The Beyond Bohm series is oriented toward sharing unique and unusual perspectives that complement and amplify the work of David Bohm. Now in our fourth year, we are continuing that tradition with an array of new faces and presenters that we are especially excited about.

Thought as a System is David Bohm’s ur-text pertaining to his views regarding the nature of collective thought. It elucidates core themes of awareness, collective assumptions, social conditioning, dialogue, fragmentation, the self-image, insight, meaning, the observer and the observed, proprioception of thought, thinking vs. thought, and many more.

In this session, Dr. Elizabeth Henderson will share with us aspects of her 20 years of engagement with Early Years (Early Childhood) education, oriented toward a process of nurturing that is fundamentally different from contemporary quantitative educational systems.

Federico Faggin is a physicist born and educated in Italy who co-invented and developed the MOS Silicon Gate Technology at Fairchild Semiconductor and designed the world’s first microprocessor at Intel. Faggin also co-founded and led Zilog and Synaptics, two successful high-tech companies, before founding the non-profit Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, dedicated to the science of consciousness. He received the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama.

Rocks as verbs? Stones with subtle wisdom? Experiencing Earth with the fourth dimension of Deep Time? Marcia Bjornerud is doing in geology what Tim Ingold has done in anthropology and David Bohm has done in physics: make new levels of embodied meaning available to non-specialists while challenging our reflexive perceptions of the world.

In this session, Pam Harris will share with us some of her contemplations of scientific and philosophical questions—including those of David Bohm—and how those contemplations translate to canvas. If contemporary abstract painting has eluded you, this is an opportunity to get a first-hand sensibility of how one artist creates such works.

In order to celebrate the centennial of Feyerabend’s birth (and three decades since he passed away), Vandana and Alex will be in dialogue for about one hour, reflecting on his legacy and its impact today. They will discuss current pernicious monotheisms of the mind and, based on general principles and concrete examples, entertain and illustrate alternatives in physics, neurobiology, agriculture, and economy. We would then open it up for questions and comments from the audience.

Cheryl Brant will share with us various aspects of her work spanning four decades, culminating in current explorations of the nature of consciousness as an innate aspect of the living world.

Melissa Nelson (Turtle Mountain Chippewa / Métis) and friends will continue our dialogue tradition, sharing indigenous perspectives on a variety of culturally-oriented issues and concerns.

After an introduction to Bohm’s physics, we will explore the relations between Russellian monism, William James’s radical empiricism and Bohm’s implicate order; some traditional and recent (e.g., Johanna Seibt’s) work on process philosophy and how it connects with Bohm’s ideas; the idea of quantum properties of matter as potentialities in Bohm’s early thought; the influence of Hegel on Bohm’s ideas about fragmentation and wholeness; and whether Bohm’s notion of active information is a candidate for a unifying notion of information.