s legal advice is widely sought on such significant issues as land claims, treaties, and hunting and fishing rights.

Dr Little Bear is the co-author of several books on self-government and Aboriginal rights, including Pathways to Self Determination, Quest For Justice, and Governments in Conflict. His credits also include a variety of influential articles such as, ‘A concept of Native Title,’ which was cited in a Canadian Supreme Court decision.

Jeannette Armstrong, Syilx Okanagan, is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Okanagan Philosophy at UBC Okanagan Campus. She is a fluent speaker and teacher of the Nsyilxcn Okanagan language, and a traditional knowledge keeper of the Okanagan Nation. She is a founder of En’owkin, the Okanagan Nsyilxcn language and knowledge institution of higher learning of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Ethics and Syilx Indigenous Literatures.

Jeannette is the recipient of the Eco Trust USA Buffett Award in Indigenous Leadership, and in 2016 received the BC George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. She is an author whose published works include poetry, prose and children’s literary titles, and academic writing on a wide variety of Indigenous issues. She currently serves on Canada’s Traditional Knowledge Subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Jeannette was recently named to the class of 2021 as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada.

Some of her publications include:

Slash. Theytus, 1987; revised edition, 1998.

Whispering in Shadows. Theytus Books, 1999.

Breathtracks. Theytus, 1991.

Enwhisteetkwa; Walk in Water (for children). Theytus, 1982.

Neekna and Chemai (for children), illustrated by Barbara Marchand. Theytus, 1984.

with Douglas Cardinal. The Native Creative Process: A Collaborative Discourse. Theytus, 1992.

Gregory Cajete is a Native American educator whose work is dedicated to honoring the foundations of Indigenous knowledge in education. Dr. Cajete is a Tewa Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico.

Dr. Cajete is a practicing ceramic, pastel and metal artist. He is extensively involved with art and its application to education. He is also a scholar of herbalism and holistic health. Dr. Cajete also designs culturally-responsive curricula geared to the special needs and learning styles of Native American students.

He worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico for 21 years. While at the Institute, he served as Dean of the Center for Research and Cultural Exchange, Chair of Native American Studies and Professor of Ethno- Science. He is the former Director of Native American Studies (18 years) and is Professor Emeritus in the Division of Language, Literacy and Socio Cultural Studies in the College of Education at the University of New Mexico. In addition, he has lectured at colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Russia, Taiwan, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, England, France and Germany.

Dr. Cajete has authored 10 books: “Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education,” (Kivaki Press, 1994); “Ignite the Sparkle: An Indigenous Science Education Curriculum Model”, (Kivaki Press, 1999); “Spirit of the Game: Indigenous Wellsprings (2004),” “A People’s Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living,” and “Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence” (Clear Light Publishers, 1999 and 2000). “Critical Neurophilosophy and Indigenous Wisdom,” Don Jacobs (Four Arrows), Gregory Cajete and Jongmin Lee) Sense Publishers, 2010. “Indigenous Community: Teachings of the Seventh Fire,” (Living Justice Press, 2015). His most recent books are edited volumes entitled: “Native Minds Rising” and “Sacred Journeys” (John Charlton Publications, 2020). Dr. Cajete also has chapters in 36 other books along with numerous articles and over 350 national and international presentations.

Amethyst First Rider is a member of the Kainai Nation, Blackfoot Confederacy, Alberta, Canada and married to Leroy Little Bear. She is a leader in the performing arts community for more that 20 years, producing and directing plays depicting Aboriginal stories and culture. Her experience in the arts has included dance productions, consulting for the University of California, Berkeley’s planetarium, as well as narration and production in the National Film Board’s documentary: Kainayssini Imanistaiswa, The People Go On. She co-conceived Iniskim an immersive puppet lantern performance celebrating the reintegration of Bison into the natural ecosystem of Banff National Park. She is central to the development and success of The Buffalo: A Treaty of Cooperation, Renewal and Restoration signed by over 30 First Nations and Tribes in Canada and the USA. It is the biggest modern Treaty amongst First Nations. Its purpose is to “one again welcome the Buffalo to live among us” and it recognizes “Buffalo as a wild free-ranging animal and as an important of the ecological ecosystem.” She is also a founding-advisor to the Kainai Ecosystem Protection Association.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. She tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Melissa K. Nelson is an ecologist and Indigenous scholar-activist. She earned her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California, Davis. Formerly a professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, she now teaches at Arizona State University in the School of Sustainability, Global Futures Laboratory. From 1993 to 2021, she served as the founding executive director and CEO of the Cultural Conservancy. She now serves as their president emerita. Melissa is the Bundle Holder for the Native American Academy. She is a contributor and co-editor of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also a contributor and the editor of Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008). She is Anishinaabe/Métis/Norwegian and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

John Briggs, PhD, taught for 25 years at Western Connecticut State University. He has taught aesthetics, journalism, and creative writing and served as co-chair of the English Department; he was one of the founders of the Department of Writing, Linguistics and Creative Process and one of the principal developers of the MFA in Professional and Creative Writing. He is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at WCSU. Among his many publications are three books he co-authored with David Peat, Looking Glass Universe (1984), Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (1989), and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (1999). He lives in the New England town of Granville, Massachusetts.

Dr. Harvey Locke is a conservationist, writer and photographer who lives in Banff National Park, Canada. He works on protecting the natural world and humanity’s relationship with nature at all scales from local to global. He has a particular interest in both the patterns and processes of nature and in shared narratives that genuinely engage both western science and other knowledge systems to build an equitable, nature positive and carbon neutral world. He is a co-founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, the global Nature Needs Half Movement and the Nature Positive global goal for nature.

Lee Nichol is a freelance writer and editor. His latest works are Entering Bohm’s Holoflux and, as editor, the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movment/Vision inspired by David Bohm (both from Pari Publishing). He was a long-time friend and collaborator of David Bohm, and is editor of Bohm’s On Dialogue, The Essential David Bohm, and On Creativity.

Lee has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, North Carolina; the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California; the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California; and Denver University in Denver, Colorado. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Pari Center, the Advisory Council of the Indigenous Education Institute, and is a member of the Founding Circle of the Native American Academy. Lee lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Eva Casey.

Dialogue in the Age of Zoom
2022-07-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/bLlTWvifB-0?si=Zn3plc9IpimUy9Ik

Dialogue in the Age of Zoom

with Julie Arts, Richard Burg, Anna Factor, Sally Jeffery, Beth Macy, Lee Nichol and David Schrum

Saturday July 23, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

It is impossible to overstate the effects of Covid-19 on the manner in which human beings interact. High on the list of these effects is a massive shift to online interaction for work, social engagement, and personal interaction. Dialogue in its many forms – Bohmian or otherwise – has also been significantly impacted by this online shift. In this session we will draw on the experience of seven people who have deep roots in various aspects of dialogue, both before and during the Covid pandemic. At the forefront of our inquiry will be the many variances that occur between in-the-flesh interaction on one hand, and interaction through the medium of streaming video on the other. What experiences are gained through the digital milieu? What experiences are lost? Is the future of dialogue – and conversation more generally – being re-shaped in accord with technology? As Covid-19 becomes endemic, will groups still gather face-to-face? What are the implications of these many changes?

Our roundtable will also take up more general questions regarding the cultural impact of social media and the human-digital interface. In what ways does the milieu of these technologies shape our awareness? What new skills of critical thinking can guide us as the digital world becomes omnipresent? At multiple junctures, we will invite audience members to engage with us on all of these questions.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

The Panel

Julie Arts is currently on a sabbatical from being a senior faculty member and consultant with the Presencing Institute (PI), an organisation founded in 2006 by Otto Scharmer and colleagues, to support action research and leadership development for systems change and societal transformation.Julie is an economist by training and has worked as a senior consultant, designing and hosting multi-stakeholder transition processes and ecosystem leadership programs such as the UN SDG Leadership Lab and many in-house leadership programs for companies and NGOs. Julie is also a board member of Meg Wheatley’s Berkana Institute. She lives in Mechelen, Belgium and in Pari, Italy.

Richard Burg – In 2003 I retired from consulting, my fourth career (IT, potter, Continuing Medical Education research). Simple Idea worked with corporate leaders to integrate human values and productivity in a constantly changing environment – engaging with teams and individuals to build relationships within the organization that nurture the humanity in everyone, even as they work together to achieve audacious goals.

In 1990 a friend sent me a transcript of a talk given by David Bohm at MIT. In my organization development practice – focused on changing corporate cultures – group work was a built-in aspect of the process. Bohm’s dialogue experiment was thus enticing, and I discovered a Bohmian dialogue group in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I attended weekly for the next eight years. Stemming from that group, Lee Nichol and I designed a nine-hour, multi-day introduction to Bohm’s experiment at the first National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation in Washington DC. I have since engaged in dialogue in many different contexts – most recently, like many, in online dialogues, before and during the covid pandemic.

Early on in my dialogue work, I received permission to transcribe the little pamphlet, Dialogue: A Proposal (D. Bohm, D. Factor, and P. Garrett) and post it online via colleagues at MIT. It is still available, in multiple “versions,” some with several addenda/commentaries.

Richard is a contributor to the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing)

Anna and her husband, Don Factor, were longtime friends and supporters of David Bohm and the process of dialogue he envisioned. Don had first met Bohm in the 1970s in London, and the two continued their friendship from that time on. It was their early acquaintance that led to inviting Bohm to be interviewed by Don at the Human Unity Conference – a large gathering of people from many different spiritual traditions – held at Warwick University, in March of 1983. Following the enthusiastic response to this interview, Bohm was invited to present more of his thinking at a weekend conference held in Mickleton, England. It was during the ensuing weekend that what is considered to have been the very first Bohmian dialogue occurred. The transcript of the weekend has been preserved by Don Factor in the book, Unfolding Meaning.

Following that weekend, Anna and Don began offering their home for dialogues among those who had been so inspired by the initial dialogue idea, and along with Peter and Jenny Garrett and David and Saral Bohm, they organized public dialogues at many locations across western Europe, Scandinavia, and Israel during the late 1980s. Stemming from these early dialogues is the well-known publication by Bohm, Don Factor and Peter Garrett, “Dialogue, A Proposal” which still is considered a cornerstone description of Bohm’s intention for dialogue.

Looking back, Anna remembers David Bohm: “He was a dear man. He really was so very kind and had a lot of humanity. I found him – and still find him – an inspiration…a lovely, lovely man.”

Sally Jeffery was introduced to the teachings of J. Krishnamurti while a young undergraduate in Sociology. Through involvement with his international school in England, she met and was deeply impressed by David Bohm (a founding trustee of the school) and, later, his proposals for dialogue. Over three decades, she has taken part in dialogue in many settings, including prisons and her local (Lancaster) dialogue group. Involvement in two online dialogue groups began in 2018/19, but since the pandemic and through the Lancaster group website, others have been in contact, expressing interest and wanting to start new ​online groups to explore David Bohm’s thinking in practice. During this same period, Sally was employed as a body work therapist, including over 20 years working with people who’d had a cancer diagnosis, along with their families. A leaning to such work might suggest she would take less readily to online dialogue, missing the physical presence of the other participants. After initial hesitation, this has proved not to be the case.

Beth Macy, PhD, organizational consultant, Bohmian dialogue practitioner

The common thread weaving through Beth’s career has been change, having been a manager, leader, consultant or participant in organizations experiencing difficult issues: organizations from small to large, private to public, non-profit to profit, health care to oil and gas, local to global. David Bohm’s dialogue has been core to her research, writing, consulting and teaching for nearly three decades. Living in the USA (Texas) she is completing a book on the ideas and individuals who influenced Bohm’s methodology of dialogue.

Beth is a contributor the the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing).

Lee Nichol is a freelance writer and editor. His latest works are Entering Bohm’s Holoflux and, as editor, the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movment/Vision inspired by David Bohm (both from Pari Publishing). He was a long-time friend and collaborator of David Bohm, and is editor of Bohm’s On Dialogue, The Essential David Bohm, and On Creativity.

Lee has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, North Carolina; the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California; the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California; and Denver University in Denver, Colorado. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Pari Center, the Advisory Council of the Indigenous Education Institute, and is a member of the Founding Circle of the Native American Academy. Lee lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Eva Casey.

David Schrum received his PhD in quantum theory at Queen’s University, following which he spent two post-doctoral years with David Bohm at Birkbeck College. Here, he entered Bohm’s world of creative and subtle philosophical approaches to physics and his enquiry into consciousness and what may lie beyond.

David Schrum continues in these explorations, in physics developing a new approach to relativistic quantum theory and, through the dialogue process, going into what it is to bring to light that which lies enfolded within our individual and collective consciousness.

Processes of Creation
2022-07-16 18:00 - 2022-07-17 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/XDP6Quiqo2Y?si=pPufF3aUROIdPeuf

https://youtu.be/QN3nvuz2cWs?si=OCzTvHRoYY9gKfgm

Processes of Creation

with Steven Breaux, Aja Bulla-Richards, Sky Hoorne and Hester Reeve

Saturday July 16 and Sunday July 17, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

Two 2-hour sessions

These sessions are live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Most artists, most artisans – really, anyone who creates – go through some process of envisioning…formulating…gestating…imagining. There are, as well, processes of intending, expressing, embodying, disclosing. And then further, manifesting, revealing, exhibiting. Some of these processes may operate prior to the threshold of conscious awareness. Some of them may move in a grey area. Some may be, or may become, overtly intentional. These various processes – and many others not named – may loop back on one another, interpenetrate one another, fuel or negate one another. For many who create, there is an element of mystery, of uncertainty, a dance of the unexpected and unforeseen.

With four artists over two days, we will explore the dynamic nature of these processes, which have multiple resonances with David Bohm’s implicate and explicate orders, and with his notions of wholeness and fragmentation. Each artist will present and discuss selections of their work. They will then further discuss their work in conversation with the three other artists in the program, before opening their segment to audience comment and participation.

July 16 Steven Breaux

As a painter I have always believed that the paint in a brushstroke is encoded with the mental states of the artist during the process of its making, and that in the analysis of the work of art by a “viewer” these states could be accessed.

I propose that during the creative art-object process a “field” or subtle structure is formed and sustained by the artist’s qualitative states and consciousness – and that this field exists as a hidden aspect of the material art-object. Revealing distinguishing features between a traditional painting and other mediums including digital (algorithmic) work, I propose that this field or subtle structure is dynamic, viable and accessible to the artist and the viewer.

Highlighting my artistic process, exploration and discovery I will focus on how these are influenced by aspects of David Bohm’s ontology.

July 16 Aja Bulla-Richards

By giving form to unseen and latent qualities and processes we open up the possibility of new ways of relating to the world around us and within us. As a designer, making latent natural systems and cycles visible is part of my creative process, one that involves collaborating with these movements in and on the earth.

This way of working is a a response to the urgent environmental crisis we are facing – a crisis that necessitates a shift out of a mechanical worldview that sees nature as resource, and towards an exploration of our participatory relationship with a living world. In this presentation I will outline and illustrate how this process of bringing forth the “implicate” aspects of natural systems works in practice, and how all of us can shift our vision to more fully see “into” the natural world.

July 17 Sky Hoorne

A lens-based, photographic way of perceiving the world has become deeply embedded in, and come to dominate, fundamental aspects of human consciousness. This mode of perception more often than not leads to fragmentation and subtle alienation, which then becomes reflexive in our relationship with the world. Through different mediums I try to counterbalance this photographic and object-oriented “error” by turning to our imaginative potential, which can reveal the world to us in new ways.

Nature – both human-impacted and the wild remnants – is not to be “transcended” and sublimated to mental objects, but rather to be “inscended” – to be stepped into and fully experienced in all of its richness, beauty, ugliness, and power. In this presentation I will illustrate some of these limits on our perception, and how these limits might be opened. The body forms an integral part of this process: the subject matter is not only perceived visually, but also psychologically, emotionally, and by imagining “into” the processes observed.

July 17 Hester Reeve

Through engaging with David Bohm’s understanding of creativity, I have had to question whether I really am creative or not – such questioning opens up a complicated but rich terrain and Bohm’s perspective has confirmed my intuition that the task is as much philosophical as artistic. There is an important line to wonder and wander along in creative unfurling, exercising a balance between being a creative creature in my own life with some sort of experimental outward stretch to enable larger, often incomprehensible processes to fulfil some sort of potential of existence.

I love to think about such things as much as I love the smell of turps in an art studio, but my real excitement is how such mental gymnastics ‘knead’ out the cultural habits and personal assumptions from my brain-body, clearing the way for attunement to fresh possibilities – in how I behave, in the forms I make, or how I might work with others. For this presentation, I will lead with examples from my art practice that engage these various philosophical and artistic interests.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm https://paricenter.com/event/beyond-bohm-2022-2/Program

The Artists

Steve Breaux, BFA, MFA, Florida State University, is retired (2020) Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he taught Art and the Computer, Conceptual and Formal Development, Advanced Drawing, and 2d. Design. For 25 years he has worked both as a solo artist and in collaboration with his wife and partner, Kathy Reed, in a variety of media including process art, printmaking, painting on silk, computer animation/video, photography, and painting often in combination. He has researched the nature of the art process as it relates to differences between painting and digital (algorithmic) artwork for over 25 years. In 2011, his research led to the ideas and concepts in quantum physics, David Bohm in particular, which helped to shift his private research into a more public arena that included lectures and presentations.

In 2015 Steve was invited to present the research behind his abstract, Waking Space: The Emerging Art Object, Quantum Theory, and Algorithmic Art at the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference in Helsinki, Finland. The abstract can be found here:

https://stevebreaux-kathyreed.com/pdfs.html

Steve’s work has been accepted regionally, nationally and internationally for inclusion in galleries, museums, catalogues and exhibitions.

https://stevebreaux-kathyreed.com/section/188730.htmlhttps://stevebreaux-kathyreed.com/section/258261-COLLABORATIVE-WORK.html

Aja Bulla-Richards is an architectural and landscape architectural designer, public artist, and educator. She works at the intersection of social, ecological, and conceptual systems and everyday experience. As the Creative Director at Watershed Progressive, Aja is responsible for managing and designing resilient landscape projects and educational programs throughout California. As a Lecturer in the landscape architecture and urbanism graduate program at University of Southern California, she leads design studios that address adapting our constructed world to shifting natural and sociocultural forces. Aja’s ongoing research questions our dominant cultural narratives, and explores multiple forms of knowledge formation and co-creation. Her projects explore how we can re-imagine and transform monofunctional systems into resilient socio-ecological cycles that engage and re-enchant everyday experience, promote alternative cultural practices, and uncover latent ecological processes.

Aja is a contributor to the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing 2022)

http://www.watershedprogressive.com/M.S. Architecture, Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury UniversityM.L.A., University of Virginia, School of DesignM.Arch, University of Virginia, School of DesignB.A., Architecture, University of California at Berkeley

Sky Hoorne holds a MS in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and attended LUCA School of Arts Ghent. She is a graphic artist, creator of comic strips, and a dedicated scholar of the work of David Bohm. Currently she is focused on ceramic sculptures, drawings, paintings, and on making complex issues digestible to a broader, non-academic public.

Rooted in her life philosophy of ‘active context’/’contexting’, Sky attempts to make ‘inscendental’ works of art, in which the viewer is invited to step into the subject by appealing to their primal imagination and subtle participation. This approach involves free play with clichés, perspectives, and polarities. Despite her background in IT, her main interests include psychology, eastern philosophy, science of mind, no-nonsense metaphysics and kiko/qi gong.

Sky is a contributor to the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing 2022)

https://www.antihype.be/

Hester Reeve is a Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University UK. Her practice encompasses live art, drawing, sculpture, poetry, philosophy and ‘dialogue’ (as set out by David Bohm): Art is not viewed straightforwardly as a tool of communication or form of personal expression, but more as a complex kingdom that is continually attempting to establish itself through human thought and action.

Hester’s work has been shown internationally, including at former Randolph Street Gallery Chicago, LIVE Biennale Vancouver, BONE Performance Festival Switzerland, Tate Britain, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Halle G Vienna and, most recently, Nirox Sculpture Park, South Africa.

Hester is a contributor the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing 2022)

https://hester-reeve.squarespace.com/https://www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-profiles/hester-reeve

The Future Scientist - A Conversation with Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
2022-07-13 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMWhew3KOM4

A Conversation between Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday July 139:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

The session is live and all registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

A monthly virtual encounter to understand where science is going and to reimage where we hope it might go.

The dialogue will be in a lively and spontaneous format of approximately 45 minutes up to an hour and we will then open up for questions from the audience.

Our social rituals in academia alternate between “coffee breaks” (to get us going) & “beer hours” (to get us loose). The former pumps our analytical mind when it is time to work, the latter inhibits it when it is time to mingle. And yet, our minds remain unchanged. However, psychedelic substances –whose etymology means mind-manifesting– are a well-known but still rather-unexplored catalyzer of the human potential. A brief history of notorious psychedelic explorers, such as Humphry Davy or William James, attests their stamp on human thought. After all, it may not be a coincidence that there are so many aged pioneers, whose minds were expanded in the 60s by their use before their stigmatization. Today, the psychedelic world is undergoing a revival, if not a revolution. We will discuss psychedelics at the intersection of science and philosophy, and also address the historical route that led to their prohibition (together with the decline of religious traditions in the West, the rise of the New Age disconnected from analytical thought, and the dominance of British idealism and current physicalism). Sacred plants are not mere recreational drugs, but mind-expanders towards other “modes of sentience”; a candidate remedy for the malaises of our civilization. The so-called ‘altered’ states of consciousness provide a fertile ground of inquiry whereby not only the mind can be recast as a different “object” of study but also afford a transformation of the very mind of the subject that studies it. The scientist and the mystic can meet within the same body. The future scientist will probably be a shaman.

Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is philosopher of mind and metaphysics who specialises in the thought of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Whitehead, and in fields pertaining to altered and panpsychological states of consciousness. He is a research fellow and associate lecturer at the University of Exeter where he has co-founded the Philosophy of Psychedelics Exeter Research Group, the ambit of which includes taught modules, conferences, workshops, and publications. Peter is the author of Noumenautics, Modes of Sentience, editor of Bloomsbury’s Philosophy and Psychedelics volume, the TEDx Talker on ‘psychedelics and consciousness’, and he is inspiration to the inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.

Dr Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception in flies, worms, mice, humans and robots. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining high-resolution experiments, computational and theoretical biology, and continental philosophy, his latest research concentrates on real-life cognition and consciousness.

The Future Scientist Series

Science as we know it is a relatively recent human invention.

After the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century, science and philosophy remained entangled as ‘natural philosophy’ until they started to separate in the nineteenth century (the very word ‘scientist’ was coined in 1834). Subsequently, science morphed from an activity carried out by wealthy people as a hobby (the ‘amateur,’ in the etymological sense of the word) into a paid job within an institutionalized system (the ‘professional’). Paradoxically or not, great ideas come more easily from people who are not paid to have them—it’s like forcing someone to be free, or compelling creativity by an act of will.

In the last decades, a series of technological and societal changes have further accelerated mutations of what it means to be a scientist; from the selection forces cast by neoliberalism on ‘scientific careers,’ to the kind of ‘science in the age of selfies’ that social media promotes. Scientists too are prey to the perverse dynamics of nowadays ‘attention economy.’ To understand what scientists do and why they do it, one must also understand the political and social contexts in which they live.

In addition, the rise of ‘big science’—initially in physics (particle physics and astronomy), and subsequently in life and mind sciences (genomics, and connectomics)—is reconfiguring the landscape typically inhabited by the romantic figure of the lone scientist receiving visions in dream-like states of consciousness and, eventually, advancing science in a stroke of genius. In turn, the idea of the scientist bred in the current academe is that of a diligent caffeinated deluxe technician as a part within the larger mechanism of research group army; a person trained exquisitely (and almost exclusively) on a research aspect, a specialist unable to keep track of what goes on beyond the narrow confines of his/her discipline. Young scientists are indeed trained to be good at following rules and procedures (explicit laboratory protocols, but also implicit codes of conduct and metaphysical commitments) but discouraged to learn to see when and how to transcend them.

In turn, the more recent promises of ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ posit a near-future landscape where some of the core skills and tasks traditionally attributed to humans may be soon carried out by machines (or so the ‘scientific soteriologists’ claim). Algorithms are not just ingenious means to an end that require human intervention to imbue them with meaning, but are swiftly becoming ends in themselves, pretending they offer an automated unbiased interpretation of the data.

A re-appraisal of the habits of the modern scientist entails an ethical dimension as well: why do we treat animals as objects (as means, rather than ends in themselves), why do we study life in laboratories primarily by killing it, and why do we study life in laboratories in the first place? These questions also reflect on ecological considerations regarding our place in nature (humans in relationship with other animals, and other kingdoms of life) and our destruction of the planet. Francis Bacon’s prophetic vision of the Promethean scientist, so vividly captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has become both a cautionary tale and an inspiration.

In addition, and despite the real ‘paradigm changes’ in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century, other branches of science such as biology and neuroscience remain under the spell of philosophical promissory materialism. Research facts are sold in tandem with covert metaphysical commitments. The objective-subjective divide still puzzles both scientists and the layperson. The mind-body problem remains to be solved (or dissolved).

In sum, the whole enterprise seems to be committed to suppressing broad thinkers, promoting academics that look more like corporate managers, PR mavericks and professional fund-raisers and less like scholars, who are asked to inhibit their interest in philosophy, and to cast suspicion on their fertile imagination. Dogma and habit are inhibiting free inquiry.

It is as if science as a whole is becoming less scientific.

In the face of this milieu of factors, in this series of online events we seek to reflect on what ‘the future scientist’ may look like. This is an ambitious exercise indeed, which goes beyond mere theoretical speculation. It is not unlikely that sooner than we think current science will be unrecognizable to most of us. The consequences for humanity writ large, not just for scientists themselves, are pressing.

The question at stake is whether by ‘future scientist’ we mean what scientists in the future are all likely to look like, or what a future better scientist might look like. In our conversations we will engage more in prescribing than in predicting, that is, we might begin by describing where science is going (prediction) to then describe where we hope science might go (prescription). Attempting the art of ‘dia-logos,’ we hope to express a creative voice that will enlighten the way of a new science in the twenty-first century.

The series will be direct conversations, that is, no formal presentation of the invited speaker but a kind of ‘thinking aloud’ in the mode of a dialogue between each guest and Àlex Gómez-Marín as the conversation host. The idea is to engage critically with various aspects of ‘the future scientist’ in a lively and spontaneous format for approximately 45 minutes to an hour, followed by comments and questions from the audience. Each conversation will take place virtually, on a Wednesday each month.

The invited speakers to The Future Scientist series are chosen not just as great interlocutors to discuss these issues, but also as exemplars and hints of what ‘the future scientist’ may actually look like here and now.

Imagining for Real
2022-07-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/cwtFTrIY2rc?si=SWt0zE9E5upeg3IY

Imagining for Real

with Tim Ingold, Melissa Nelson, Lee Nichol, Hester Reeve

Sunday July 10, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in his latest book, Imagining for Real, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination that is at the heart of modern thought and science.

Ingold’s work in anthropology is as radical in its field as that of David Bohm in physics and Christopher Alexander in architecture, and has been brought to fruition through a five-year research project, “Knowing from the Inside.” As Ingold describes it, he was determined “to develop a way of study, or a method, that would join with the people and things with whom and which we share a world, allowing knowledge to grow from our correspondences with them.”

In this session we will have an extended conversation with Prof. Ingold, exploring the multiple layers of his extensive body of work – and the numerous correspondences this work has with David Bohm’s inquiries into participatory consciousness.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

The Panel

Tim Ingold, FBA, FRSE, is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020) and Imagining For Real (2022).

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/socsci/people/profiles/tim.ingold

Melissa K. Nelson is an ecologist and Indigenous scholar-activist. She earned her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California, Davis. Formerly a professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, she now teaches at Arizona State University in the School of Sustainability, Global Futures Laboratory. From 1993 to 2021, she served as the founding executive director and CEO of the Cultural Conservancy. She now serves as their president emerita. Melissa is the Bundle Holder for the Native American Academy. She is a contributor and co-editor of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also a contributor and the editor of Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008). She is Anishinaabe/Métis/Norwegian and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

Lee Nichol is a freelance writer and editor. His latest works are Entering Bohm’s Holoflux and, as editor, the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movment/Vision inspired by David Bohm (both from Pari Publishing). He was a long-time friend and collaborator of David Bohm, and is editor of Bohm’s On Dialogue, The Essential David Bohm, and On Creativity.

Lee has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, North Carolina; the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California; the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California; and Denver University in Denver, Colorado. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Pari Center, the Advisory Council of the Indigenous Education Institute, and is a member of the Founding Circle of the Native American Academy. Lee lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Eva Casey.

Hester Reeve is a Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University UK. Her practice encompasses live art, drawing, sculpture, poetry, philosophy and ‘dialogue’ (as set out by David Bohm): Art is not viewed straightforwardly as a tool of communication or form of personal expression, but more as a complex kingdom that is continually attempting to establish itself through human thought and action.

Hester’s work has been shown internationally including at former Randolph Street Gallery Chicago, LIVE Biennale Vancouver, BONE Performance Festival Switzerland, Tate Britain, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Halle G Vienna and, most recently, Nirox Sculpture Park, South Africa.

Hester is a contributor the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing 2022)

https://www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-profiles/hester-reeve

http://www.hesterreeve.com/

Imagining Imagination
2022-07-09 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/oESEtsX_iC8?si=viacKy-JvlKZq-T7

Imagining Imagination

with Richard Burg, Beth Macy and Lee Nichol

Saturday July 9, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

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?

To illustrate how these questions regarding imagination can have practical applications, the second portion of this session will consider a two-year experiment into Bohm’s notion of “holoflux.” At the core of this process is an approach to embodiment called rheosoma, the flowing body – itself an experiment in “Bohmian” imagination.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

The Panel

Richard Burg – In 2003 I retired from consulting, my fourth career (IT, potter, Continuing Medical Education research). Simple Idea worked with corporate leaders to integrate human values and productivity in a constantly changing environment – engaging with teams and individuals to build relationships within the organization that nurture the humanity in everyone, even as they work together to achieve audacious goals.

In 1990 a friend sent me a transcript of a talk given by David Bohm at MIT. In my organization development practice – focused on changing corporate cultures – group work was a built-in aspect of the process. Bohm’s dialogue experiment was thus enticing, and I discovered a Bohmian dialogue group in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I attended weekly for the next eight years. Stemming from that group, Lee Nichol and I designed a nine-hour, multi-day introduction to Bohm’s experiment at the first National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation in Washington DC. I have since engaged in dialogue in many different contexts – most recently, like many, in online dialogues, before and during the covid pandemic.

Early on in my dialogue work, I received permission to transcribe the little pamphlet, Dialogue: A Proposal (D. Bohm, D. Factor, and P. Garrett) and post it online via colleagues at MIT. It is still available, in multiple “versions,” some with several addenda/commentaries.

Richard is a contributor to the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing)

Beth Macy, PhD, organizational consultant, Bohmian dialogue practitioner

The common thread weaving through Beth’s career has been change, having been a manager, leader, consultant or participant in organizations experiencing difficult issues: organizations from small to large, private to public, non-profit to profit, health care to oil and gas, local to global. David Bohm’s dialogue has been core to her research, writing, consulting and teaching for nearly three decades. Living in the USA (Texas) she is completing a book on the ideas and individuals who influenced Bohm’s methodology of dialogue.

Beth is a contributor the the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing)

Lee Nichol is a freelance writer and editor. His latest works are Entering Bohm’s Holoflux and, as editor, the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movment/Vision inspired by David Bohm (both from Pari Publishing). He was a long-time friend and collaborator of David Bohm, and is editor of Bohm’s On Dialogue, The Essential David Bohm, and On Creativity.

Lee has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, North Carolina; the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California; the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California; and Denver University in Denver, Colorado. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Pari Center, the Advisory Council of the Indigenous Education Institute, and is a member of the Founding Circle of the Native American Academy. Lee lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Eva Casey.

Beyond Bohm 2022
2022-07-09 17:59 - 2022-08-28 20:00 | Online
Part 1: Imagination, Creativity, Dialogue

Part 2: David Bohm and 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.

Part 1: Imagination, Creativity, Dialogue

Pari Center Online Series

July 9 – 10, 16 – 17, 23 – 24, 2022

9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

6 Two-hour sessions, Saturdays and Sundays

All sessions are live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

In this second year of our Beyond Bohm series, we will emphasize three themes–one for each of three weekends in July.

The first weekend will explore imagination. How might we enter it? How might we inhabit it? On July 9 we will inquire into how David Bohm worked with imagination, while improvising upon and extending Bohm’s approach. On July 10 we will explore Tim Ingold’s radical anthropology and his new book, Imagining for Real, while touching upon some of the linkages with Bohm’s “participatory consciousness.” We are delighted that Prof. Ingold will join us for this session.

Our second weekend will take up questions of creativity and the artistic process. On July 16 and 17 we will engage with the work of four different artists, and the way this work complements and illuminates the work of David Bohm. Themes will include wholeness and fragmentation, the artistic movement from implicate to explicate, the nature of perception, and the relation of consciousness to the “art object.”

Our final weekend has the theme of dialogue. On July 23 our roundtable will open up the many questions and concerns regarding the shift from ‘in person” dialogue to on-line dialogue during the time of Covid-19. We will also take into consideration some of the more general questions about the human-digital-technological interface. Finally, on July 24 we will have our second annual Indigenous Dialogue, facilitated by Leroy Little Bear. This year’s theme is “Walk in Beauty,” and will consider various approaches to ecology, the environment, and the Anthropocene”–the time of the new human.

Program of Event

Saturday July 9Imagining Imaginationwith Richard Burg, Beth Macy and Lee Nichol

Sunday July 10Imagining for Realwith Tim Ingold, Melissa Nelson, Lee Nichol and Hester Reeve

Saturday July 16 and Sunday July 17Processes of Creation, Part One and Twowith Steven Breaux, Aja Bulla-Richards, Sky Hoorne and Hester Reeve

Saturday July 23Dialogue in the Age of Zoomwith Julie Arts, Richard Burg, Anna Factor, Sally Jeffery, Beth Macy, Lee Nichol and David Schrum

Sunday July 24Indigenous Dialogue: Walk in Beautywith Leroy Little Bear, Jeannette Armstrong, Greg Cajete, Amethyst First Rider, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Melissa Nelson, John Briggs, Harvey Locke and Lee Nichol

Part 2: David Bohm and Philosophy

with Basil Hiley, Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila, Petteri Limnell, Paavo Pylkkänen, William Seager and Marij van StrienCurated by Paavo Pylkkänen

Pari Center Online Series

August 6 – 7, 20 – 21, 27 – 28, 2022

9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

6 Two-hour sessions, Saturdays and Sundays

All sessions are live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

David Bohm was concerned with providing a description of reality – at the quantum level, and more generally, a unified description of matter, life, and consciousness, all adding up to a general concept of reality or a metaphysical theory. This concern with reality did not mean that he ignored the role of the mind (language, perception, etc.) in his attempts to describe reality. In other words, he did not ignore epistemological issues or questions that concern the nature of our knowledge and the problems of justifying it. On the contrary, his broad philosophical work includes extensive studies of various epistemic issues: physics and perception, the notions of truth and understanding, a view of science as “perception-communication”, experimentation with the structure of language, study of knowledge understood as process, and discussions of topics such as communication, creativity, art, religion and so on. This series discusses various aspects of Bohm’s philosophical thought.

Program of Event

Saturday August 6Bohm and Philosophy: An Introductionwith Paavo Pylkkänen

Sunday August 7Creativity and the Generative Orderwith Petteri Limnell interviewed by Paavo Pylkkänen

Saturday August 20The Role of Philosophy in Bohm and Hiley’s Research in Physicswith Basil Hiley interviewed by Petteri Limnell

Sunday August 21Consciousness, Bohm and the Quest for Intelligibilitywith William Seager

Saturday August 27Why Bohm was Never a Deterministwith Marij van Strien

Sunday August 28Aristotelian Metaphysical and Epistemological Reflections in David Bohmwith Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila

The Future Scientist - A Conversation with Dr. Jimena Canales
2022-06-15 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
A Conversation between Dr. Jimena Canales and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday June 159:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

A monthly virtual encounter to understand where science is going and to reimage where we hope it might go.

The dialogue will be in a lively and spontaneous format of approximately 45 minutes up to an hour and we will then open up for questions from the audience.

Science is what scientists make of it in the context of their times. Therefore, to better understand its current state and its likely future, we must study its history. However, history is often written by the “winners”, and we swim in it like a fish oblivious to the kinds of waters that nourish (but also constrain) our understanding of the world. In this installment of The Future Scientist series, we will concentrate on the revolutions of physics at the dawn of the 20th century. The transformations of the very idea of science that ensued from certain ways of interpreting those advances percolated to biology and neuroscience all the way to the present moment. Drawing from major concrete historical events, we will discuss the very concept of measurement, the troubled relationship between the sciences and the humanities, and the crucial question of who has the authority to make claims about reality, and why. Although historians repeatedly learn that we hardly learn from history, a careful looking back can certainly offer a glimpse as to how to make the future science more scientific.

Dr. Jimena Canales is an award-winning author and scholar focusing on the history of science in the modern world. She is currently a faculty member at the Graduate College at the University of Illinois-Urbana, Champaign. She was previously the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at the University of Illinois and an Associate Professor at Harvard University. Canales is the author of A Tenth of a Second: A History, The Physicist and The Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, and Simply Einstein. Her books have been voted Top 10 Books about Time (The Guardian), Best Science Books for 2015 (Science Friday, NPR, Public Radio International and Brainpickings), Top Reads for 2015 (The Independent), and Books of the Year for 2016 (The Tablet). Her scholarly work on the history of science has been published in Isis, Science in Context, History of Science, the British Journal for the History of Science, and the MLN, among others. Her work on visual, film and media studies has appeared in Architectural History, Journal of Visual Culture, and Thresholds. Canales writes frequently for general audiences publishing in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Artforum, Aperture, Nautilus and WIRED among others. She has presented her work on science and art at the Pompidou Museum, SFMOMA, the 11th Shanghai Biennale, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. She was a senior fellow at the IKKM (Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie).

Dr Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception in flies, worms, mice, humans and robots. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining high-resolution experiments, computational and theoretical biology, and continental philosophy, his latest research concentrates on real-life cognition and consciousness.

The Future Scientist Series

Science as we know it is a relatively recent human invention.

After the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century, science and philosophy remained entangled as ‘natural philosophy’ until they started to separate in the nineteenth century (the very word ‘scientist’ was coined in 1834). Subsequently, science morphed from an activity carried out by wealthy people as a hobby (the ‘amateur,’ in the etymological sense of the word) into a paid job within an institutionalized system (the ‘professional’). Paradoxically or not, great ideas come more easily from people who are not paid to have them—it’s like forcing someone to be free, or compelling creativity by an act of will.

In the last decades, a series of technological and societal changes have further accelerated mutations of what it means to be a scientist; from the selection forces cast by neoliberalism on ‘scientific careers,’ to the kind of ‘science in the age of selfies’ that social media promotes. Scientists too are prey to the perverse dynamics of nowadays ‘attention economy.’ To understand what scientists do and why they do it, one must also understand the political and social contexts in which they live.

In addition, the rise of ‘big science’—initially in physics (particle physics and astronomy), and subsequently in life and mind sciences (genomics, and connectomics)—is reconfiguring the landscape typically inhabited by the romantic figure of the lone scientist receiving visions in dream-like states of consciousness and, eventually, advancing science in a stroke of genius. In turn, the idea of the scientist bred in the current academe is that of a diligent caffeinated deluxe technician as a part within the larger mechanism of research group army; a person trained exquisitely (and almost exclusively) on a research aspect, a specialist unable to keep track of what goes on beyond the narrow confines of his/her discipline. Young scientists are indeed trained to be good at following rules and procedures (explicit laboratory protocols, but also implicit codes of conduct and metaphysical commitments) but discouraged to learn to see when and how to transcend them.

In turn, the more recent promises of ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ posit a near-future landscape where some of the core skills and tasks traditionally attributed to humans may be soon carried out by machines (or so the ‘scientific soteriologists’ claim). Algorithms are not just ingenious means to an end that require human intervention to imbue them with meaning, but are swiftly becoming ends in themselves, pretending they offer an automated unbiased interpretation of the data.

A re-appraisal of the habits of the modern scientist entails an ethical dimension as well: why do we treat animals as objects (as means, rather than ends in themselves), why do we study life in laboratories primarily by killing it, and why do we study life in laboratories in the first place? These questions also reflect on ecological considerations regarding our place in nature (humans in relationship with other animals, and other kingdoms of life) and our destruction of the planet. Francis Bacon’s prophetic vision of the Promethean scientist, so vividly captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has become both a cautionary tale and an inspiration.

In addition, and despite the real ‘paradigm changes’ in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century, other branches of science such as biology and neuroscience remain under the spell of philosophical promissory materialism. Research facts are sold in tandem with covert metaphysical commitments. The objective-subjective divide still puzzles both scientists and the layperson. The mind-body problem remains to be solved (or dissolved).

In sum, the whole enterprise seems to be committed to suppressing broad thinkers, promoting academics that look more like corporate managers, PR mavericks and professional fund-raisers and less like scholars, who are asked to inhibit their interest in philosophy, and to cast suspicion on their fertile imagination. Dogma and habit are inhibiting free inquiry.

It is as if science as a whole is becoming less scientific.

In the face of this milieu of factors, in this series of online events we seek to reflect on what ‘the future scientist’ may look like. This is an ambitious exercise indeed, which goes beyond mere theoretical speculation. It is not unlikely that sooner than we think current science will be unrecognizable to most of us. The consequences for humanity writ large, not just for scientists themselves, are pressing.

The question at stake is whether by ‘future scientist’ we mean what scientists in the future are all likely to look like, or what a future better scientist might look like. In our conversations we will engage more in prescribing than in predicting, that is, we might begin by describing where science is going (prediction) to then describe where we hope science might go (prescription). Attempting the art of ‘dia-logos,’ we hope to express a creative voice that will enlighten the way of a new science in the twenty-first century.

The series will be direct conversations, that is, no formal presentation of the invited speaker but a kind of ‘thinking aloud’ in the mode of a dialogue between each guest and Àlex Gómez-Marín as the conversation host. The idea is to engage critically with various aspects of ‘the future scientist’ in a lively and spontaneous format for approximately 45 minutes to an hour, followed by comments and questions from the audience. Each conversation will take place virtually, on a Wednesday each month.

The invited speakers to The Future Scientist series are chosen not just as great interlocutors to discuss these issues, but also as exemplars and hints of what ‘the future scientist’ may actually look like here and now.

Psyche and Time
2022-06-14 19:00 - 2022-06-20 14:00
Organizers: The Pari Center and ISAPZURICH

Dates: June 14 – 20, 2022

Speakers: Frédérique Dambreville, Deborah Egger, Andrew Fellows, Christopher Hauke, Mathew Mather, Shantena Sabbadini and Yuriko Sato

Venue: Pari, Italy

Price: 1400.00 euros (This fee includes 6-night stay in private accommodation, all meals, sessions and workshops.)

[W]e cannot apply our notion of time to the unconscious. Our consciousness can conceive of things only in temporal succession, our time is, therefore, essentially linked to the chronological sequence. In the unconscious this is different, because there everything lies together, so to speak.C.G. Jung

Time is integral to many of C.G. Jung’s remarkable insights into the nature and dynamics of the psyche, from individual development to the unus mundus—the invisible and timeless foundation of reality.

Join ISAPZURICH and the Pari Center for an in-depth exploration of the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomena of Psyche and Time from the perspectives of science, philosophy, symbolism, mythology, therapeutic practice, and culture.

About the Event:

A defining characteristic of Carl Jung’s extraordinary life’s work is his engagement across all scales, from the cosmic and metaphysical to the personal and psychological. Another is his breadth of influences, from Hermetic to quantum worldviews. This is the context for our exploration of two ubiquitous phenomena that, like fish in water, we take for granted, but which on closer examination are profoundly puzzling: psyche and time. Our perspectives will be scientific, philosophical, symbolic and mythological, clinical and cultural as we zoom in from the universe to the practice room, and end with a trip to the cinema!

In the first two days we will explore the fundamental nature of time with theoretical physicist Shantena Sabbadini, and of psyche with applied physicist and Jungian Analyst Andrew Fellows. The next day we will enter the world of astrology—a lifelong interest of Jung’s that connects psyche and cosmos through time—with Jungian Analyst and professional astrologer Frédérique Dambreville. We will also explore synchronicity and the turning of the age through the symbolism of the scarab with Jungian scholar and educator Mathew Mather. On the fourth day, Jungian Analyst Deborah Egger will delve into the vital role of time in the psychotherapeutic process, and Mathew will follow up his previous presentation with an experiential workshop. On the last whole day, Jungian Analysts Yuriko Sato and Christopher Hauke will, respectively, present an Eastern view of psyche and time, and show how predominantly Western views have been depicted, and sometimes deconstructed, in film. The final morning will feature a dialogue among all the presenters responding to further questions and those aspects of the event which have generated most interest.

This will be an informal meeting with presentations by experts followed by roundtable discussions. The cost of the event is 1400.00 euros. The event fee includes a 6-night stay in private accommodation and all meals. It also includes activities, materials, sessions and workshops. The event starts on Tuesday June 14 at 19:00 with a welcome dinner and ends on Monday June 20 after lunch.

Participating in an event at the Pari Center means not only meeting with scholars and experts but living for a week in a medieval village, mingling with the tiny local population, eating local dishes and drinking local wines, appreciating the beauty of the surrounding countryside, and participating in a very gentle way of life far from the frenzy of work and city living. David Peat compared Pari to an alchemical vessel—a place where transformation can come about—as well as an opportunity to pause for a moment and re-assess one’s life. It’s a unique opportunity open to everyone.

Please contact Eleanor if you would like more information about this event at eleanor@paricenter.com

Presentations:

The Nature of Time with Shantena Sabbadini

The Nature of Psyche with Andrew Fellows

The Infinity of the Cosmos and the Depth of Psyche with Frédérique Dambreville

A Green Gold Scarab: Symbol for the Turning of an Age? with Mathew Mather

Time and Timing in Therapy with Deborah Egger

Anima Mundi: Synchronicity and the Soul of the World with Mathew Mather

Lived Time in Japan with Yuriko Sato

Screen Time: Movies, Mind and the Experience of Time with Christopher Hauke

Information:

For additional information about the event, you can check the PDF.

For additional information about The Pari Center, you can check the PDF.

For more information about ISAPZURICH see https://www.isapzurich.com

For Terms and Conditions, you can check the PDF.

Re-Visioning Consciousness
2022-06-05 18:00 - 2022-06-12 14:00
Dates: June 5 – 12, 2022

Speakers: Harald Atmanspacher, Gary Lachman, Iain McGilchrist, John Pickering, William Seager, Shantena Augusto Sabbadini, Angelita Valencia Borbon and Beverley Zabriskie. Guests Federico Faggin and Roberto Miller

Venue: Pari, Italy

Price: 1700.00 euros (This fee includes 7-night stay in private accommodation, all meals and sessions and workshops.)

About the Event:

When we move beyond the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ by recognizing the primacy of consciousness, a vast panorama of questions opens up. How do we understand matter, time and space, individual consciousness, birth and death, free will? Are all things alive and conscious in some sense?

Join us at the Pari Center and let us explore together the tip of the iceberg of these challenges, perhaps the closest that philosophical enquiry comes to our existential questions and emotional involvement.

We are delighted and honoured to announce that Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor and delver into the science of consciousness, will be with us in Pari for this event. We will also be hosting Roberto Miller the filmmaker of the documentary The Four Lives of Federico Faggin. Following a screening of the film, there will be a panel discussion with Federico and other presenters and then an open discussion and Q&A with all participants of ‘Re-visioning Consciousness.’

This will be an informal meeting with presentations by experts followed by roundtable discussions. The cost of the event is 1700.00 euros. The event fee includes a 7-night stay in private accommodation and all meals. It also includes activities, materials, sessions and workshops. The event starts on Sunday June 5 at 19:00 with a welcome dinner and ends on Sunday June 12 after lunch.

Participating in an event at the Pari Center means not only meeting with scholars and experts but living for a week in a medieval village, mingling with the tiny local population, eating local dishes and drinking local wines, appreciating the beauty of the surrounding countryside, and participating in a very gentle way of life far from the frenzy of work and city living. David Peat compared Pari to an alchemical vessel—a place where transformation can come about—as well as an opportunity to pause for a moment and re-assess one’s life. It’s a unique opportunity open to everyone.

Please contact Eleanor if you would like more information about this event at eleanor@paricenter.com

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.Schrödinger

When we move beyond the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ by abandoning the tacit premises of materialism and physicalism, a vast panorama of questions opens up.

Is consciousness indeed, as Schrödinger suggests above, the primal experience, the elementary primary fact all our philosophy and all our science are built upon?

Does consciousness arise in the world, according to the physicalist view (e.g., when a sufficiently complex nervous system evolves), or does the world arise in consciousness? And, if the latter is the case, how does that happen? If the world is a dream arising in consciousness, why does it arise? And why is the dream structured as it is, why is it a cosmos, not a chaos?

Matter and spacetime appear to have their own order, their own laws that govern our experience. Are those laws intrinsic to consciousness? Are they in turn a creation of consciousness?

Another possible approach is that of pantheism. In this perspective the world exists and consciousness exists, they are both primary. But the world is infused with consciousness, everything is conscious to some degree, from the most elementary (say, an elementary particle) to the cosmic scale of the universe itself.

If that is so, why are we not aware of it? The reason might be that we recognize consciousness only when it is close enough to our own level. I am aware of the consciousness of my dogs and cats, but the consciousness of an atom and that of a solar system both elude me, they are too different.

Or you might say matter and consciousness are just two sides of one coin. Dual aspect monism suggests that mind and matter are the dual manifestation of one substance, which is perceived from the inside (in the first person) as consciousness, from the outside (in the third person) as things.

In Re-Visioning Consciousness, we will explore together the tip of the iceberg of these profound questions, perhaps the closest philosophical enquiry comes to our existential and emotional involvement.

Presentations:

Does “Consciousness” Exist? with Harald Atmanspacher

Awakening Conciencia and The Path With Heart with Angelita Valencia Borbon

Dreaming Ahead of Time with Gary Lachman

Value and Purpose with Dr. Iain McGilchrist

Why Re-vision Consciousness? with John Pickering

The Problem of Consciousness in Philosophy, Or What’s All the Fuss About?  with William Seager

Inside Out and Outside In with Beverley Zabriskie

The Four Lives of Federico Faggin – Screening of the Film followed by Roundtable with the filmmaker Roberto Miller, Federico Faggin and Presenters from this event

Information:

For additional information about the event, you can check the PDF.

For additional information about The Pari Center, you can check the PDF.

For Terms and Conditions, you can check the PDF.

Strangers on the Threshold: Love, Wisdom, and the Task of Philosophy
2022-05-29 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Strangers in the Threshold: Love, Wisdom, and the Task of Philosophy with Will Buckingham€10,00

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Strangers on the Threshold: Love, Wisdom, and the Task of Philosophy

with Will Buckingham

Sunday May 29, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

What is philosophy? Why do we philosophise? And why, in a time of crisis, does philosophy matter?A familiar answer might be that philosophy is the love of wisdom, that we philosophise out of a hunger for wisdom, and that this deep need for wisdom is all the greater when we navigate through times of crisis. But for the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, this gets things back to front. Philosophy, Levinas writes, is not the love of wisdom. It is, instead, the wisdom of love in the service of love. Why do we philosophise? Why do we awaken to philosophical questions? Levinas’s answer is clear: we philosophise, or awaken to love’s wisdom, because we are called to do so by another – by the proximity of a stranger on the threshold, by someone who is not us.In a time of crisis, the temptation is often to withdraw, to fall back on our own resources, or to batten down the hatches. But in this talk, writer and philosopher Will Buckingham will explore how Levinas sets out a more challenging, and more fruitful, path. Weaving together philosophy and storytelling, he will argue that in a time of crisis, the greatest philosophical demand may be this: to open up the door.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Will Buckingham is a writer from the UK with a PhD in philosophy and an MA in anthropology. He has previously been associate professor of writing and creativity at De Montfort University, Leicester, and visiting associate professor in the School of Literature and Journalism at Sichuan University. He now works as a freelance writer, and is on the visiting faculty at Parami University, Myanmar. His most recent book is Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World (Granta 2021). https://www.willbuckingham.com

Love Across Traditions
2022-05-28 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Love Across Traditions with Jane Clark and Mark Vernon€10,00

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Love Across Traditions

with Jane Clark and Mark Vernon

Saturday May 28, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

It is often noted that the ancient Greeks had an advantage in possessing several words for love. Eros, philia, agape and others allowed them to be nuanced about love and navigate its differences. So is there benefit in considering how love has been understood in different wisdom traditions, too? This conversation will explore how love has been understood in various faith contexts and across time, looking at Christian, Sufi, Platonic and other insights. The aim will be to tease out similarities and differences so as to deepen and refresh the felt presence of love in our lives.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Jane Clark is a teacher and independent researcher who lives in Oxford. She has been studying the Islamic mystical tradition for more than forty years and has given many lectures and courses both in the UK and internationally for organisations such as The Beshara Trust, Oxford University Department for Continuous Education and Temenos Academy. She is a Senior Research Fellow of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, and also the editor of Beshara Magazine, in which capacity she is able to pursue her particular interest in the relevance of the spiritual traditions to contemporary life. Jane originally studied science, and first came across David Bohm’s ideas during her PhD studies when she was working on magnetism. She went on to do a series of dialogues with him in London in the 1980s/90s, and interviewed him for Beshara Magazine https://besharamagazine.org/metaphysics-spirituality/david-bohm-wholeness-timelessness-and-unfolding-meaning/. She also did a piece on Infinite Potential with Paul Howard https://besharamagazine.org/metaphysics-spirituality/david-bohm-infinite-potential-paul-howard/

Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist. He contributes to and presents programmes on the radio, as well as writing for the national and religious press, and online publications. He also podcasts, in particular The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues with Rupert Sheldrake, gives talks and leads workshops. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and other degrees in physics and in theology, having studied at Durham, Oxford and Warwick universities. He is the author of several books, including A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness which in part explores the work of Owen Barfield. He used to be an Anglican priest and lives in London, UK. He is working on the notion of spiritual intelligence with the research group, Perspectiva. Mark’s latest book is Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, Angelico Press, 2021. For more information see www.markvernon.com.

Love In A Time of Crisis
2022-05-22 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Love in a Time of Crisis with Mark Vernon€10,00

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Love In A Time of Crisis

with Mark Vernon

Sunday May 22, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Love is often used in nebulous or ill-defined ways, which means that its nuanced perceptions and mature forms can be hard to grasp. The need for a deeper awareness of love becomes particularly acute in times of crisis, though times of crisis also offer moments to understand love move fully. In this talk, Mark Vernon will explore the links between love and personal development, different types of power, its relationship with freedom and mind, as well as erotic yearning, suffering and loss, and so also to the knowledge of the ways in which reality itself is shaped by love.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist. He contributes to and presents programmes on the radio, as well as writing for the national and religious press, and online publications. He also podcasts, in particular The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues with Rupert Sheldrake, gives talks and leads workshops. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and other degrees in physics and in theology, having studied at Durham, Oxford and Warwick universities. He is the author of several books, including A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness which in part explores the work of Owen Barfield. He used to be an Anglican priest and lives in London, UK. He is working on the notion of spiritual intelligence with the research group, Perspectiva. Mark’s latest book is Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, Angelico Press, 2021. For more information see www.markvernon.com.

Parenting as a Journey Towards Awakening
2022-05-21 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Parenting as a Journey Towards Awakening with Ramona Rolle-Berg and Renée Rolle-Whatley€10,00

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Parenting as a Journey Towards Awakening

Exploring Self-growth through the Hidden Guidance of the Heart

with Ramona Rolle-Berg and Renée Rolle-Whatley

Saturday May 21, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

A well-known wisdom teaching from de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince mirrors what Vedic rishis, Sufi and Christian mystics alike have imparted for millennia: ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.’

How then do we perceive this unseen field of potential-filled guidance? And how, once aware of it, can we engage with it in a conscious and coherent way? That’s what researcher-clinicians and integrative medicine practitioners Ramona Rolle-Berg, Ph.D. and her sister, Renée Rolle-Whatley, Ph.D. will discuss using the results of their published and ongoing research about parental love.

Rolle-Berg and Rolle-Whatley suggest that experiencing parenting over time may eventually reveal the existence of a fundamental invisible awareness— a ubiquitous orthogenetic vibration acting upon humanity—guiding individuals towards heart-centered evolution.

The daily choices we make direct our lives. Choosing to actively parent is one such choice. As parents, we become more devoted, more loyal, and more humble. We transformation. Through the vehicle of active parenting, Rolle-Berg and Rolle-Whatley propose that egocentric perceptions give way. Over time, integration of new parenting behaviors evolves perceptions and ultimately, our heart’s capacity to love unconditionally.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Ramona Rolle-Berg, Ph.D. describes herself as an intuitive, an integrative medicine practitioner-clinician, and scholar. Her clinical approach is based on healing through trust and compassion. With the aid of energetic and evidenced-based healing modalities, she promotes client-realized self-awareness growth and a reclaiming of self. As a scholar, she is focused on using CAQDAS (computer-assisted qualitative data analysis systems) to conceptually reveal deeper process-based relationships, grounded in data, exemplified by parental behaviors. Her original published research presented devotion as a process of change used by parents of Autistic children to both strengthen self-induced physical/psychological limitations and to reclaim life. She has a BS & MS in Engineering and PHD in Mind-Body medicine. With her sister, her current research explores how loyalty, devotion & humility interact to provide parents with life experiences that promote integration to higher levels of consciousness via non-judgmental compassion.

Renée Rolle-Whatley, Ph.D. takes a two-prong approach to health and wellness: as a practitioner-clinician, she provides intuitive guidance and evidence-based energetic-and integrative-modality supports for clients seeking mind-body-spirit healing and health care around chronic and/or long-term physical and emotional health challenges. As a scholar she is focused on revealing the theoretical concepts and behavioral processes between physical and non-physical vibratory experiences of love through study of the lived experiences of parents that actively parent. Her original published research presented relational loyalty as an underlying process adopted by parents towards individuated growth in self-acceptance and self-awareness. She has a BS & MS in Engineering and PHD in Mind-Body medicine. With her sister, her current work explores the intersection of self-awareness and self-acceptance as revealed thru the impact of non-judgmental compassion.

Power of Love
2022-05-15 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Power of Love with Satish Kumar€10,00

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Power of Love

with Satish Kumar

Sunday May 15, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

As gravity holds the physical world together, love holds the metaphysical world together. Love permeates through all our activities and gives us a sense of joy, fulfilment and contentment. Satish Kumar will speak about personal love, love of people, love of nature; love at all levels.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Peace-pilgrim, life-long activist and former monk, Satish Kumar has been inspiring global change for over 50 years. Aged 9, Satish renounced the world and joined the wandering Jain monks. Inspired by Gandhi, he decided at 18 that he could achieve more back in the world and soon undertook a peace-pilgrimage, walking without money from India to America in the name of nuclear disarmament. Now in his 80s, Satish has devoted his life to campaigning for ecological regeneration, social justice and spiritual fulfilment.

Satish founded Schumacher College as well as The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity that seeks a just future for all. To join Satish in protecting people and planet, become a member of Resurgence (with 20% off), entitling you to this charity’s change-making magazine, Resurgence & Ecologist.

Satish appears regularly on podcasts, radio and television shows. He has been interviewed by Richard Dawkins, Russell Brand and Annie Lennox, appearing as a guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Thought for the Day and Midweek. Satish presented an episode of BBC2’s Natural World documentary series, which was watched by 3.6 million people. An acclaimed international speaker and author, Satish’s autobiography sold over 50,000 copies, inspiring change around the world.

Portrayals of Love in Literature and Culture
2022-05-14 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Portrayals of Love in Literature and Culture with John Briggs€10,00

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Portrayals of Love in Literature and Culture

with John Briggs

Saturday May 14, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

‘Love makes the world go round,’ according to a song from the Broadway musical Carnival. Certainly the theme of love stands out as a central force motivating poetry, fiction, film, and popular culture.

This session will explore selected familiar works of literature and popular culture in order to consider what clues these they contain to the implicit meanings of love that haunt us. What secret does the song suggest when it tells us:

Love makes the world go ‘roundLove makes the world go ‘roundSomebody soon will love youIf no one loves you now

In the 1960s people were advised to make love not war. Still, why is it that war makes for the best romantic love stories? Do our literary and popular portrayals of love provide insights into the tangled thickets of love where narcissism, domination, betrayal, disillusion and conflict accompany expressions of infinite tenderness and care?

Types of love portrayed in this sessionRomantic and Erotic LoveLove of Friends, FamilyLove and the Innocence of ChildhoodLove of God and Country, Cosmos, Knowledge and Other AbstractionsLove of Life, Love of Earth

The feelings of love expressed in literature from the Native American context will provide a contrast to the feelings and ideas of love for those of us raised in anthropocentric (human-centered) cultures.

Fred Rogers, host of the public television children’s show Mr. Rogers Neighborhood articulated the vital importance of love to children, as you can see in these two YouTube clips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtsLoA1nBDQ&list=TLPQMTQwMzIwMjJFAj-eQEew9A&index=3https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIG5rroOv5I

Scientists have shown that without love a child becomes psychologically damaged and may even die. But love and death are woven together, so literature tells us.

Participants are urged to review several short YouTube clips from film versions of one of the most intense romantic love stories every written: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

An overview montage of the story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqwS3614J7Q

Dramatic moments

Cathy reflects on love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNmWXt-8J1U

Cathy remembering her childhood castle with Heathcliff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gbCsNzr-L8

Heathcliff reacting to Cathy’s death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nB84L4aIZo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofLC0be13Ks

Heathcliff reaching for the ghost of Cathy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABx-JZPSM10

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

John Briggs, PhD, taught for 25 years at Western Connecticut State University. He has taught aesthetics, journalism, and creative writing and served as co-chair of the English Department; he was one of the founders of the Department of Writing, Linguistics and Creative Process and one of the principal developers of the MFA in Professional and Creative Writing. He is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at WCSU. Among his many publications are three books he co-authored with David Peat, Looking Glass Universe (1984), Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (1989), and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (1999). He lives in the New England town of Granville, Massachusetts.

The Future Scientist - A Conversation with John Horgan
2022-05-11 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xojiLfdukI

A Conversation between John Horgan and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday May 119:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

The session is live and all registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

A monthly virtual encounter to understand where science is going and to reimage where we hope it might go.

The dialogue will be in a lively and spontaneous format of approximately 45 minutes up to an hour and we will then open up for questions from the audience.

The idea that the end of science “as we know it” is near may sound absurd to many. And yet, in the era of “Big Data and Artificial Intelligence” the limits of human insight seem to saturate, as scientific revolutions and revelations stall. In this instalment of The Future Scientist series, we will reflect upon the limits of knowledge, the idea of scientific progress, and current exciting directions in both in fundamental physics and consciousness studies. We will also discuss the role of science journalism in shaping the public perception of science in the age of selfies, outlining future challenges and present opportunities at the intersection of science and society.

John Horgan is an award-winning science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, a 1996 bestseller translated into 13 languages, and Mind-Body Problems, published online in 2018. A frequent contributor to Scientific American, he has also written for The New York Times, National Geographic and many other publications.

Dr Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception in flies, worms, mice, humans and robots. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining high-resolution experiments, computational and theoretical biology, and continental philosophy, his latest research concentrates on real-life cognition and consciousness.

The Future Scientist Series

Science as we know it is a relatively recent human invention.

After the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century, science and philosophy remained entangled as ‘natural philosophy’ until they started to separate in the nineteenth century (the very word ‘scientist’ was coined in 1834). Subsequently, science morphed from an activity carried out by wealthy people as a hobby (the ‘amateur,’ in the etymological sense of the word) into a paid job within an institutionalized system (the ‘professional’). Paradoxically or not, great ideas come more easily from people who are not paid to have them—it’s like forcing someone to be free, or compelling creativity by an act of will.

In the last decades, a series of technological and societal changes have further accelerated mutations of what it means to be a scientist; from the selection forces cast by neoliberalism on ‘scientific careers,’ to the kind of ‘science in the age of selfies’ that social media promotes. Scientists too are prey to the perverse dynamics of nowadays ‘attention economy.’ To understand what scientists do and why they do it, one must also understand the political and social contexts in which they live.

In addition, the rise of ‘big science’—initially in physics (particle physics and astronomy), and subsequently in life and mind sciences (genomics, and connectomics)—is reconfiguring the landscape typically inhabited by the romantic figure of the lone scientist receiving visions in dream-like states of consciousness and, eventually, advancing science in a stroke of genius. In turn, the idea of the scientist bred in the current academe is that of a diligent caffeinated deluxe technician as a part within the larger mechanism of research group army; a person trained exquisitely (and almost exclusively) on a research aspect, a specialist unable to keep track of what goes on beyond the narrow confines of his/her discipline. Young scientists are indeed trained to be good at following rules and procedures (explicit laboratory protocols, but also implicit codes of conduct and metaphysical commitments) but discouraged to learn to see when and how to transcend them.

In turn, the more recent promises of ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ posit a near-future landscape where some of the core skills and tasks traditionally attributed to humans may be soon carried out by machines (or so the ‘scientific soteriologists’ claim). Algorithms are not just ingenious means to an end that require human intervention to imbue them with meaning, but are swiftly becoming ends in themselves, pretending they offer an automated unbiased interpretation of the data.

A re-appraisal of the habits of the modern scientist entails an ethical dimension as well: why do we treat animals as objects (as means, rather than ends in themselves), why do we study life in laboratories primarily by killing it, and why do we study life in laboratories in the first place? These questions also reflect on ecological considerations regarding our place in nature (humans in relationship with other animals, and other kingdoms of life) and our destruction of the planet. Francis Bacon’s prophetic vision of the Promethean scientist, so vividly captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has become both a cautionary tale and an inspiration.

In addition, and despite the real ‘paradigm changes’ in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century, other branches of science such as biology and neuroscience remain under the spell of philosophical promissory materialism. Research facts are sold in tandem with covert metaphysical commitments. The objective-subjective divide still puzzles both scientists and the layperson. The mind-body problem remains to be solved (or dissolved).

In sum, the whole enterprise seems to be committed to suppressing broad thinkers, promoting academics that look more like corporate managers, PR mavericks and professional fund-raisers and less like scholars, who are asked to inhibit their interest in philosophy, and to cast suspicion on their fertile imagination. Dogma and habit are inhibiting free inquiry.

It is as if science as a whole is becoming less scientific.

In the face of this milieu of factors, in this series of online events we seek to reflect on what ‘the future scientist’ may look like. This is an ambitious exercise indeed, which goes beyond mere theoretical speculation. It is not unlikely that sooner than we think current science will be unrecognizable to most of us. The consequences for humanity writ large, not just for scientists themselves, are pressing.

The question at stake is whether by ‘future scientist’ we mean what scientists in the future are all likely to look like, or what a future better scientist might look like. In our conversations we will engage more in prescribing than in predicting, that is, we might begin by describing where science is going (prediction) to then describe where we hope science might go (prescription). Attempting the art of ‘dia-logos,’ we hope to express a creative voice that will enlighten the way of a new science in the twenty-first century.

The series will be direct conversations, that is, no formal presentation of the invited speaker but a kind of ‘thinking aloud’ in the mode of a dialogue between each guest and Àlex Gómez-Marín as the conversation host. The idea is to engage critically with various aspects of ‘the future scientist’ in a lively and spontaneous format for approximately 45 minutes to an hour, followed by comments and questions from the audience. Each conversation will take place virtually, on a Wednesday each month.

The invited speakers to The Future Scientist series are chosen not just as great interlocutors to discuss these issues, but also as exemplars and hints of what ‘the future scientist’ may actually look like here and now.

Tales of Love and Narcissism in Classical Jewish Sources
2022-05-08 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Buy the recording

Tales of Love and Narcissism in Classical Jewish Sources with Rabbi Neal Rose€10,00

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Tales of Love and Narcissism in Classical Jewish Sources

with Rabbi Neal Rose

Sunday May 8, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

The foundational literature of many societies contains reflections on the nature of love. These sources come in the form of stories, aphorisms, and even theoretical discussions. Ancient Greek literature has a variety of philosophical reflections on the nature of love and narcissism. Classical Hebraic literature, biblical and rabbinic, evidences a lack of theoretical discussions in favor of more concrete expressions. This literature contains moral rules and regulations, wisdom teachings, and a great variety of stories. My presentation will center primarily on the narratives of love in both biblical and rabbinic sources. The many dimensions of love and narcissism are enacted by an array of characters such as Moses, Sarah, Queen Jezebel, the Messiah, and above all God. The theoretical aspects of the presentation are informed by the work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Erich Fromm. (Have a Bible at hand so we can look at the material together).

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Rabbi Neal Rose taught at the University of Manitoba from 1967 to 2000. He was a member of the Departments of Judaic Studies and Religion. He also was an instructor in family therapy at the University of Winnipeg’s Department of Spiritual Care. He and his wife currently live in St. Louis, MO where he serves as rabbinic scholar in residence at Congregation Bnai Amoona and community Chaplain.

Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Love
2022-05-07 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Buy the recording

Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Love with Vincent Colapietro€10,00

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Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Love

with Vincent Colapietro

Saturday May 7, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

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)? That is, is the dominant understanding of time among theoretical physicists compatible with what physicists do as agents? Colapietro will argue that agential time is an irreducible phenomenon and any attempt to explain it away (or to render it illusory) is mistaken.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Vincent Colapietro is Liberal Arts Research Professor Emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University. He is presently at the Center for the Humanities (University of Rhode Island). One of his main areas of research is pragmatism, with emphasis on Peirce. Though devoted to developing a semiotic perspective rooted in Peirce’s seminal work, Colapietro draws upon a number of other authors and perspectives (including Bakhtin, Jakobson, and Bourdieu as well as such movements as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction). He is the author of Peirce’s Approach to the Self (1989), A Glossary of Semiotics (1993), Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom (2003), and Acción, sociabilidad y drama: Un retrato pragmatista del animal humano (2020) as well as numerous essays. He has written on a wide range of topics, from music (especially jazz) and cinema to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, from art and literature to ontology and phenomenology. He has served as President of the Charles S. Peirce Society, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the Semiotic Society of America.

Love in the Time of Crisis
2022-05-07 17:59 - 2022-05-29 20:00 | Online
Love in the Time of CrisisFrom Separation to Interbeing

with John Briggs, Will Buckingham, Jane Clark, Vincent Colapietro, Satish Kumar, Ramona Rolle-Berg, Renée Rolle-Whatley, Rabbi Neal Rose and Mark Vernonand Special guest poet Richard Berengarten

Pari Center Online Series

May 7 – 8, 14 – 15, 21 – 22, 28 – 29, 20229:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

8 Two-hour sessions, Saturdays and Sundays

Blessed be the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed.Leonard Cohen

We live in a challenging time of transition which promises both hope and peril. How are we to navigate a course that will take us from a story of separation, competition, and distrust to a new narrative of inter-being, cooperation, and love? How do we begin to give up and move beyond an incoherent and too often destructive structure of consciousness and a world which seems rarely to see the mediating presence of what has been called ‘evolutionary love’?

This program approaches these questions and others from a wide variety of perspectives:

On our journey we explore the concept of ‘evolutionary love’ in the context of the metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce with Vincent Colapietro. We travel into and through the rich imagery of love in literature and culture with John Briggs. We enter energy and mind-body medicine with Renee Rolle-Whatley and Ramona Rolle-Berg, each of whom holds a PhD in Mind Body Medicine, as we explore parental love. With Mark Vernon we will address the need for a deeper awareness of love that becomes particularly acute in times of crisis, though times of crisis also offer moments to understand love move fully.

Satish Kumar brings us to ecology, approached from a love which finds its expression in a reverence for nature—which he strongly feels should be at the heart of every political and social debate. Jane Clark and Mark Vernon take us with them in a journey which explores the meaning of divine love.

In this program, we will approach love from multiple perspectives of how to go about restoring the power of love—the power of a positive mediating force, to enliven, re-enchant, and re-invigorate our world. We seek pathways that restore reason as a guide to the expansion of knowledge and understanding, and we see love as a guide, bringing goodness and order to their application. From within the midst of present chaos, we look to love in its varied dimensions to bring quiescence within, and creativity and intelligence in its outer expression.

We are again fortunate to have poet, Richard Berengarten, as part of our series on the theme of love. Richard will be read short poems from several of his collections, including The Blue Butterfly, Notness, Changing , and a new sequence of villanelles in honour of Tao Yuanming, entitled The Wine Cup. Richard will briefly introduce himself and his work and each session will begin with his reading from one of these books.

Program of Event

Saturday May 7Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Lovewith Vincent Colapietro

Sunday May 8Tales of Love and Narcissism in Classical Jewish Sourceswith Rabbi Neal Rose

Saturday May 14Portrayals of Love in Literature and Culturewith John Briggs

Sunday May 15Power of Lovewith Satish Kumar

Saturday May 21Parenting as a Journey towards Awakening: Exploring Self-growth through the Hidden Guidance of the Heartwith Ramona Rolle-Berg and Renée Rolle-Whatley

Sunday May 22Love In A Time of Crisiswith Mark Vernon

Saturday May 28Love Across Traditionswith Jane Clark and Mark Vernon

Sunday May 29Strangers on the Threshold: Love, Wisdom, and the Task of Philosophywith Will Buckingham

The Future Scientist – A Conversation with Dr Vandana Shiva
2022-04-27 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j41Fcg2HmdY

A Conversation between Dr. Vandana Shiva and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday April 279:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

The session is live and all registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

A monthly virtual encounter to understand where science is going and to reimage where we hope it might go.

The dialogue will be in a lively and spontaneous format of approximately 45 minutes up to an hour and we will then open up for questions from the audience.

Science is more than an academic activity circumscribed to laboratories and seminar rooms; it is a human creative effort that has political implications and bears societal responsibilities. In this installment of The Future Scientist series, we will explore what scientists actually do, aren’t doing, and could do in the wider picture of the troubled relationship between human beings and the Earth. Drawing from science and philosophy, but also from real-world activism, we will explicitly address the pervasive and pernicious effects of the neoliberal tide and discuss how to enact reciprocal transformations at the individual and planetary levels, so as to honor the land, the feminine and, above all, mother nature. The Future Scientist shall not be the modern Prometheus.

Dr Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, activist, and author. A food sovereignty advocate, environmentalist, and ecofeminist, Shiva holds a PhD in physics and has written more than 20 books, including Making Peace with the Earth, Staying Alive, Monocultures of the Mind, Democratizing Biology, Soil Not Oil, and Stolen Harvest. Based in Delhi, she is referred to as “Gandhi of grain” for her activism associated with the anti-GMO movement. Shiva is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization, and a figure of the anti-globalization movement. She has worked as a consultant for the Indian government and abroad, and in NGOs such as the International Forum on Globalization, Women’s Environment & Development Organization and Third World Network. She is a co-founder of the gender unit of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, and of the Women’s Environment & Development Organization. Shiva has received numerous international honors, such as the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Grant for Peace (2008), Sydney’s Peace Prize (2010), Calgary’s Peace Prize (2011), and the Right Livelihood Award (1993), which is regarded as the “alternative Nobel Prize”.

Dr Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception in flies, worms, mice, humans and robots. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining high-resolution experiments, computational and theoretical biology, and continental philosophy, his latest research concentrates on real-life cognition and consciousness.

The Future Scientist Series

Science as we know it is a relatively recent human invention.

After the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century, science and philosophy remained entangled as ‘natural philosophy’ until they started to separate in the nineteenth century (the very word ‘scientist’ was coined in 1834). Subsequently, science morphed from an activity carried out by wealthy people as a hobby (the ‘amateur,’ in the etymological sense of the word) into a paid job within an institutionalized system (the ‘professional’). Paradoxically or not, great ideas come more easily from people who are not paid to have them—it’s like forcing someone to be free, or compelling creativity by an act of will.

In the last decades, a series of technological and societal changes have further accelerated mutations of what it means to be a scientist; from the selection forces cast by neoliberalism on ‘scientific careers,’ to the kind of ‘science in the age of selfies’ that social media promotes. Scientists too are prey to the perverse dynamics of nowadays ‘attention economy.’ To understand what scientists do and why they do it, one must also understand the political and social contexts in which they live.

In addition, the rise of ‘big science’—initially in physics (particle physics and astronomy), and subsequently in life and mind sciences (genomics, and connectomics)—is reconfiguring the landscape typically inhabited by the romantic figure of the lone scientist receiving visions in dream-like states of consciousness and, eventually, advancing science in a stroke of genius. In turn, the idea of the scientist bred in the current academe is that of a diligent caffeinated deluxe technician as a part within the larger mechanism of research group army; a person trained exquisitely (and almost exclusively) on a research aspect, a specialist unable to keep track of what goes on beyond the narrow confines of his/her discipline. Young scientists are indeed trained to be good at following rules and procedures (explicit laboratory protocols, but also implicit codes of conduct and metaphysical commitments) but discouraged to learn to see when and how to transcend them.

In turn, the more recent promises of ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ posit a near-future landscape where some of the core skills and tasks traditionally attributed to humans may be soon carried out by machines (or so the ‘scientific soteriologists’ claim). Algorithms are not just ingenious means to an end that require human intervention to imbue them with meaning, but are swiftly becoming ends in themselves, pretending they offer an automated unbiased interpretation of the data.

A re-appraisal of the habits of the modern scientist entails an ethical dimension as well: why do we treat animals as objects (as means, rather than ends in themselves), why do we study life in laboratories primarily by killing it, and why do we study life in laboratories in the first place? These questions also reflect on ecological considerations regarding our place in nature (humans in relationship with other animals, and other kingdoms of life) and our destruction of the planet. Francis Bacon’s prophetic vision of the Promethean scientist, so vividly captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has become both a cautionary tale and an inspiration.

In addition, and despite the real ‘paradigm changes’ in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century, other branches of science such as biology and neuroscience remain under the spell of philosophical promissory materialism. Research facts are sold in tandem with covert metaphysical commitments. The objective-subjective divide still puzzles both scientists and the layperson. The mind-body problem remains to be solved (or dissolved).

In sum, the whole enterprise seems to be committed to suppressing broad thinkers, promoting academics that look more like corporate managers, PR mavericks and professional fund-raisers and less like scholars, who are asked to inhibit their interest in philosophy, and to cast suspicion on their fertile imagination. Dogma and habit are inhibiting free inquiry.

It is as if science as a whole is becoming less scientific.

In the face of this milieu of factors, in this series of online events we seek to reflect on what ‘the future scientist’ may look like. This is an ambitious exercise indeed, which goes beyond mere theoretical speculation. It is not unlikely that sooner than we think current science will be unrecognizable to most of us. The consequences for humanity writ large, not just for scientists themselves, are pressing.

The question at stake is whether by ‘future scientist’ we mean what scientists in the future are all likely to look like, or what a future better scientist might look like. In our conversations we will engage more in prescribing than in predicting, that is, we might begin by describing where science is going (prediction) to then describe where we hope science might go (prescription). Attempting the art of ‘dia-logos,’ we hope to express a creative voice that will enlighten the way of a new science in the twenty-first century.

The series will be direct conversations, that is, no formal presentation of the invited speaker but a kind of ‘thinking aloud’ in the mode of a dialogue between each guest and Àlex Gómez-Marín as the conversation host. The idea is to engage critically with various aspects of ‘the future scientist’ in a lively and spontaneous format for approximately 45 minutes to an hour, followed by comments and questions from the audience. Each conversation will take place virtually, on a Wednesday each month.

The invited speakers to The Future Scientist series are chosen not just as great interlocutors to discuss these issues, but also as exemplars and hints of what ‘the future scientist’ may actually look like here and now.

Teaching the Dinosaur to Dance: Moving Beyond Business as Usual
2022-04-13 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNDpL1S2fLY

Teaching the Dinosaur to Dance: Moving Beyond Business as Usual

Donna Kennedy-Glans in conversation with Julie Arts

Wednesday April 13 9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

Free Online Pari Dialogue

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.

On Wednesday April 13, Donna and Julie will be in conversation followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85176061107

If you would like to participate, have any questions or need any help just contact Eleanor Peat: eleanor@paricenter.com

Donna Kennedy-Glans is a boundary-crosser, adding value throughout her career to enterprising projects in over thirty-five countries, in the public, private and non-profit sectors: as an energy insider rooted in Alberta’s oil patch; founding a non-profit to build the capacity of women in Yemen; serving as an elected politician and cabinet minister; holding leading roles on boards of directors; and helping to steward the family farm enterprise. She is a political commentator, community builder, writer and speaker, weighing in on energy, leadership, governance, community and integrity issues.

Julie Arts is currently on a sabbatical from being a senior faculty member and consultant with the Presencing Institute (PI), an organisation founded in 2006 by Otto Scharmer and colleagues, to support action research and leadership development for systems change and societal transformation.Julie is an economist by training and has worked as a senior consultant, designing and hosting multi-stakeholder transition processes and ecosystem leadership programs such as the UN SDG Leadership Lab and many in-house leadership programs for companies and NGOs.

Julie is also a board member of Meg Wheatley’s Berkana Institute. She lives in Mechelen, Belgium and in Pari, Italy.

Music and Numbers, Part II
2022-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG0La1b-QuQ

a webinar produced, presented, and performed by

Dr Donna Coleman

Streaming from Studio OutBach® Santa Fe, situated in the heart of the deep Indigenous history of Native New Mexico, from ancient Paleoindians to Keres- and Tanoan-speaking peoples who were raided by the Comanches.

Wednesday April 6

9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CESTThursday April 7 at 2:00am AEST (Australia)

“What is above is as what is below.”The Book of Thoth

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.

Repertory to be explored on this leg of the Quintessence of Music journey:

Johann Sebastian Bach: Sinfonia in F minor, BWV 795 (1723)Riccardo Malipiero: Invenzioni, No. 7 (1949)Anton Webern: Variationen für Klavier, opus 27 (1936)Luigi Dallapiccola: Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera (1952)

The discussion will also dwell upon traditional number attributes, delving back to the Sephiroth of the ancient Qabalah, the significance of the ten numbers assigned to the branches of the Tree of Life, its seven planes, twenty-two intersections, and the hermetic adaptation of these into the Tarot. As always, we will look for the meaning behind all of these inter-related manifestations of the Ethereal Universe.

On Wednesday April 6, Donna will open our monthly monthly musical and philosophical journey with a presentation and followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83082713624

If you would like to participate, have any questions or need any help just contact Eleanor Peat: eleanor@paricenter.com

Suggested Reading

Crowley, Alistair. The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians, Being the Equinox Volume III No. V. Newburyport MA: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1974. https://echoesofegypt.peabody.yale.edu/egyptosophy/fragments-book-thoth

———. Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck. http://www.thule-italia.net/esoterismo/Aleister%20Crowley/Crowley%20Thoth%20Tarot%20Deck.pdf

Morris, Robert. Mathematics and the Twelve-Tone System. https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/229011/mod_resource/content/1/Mathematics%20and%20the%20Twelve-Tone%20System%20(Morris%202007).pdf

Papus. The Tarot of the Bohemians. https://www.labirintoermetico.com/02tarocchi/papus_the_tarot_of_the_bohemians.pdf

Tufts University Faculty (unnamed). Twelve-Tone Technique: A Primer. https://sites.tufts.edu/markdevoto/files/2015/10/12TonePrimer.pdf

Donna Coleman is a multi-award-winning concert pianist, recording artist, author, performance researcher and philosopher, and master teacher whose career spans a half-century, of which more than half has been based in Australia. She is also an accomplished weaver and photographer and an amateur but passionate astronomer and archaeologist with a keen interest in the culture of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the United States. As Head of Keyboard and of Postgraduate Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, she convened weekly thought-provoking seminars that explored relationships between music and other disciplines. Donna is writing a book entitled Dancing with the Piano, a collection of essays distilled from these sessions and from her many years of phenomenological engagement with her ultimate dance partner, the piano.

The Future Scientist – A Conversation with Michel Bitbol
2022-03-30 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N48vkz4qrgw

A Conversation between Dr. Michel Bitbol and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday March 309:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

The session is live and all registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

A monthly virtual encounter to understand where science is going and to reimage where we hope it might go.

The dialogue will be in a lively and spontaneous format of approximately 45 minutes up to an hour and we will then open up for questions from the audience.

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.

Michel Bitbol is emeritus researcher at CNRS/École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. He received a M.D., a Ph.D. in physics and a “Habilitation” in philosophy. After a start in scientific research, he turned to philosophy of science, editing texts by Erwin Schrödinger and formulating a philosophy of quantum mechanics based on phenomenological and neo-kantian conceptions. He then studied the relations between physics and the philosophy of mind, as well as a first-person conception of consciousness arising from an experience of the phenomenological Epoché. More recently, he engaged a debate with the philosophical movement called “speculative realism”, from the same standpoint.

Dr Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception in flies, worms, mice, humans and robots. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining high-resolution experiments, computational and theoretical biology, and continental philosophy, his latest research concentrates on real-life cognition and consciousness.

The Future Scientist Series

Science as we know it is a relatively recent human invention.

After the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century, science and philosophy remained entangled as ‘natural philosophy’ until they started to separate in the nineteenth century (the very word ‘scientist’ was coined in 1834). Subsequently, science morphed from an activity carried out by wealthy people as a hobby (the ‘amateur,’ in the etymological sense of the word) into a paid job within an institutionalized system (the ‘professional’). Paradoxically or not, great ideas come more easily from people who are not paid to have them—it’s like forcing someone to be free, or compelling creativity by an act of will.

In the last decades, a series of technological and societal changes have further accelerated mutations of what it means to be a scientist; from the selection forces cast by neoliberalism on ‘scientific careers,’ to the kind of ‘science in the age of selfies’ that social media promotes. Scientists too are prey to the perverse dynamics of nowadays ‘attention economy.’ To understand what scientists do and why they do it, one must also understand the political and social contexts in which they live.

In addition, the rise of ‘big science’—initially in physics (particle physics and astronomy), and subsequently in life and mind sciences (genomics, and connectomics)—is reconfiguring the landscape typically inhabited by the romantic figure of the lone scientist receiving visions in dream-like states of consciousness and, eventually, advancing science in a stroke of genius. In turn, the idea of the scientist bred in the current academe is that of a diligent caffeinated deluxe technician as a part within the larger mechanism of research group army; a person trained exquisitely (and almost exclusively) on a research aspect, a specialist unable to keep track of what goes on beyond the narrow confines of his/her discipline. Young scientists are indeed trained to be good at following rules and procedures (explicit laboratory protocols, but also implicit codes of conduct and metaphysical commitments) but discouraged to learn to see when and how to transcend them.

In turn, the more recent promises of ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ posit a near-future landscape where some of the core skills and tasks traditionally attributed to humans may be soon carried out by machines (or so the ‘scientific soteriologists’ claim). Algorithms are not just ingenious means to an end that require human intervention to imbue them with meaning, but are swiftly becoming ends in themselves, pretending they offer an automated unbiased interpretation of the data.

A re-appraisal of the habits of the modern scientist entails an ethical dimension as well: why do we treat animals as objects (as means, rather than ends in themselves), why do we study life in laboratories primarily by killing it, and why do we study life in laboratories in the first place? These questions also reflect on ecological considerations regarding our place in nature (humans in relationship with other animals, and other kingdoms of life) and our destruction of the planet. Francis Bacon’s prophetic vision of the Promethean scientist, so vividly captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has become both a cautionary tale and an inspiration.

In addition, and despite the real ‘paradigm changes’ in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century, other branches of science such as biology and neuroscience remain under the spell of philosophical promissory materialism. Research facts are sold in tandem with covert metaphysical commitments. The objective-subjective divide still puzzles both scientists and the layperson. The mind-body problem remains to be solved (or dissolved).

In sum, the whole enterprise seems to be committed to suppressing broad thinkers, promoting academics that look more like corporate managers, PR mavericks and professional fund-raisers and less like scholars, who are asked to inhibit their interest in philosophy, and to cast suspicion on their fertile imagination. Dogma and habit are inhibiting free inquiry.

It is as if science as a whole is becoming less scientific.

In the face of this milieu of factors, in this series of online events we seek to reflect on what ‘the future scientist’ may look like. This is an ambitious exercise indeed, which goes beyond mere theoretical speculation. It is not unlikely that sooner than we think current science will be unrecognizable to most of us. The consequences for humanity writ large, not just for scientists themselves, are pressing.

The question at stake is whether by ‘future scientist’ we mean what scientists in the future are all likely to look like, or what a future better scientist might look like. In our conversations we will engage more in prescribing than in predicting, that is, we might begin by describing where science is going (prediction) to then describe where we hope science might go (prescription). Attempting the art of ‘dia-logos,’ we hope to express a creative voice that will enlighten the way of a new science in the twenty-first century.

The series will be direct conversations, that is, no formal presentation of the invited speaker but a kind of ‘thinking aloud’ in the mode of a dialogue between each guest and Àlex Gómez-Marín as the conversation host. The idea is to engage critically with various aspects of ‘the future scientist’ in a lively and spontaneous format for approximately 45 minutes to an hour, followed by comments and questions from the audience. Each conversation will take place virtually, on a Wednesday each month.

The invited speakers to The Future Scientist series are chosen not just as great interlocutors to discuss these issues, but also as exemplars and hints of what ‘the future scientist’ may actually look like here and now.

An Introduction to Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind
2022-03-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KePJVhhOELA

An Introduction to Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind

with Jon Goodbun

Wednesday March 2310:00am PDT | 1:00pm EDT | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

Free Online Pari Dialogue

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.

On Wednesday March 23, Dr. Goodbun will open our monthly Community Call with a presentation and followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Dr Jon Goodbun is mostly based in Athens, Greece where he runs Rheomode, a small experimental studio working and writing at the intersection of art, architecture, and ecological pedagogy, although he also contributes to the MA Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London and the architecture and landscape programmes at University College London. His 2011 PhD, ‘Critical Urban Ecologies: The Architecture of the Extended Mind,’ drew together thinking on ecological and complex systems theory, together with cognitive science and consciousness studies, in relation to aesthetic theory, spatial perception and ecological empathy, and he is currently working on a book called The Ecological Calculus, which builds on this work. He spent some time at the Pari Center in 2010, interviewing David Peat about his own work, and the work of his collaborator David Bohm (from whose work Goodbun borrowed the name ‘rheomode’ for his blog and studio!).

Dualities and Non-Duality
2022-03-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Dualities and Non-Duality

with Mauro Bergonzi and Shantena Sabbadini

Sunday March 6, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

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).

Not even the boundary between subject and object is real: according to non-duality, the opposing terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘world’ are just two different conceptual descriptions (in terms of the ‘first’ or of the ‘third’ person) of one and the same indivisible reality, just as ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’ are two different words for the same slope, depending which way one is going. So the alleged separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ is only an illusory mental construct.

This non-dual perspective has unfolded through a wide range of different forms not only in Eastern thought (mahāyāna buddhism, advaita-vedānta, tantrism, daoism, etc), but also in Western philosophical tradition, albeit frequently in more implicit forms (e.g Parmenides, Plotinus, Cusanus, Berkeley, Spinoza, Shelling or even Hegel), which may engender new prospects of dialogue with some challenging issues of contemporary scientific thought.

To see the Full Dualities Program

Mauro Bergonzi taught “Religions and Philosophies of India” and “General Psychology” from 1985 to 2017 at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. He is also a member of I.A.A.P. (International Association for Analytical Psychology) and of C.I.P.A. (Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica). He is author of academic essays and articles on Oriental Philosophies, Comparative Religion, Comparative Philosophy, Psychology of Mysticism and Transpersonal Psychology. Since 1970, for about 25 years he has been practicing meditation (mainly within Buddhist, Taoist and Vedānta traditions), always preserving a non-confessional and non-dogmatic approach, until only a radical non-duality prevailed. From then on, he has been regularly invited to lead spiritual groups in Italy. A survey of his non-dual communication is available in his book Il sorriso segreto dell’essere (Mondadori) and in his website: https://sites.google.com/site/ilsorrisodellessere/.

Shantena Augusto Sabbadini graduated from the University of Milan in 1968 and was awarded his PhD in physics from the University of California in 1976. In Milan he researched the foundations of quantum physics, laying the base for what is currently known as the decoherence interpretation of quantum physics. At the University of California, he contributed to the theoretical work behind the first identification of a black hole, the X-ray source Cygnus X-1. In the 1990s he was scientific consultant for the Eranos Foundation, an East-West research center founded under the auspices of C.G. Jung in the 1930s. In that context he produced various translations and commentaries of Chinese classics in Italian and English, including the Yijing and the trilogy of Daoist classics, the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and the Liezi. From 2002 onwards he collaborated with F. David Peat running the Pari Center for New Learning and in 2017 he succeeded his friend and colleague as director of the center.

Shantena leads workshops and courses on the philosophical implications of quantum physics, on Daoism, and on using the Yijing as a tool for introspection. His most recent book in English, Pilgrimages to Emptiness: Rethinking Reality through Quantum Physics, was published by Pari Publishing in 2017.

Jung’s Two Personalities: Psychological Implications
2022-03-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Jung’s Two Personalities: Psychological Implications

with Mark Saban

Saturday March 5, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

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. It was this dynamic that powered Jung’s notion of individuation. In short, any one-sided position needs to be brought into tension with a conflicting ‘opposite’ position, in order that a third position can be achieved which transcends both of the earlier positions. This latter operation Jung called the Transcendent Function.In this talk, Saban will open up this notion, showing how it operates within both psychotherapeutic work and wider cultural and political spheres.

To see the Full Dualities Program

Mark Saban PhD worked for 20 years as an actor and performer before training with the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists, with whom he is a senior analyst. He is also a lecturer in Jungian and post-Jungian studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.

Publications: Mark co-edited (with Emilija Kiehl and Andrew Samuels) Analysis and Activism – Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Psychology (Routledge 2016) and wrote Two Souls Alas: Jung’s Two Personalities and the Making of Analytical Psychology (Chiron 2019) which won the International Association of Jungian Studies’ Best Book of 2019.

s the 2019 Zürich Lecture Series at the International School of Analytical Psychology. Based on his Ph.D. thesis, the book was published by Chiron in 2019.
