The Pari Center

Ancient Wisdom Transforming Tomorrow
2021-05-08 17:59 - 20:30 (Europe/Rome) | Online
Ancient Wisdom Transforming Tomorrow

4-part series: Saturday May 8, 15, 22, 299:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST | 6:00pm SAST

Each session is 2.5 hours

with Gavin Andersson, Rutendo Ngara and Godelieve Spaasand special guests Ela Manga and Keith Mparana

This programme features meditation, drawing, music, stories, dialogues and experiences and is limited to 20 active participants.

We find ourselves in a world in crisis. While theories abound, to some humanity is at the edge of the apocalypse. We are at a time of reckoning, a time of turning. We are both actors and spectators in the time foretold by ancient prophecy.

There has been no greater symbol of this in recent history than the global health emergency due to Covid-19. As a consequence of the virus, borders have been closed, millions of sources of livelihood have been lost, systems have been stifled, economies have suffered, and all the ills of the world have been accentuated. At the peak of the pandemic, the world was stopped in its tracks and activity—as we knew it—and was locked down. Some point out that this may just be the first such pandemic, and that it is merely a harbinger of the crises to come with climate change.

At this watershed moment humanity is asked to re-think, re-imagine, re-define, re-act, re-store, re-generate and re-new.

Can the current Western economic thinking solve everything? What lessons can we learn from Ancient Wisdom?

This series of dialogues aims to bring to light concepts from African Indigenous Knowledge Systems as catalysts for reimagining how to approach issues in our current reality in an interrelated and unbounded way.

By enlarging the space, we can move beyond the existing dominant paradigms and rethink the fictions that shape the modern world. We explore four different Indigenous principles, allowing other ways of knowing to expand our ways of doing—our activity. We create a container for unbounded organising in a time of transition. We traverse the bridge between remembering and imagining and paint the world as we would wish it to become.

Each session addresses one principle:

Ubuntu (Southern Africa)Ubuntu is the principle of interrelatedness, interconnectedness and interdependence. It asserts that: ‘A person is a person through other persons. I am because you are. You are because we are. We are because it is. It is because All that is is.’ This is the root of identity.

Sankofa (West Africa)Sankofa tells us to ‘go back and fetch it.’ It is a concept of ‘historical recovery,’ moving us to reflect on and reclaim Indigenous cultural ideas and principles in order to advance towards a co-created future.

Kemetic Tree of Life (Ancient Egypt)The Tree of Life tracks the process of creation from the Void to All That Is. It is a cosmological principle describing the ancient wisdom about the nature of the cosmos: from the unmanifest to the manifest, the infinite to finite.

Ancestors (throughout)African spirituality holds that there is no separation between the living, those who have walked before and those who are to come. Death is a complementary of life and the beginning of the communication between the visible and the invisible worlds.

How do we look back to move forward, what new insights seek to emerge and what transformative activity fractals can we manifest?

Pre-readingGavin Andersson (2021) ‘Unbounded Organising’ Pari Perspectives, Issue 7, ‘The Common Good’

Gavin Andersson, PhD, is a development practitioner and activity theorist whose life work has focused on strengthening community organisation, and leadership development within civil society.

Gavin was founder and co-ordinator of CORDE, which worked with farmer groups and community enterprises in Botswana. He later consulted in organisational development across southern Africa and in the Caribbean. Returning to South Africa at the inception of democracy he led a development advocacy organization and worked in the fields of corporate social responsibility, civil accountability, and leadership development. Gavin has helped to develop methodologies for citizen-based monitoring of government programmes.

Gavin is an executive coach, senior fellow of the Chair for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg and was a distinguished fellow of the Chair in Development Education housed at the University of South Africa UNISA. He is Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town where he hosts critical conversations on Macroeconomics, Ethics and Organizing. Gavin lives with three of his five children, is passionate about agroecology, and follows African spirituality.

Rutendo Ngara is an African Indigenous Knowledge Systems practitioner and transdisciplinary researcher whose professional interests have spanned from clinical engineering, healthcare technology management, socio-economic development, mathematics, leadership and fashion design; to the interface between science, culture, cosmology and paradigms of healing. With a passion for integrating art, science and spirituality towards healing of the Collective and restoration of the Whole, she is a spiritual coach, priestess and counsellor, who engages several modes of healing. She consults in workshop facilitation in areas such as leadership, personal development, health and wellness. Rutendo is a co-founder of Ancient Wisdom Africa, a forum that seeks to gather knowledges and voices of Ancient Wisdom and see how these can illuminate the present; as well as a member of the Assegaia Alliance—a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary group of experts dedicated to the protection of the Earth’s Sacred Natural Sites. She serves on a number of boards, advisory and convening committees, including the Credo Mutwa Foundation, the South African Wushu Federation, Earthrise Collective and Umphakatsi Peace Ecovillage. Rutendo is a practitioner of a number of physical disciplines, including Wushu/Kung Fu/Tai Ji for which she has represented South Africa as an international silver medallist. She holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering, an MSc in Medicine in Biomedical Engineering, and is pursuing a doctorate in Philosophy of Education. The quest for harmony, co- existence and complimentarity underpins her endeavours.

Godelieve Spaas is a professor of Sustainable Strategy and Innovation at Avans University of Applied Science in the Netherlands. She is a researcher and also creates and makes performances and podcasts about new ways of entrepreneurial organizing where ecology, society, and the economy all benefit from and interact seamlessly with each other. Her aim is to increase diversity in organizational and entrepreneurial models and realities with a view to the development of a fairer, more sustainable and robust entrepreneurial space. She combines art, science, entrepreneurial practices and indigenous knowledge.

Godelieve also creates new businesses that are collaborative, inclusive and work in harmony with nature. She is associate Director of the Pari Center and a regular guest in Pari, a place where she writes, participates in dialogues, and follows and gives courses.

Dr Ela Manga is an integrative medical doctor with an ancient vision for the future. Amongst the gifts she offers, she is a specialist in energy management, author and speaker who uses Breathwork as a tool for self-empowerment, healing and transformation. For those who have had the privilege of experiencing the transformative power of the breath under her facilitation, it was a source of inspiration and expiration. Last year she ran a podcast series called ‘Threads of Healing,’ where she expanded the notion of healing through different voices and wove it back together into a tapestry of beauty. Apart from her medical practice, she is the Founder of Breathwork Africa.

Keith Mparana is an avid student of African-based systems of knowledge that he translates into artwork through studying the thought processes that are depicted in ancient cosmologies.

Hope and Delusion
2021-05-16 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogTF4n-mRXM

Hope and Delusion: Critical Storytelling for Difficult Times

with Robert Norris

Sunday May 169:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

When we realise just how much hangs on our attitudes towards the various forms of crisis we are exposed to, we may come to see what our work really is. Hope has a curious story to tell. It reminds us of the wealth we carry within us, but also of how easily we are persuaded to give it all up. This talk attempts to string together disparate stories relating to, but not necessarily about, hope, and aims specifically to raise more questions than it answers. Accompanying the talk there will be breakout and plenary sessions in which participants will be able to articulate their thoughts and responses.

On Sunday May 16, Robert will open our monthly Community Call 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/84842167052

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

When asked once to provide a blurb for a book on the philosophy of language, the question of how to describe Robert professionally had to be addressed. It was decided to describe him as an independent researcher, and this is more or less how Robert has viewed himself ever since. Robert teaches English as a foreign language, but his interests and experience are wide-ranging. Born to British parents in Modena, Italy, he studied Classics at school, English at Aberdeen University and General Linguistics and Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. He has travelled and worked in various parts of Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, Southeast Asia, Australasia and the United States. In 2014, he completed a Permaculture Design Course in Vang Vieng, Laos, and holds a second degree black belt in the art of aikido. He is indebted to many teachers in the fields of aikido and meditation, especially Vipassana meditation, and in 2018 completed a Mindfulness Teacher Training Course at the Mangalam Meditation Centre in Germany. He now lives with his beloved wife in Zürich, Switzerland, where he plans to embark on training as a Jungian Analyst at the International School for Analytical Psychologists.

Analytic Idealism
2021-06-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Analytic Idealism

with Bernardo Kastrup

Saturday June 5, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

If you are unable to attend the live session, the recording will be available.

Two widespread current notions of consciousness are physicalism, i.e. the perspective that assumes physical reality, matter, as fundamental, and bottom-up panpsychism, i.e. the perspective that takes everything as possessing mind or consciousness and higher levels of consciousness consisting of a combination of more elementary levels. Bernardo Kastrup will argue for an idealist (consciousness only) ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (the challenge of deducing consciousness from matter) or the ‘subject combination problem,’ (the challenge of deducing higher levels of consciousness from lower levels). It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be the only ontological reality, the ultimate nature of everything. We, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness, similarly to what happens in multiple personality disorders.

Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a PhD in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and a second PhD in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect‘ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. Bernardo’s most recent book is The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com.

To see the full What is Consciousness Series and list of speakers click here

The Ancestors—the Tree of Life and Intergenerational Patterning
2021-06-16 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y12raflNx6g

The Ancestors—the Tree of Life and Intergenerational Patterning

with Melanie Rein

Wednesday June 16 9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

Online Pari Dialogue

This talk will focus on the unconscious patterns which run through families and generations of families, as one generation inherits, responds and reacts to the complexes and archetypal energies of the previous generation—and even of the generation before that—parents, grandparents and in some cases, great-grandparents. Drawing on mythology and other cultural experiences, the presenter will explore the symbolic nature of the genogram, or psychological genealogy tree, and its connection to the Tree of Life as a visual image for eliciting, revealing and deepening insights into family and ancestral patterning.

On Wednesday June 16, Melanie will open our monthly Community Call 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/84239833716

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

Melanie Rein PhD., is a Jungian analyst and supervisor with a practice in Cambridge, UK. She is a senior member of the Guild of Analytical Psychologists, London, where she originally trained, and of the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists. Many moons ago, Melanie worked as a Psychiatric Social Worker, using family therapy in her work with children and families. Later, following her PhD., and as a social scientist, she directed a number of British Government and EU projects in Central and Eastern Europe, as well working on a collaborative research project with colleagues in Zambia and Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa.

Image Above:Israhel van MeckenemOrnament with the Tree of Jesse, 1480–90With kind permission of The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

Epistemic Justice
2021-06-16 19:00 - 20:00 | Online
Epistemic Justice

Reflections on Past, Present and Future – from an African Perspective With Dr. Baba Buntu (PhD)

June: Cognitive

Wednesday June 16, 23 and 30 – 1 hour sessions10:00 am PDT | 1:00 pm EDT | 6:00 pm BST | 7:00 pm CEST

This seminar-series is a presentation of reflections on justice, liberation and transformation. It is a fragmented story, inspired by the presenter’s tri-continental life-journey, interpreted through a trans-disciplinary lens and motivated by finding strategies for change through epistemic disobedience.

Rooted in African worldviews, each session will explore aspects of history that has had a devastating impact on human development. Literary references will be used as navigation points in order to interrogate complex problems and stimulate philosophical introspection.

More than providing the answers, the seminar-series will seek to disrupt common thinking and encourage a transdisciplinary approach to transformation. Realizing that our views of the world have been greatly impacted by exclusion and silencing, the series is an attempt to speak the unspoken and envision the righteous.

The seminar-series will be scheduled along 12 key-concepts, structured through four dimensions: Physical, cognitive, social and metaphysical. 3 sessions will be held each month of May, June, July and August at 7:00 CEST of 1 hour.

June: Cognitive

June 16 – Violence: What is the script of violence, beyond physical aggression?June 23 – Economy: How do we manage a world where “to have” is a privilege?June 30 – Leadership: Is there a universal script for how to lead?

What people have said….

This program is -in my eyes- an absolute prerequisite for everyone aspiring to bring change in the world, for everyone who claims to believe in change, equality and justice. You cannot not listen to Baba Buntu’s work on (in)justice. Julie Arts

Using evocative questions and images, engaging around both the mind and lived experience, Dr. Buntu opens the potential for understanding at a deep and enduring level. Sharon Landes

Dr. Baba Buntu strikes the perfect balance between personal experience and in-depth academic research in this eye-opening series. This course should be mandatory for people of all colours to become aware and hopefully start to fight the inherent systemic injustices both in our daily lives and at a larger scale. Rose Vervenne

Following months…..

July: SocialJuly 14 – Family: Who is the teacher of familyhood?July 21 – Youth: Why do we hate youth so much?July 28 – Gender: Is gender a concept of violence?

August: MetaphysicalAugust 11 – Spirit: Who defines truth beyond the physical world?August 18 – Unity: What are the mechanics of reuniting a fragmented world?August 25 – Balance: Whose responsibility is it to restore what was broken?

Previous month…..

May: The PhysicalMay 12 – Skin: How did appearance become punishable?May 19 – Presence: What does it mean to exist in this world?May 26 – Representation: Who can represent who, and why?

Dr Baba Amani Olúbánjọ Buntu is a Community/Activist Scholar with more than 30 years of experience in conceptualizing and implementing programs on social development, innovative entrepreneurship, youth empowerment and indigenous knowledge – particularly suited for Afrikan applicability. He has background from Anguilla, grew up in Norway and has lived in South Afrika since the 90’s.

In Norway he founded Afrikan Youth In Norway (AYIN), started Norway’s first Afrikan-centered retail shop, Afrikan Excellence, and co-founded Afrikan History Week (AHW). He is the Founder and Co-Director of eBukhosini Solutions, a community based company in Johannesburg, focusing on Afrikan-Centered education and decolonial transformation. He holds a Doctoral and a Master Degree in Philosophy of Education from University of South Africa and has also studied social work, group therapy and political science. As a Pan-Afrikan educator, writer, mentor and practitioner, with broad experience from work in Afrika, the Caribbean and Europe.

The Image Above: MMRA KRADO belongs to the family of Adinkra conceptual symbols created by the Bono and Akan civilizations, in today’s Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

In the literal sense, mmra means law while krado means padlock. Together they can be translated to mean the seal of the law. This symbol represents justice and authority. When there is a desire for law and order, citizens must resolve to be law abiding for a peaceful and harmonious community.

The Screen and the Soul
2021-07-03 18:00 - 19:30
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6TRmZBZIpo

The Screen and the Soul: Virtual Reality, Real Reality and How It Is

with Christopher Hauke

Saturday July 39:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

Free Online Pari Dialogue

The Covid pandemic has required us to keep a broader social distance from one another; for psychotherapists this should be less of a problem. With reliable broadband making therapy sessions (and presentations like this one) possible online, why do so many people still find the virtual session falls so far short of the ‘real’ meeting in person? Maybe our assumption that there is a ‘real’ version and there is an inferior ‘virtual’ version is wrong to begin with. Christopher Hauke will lay out three approaches to this question.

The first derives from quantum theorist David Deutsch and his book The Fabric of Reality (Deutsch, 1997). The second approach digs further into philosophical implications around the idea that material reality is not an objective fact and consciousness is all there is. This is known as metaphysical idealism as analysed by Bernardo Kastrup’s (Kastrup 2020, 2021) work especially his understanding of Jung’s metaphysics.

Lastly, film narratives, as well as factual ‘reality’ films, have long been delivering ‘reality’ to us on screens in their own virtual way. So Chris will finish by discussing the bio-evolutionary ideas around visual perception, affordance (Gibson, 1979) and the central role of meaning in both film and the therapy session. In doing so, he will bring us back to the definition of ‘virtual’ which flagged it as something in essence or effect. In this way he brings a new perspective to the idea of ‘real reality’ and ‘virtual reality’ in our new way of working.

On Saturday July 3, Chris will open our monthly Community Call 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/83111513487

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

Christopher Hauke is a Jungian analyst in private practice and Senior Lecturer emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London interested in the applications of depth psychology to a wide range of social and cultural phenomena including film. His books include Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities, (2000); Human Being Human. Culture and the Soul (2005) Visible Mind. Movies, Modernity and the Unconscious.(2013). He has co-edited two collections of Jungian film writing: Jung and Film. Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image(2001) and Jung and Film II – The Return (2011).

His short films, documentaries One Colour Red and Green Ray and the psychological drama Again premiered in London venues and at congresses in Barcelona, Zurich and Montreal.

In addition to new film projects he is now researching the limits of rationality, and the place of the irrational in our lives.

Contextuality in de Broglie-Bohm and Beyond
2021-07-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Buy the recording

Contextuality In De Broglie-Bohm And Beyond with Emily Adlam€10,00

Shop now

Contextuality in de Broglie-Bohm and Beyond

with Emily Adlam

Saturday July 10, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

If you are unable to attend the live session, the recording will be available.

Contextuality is one particularly puzzling non-classical feature of the quantum world—but what conclusions should we draw from it? In this talk, Dr Adlam will explain what contextuality is and why the presence of contextuality in our theories needs explaining. She will describe how contextuality is manifested in the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics and compare and contrast the de Broglie-Bohm account of contextuality to various alternatives. Finally, she will discuss some interesting new mathematical approaches to contextuality and consider what these results add to our understanding.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Series

Emily Adlam is a theoretical physicist and philosopher of physics specialising in quantum information and foundations. She studied physics and philosophy at Oxford and then received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in relativistic quantum information. She recently published a book, Quantum Foundations, as part of the Cambridge University Press Elements of Philosophy series.

The Brain and our Encounter with the World
2021-09-04 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6ZNDD77in8

The Brain and our Encounter with the World

with Iain McGilchrist

Saturday September 49:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

If you are unable to attend the live session, the recording will be available.

At the very least, our brains help to shape our consciousness. Can an examination of the way in which they do so help us to reconcile different visons of ourselves and of our world? There is nothing reductionist about asking such a question: rather, McGilchrist shall suggest, it helps us to transcend the limitations of reductionism itself. Importantly it may, for the first time, give philosophy a basis for judging certain views on the world as worthier of acceptance than others.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009), and is shortly to publish a book on epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things. He lives on the Isle of Skye, and has two daughters and a son.

Exploring the Earth-Mind
2021-09-11 18:00 - 2021-09-19 20:00 | Online
Exploring the Earth-Mind

4-part series: Saturday and Sunday September 11- 12, 18 – 199:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

Each session is 2 hours

with John Briggs PhD, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at WCSUand coauthor of three books with F. David Peat

Featuring Guests:Robert Toth: Former Executive Director of the Merton Institute for Contemplative LivingOfelia Rivas: Elder of the Tohono O’odham NationShantena Augusto Sabbatini, Director of The Pari CenterJames Peat Barbieri, Associate Program Director of The Pari Center

Indigenous peoples alive today are rooted in a consciousness of Earth that once provided the guiding mode of consciousness for humans but which at this point in time most of the rest of humanity has lost. The mainstream mode of consciousness is the “anthropocentric” or human-centered mode—a consciousness of objects, causality, competition and hierarchy that focuses on the individual self and on the conflict for survival of the individual. By contrast, the holomorphic or Earth-Mind consciousness is a holistic awareness; it’s an awareness of living in dynamic balance with other beings as “relatives,” including mountains, trees, rivers, wind. It’s an awareness of the deeply metaphoric nature of our relationship to reality and of our obligation to engage in “reciprocity” with all beings, animate or inanimate.

Everyone comes to life naturally endowed with both modes of consciousness, but the holistic Earth-Mind has been suppressed by the all-consuming anthropocentric structures of thought and self-interest that have moved to control nature since the Neolithic Revolution. In the words of one Native elder: “Instead of taking care, we are taking over.”

The objective of the four sessions of this course is to alert participants to the existence of the Earth-Mind mode of awareness in their own consciousness and to explore the implication of this mode of awareness for their individual lives and the collective life of the planet.

The sessions will be interactive. Through simple activities, participants will engage their Earth-Mind and report back to the group for discussion what they find. Guests will include Ofelia Rivas elder of the Tohono O’odam Nation in Southern Arizona and Mexico. Physicists Shantena Sabbadini and James Peat Barbieri will join the final session in a dialogue exploring how modern physics and ideas of the whole might find resonance with the holistic mode of consciousness that grounds traditional People.

Program

Session 1: A Holistic Kind of Consciousness—Saturday September 11Climate change and catastrophic species extinction have resulted from a way of thinking that could be called anthropocentric or “human-centered.” This is thinking about the world and ourselves in terms of separate objects and interchangeable parts. The so-called “human enhancement project” exemplifies this kind of thinking that most people would conclude is, for better and ill, the only kind of human thinking there is short of enlightenment. However, Indigenous people around the world are guided by another mode of consciousness, a holomorphic or Earth-Mind consciousness. This first session will sketch the characteristics of Earth-Mind consciousness. Short selections of reading will be assigned along with an activity. Both will be discussed on Sept. 18 in session 3.

Session 2: A Conversation with O’odam Elder Ofelia Rivas—Sunday September 12Among the items Ofelia will discuss: her experience of reality as flux, relations with other entities, ceremony, reciprocity, balance, the original instructions. What is the role of the feminine in maintaining balance in the flux of the world? What is it like for her to live under the pressures of a toxic anthropocentric society? This session will end with a recommendation that participants engage in two simple activities over the next week and come prepared to communicate their experiences on the 18th, session 3.

Session 3: Living with Our Relatives—Saturday September 18This session is devoted to participants’ thoughts about the reading selections and their experiences as they engaged the recommended “homework” activities. Final assignment will be given to view two short videos on YouTube in preparation for the last session.

Session 4: What Is the Whole?—Sunday September 19Physics has pursued the idea of a universe made of separate objects connected by forces and causality. But figuring out how the smallest objects come together to make the world eventually led to the discovery of a missing ingredient in scientific theories: the whole. What is the whole according to chaos theory, quantum mechanics and David Bohm’s implicte order? The final session will unfold as a dialogue with physicists Shantena Augusto Sabbadini and James Peat Barberi exploring physical conceptions of holism and their possible connections to Earth-Mind consciousness.

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.

Ophelia Rivas My people are the O’odham from the desert, O’odham means people. The O’odham oral history teaches us where and when we originated and how to live on the land and follow our way of life called the Him’dag. My homelands are illegally occupied by the United States of America and the Republic States of Mexico—an International Boundary bisected my homelands. Today we live on reservations “wards of the state”, where the poverty levels are above national levels. My father’s community is in Cu:Wi I-gersk, Sonora, Mexico and my mother’s community is Ali Jegk, Arizona, USA. I hold my alliance with my Indigenous brothers and sisters and my traditional O’odham Elders and ceremony leaders. The traditional O´odham hold their alliance to Mother Earth. No written documents required. I carry the words from my traditional elders and ceremony leaders. They call for solidarity to defend the sacred places of our people for our survival. They call to defend the source of our original birthplaces as people, Mother Earth, Father Sky and the sacred Water and Air.

Robert G. Toth served as Executive Director the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living from 1998 to 2010. He co-edited Bridges to Contemplative Living with Thomas Merton, a popular series designed for small group dialogue. He is an active member of The Contemplative Alliance, an initiative of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, which organizes dialogues and programs around the world to advance contemplative approaches to issues affecting the welfare of all being. He also serves on the Board of the Lake Erie Institute which offers holistic ecological leadership programs to individuals engaged in creating flourishing, regenerative, and socially just communities.

Shantena 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.

James Peat Barbieri is the Associate Programme Director at the Pari Center, and host of the Pari Center online events. He studied at a professional dance school, Ateneo della Danza, Siena, but moved on to academic studies. James is now a King’s College, University of London graduate in Physics and Philosophy. His other interests include Film, Art, and Philosophy. He is interested in analysing cinema and works of art by applying philosophical approaches such as aesthetics and the Continental philosophies.

James has been taking part in conferences and courses at the Pari Center since he was 11. He was David Peat’s Teaching Assistant from the age of 15 and has since then given several presentations at the Pari Center, including two mini-courses on Beauty and Mathematics, dealing with the relationship of Nature and the Golden Section, on Hegel’s philosophy and its symmetry with the works of David Bohm, and the historical relationship between Art and Science.

On the Interpretation of Signs: The Search for Meaning in Music Notation
2021-09-30 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
On the Interpretation of Signs: The Search for Meaning in Music Notation

with Donna Coleman

Thursday September 309:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays1803 Boston MA – 1882 Concord MA

What in the hell have the notes got to do with the music?!Charles Edward Ives1874 Danbury CT – 1954 West Redding CT

If we gaze at the image above, many thoughts, ideas, interpretations come to mind. My tendency is to see astronomical phenomena. Total solar eclipse. Sunspot. Inverse full moon. End of a sentence; a separator. Centre of a universe; a generator.

The line suggests altogether different meanings. A horizon. An edge. ‘The bottom line.’ Another version of a separator. A blue highway across Kansas.

The origins of written language—the use of symbols to represent sounds—date back to c 4,000 BC and the ancient Sumerians. Their script, called Proto-Sumerian, consisted of marks pressed into soft clay using either the blunt or the sharp end of a stylus. Since that time, attempts to translate the aural experience of music into visual cues for its re-creation by a performer have evolved into a sophisticated but ultimately inadequate system of ‘notation.’ As a performer and researcher, world renowned concert pianist Dr Donna Coleman has spent six decades engaged in the daily challenge of turning a collection of black dots on a line into a narrative, yet wordless, aural journey.

In this two-hour webinar, divided into two forty-minute presentation sessions followed by twenty minutes for questions and debate, Coleman will lead a discussion about the perception and interpretation of signs and symbols at it relates to music notation. The discourse will encircle Coleman’s Music: It IS Rocket Science and the many disciplines that inform the study and contemplation and performance of music. We will explore the history of music notation and contemplate the notion of music as language. Coleman will demonstrate at the piano the diverse performance outcomes that arise from the often confusing, different published editions of a single work. Webinar attendees will be encouraged to actively engage in discussion, and they will be provided with links to materials that can be perused in advance of the scheduled session.

On Thursday September 30, Donna will open our monthly Community Call 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/88489296199

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

Dr Donna Coleman is a world renowned concert pianist, recording artist, author, philosopher, and master teacher whose career spans a half-century, of which half has been based in Australia. She is also an accomplished weaver and photographer and an amateur but passionate astronomer and archeologist with a keen interest in the deep history of the US Southwest. As Head 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 Multiverse and the Limits of Science
2021-10-02 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeOyQW8QyoQ

The Multiverse and the Limits of Science

with Bernard Carr

Saturday October 2, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

If you are unable to attend the live session, the recording will be available.

Developments in both cosmology and particle physics suggest that our universe may just be one member of an ensemble of universes, termed the multiverse. However, there are many different versions of the multiverse proposal, so it is important to distinguish between these in assessing the plausibility of the notion. In some versions the values of the physical constants may vary across the ensemble, so this could provide a scientific basis for the suggestion that some of the constants are fine-tuned for the existence of observers. The evidence for this comes from numerous unexplained ‘coincidences’ between the constants, a notion which used to regarded as purely philosophical or even theological. But what is the universe fine-tuned for? Is it for complexity or some physical feature (such as the existence of black holes) or is for life or consciousness. And is the multiverse a proper scientific proposal or just philosophical speculation? This depends on the definition of ‘science’ but it is argued that the nature of science has continually changed as our knowledge of the universe has expanded.

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

Bernard Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. His professional area of research is cosmology and astrophysics and includes such topics as the early universe, dark matter, black holes and the anthropic principle. For his PhD he studied the first second of the Universe, working under the supervision of Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology.He was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1975 and moved to Queen Mary College in 1985. He has also held Visiting Professorships at Kyoto University, Tokyo University, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. He is the author of nearly three hundred scientific papers and the books Universe or Multiverse? and Quantum Black Holes. Beyond his professional field, he is interested in the role of consciousness in physics and in an expanded paradigm which accommodates mind. He also has a long-standing interest in the relationship between science and religion. He was President of the Society for Psychical Research in 2000-2004 and is currently President of the Scientific and Medical Network.

Imagined Problems: Real Opportunities
2021-10-20 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz0CxUbY3iY

Imagined Problems: Real Opportunities

with Susanna Wu-Pong Calvert and Gary Goldberg

Wednesday October 209:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

The science of perception tells us that our problems are subjective and socially constructed. So what is a “real” problem, and what solutions become available to us? In this engaging session, Drs. Susanna Wu-Pong Calvert, MAPP, PhD and Gary Goldberg, MD discuss the nature of perception and “reality” in our VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). They will also discuss how to move from feelings of overwhelm and despair to inspiration and agency by accessing our deep, inner wisdom. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey will be presented as a timeless, increasingly relevant, and useful frame for our individual and collective pursuit of meaning and authentic, impactful action, especially in light of our modern challenges. Personal stories and anecdotes will be used to illustrate how we can create our own sagas akin to Dorothy (Wizard of Oz) and Luke Skywalker (Star Wars). Participants will be invited to envision, and then pursue their own achievable, unique, and deeply authentic solutions to achieve the beautiful new world that we all desire.

On Wednesday October 20, Susanna and Gary will open our monthly Community Call 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/86035064521

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

Dr. Susanna Wu-Pong Calvert is a 26-year veteran of higher education, first starting at Virginia Commonwealth University where she was a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy, Department of Pharmaceutics, and Director of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Graduate Program for 11 years. She joined the Office of Faculty Affairs at the University of Georgia in 2016 as the inaugural Director of Programming, where she supported faculty success and wellbeing, and leadership and organizational development for the 2300 faculty across the UGA campuses. In 2018, she founded the Foundation for Family and Community Healing, who focuses on creating vibrant connections between individuals and their families, communities, and with Earth to promote wellbeing for all.

Susanna has a Bachelors Degree in Pharmacy from the University of Texas, Austin, a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, a PhD in pharmacy and pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco and a postdoctoral fellowship in dermatology, also at UCSF. During her career she has published almost 100 journal articles, books, and book chapters, and has written hundreds of blogs for the Silver Lining blog (www.findingpositiveperspective.wordpress.com) and through FFCH. She has several coaching credentials including Clifton StrengthsFinders, Growth Edge Coaching, Arbinger Institute, and the Leadership Circle, and is trained as a life coach. Her passion is in helping individuals and organizations find and pursue their calling and the highest versions of themselves.

For more information on Susanna and her work www.HealingEdu.org and www.SusannaCalvert.com

Dr. Gary Goldberg received an undergraduate degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and then a Medical Degree from McMaster University. He completed residency training in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation with subspecialty certification in Brain Injury Medicine. In 2020, he retired from clinical practice after over 35 years working in the field of brain injury rehabilitation at academic medical centers in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Richmond in the USA. He now is focused on drawing on this work experience to seek a means of conjoining faith and science into a coherent conceptual framework of holistic inquiry.

Gary is an energetic member of the Pari Center, actively participating in our online events and is a member of the Pari Center Advisory Board.

The Consciousness of Neuroscience
2021-11-06 18:00 - 20:00
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxG7_rMpnuk

The Consciousness of Neuroscience

with Alex Gomez-Marin

Saturday November 610:00am PDT | 1:00pm EDT | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

Free Online Pari Dialogue

The scientific study of consciousness used to be taboo just a few decades ago, but it is now in its heyday. Consciousness research captures the imagination of laypeople, attracts research funding, and sells books. Amongst neuroscientists, the dominant position is this: whatever consciousness is, it must somehow emerge somewhere in the brain. Where else could it be? The challenge then is to find out how subjective experience springs from neural activity. But does it? By what kind of modern alchemy is the water of the matter supposed to be transformed into the wine of experience? We are never told. Instead, materialism excels at selling old metaphysical commitments as new scientific data. In addition, materialism is promissory by necessity: the grand resolution is at hand but always lies ahead – the best is yet to come. Moreover, and despite the impressive tools available, such a conception of the physical world dates back to the nineteenth century – ironically, physicalism is embraced by virtually everyone except physicists themselves. In sum, the blind spot of the neuroscience of consciousness is paradoxical: a mind studies other brains and declares itself illusory, epiphenomenal, or emergent at best. Here, rather than trying to answer how “matter makes mind”, Alex Gomez-Marin questions whether it does, and what this entails for science writ large. He argues that the science of consciousness is at a sweet crossroads: either we continue doing science as usual with ever fancier tools and bigger data or we seize the opportunity to craft a new idea of science.

On Saturday November 6, Alex will open our monthly Community Call 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/89671398135

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

Alex Gomez-Marin is a theoretical physicist turned cognitive neuroscientist. He was awarded his PhD in physics in 2008 by the University of Barcelona. He also holds a Masters in Biophysics from the same university. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the EMBL-CRG Centre forGenomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, where he studied worms, flies and mice. Since 2016 he has been the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias (CSIC-UMH) in Alicante, Spain. The mission of his group is to establish neuro-ethological principles across species. His latest research concentrates on machines and humans in real-world situations, combining computational techniques with theoretical biology and continental philosophy. You can follow him at @behaviOrganisms and read his work here: https://behavior-of-organisms.org/read-us

Beyond Words
2022-01-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Online
A Film Trilogy: Giving Form to the Ineffable

with director, writer and producer Hugh PidgeonRoundtable Guests: Eelco de Geus, Gary Goldberg, Donna Kennedy-Glans, Jacob Raz, Yuriko Sato and David SchrumModerated by Lee Nichol

Saturday January 8, 2022

Three Short Films9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

Roundtable Conversation10:00am PST | 1:00pm EST | 6:00pm GMT | 7:00pm CET

Free Online Pari Dialogue

I first heard of Hugh Pidgeon’s Beyond Words trilogy from Hugh himself, when he sent me a link to view the three films. Not realizing these were short films, I put off viewing them for some time, assuming an hour or more for each film. When I realized they were not lengthy, I opened them right away, beginning with A Moment of Clarity.

At the end of Clarity, there was a simple state of silence. Eventually I began to reflect on what I had seen, and was taken aback to realize that not once, in 15 minutes of film about David Bohm, did Bohm’s image ever appear. And yet, the very essence of Bohm was everywhere, distilled and concentrated with great artistry and a true sense of love.

As it turns out, all these qualities are to be found in The Wall within Our Minds and Negotiating with Gravity, the other two films in the trilogy. But it is from within the wholeness of the three films, seen in their original intended sequence, that the true import of Hugh’s work emerges. The overlapping, interlaced meanings of the trilogy evoke a sense of mystery and beauty that transcends any of the individual films. These qualities linger, and indeed work to rearrange one’s interiority, one’s very being.

It was with great joy to learn from Hugh – who has kept these films rather close for a number of years – that he was enthusiastic about sharing them with the larger Pari community. This prospect has now come to fruition. Please join us for this very special, one-time-only event!

Lee Nichol, Moderator

On Saturday January 8, 2022, we are offering all our friends at the Pari Center the unique opportunity to view Hugh Pidgeon’s trilogy Beyond Words followed by a panel discussion.

Our invited guests at the table will come together to discuss the ideas, the beauty, and the overall sense of Wholeness that is portrayed throughout. They will examine the interconnections between David Bohm, Martin Buber, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of young Palestinians and Israelis, and the artist Andy Goldsworthy.

The films (with a combined running time of 32 minutes) can be viewed at leisure in a 60-minute window prior to the 90-minute roundtable discussion between our panelists. There will not be Q&A during this event.

It is essential that you get your ticket above in order to receive the necessary links.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Please get your ticket for this event at the top of the page and you will be sent the links to the films and to the roundtable conversation.

If you have any questions or need any help just contact Eleanor Peat: eleanor@paricenter.com

Join us at the Pari Center on Saturday January 8, 2022 for a screening of Hugh Pidgeon’s trilogy Beyond Words followed by a panel conversation. This is a unique opportunity to not only view Hugh’s films but to hear a ninety-minute roundtable conversation on the ideas presented in the films.

Thanks to creator and director Hugh Pidgeon, it is our privilege to screen the Beyond Words trilogy, Hugh’s stunning short films, free of charge, for the Pari Center community.

The Beyond Words trilogy opens with The Wall in Our Minds which introduces Arab and Jewish young musicians from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, with founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim who believes the orchestra is a metaphor for what could be achieved in the Middle East.

These young people were brought together as a one-off scratch orchestra in 1999 (yet is still giving performances) by Barenboim and the philosopher and writer, the late Edward Said. The name chosen for the orchestra The West-Eastern Divan was the title of a collection of lyrical poems by Goethe. One hundred years earlier, Martin Buber prefaced two lines from the very same collection in his book I and Thou.

Negotiating With Gravity, the second film in the trilogy, was the outcome of an invitation to the director to lead a plenary at an international conference of Gestalt therapists on Martin Buber’s contribution to the core notions of dialogue that inform Gestalt psychotherapy.

For Buber the first of what he called the ‘spheres of relation’ was our life with Nature. Going beyond words, the photographic essay that became the film followed conversations with a botanist from Kew Gardens, a professor of physics at Oxford, a professor of mathematics at Warwick University, a resident ecologist at Schumacher College, and an artist whose paintings feature in the film, the better to understand the five perspectives that featured in the passage from Buber’s book and begins ‘I consider a tree.’

The third in the series A Moment of Clarity was conceived as a sister film to bring David Bohm and Martin Buber together for the first time in the same space. In Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order the physicist includes extensive reference to the Ancient Greek notions of measure in music and the visual arts.

Hugh drew his inspiration from Andy Goldsworthy, a site-specific sculptor whose work he has long admired and is featured on the cover of the Routledge edition of Bohm’s On Dialogue edited by Lee Nichol. It is Andy Goldsworthy who speaks of a moment of clarity at the close of the film.

Hugh presents an entirely new configuration of Goldsworthy’s film Rivers and Tides brought into conjunction with David Bohm’s writing on process from Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and the extraordinary Ice Music of Norwegian musician Terje Isungset.

Hugh Pidgeon is an organisational consultant, an academic and a practicing Gestalt psychotherapist. He has been as much influenced in his work by the teaching of Martin Buber on dialogue as he has been by that of David Bohm . Drawn by the commonality of insight they shared with each other, Hugh created the trilogy Beyond Words, several years in the making, that features the two of them for the first time in the same space.

A number of years living and working in Thailand and China and often visiting Japan have also proved a significant influence on Hugh personally. He was first introduced to David Bohm’s work by fellow US consultants Roger Harrison and Peter Block while he was representing a Kansas City-based consultancy in Europe and was intrigued from the beginning by the interest David Bohm developed in the parallels in Buddhist teaching to his own work as a physicist.

Hugh’s primary interest is the contribution a dialogic orientation yet might make to the fractious collisions of opinion on how best to address our seemingly insatiable determination as the human race to sacrifice the ecological balance of the planet in pursuit of our own economic development – the outcome of the fragmentation in the way we think that David Bohm anticipated over 40 years ago.

Eelco de Geus met the work of David Bohm in his Dialogue Training in Germany with Freeman Dhoritiy. He is inspired by the integration of Bohm’s Thinking, the relational approaches in the works of Martin Buber, the process work of Arnold Mindell and different community building practices. Eelco applies this integration in a proces- oriented approach on dialogue, that inquires beyond words into the essence of human connection. He is co- founder of the Dialogue Academy Vienna, which provides learning spaces for dialogue process work and systemic constellations.

Gary Goldberg received an undergraduate degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and then a Medical Degree from McMaster University. He completed residency training in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation with subspecialty certification in Brain Injury Medicine. In 2020, he retired from clinical practice after over 35 years working in the field of brain injury rehabilitation at academic medical centers in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Richmond in the USA. He now is focused on drawing on this work experience to seek a means of conjoining faith and science into a coherent conceptual framework of holistic inquiry.

Gary is an energetic member of the Pari Center, actively participating in our online events and is a member of the Pari Center Advisory Board.

Donna Kennedy-Glans is a boundary-crosser. As a Canadian, she has worked on the ground to add value to enterprising projects in over thirty-five countries, in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Donna began her career as a lawyer in the energy sector, where she held several unique and pioneering roles involving corporate integrity, transparency and sustainability. She founded a non-profit to build the capacity of women in Yemen, served as an elected politician and cabinet minister in the province of Alberta, has held leading roles on boards of directors, and participates with her siblings in the stewardship of a family farm enterprise.

Donna’s book about her work with women in Yemen—Unveiling the Breath: One Woman’s Journey into Understanding Islam and Gender Equality–was published by Pari Publishing in 2009. Donna’s latest book—Teaching the Dinosaur to Dance: Moving Beyond Business as Usual—will be released in March 2022; see teachingthedinosaur.com for details. Donna blogs at https://beyondpolarity.blog and is active on several social media platforms. She is an amateur photographer and delighted grandmother to two-year-old Kennedy.

Lee Nichol is the editor of David Bohm’s On Dialogue; On Creativity; and The Essential David Bohm. From 1980-1992 he collaborated with Bohm on various aspects of dialogue, consciousness, and education.

He has been on the faculty of the Arthur Morgan School in Celo, NC; of the Oak Grove School in Ojai, CA; of the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, CA; and of Denver University in Denver, CO.

Lee has recently released – Entering Bohm’s Holoflux – which can be downloaded for free at: https://paricenter.com/product/entering-bohms-holoflux-by-lee-nichol/

Jacob Raz is Professor Emeritus, East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University. He translates and writes on Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Japanese Culture and poetry, as well as his own haiku. Raz lived many years in Japan and travelled extensively in Asia. He has long been a practitioner and teacher of Zen.

Raz has taught seminars and workshops on Martin Buber and Buddhism, and wrote the Afterword in the new translation of Martin Buber’s book I and Thou into Hebrew [2014]. He has been active in the Consciousness Laboratory, Tel Aviv University, and wrote extensively on the subject.

He is also the father of Yoni, a loving person with DS. They speak ‘Yonish’, a language they have been creating over a lifetime through constant, embodied dialogue. Consequently, Raz became a social activist, and has led a national movement toward a paradigmatic change in the life and dialogue with people with disabilities.

Yuriko Sato is a Japanese Jungian analyst and psychotherapist, and a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich. She studied medicine and worked as a psychiatrist in Osaka and Kyoto. She has private psychotherapy practices in Zürich and Bern, and is a training/supervising analyst at ISAPZURICH (International School of Analytical Psychology Zürich), where she teaches on topics such as the Eastern (Japanese) psyche, narcissism, and psychiatry.

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.

The Future Scientist - A Conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist
2022-01-19 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
A Conversation between Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday January 199:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

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.

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.

Join Iain McGilchrist and Àlex Gómez-Marín on Wednesday January 19 for the first event in this series.

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

Some likely topics that may emerge in this first conversation involve (i) the need of synthesis in the face of piles of analytic studies, (ii) the pursuit of convergence from different lines of inquiry (such as neurology, philosophy, and physics), and (iii) the constraints, both challenges and opportunities, of doing research with and without current academia.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). A book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, was published in November 2021.

Dr Alex Gomez-Marin is a theoretical physicist turned cognitive neuroscientist. He earned his PhD in Physics in 2008 from the University of Barcelona, where we studied the microscopic origins of the arrow of time. He also holds a Masters in Biophysics from the same university. He was a Juan de la Cierva Fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation where he investigated the neurobiology of action and perception in fruit flies, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, where he deployed a computational ethology approach to establish neuro-ethological principles in worms, flies and mice. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, Spain, where he has been a Ramón y Cajal Fellow, and where he currently is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. His latest research concentrates on consciousness and cognition in humans in real-world situations, combining high-resolution experiments with theoretical biology and continental philosophy. He is the author of a number of research articles, and he is shortly to publish his first book in Spanish on the ‘tales not told’ in current neuroscience. Born in Barcelona, he now lives in the Mediterranean coast of Alicante and has two daughters and a cat. You can follow him on social media at @behaviOrganisms and read his work here: https://behavior-of-organisms.org/read-us

A Conversation about Duality and Non-duality in East and West
2022-02-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
A Conversation about Duality and Non-duality in East and West

with Anjali D’souza, Andrew Fellows and Shantena Sabbadini

Saturday February 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.

Our primary subjective experience is one of duality, of experiencing the separateness of self and the rest of the world around us. This informs how we live and perceive the world, the knowledge and institutional systems we have created throughout history and as we continue to do so in the present.

On the other hand, some Eastern systems and mystics of all religions have insisted on the fundamental non-duality of the world. In India for instance, the belief in the discrete disconnected egoic self is seen as epitomizing ignorance and the root cause of suffering. The experience of nonduality liberates and transforms one’s existence. The Tao in Chinese philosophy is the symbol and experience of integration and wholeness, nonduality beyond duality, undergirding the universe. In our contemporary times the insights and explorations into nonduality have been coming through Quantum physics; consequently, initiating much needed dialogues between science and spirituality.

Nonduality as a construct and experience is not merely a wondrous spiritual belief, or an exploration into fascinating but abstract ideas. It has tangible consequences individually, collectively and politically for the integrity of ourselves and our world/planet as a whole. It impacts how we choose to live, relate and behave as we begin to understand that we are all one indivisible whole.

To see the Full Dualities Program

Anjali D’Souza has a Master’s degree in Sociology and has just completed her training in Jungian Analysis at ISAP-Zurich. She has 20 years of experience working in India as a psychotherapist and consultant with individuals, groups, communities and organisations. She also trained as an Indian classical dancer and subsequently studied dance expression and Authentic Movement. Her multi systemic approach is shaped by her own experiences, C.G. Jung, the expressive arts, Indian philosophy, and gender and post-colonial studies.

Andrew Fellows, is a Jungian Analyst (AGAP/IAAP) with private practices in Bern and Zürich, a deep ecologist, and a writer. He holds a Doctorate in Applied Physics (Dunelm), and enjoyed two decades of international professional engagement with renewable energy, sustainable development and environmental policy before moving from the U.K. to Switzerland in 2001 to study Analytical Psychology. His special interests include the anima mundi, the mid-life transition, the new sciences, and the use of depth psychology to understand and address global collective and environmental problems, especially climate change and other aspects of the Anthropocene. His personal passions include nature, mountains and music, and he lives over three thousand feet above sea level in rural Switzerland without a car.

His lecture draws on many years of independent research and writing, from which he has presented his evolving ideas since 2007 at international conferences in England, Estonia, Japan, Switzerland and the U.S. in addition to teaching at ISAP Zurich. His first book, published by Routledge in March 2019, is Gaia, Psyche and Deep Ecology: Navigating Climate Change in the Anthropocene.

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.

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!).

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.

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

Shop now

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Enchanted Universe
2022-08-29 00:00 - 2022-09-05 23:59
Dates: August 29 – September 5, 2022

Speakers: Jessica Ball, Bernard Carr, Patrick Curry, Alex Gomez-Marin, Ruth Kastner, Alison MacLeod, Hester Reeve

Chaired by Alex Gomez-Marin

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:

Enchantment is the experience of sheer wonder. It returns us to a state of mind, and condition of the world, as undivided concrete magic: equally natural and cultural, material and spiritual, inner and outer.Patrick Curry

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 Monday August 29 at 19:00 with a welcome dinner and ends on Monday September 5 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

While technology is occupying an ever growing place in our modern world and the predominance of abstraction gets us farther and farther removed from the living world, an increasing longing is developing for a return to our roots in nature, to the enchantment and awe of existence, to the fantastic realms of imagination, to the symbolic richness of myth and fairytale.

We are meaning-making creatures, we are explorers and adventurers of the symbolic dimension. We feel that our life is worth living only when our experiences speak to us, when we live in conversation with the mystery, when we commune with it.

Come join us in this journey through the forests of imagination, reclaiming a territory we once roamed, recovering the soul of the world.

Presentations:

The Body, Nature and Dialogue with Jessica Ball

The View Beyond: Magic and Enchantment at the Frontiers of Physics with Bernard Carr

What is Enchantment, and What Follows? with Patrick Curry

Science and Magic: A Disturbing Charming Braid with Àlex Gómez-Marín

Quantum Physics and the Return of Enchantment with Ruth E. Kastner

The Deep Imagination, Metaphor, and “All’s One” Vision with Alison MacLeod

Brain Seed: Planting the Mind in the Non-Human Universe with Hester Reeve

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.

Il Processo della Trasformazione
2022-09-10 00:00 - 2022-09-11 23:59 | Pari, Italy
Date: settembre 10 – settembre 11, 2022

Speakers: Max Bindi, Gloria Nobili, Martina Stolzlechner, Chiara Zagonel

Venue: Pari, Italy

Prezzo: 420 euro

Seminario teorico-esperienziale alla scoperta delleteorie quantistiche di David Bohm e di alcune sue applicazioni

Il seminario si articola in un’alternanza di momenti di spiegazione e altri di sperimentazione pratica delle idee del fisico quantistico David Bohm: la vita e lo sviluppo del suo pensiero, la tecnica metamorfica riletta alla luce del concetto di ordini di realtà, la connessione tra fisica e senso della vita, e la ricerca del superamento della coscienza individuale attraverso il dialogo bohmiano.

Sabato 10 settembre 2022

Ore 10-11

Saluti iniziali. Presentazione del Workshop

Ore 11-13

Fisica e metafisica di David Bohm: la sua vita e le sue ideecon Chiara Zagonel

Il fisico americano David Bohm è stato una figura estremamente significativa nel panorama scientifico del secolo scorso e le sue idee ed intuizioni hanno contribuito a una trasformazione profonda e radicale dell’immagine della realtà.Aspetti fondamentali delle teorie di Bohm sono i concetti di processo, di olismo e di totalità, che nelle sue mani diventavano dei potenti strumenti di indagine e interpretazione della realtà e grazie ai quali Bohm è riuscito a creare un vero ponte con il mondo del misticismo, raggiungendo moltissime persone anche al di fuori del mondo scientifico.

Ore 15 -18.30

L’ordine implicato a portata di manocon Martina Stolzlechner

La Tecnica Metamorfica, sviluppata da Gaston Saint Pierre negli anni 70, consiste in leggeri sfioramenti ai piedi, alle mani e alla testa e opera oltre spazio, tempo e materia, raggiungendo il livello dell’Unità paradossale dell’Essere e del Non-Essere, ossia l’ordine implicato di David Bohm. Per Gaston Saint-Pierre, in ogni cosa c’è un’intelligenza innata che a partire da questo livello si manifesta in tempo, spazio e materia. E’ come una ghianda che, quando il tempo è maturo, si trasforma proprio in una quercia perché dentro contiene questa coscienza, questa intelligenza Nella prima parte del suo intervento, Martina Stolzlechner ci presenta la Tecnica Metamorfica, un semplice rituale dove viene riconosciuto il potere di trasformazione, di metamorfosi, che proviene dall’interno e si manifesta all’esterno, proprio, come l’onda quantistica diventa particella. E così interno ed esterno risultano avviluppati in un continuo divenire.Nella seconda parte del pomeriggio avremo modo di mettere in pratica questa tecnica e sperimentare l’essere semplicemente presenti ai fatti che emergono.

Ore 21

Proiezione di un dialogo tra David Bohm e Jiddu Krishnamurti

Domenica 11 settembre 2022

Ore 9-11

Mente e materia tra matematica, fisica e concezioni del mondocon Gloria Nobili

Negli ultimi anni della sua vita, David Bohm aveva allargato la ‘lettura’ della Fisica quantisitca secondo la sua interpretazione a connessioni molto più ampie, che esulavano dalla stretta trattazione attraverso la formulazione matematica e le teorie scientifiche. Il suo sguardo si ricollegava all’uomo, alle grandi domande che l’uomo si pone riguardo al senso della propria vita, oltre alla relazione tra la parte impalpabile mentale e quella materiale connessa con le nostre percezioni sensoriali.

Ore 11.30-12.30Introduzione al dialogo bohmiano previsto nel pomeriggio.

Ore 14.30-17.30

Il dialogo bohmianocon Max Bindi

Grazie alla facilitazione di Max Bindi il gruppo farà un’esperienza di dialogo bohmiano: una forma di dialogo libero dagli schemi dove si dà spazio al flusso della comunicazione e nel quale i partecipanti cercano di raggiungere una comprensione comune, sperimentando il punto di vista di tutti completamente, allo stesso modo e senza giudicare.

Ore 17.30-18

Conclusioni

Il costo dell’evento è di 420 euro. Sono previsti dei prezzi di favore per chi completa l’iscrizione secondo il seguente calendario: -I primi 12 iscritti entro il 15 luglio 2022 potranno usufruire di un prezzo agevolato di 380 euro. Dopo il 15 luglio il prezzo sarà quello intero di 420 euro. Il prezzo comprende: partecipazione alle attività previste dal programma, alloggio in stanza privata nel caratteristico Borgo di Pari, il pranzo e la cena di Sabato 10 settembre e la colazione e il pranzo di Domenica 11 settembre presso il Bar-Ristorante “Le Due Cecche”, nella suggestiva piazzetta del Paese. Al momento dell’iscrizione dovrà essere versata una caparra di 200 euro, da saldare entro il 01 di settembre. L’evento inizierà Sabato 10 settembre alle ore 10:00 e terminerà Domenica 11 settembre alle ore 18:00.

Recovering the Soul
2022-11-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/l-PrCIprgIU?si=DghmvkkPB9wBuNAS

Recovering the Soul

with Iain McGilchrist

Saturday November 5, 202210:00am PDT | 1:00pm EDT | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

2-hour session

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

The topic of the sacred is immense, as I confirmed to myself when I wrote a very long chapter on it in The Matter with Things. I have chosen to approach it here by directing our attention, as it might seem at first, to one side: on the soul. I will argue that the sacred exists not simply in this or that thing—an object, a place, or an act—but in the relationship between whatever it is beyond ourselves that we recognise as sacred and that part of our being that has been traditionally referred to as the soul; that this relationship is one of the reasons for evolved beings such as ourselves to have come into existence; that whatever else it may be, the soul is a faculty, like intellect or eyesight, but much more than, and more important than, either; and that our sense of the sacred is both driven by, and in turn drives, the actively receptive attention paid by the soul. I suggest that the soul is in process, and that it is one task of our lives to grow the soul—an important task, because much depends on it: we can, like attentive or neglectful gardeners, nourish, stunt the growth of, or extinguish, that soul. I suggest that therefore we need first to attend to our souls if we are to recover the sacred, and I make a few exploratory forays into what we can (and cannot) say about the soul, and how it might be integrated into a new cosmology.

To see the Full Recovering the Sacred Program

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). A book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, was published in November 2021.

Reflections on Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things
2022-11-08 19:00 - 21:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5irBZhy15s

Reflections on Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things

Iain McGlichristwith Mary Attwood | Sharon Dirckx | Alex Gómez-Marín | Jürg Kesselring | David Lorimer | Martin Rossor | Jonathan Rowson | Jan Zwicky

Tuesday November 8, 20221-3pm EST | 6-8pm GMT | 7–9pm CET

FREE EVENT

Anniversary event, hosted by The Pari Centerin conjunction with Channel McGilchrist, Perspectiva, The Scientific and Medical Network and The Arthur Conan Doyle Centre.

Trouble Registering: just send us an email and we will send you the link! eleanor@paricenter.com

To mark the one year since the publication of The Matter with Things, this free online event will reflect on its first year of being in the world. Dr. McGilchrist will be interviewed by the publisher of the book, Perspectiva’s Jonathan Rowson, followed by a discussion with experts for the sciences and humanities. The final part of the event will give you a chance to put a question to Dr. McGilchrist.

You can view the footage of The Matter with Things launch party in 2021 by Perspectiva Press in the following link: https://youtu.be/ibI0mRLgMI8

Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps
2022-12-16 20:00 - 21:30 | Online
With the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35kzTlV1LxI

Spiritual Intelligence – what is it, how can it be cultivated, and why does it matter?

Mark Vernon in conversation with Beth Macy

Friday December 1611:00am PST | 2:00pm EST | 7:00pm GMT | 8:00pm CET

Free Online Pari Dialogue

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

“In Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, Mark Vernon draws on the understanding of numerous individuals and cultures, weaving them into a text that leads the reader on a journey into the very heart of their self and, at the same time, to the reality that lies behind and is expressed as the world. Like the journey which his mentor, Dante, undertakes, each chapter guides us more and more deeply into the perennial understanding that lies at the foundation of our civilisation.” Rupert Spira

“Compellingly readable, urgently important, kind, wise and scholarly. This is a manual for living and dying that begins with the usually overlooked questions: ‘What are we?’ and ‘Where did we come from?’ Unless we have informed answers we can’t begin to say how we should behave, or what makes us thrive, or speculate on our prognosis as a species, let alone about the therapy that might avert catastrophe. Vernon’s gentle, humble and powerful book needs to be widely read before it’s too late for us all.” Charles Foster

“The world is desperately in need the kind of spiritual intelligence which Vernon presents, based on humility, insight, compassion and, above all, joy. His attempt to talk about it in a way which is not circumscribed by specific religious belief, but rather draws upon the wisdom of all the great spiritual traditions as well as the contemporary psychology and science, is both original and immensely helpful for those who wish to cultivate these qualities in themselves.” Jane Clark

“As entertaining and passionate as it is profound, this book is a treasure trove of spiritual insight and guidance. Expertly interweaving the wisdom of mysticism, philosophy and psychology, Mark Vernon shows that spiritual awakening is the most urgent need of our time.” Steve Taylor

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81518521680

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

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.

Beth Macy, 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 in the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing).

The Future Human - A Conversation with Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal
2023-02-15 17:30 - 19:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meF3nIRcQDc&t=12s

A Conversation between Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday February 158:30am PST | 11:30am EST | 4:30pm GMT | 5:30pm CET

This event is LIVE and FREE. All registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

A monthly virtual encounter to reckon whence and whither humanity.

Following an hour-long lively and spontaneous dialogue between Alex and his guests, the sessions will be open to questions from the audience.

What will the future look like? How will the Future Human live? How will families, child rearing, education, health services, work, art, religion, love, science, language, storytelling change? And politics, economics, government, and the law? Will we be able to inhabit our planet in harmony, have sufficient energy, and afford to eat healthy food? Will we even survive? Can we thrive? These are just some of the topics that will be discussed online at the Pari Center in 2023.

Each month the Director of the Pari Center, physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín, will be thinking and feeling aloud in the mode of dialogue with a prominent guest for about an hour, followed by questions and comments from the audience. Pursuing a major theme without rehearsal or script, they will attempt to engage with ‘that’ which sometimes takes place between (and beyond) two people talking.

Throughout 2022, Àlex hosted the very successful conversation series The Future Scientist, a monthly virtual encounter that aimed to understand where science is going and to reimage where we hope it might go. Maintaining the spirit and the format, the series will now expand its scope and morph into The Future Human as a natural continuation of the quest to reckon whence and whither humanity.

We will inaugurate the series on Wednesday 15th of February of 2023 (from 17:30 to 19:00 CET) with Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal. Our conversation will orbit around “The Superhumanities”.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the Associate Dean of the Faculty and Graduate Programs in the School of the Humanities and the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He also helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and sits on numerous advisory boards in the U.S. and Europe involving the nature of consciousness and the sciences. Jeff is the author of ten single-authored books, including, most recently, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022), where he intuits an emerging new order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories, cultures, and futures. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction for the University of Chicago Press collectively entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. His full body of work can be seen at http://jeffreyjkripal.com He thinks he may be Spider-Man.

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 across species, from flies and worms to mice and humans. Since 2016 he has been 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 computational biology and continental philosophy, his current research concentrates on consciousness in the real world.

Entanglement for Amateurs
2023-02-18 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Entanglement for Amateurs

with Dr. Jonathan Allday

Saturday February 18, 20239:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

2-hour session

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

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

To see the Full Entanglement program

Jonathan Allday was born in Liverpool in 1960. He did his first degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1982 and then returned to Liverpool to complete a PhD in elementary particle physics. As part of this, he was fortunate to spend some time working at the European particle physics centre, CERN, in Geneva.

Also, during that time he was co-opted onto a working party looking at the teaching of particle physics in schools and universities. The upshot was a new syllabus in particle physics and cosmology to be added to UK A-level (16-18) physics qualifications. The first questions were set in 1992.

On the back of the work on this syllabus, Jonathan wrote his first book Quarks, Leptons and the Big Bang, which was published in 1998 and is about to enter its fourth edition. Jonathan has also collaborated on a couple of textbooks and written his own books on Quantum Theory, General Relativity and the Apollo moon missions.

Professionally, Jonathan worked as a physics teacher for 30 years in a variety of independent day and boarding schools in the UK. He was a head of physics, a head of science and latterly an academic deputy head. He retired in 2000 and now runs a consulting company providing training and educational advice for schools.

Jonathan is married to Carolyn, and they have three sons all of whom are far better at sport than he was. Carolyn was a GB swimmer, which explains how come the boys can do sport. Jonathan and Carolyn live in a hamlet not far from Worcester in the UK. When not writing or consulting, Jonathan enjoys watching cricket, James Bond movies and Formula 1 races.

Reflections On Rupert Sheldrake’s “The Science Delusion”
2023-03-14 18:00 - 19:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3wA4KEjxYo

Reflections On Rupert Sheldrake’s “The Science Delusion”

On the 10th anniversary of his banned TED talk

Dr. Rupert Sheldrakein conversation with Dr. Alex Gomez-Marin

Tuesday March 1410:00am PDT | 1:00pm EDT | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

Free Online Pari Dialogue

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

The irony (and tragedy) was twofold. First, Sheldrake’s questioning of dogmatism was met with a dogmatic canceling of his questioning. Second, despite TED’s famed ethos of “ideas worth spreading”, they deemed other ideas worth canceling, especially when challenging TED’s sanctioned narrow worldview. Mislaying their reputation, TED’s decision refuted itself.

Ten years after the controversy, Dr. Sheldrake will reflect together with Dr. Gomez-Marin on the effectiveness of heterodox critiques of mainstream scientific thinking. Did they make a difference? What has changed, if anything, after such clashes?

Nowadays’ media landscape affords new opportunities to expose and share different worldviews through podcasting and blogging. However, curricula remain unchanged, as students continue to be indoctrinated with the materialist mechanistic reductionist program. In addition, venues such as Wikipedia profess the same unexamined prejudices, and so do major newspapers, TVs, and grant agencies. In the meantime, scientific breakthroughs stagnate.

In this free online event we will ask what has to really change for things to really change.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

You can view the censored TEDx talk here:https://youtu.be/hO4p3xeTtUA

As well a recent animation by After Skool on “Exposing Scientific Dogma”:https://youtu.be/sF03FN37i5w

TED’s justification and Sheldrake’s reply:https://blog.ted.com/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/

Sheldrake’s book “The Science Delusion”:https://sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/the-science-delusion-science-set-free

And a conversation between Sheldrake and Gomez-Marin on scientific dogmatism:https://youtu.be/nFQWgnVrmZU

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than ninety technical papers and nine books, including The Science Delusion (called Science Set Free in the US). As a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, he was Director of Studies in Cell Biology, and was also a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He worked in Hyderabad, India, as Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and also lived for two years in the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu. From 2005-2010, he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project for the study of unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California and of Schumacher College in Dartington, Devon. He lives in London and is married to Jill Purce, with whom he has two sons. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

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.
