The Pari Center

Beyond Words
2022-01-08 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Rome) | 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

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Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Love

with Vincent Colapietro

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

2-hour session

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

A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality can be read as a sustained meditation on Locke’s characterization of time as ‘perpetual perishing.’ But he refuses to see time solely as an occasion of perishing. Colapietro will seize this occasion itself to reflect on time and tragedy. Is time by its very nature tragic, entailing the irrevocable loss of whatever emerges and, for a time, endures in its flux? Or is time a site wherein forms of ‘ immortality’ are attainable? But of even more basic concern are several different senses of time, above all, the time envisioned by the most influential physicists (including Einstein) and the conception of time implicit in the activity of physicists themselves. Are physicists in time in the same sense that they so often conceive time (specifically, time as a reversible process or even an illusory phenomenon)? That is, is the dominant understanding of time among theoretical physicists compatible with what physicists do as agents? Colapietro will argue that agential time is an irreducible phenomenon and any attempt to explain it away (or to render it illusory) is mistaken.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

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

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.

Nexus with Dr Jeffrey Dunne
2023-04-18 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phP9kecFbEc

Nexus

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne in conversation with Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marin

Tuesday April 189:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

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

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne is the President and Chairman of the Board of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL), a charitable research organization established in the late 1990’s to build upon the foundation laid by Dr. Robert Jahn and Dr. Brenda Dunne in the research carried out at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory. In addition to his role with ICRL, Jeff is a researcher and systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University and an award-winning author and playwright. In his recently published book, Nexus, Jeff brings unites three decades of scientific experience with four decades of pursuits in philosophy and metaphysics to weave a story that introduces the principle of syntropy and its importance of finding balance at every scale – personal, societal, and global. Jeff’s driving passion is to help transform our world such that materialism gives way to the recognition of the crucial role that consciousness plays in the formation of reality.

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.

Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plants
2023-04-22 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plants

with Dr. Paco Calvo

Saturday April 22, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

2-hour session

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

Plants can be knocked out using the very same drug that your vet might use to put your pet to sleep. Although demonstrations of “plants under anaesthesia” provides the perfect blank slate from which to begin to view plants in an entirely new way, this just the beginning. Take sleep; do plants sleep? Or can plants suffer from jet lag? Most people would assume I am talking metaphorically in my hot off the press Planta Sapiens. And yet, planta sapiens is not unlike Harari’s Sapiens, if you see what I mean. Plants biosynthesize their own melatonin that helps them regulate their circadian rhythms, just as we do with our internal circadian clocks under the cycles of day and night. And what if plants could suffer or feel pain? Assuming otherwise is extremely convenient for the human purpose of guilt-free plant consumption, but what if plants were like “locked-in syndrome” patients? What if they happened to have their own internal experiences that are just currently inaccessible to us? We cannot possibly ignore such a possibility. Many of the chemicals that control behavior and emotions in humans and other animals such as serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline are also synthesized or have analogs in plants. Being expensive to produce, it would make no evolutionary sense to manufacture such substances without purpose. Some of these chemicals are only produced in situations when plants are stressed or injured. Plants make many substances that have pain-killing or anesthetic effects, such as ethylene. We certainly don’t know that these molecules act as painkillers in plants, but given that they are created in stressful situations, there is reason to believe that they serve to relieve suffering. From an evolutionary standpoint, the ability to perceive pain or to suffer in some way is essential. More generally, we need to consider the evolutionary importance of “feelings” beyond being an abstract distinguishing feature of humanity. Emotion and emotional behaviors might have evolved across the tree of life for very good reasons. They give the capacity to make rapid, prioritized decisions in response to the demands of a dangerous environment. We are actually far more driven by emotions than we like to think—they are powerful guides! If it makes sense to animals to “trust their gut,” it might as well pay off for plants to “trust their gut” too. It’s just unfortunate that our instincts are to ignore plants as background greenery because they don’t fit into our immediate, fast-paced attention spans. However, perhaps it’s time to rethink how we understand ourselves. Or so I’ll argue.

Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant IntelligencePaco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence

Times Literary Supplement – A manifesto inviting us to think about plants and our attitudes to them in revolutionary ways

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

Paco Calvo (PhD, University of Glasgow, 2000) is a Professor of Philosophy of Science, and Principal Investigator of the MinimalIntelligence Laboratory (MINTLab) at the University of Murcia (Spain).

His research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on plant intelligence, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science, robotics and AI.

He uses time-lapse photography to explore perception-action and learning in plants. His scientific articles have appeared in Annals of Botany, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Journal of the Royal Society, Plant, Cell & Environment, Plant Signaling & Behavior, Scientific Reports, and Trends in Plant Science, among other journals. He is co-author with Natalie Lawrence of Planta Sapiens (Little, Brown (UK); Norton (US)).

Never Land: Culture, Agriculture and the Striving after Belonging
2023-05-12 00:00 - 2023-05-15 23:59 | Pari, Italy
Stephen Jenkinson

Dates: May 12 – 15, 2023

Curated and Chaired by: Àlex Gómez-Marín

Location: Pari, Italy

Price: 725.00 euros

which includes:

a 3-night stay in private accommodation;

breakfast, lunch and dinner at the local restaurant featuring locally sourced produce and traditional dishes;

the water, wine, and coffee provided with meals;

programmed activities and materials;

refreshments provided at mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks.

Event: The event starts on Friday May 12 at 16:00 and ends on Monday May 15 after lunch.

The Concept

People half our age will someday soon confront us with two questions: when you were my age, did you know what was happening (or what could happen)? And so, what did you do?

The most bearable answer: we had no idea. The state of the world would then seem more tolerable if failure by naive ignorance was actually the case. But was it? If it wasn’t, this would entail a kind of intolerable inheritance. We’d quickly become the ancestral monsters no one would claim as their own. It’ll be a psychic DNA whose indelible stain won’t be amenable to cosmetic fixes.

We are children of strange times. Our birthmarks are both troubled and troubling. We do not, most of us, belong. We inhabit, we own, instead. Being in the world but not of it: that was once a foundation of Western spirituality. It will end up being a stain by which we will be held in disrepute. Our way with the land entrusted to us bears the marks of our unbelonging. Given the fact that we don’t have a long time here, we should proceed with an undesperate degree of urgency in the matter of land stewardship. There is a fine decision to be made: we bear the mark of unbelonging either as an affliction or as an assignment. Those coming to this event may have, voluntarily or not, opted for the latter.

In this gathering —employing a format, approach, and content unprecedented at the Pari Center— we will raise these questions until they attain deliberateness and intention. We will work on inheritance, prejudice, spirit work, grief and wisdom. We will work with what is difficult to recognize and hard to live with.

The Teacher

Stephen Jenkinson is a poet of non-negotiable truths, a whisperer of the unspeakable.

Co-founder of the Orphan Wisdom school in Canada, he is known as “griefwalker” in the “death trade”, due to his insistence on avoiding the pervasive absurdity of the current cultural imperative to “die not dying”. He has also written books about elderhood and money and its corollary in the soul, about the phenomenology of the pandemic. Relentlessly teaching about the very same untold reality, he never says the same thing twice. His use of speech is masterfully and deliberately conjuring and sacramental. Democratizing whatever wisdom has come to him, he means to keep nothing to himself.

In order to midwife his new book on culture and agriculture, Stephen will do a residency at the Pari Center. The residency will culminate with a four-day teaching event, when he will work his book out loud with participants.

The themes of the work are three-fold: our debt to the young and their obligation to life, plant/animal domestication, and the advent of the iron age and its contemporary edge, the barbed wire fence, and the obscenity of surplus. Along the way the session will consider the strange contradictory demand to return back to that land was never known by younger generations, searching a kind of ab-solution, a kind of neolithic restoration whose causes and consequences remain unexamined. Second, the rather unavoidable psychic and poetic contradictions of animal domestication in farms. Third, the strange sense of victory contemporary Western cultures revel in as estrangement from the natural order deepens and we begin flirt with our demise.

Stephen’s allegations are a dark pool of light – a harsh blessing that calls for reckoning in times of trouble.

The Participants

People will be challenged at a level typically unwelcome in gatherings covertly designed to find self-avowal.

This is how Stephen’s workshops and lectures work: We will address our limits, frailties, and endings. A mostly troubling radicalized hospitality will be provided. Seeking commitment rather than interest, people will be vehemently minded. Instead of reaffirming an inarticulate longing that rests on associations devoid of grounding, we will seek to do something that is real, that can be lived, and that it is consequential.

Stephen will dissolve the notion of an audience. His work aspires to be seminal, not a display or summary of contents. He will summon something like a learning ceremony, not entertainment. The criteria for inclusion is suspended. Participants should consider themselves the willing casualties of a sheer willingness to entertain subversion beyond decoration.

If you are up for something that never happened before, please register.

The Format

It is perhaps appropriate that such attempt at a cultural redemption be explored in Pari. A small group of participants will gather in the small medieval village at the heart of Tuscany, starting on a Friday evening, and departing on Monday after lunch.

Participating in an event at the Pari Center means 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.

Coda

Being human and being humane are different things.

In the face of culture failure, we will practice a method of inquiry that can reveal (and perhaps heal) our grief illiteracy and amnesia of ancestry beyond the pernicious triad of cope, hope, and dope.

We shall acknowledge our own ectopic ideas and cultural homelessness. Being radically contingent upon each generation and the troubles of their times, wisdom is actually “too indigenous” and never indigenous-enough.

Thus, this is not going to be an easy encounter. The so-called homo part of the sapiens etymologically stems from humus, meaning earth, ground, soil, and ultimately, dirt. Celebrating Leonard Cohen’s genius verse, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with powdered gold. Dirt & grief are one portal for our very own “golden repair”.During this event we will be screening in the main piazza in Pari:

Griefwalker is a National Film Board of Canada feature documentary film, directed by Tim Wilson. It is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with dying people. The talk will be in English. Italian subtitles are made by Giulia Sbernini, who will also be in attendance.

When? Saturday, May 13, 2023 (8:30pm – 10:30pm followed by book signing)

ABOUT GRIEFWALKER ~ Filmed over a twelve year period, Griefwalker shows Jenkinson in teaching sessions with doctors and nurses, in counselling sessions with dying people and their families, and in meditative and often frank exchanges with the film’s director while paddling a birch bark canoe about the origins and consequences of his ideas for how we live and die. This extraordinary film portrait reveals some of the cultural and spiritual roots that continue to shape his death and dying ideas and teachings.

Dying: the great blindspot in a culture awash in information, the great arbiter in a culture adamant about extending the power of choice across all of our endeavours. Griefwalker is a feature length National Film Board of Canada documentary of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with and on behalf of dying people, directed by Tim Wilson. It is also a profound mandate for creating sanity around the heart breaking and often toxic death fears and practices that gather at our dying time now.

Jenkinson asks,”What does it take to fall in love with being alive?”, and the answer that he offers, both unwelcome and vitally necessary, is, “Being willing to see the end of what you love.”

Video Clip 1

Video Clip 2

Video Clip 3

Video Clip 4

Available in DVD format in English with French subtitles, or watch online in English, Spanish and Hebrew versions. Note About the Watch Online Version: You can watch the online streaming version on any desktop, tablet or mobile device that supports video while connected to a high-speed internet connection.

Information

Terms and Conditions – the pdf

Additional Information about The Pari Center – the pdf

Griefwalker ~ Film Screening & Talk ~ Pari, Italy
2023-05-13 20:30 - 22:30 | Pari, Italy
Join Stephen Jenkinson for a film screening and live conversation.

Griefwalker is a National Film Board of Canada feature documentary film, directed by Tim Wilson. It is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with dying people. The talk will be in English. Italian subtitles are made by Giulia Sbernini, who will also be in attendance.

When? Saturday, May 13, 2023 (8:30pm-10:30pm followed by book signing)

Where? Pari, Italy

ABOUT GRIEFWALKER ~ Filmed over a twelve year period, Griefwalker shows Jenkinson in teaching sessions with doctors and nurses, in counselling sessions with dying people and their families, and in meditative and often frank exchanges with the film’s director while paddling a birch bark canoe about the origins and consequences of his ideas for how we live and die. This extraordinary film portrait reveals some of the cultural and spiritual roots that continue to shape his death and dying ideas and teachings.

Dying: the great blindspot in a culture awash in information, the great arbiter in a culture adamant about extending the power of choice across all of our endeavours. Griefwalker is a feature length National Film Board of Canada documentary of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with and on behalf of dying people, directed by Tim Wilson. It is also a profound mandate for creating sanity around the heart breaking and often toxic death fears and practices that gather at our dying time now.

Jenkinson asks,”What does it take to fall in love with being alive?”, and the answer that he offers, both unwelcome and vitally necessary, is, “Being willing to see the end of what you love.”

Video Clip 1

Video Clip 2

Video Clip 3

Video Clip 4

Available in DVD format in English with French subtitles, or watch online in English, Spanish and Hebrew versions. Note About the Watch Online Version: You can watch the online streaming version on any desktop, tablet or mobile device that supports video while connected to a high-speed internet connection.

MORE ABOUT STEPHEN JENKINSON ~ culture activist, worker, author, founder of The Orphan Wisdom School ~ Jenkinson teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded the school with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010, convening semi-annually in Deacon, Ontario, and in northern Europe.He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).

He is the author of Reckoning (co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson (2022), A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015 and translated into Hebrew and Turkish), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Homecoming – The Haiku Sessions (Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002). He was a contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, dir. Tim Wilson and translated into five languages), a portrait of his work with dying people, and Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours (2019, dir. Ian Mackenzie). Read more about Stephen at orphanwisdom.com/about

At the Edges of Consciousness
2023-06-06 00:00 - 2023-06-13 23:59 | Pari, Italy
At the Edges of Consciousness

Dates: June 6 – 13, 2023

Speakers: Allan Leslie Combs, Etzel Cardeña, Paul Grof, Sarah Janes, Jeffrey Kripal, Roderick Main, Dean Radin (via zoom), Tanya Sacramento, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes.

Curated and Chaired by: Àlex Gómez-Marín

Location: Pari, Italy

Price: 1975.00 euros

which includes:

a 7-night stay in private accommodation;

breakfast, lunch and dinner at the local restaurant featuring locally sourced produce and traditional dishes;

the water, wine, and coffee provided with meals;

programmed activities and materials;

refreshments provided at mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks.

Event: The event starts on Tuesday June 6 at 19:00 with a welcome dinner and ends on Tuesday June 13 after lunch.

About the Event:

Join us at the Pari Center with world-renowned scholars as we deepen our insights into the ‘exceptional’ experiences we have all encountered.

This will be an informal meeting with presentations by experts followed by roundtable discussions.

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

Through presentations and informal discussions in a convivial atmosphere you will learn about and have opportunities to discuss the insights and research findings of world-renowned experts on what are called ‘exceptional’ experiences.

The subject fits under the umbrella of consciousness research, which is currently enjoying a huge renaissance in terms of general interest and academic momentum.

The study of consciousness requires that we take seriously the many flavors of human experience, even those—ranging from psychedelics and lucid dreaming to synchronicities, near death experiences and mystical phenomena—that could be said to enter through the ‘backdoors of perception.’ Such experiences have until now been largely avoided by academia and left to lie beyond the border of what is typically explored scientifically and discussed in public.

However, now it is more openly being asked whether such experiences can actually inform—and even transform—not just neuroscience and fundamental physics but also our very understanding of the nature of reality and our collective and individual place in the world.

The scientific study of consciousness is now acknowledging that it has reached a stage where such parcels of human subjectivity have to be taken seriously. In fact, it is playing an important role in the recognition that such ‘backdoors of perception’ have the potential to profoundly impact our current state of knowledge in many fields.

We at the Pari Center seek to bring together world-renowned experts from a variety of disciplines to meet together in person and deepen our insights on the workings and bases of such experiences, while also exploring creative and rigorous frameworks to integrate such a constellation into a coherent understanding. You are cordially invited to join us.

Presentations

The Evolutionary Ascent of ConsciousnessAllan Leslie Combs

A Review of the Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological PhenomenaEtzel Cardeña

Local and Non-local Consciousness ComponentsPaul Grof

Divine Dreams: The History and Culture of the Dream as Medicine in the Western Esoteric TraditionSarah Janes

Archives of the Impossible: The Further Reaches of the Imagination and the Future HumanJeffery Kripal

The Hermeneutics of Exceptional ExperiencesRoderick Main

Dean Radin

The Subtle Art of Mediumship: Effectively Communicating with ConsciousnessTanya Sacramento

Metaphysics, Mysticism, and Psychedelic ResearchPeter Sjöstedt-Hughes

Information

Additional Information about the event – the pdf

Additional Information about the Pari Center – the pdf

Terms and Conditions – the pdf

Gentle Action: A Gathering of Common Experience
2023-06-14 00:00 - 2023-06-20 23:59 | Pari, Italy
Gentle Action: A Gathering of Common Experience

Dates: June 14 – 20, 2023

Location: Pari, Italy

Price: 850 euros

which includes:

a 6-night stay in private accommodation;

breakfast, lunch and dinner at the local restaurant featuring locally sourced produce and traditional dishes;

the water, wine, and coffee provided with meals;

programmed activities and materials;

refreshments provided at mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks.

Event: The event starts on Wednesday June 14 at 19:00 with a welcome dinner and ends on Tuesday June 20 after breakfast.

“The world is a sacred vessel and cannot be controlled. If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it…

Can you see things as they are, without trying to control them?

Can you let them go theirown way while remaining centered?”

Lao Tse, Dao De Jing #29(Mitchell & MacDonald Combined)

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

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

Throughout the week you will have plenty of opportunities to cultivate connections with Nature, others, and — perhaps most importantly — yourself. Explore the medieval village and its surroundings, or take in the beauty of the landscape from Pari’s expansive palazzo. Dialogue with others in a supportive atmosphere and experience what it feels like to have others truly listen to your unique perspectives and experiences from a place of genuine interest and curiosity. Set aside thoughts of forcing or striving and experience how insights and interconnections naturally bubble up during dialogue.

Become more responsive and less reactive by learning to actively listen, not only to others but also to yourself. As F. David Peat, one of the founders of the Pari Center states in his autobiography, Pathways of Chance:

“Much depends upon how we react when the unexpected occurs and a new door temporarily opens. Do we compensate as best we can and attempt to remain on our own predetermined track, or do we ask ‘What is life trying to tell me? In what direction could this new possibility take me? Is it worth suspending what I am doing at the moment to explore something new?”1

Somewhat paradoxically, setting aside striving and engaging in gentle action often gives rise to the types of benefits that many people often seek, but seldom find in a sustainable form. Along with feelings of openness, trust, joy, and a childlike sense of wonder, gentle action often gives rise to a deeper sense of engagement with yourself, others, and the Universe.

1. Pathways of Chance, pp. 1-2.

Our Story (and an invitation) Several years ago, a small group of us were sitting outside the bar in Pari, Italy when the idea came up to bring a group of very open-minded people together for a gathering without any agenda, topic, intention, or specific purpose. After leaving Pari, we continued to meet monthly through an online Zoom dialogue, where our small group of three individuals gradually grew in a most organic manner. More than a year of online meetings led to our first “Gentle Action Gathering” back at Pari in September of 2022. Our original group of Jena, Manfred, and Tom, who hail from New York, Germany, and Ireland were joined by several additional members of our online community. Stefan, Rose, and Todd, traveled from Sweden, Germany/Canada, and Alaska to finally meet everyone in person. Two of our members, Lisa, from Italy, and Michael, from Connecticut, were unable to meet in person, but are quite active in our online meetings and the preparations for our gathering in June of 2023. Over the course of time, we have come to discover that we have much to share with one another due to, rather than despite, our differing backgrounds. And yet, we have also found that we also have much in common. Perhaps most importantly, we all share a genuine interest in one another’s perspectives on the world, quite reminiscent of Rumi’s quote: “Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

This June we have chosen to meet once again in Pari, Italy. This medieval village, nestled in the the Tuscan landscape, provides the perfect backdrop for new insights and explorations. During our “Gentle Action Gatherings”, participants are largely free to roam around as they please. Meet in the newly renovated Palazzo, take part in a yoga class, explore the area’s hot springs, or just sit down to have an espresso at the charming and peaceful square. Set aside your daily routine and begin to reconnect with your own innermost nature by setting aside the expectations of the outer world. Communicating and interacting in the moment, for the moment has enabled each of us to interact with ourselves, each other, and the world at large in a much more playful manner. Over time, we have noticed that an almost childlike curiosity tends to emerge, unforced and unbidden “beyond the ideas of right and wrong” allowing us to experience the innate beauty of the present moment and our interactions. More than anything, our gatherings have given us a deep sense of connection and friendships that endure beyond the limits of time and space. This June we get to come home again.

It would be wonderful if you could join us, Jena, Lisa, Manfred, Michael, Rose, Stefan, Todd, & Tom

Information

Additional Information about the event – the pdf

Community Activities – the pdf

Terms and Conditions – the pdf

Additional Information about The Pari Center – the pdf

East and West Philosophy in Dialogue
2023-06-20 00:00 - 2023-06-25 23:59 | Pari, Italy
East and West Philosophy in Dialogue – From Worldview to Sustainable Order

Commencing at the Pari Center 20-25 June 2023 and concluding at the Vatican 27-28 June 2023.

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

Engendering a new chapter in East and West communication especially in relation to pressing global challenges.

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

Some of the pertinent questions to be addressed include:

How does Eastern holism relate to the modern Western philosophical schools of Continental Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, and Process Philosophy?

Whether and to what extent a holistic vision also can be found in the West?

Whether the diverse philosophical paths may complement each other and to what extent a Perennial Philosophy exists?

How does worldview relate to global sustainability?

How does worldview relate to local and global order?

Through substantive discussions, the Symposium hopes to engender a new chapter in East and West communication, especially insofar as it relates to pressing global challenges.

Bohm / Bergson / Whitehead: Life as Movement
2023-07-16 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Bohm / Bergson / Whitehead: Life as Movement

with Àlex Gómez-Marin, Hester Reeve, Lee Nichol

Sunday July 16, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

2-hour session

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

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

Please join us as we initiate new lines of inquiry in the Pari community, drawing from three profoundly original yet complementary philosophical perspectives.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm program

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.

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

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

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

Lee Nichol is a freelance writer and editor. His latest works are Entering Bohm’s Holoflux and, as editor, Holoflux: Codex – Form / Movement / 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. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Eva Casey.

Seizing the Underlying Unity of Science, the Arts and the Sacred
2023-08-29 00:00 - 2023-09-05 23:59
Dates: August 29 – September 5, 2023

Speakers: Mary Attwood, John Cleese (via Zoom), John Krakauer, Mervat Nasser, Melissa Nelson, John Pickering, Jordi Pigem, Mark Vernon

Curated and Chaired by: Àlex Gómez-Marín

Location: Pari, Italy

Price: 1995.00 euros

which includes:

a 7-night stay in private accommodation;

breakfast, lunch and dinner at the local restaurant featuring locally sourced produce and traditional dishes;

the water, wine, and coffee provided with meals;

programmed activities and materials;

refreshments provided at mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks.

Event: The event starts on Tuesday August 29 at 19:00 with a welcome dinner and ends on Tuesday September 5 after lunch.

About the Event:

There was a time when understanding was unified and spoke to our inner wholeness. This initial vision was lost, leading to a bifurcation of nature that has impeded human flourishing. In the medieval hilltop of a Tuscan town, we will seek to explore and experience the underlying wholeness that was initially present in the spirit of the arts, the scientific mind, and the sense of the sacred.

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 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

The 20th century composer of devotional music, John Tavener, has written of the “one simple memory,” a deeply buried sense of a time when understanding was unified and spoke to our inner wholeness. In that period the artisan, miner, metal worker and artist alike were considered as the midwives to nature, aiding her in her striving to perfection. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli believed that this sprit was still alive in the 17th century when the quantitative science of Kepler and Galileo coexisted with a more deeply symbolic approach to nature and matter—each complementing the other. This later vanished in the hands of the followers of Descartes and Newton and, for Wolfgang Pauli, the ‘spirit in matter’ was banished for over two hundred years. Particularly in the twentieth century, physics (and subsequently other major disciplines, mirroring themselves in it) had lost its initial vision and become obsessed with a “will to power” as it sought control over nature. A “bifurcation of nature” —the harsh separation of reality as conceived by science and as experienced by humans (including scientists) —, in the words of mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, is one of the greatest fallacies of modernity and a major impediment to human flourishing. However, a “resurrection” of spirit within matter may be at hand today. Such wholeness can be explored in the medieval hilltop town of Pari, Tuscany, for in the Middle Ages nature, beauty and the sacred were seen as one. The presenters and participants who come to Pari will bring together many skills to the discussions on the relationship of religious ritual to sacred theatre; of brain activity to the orders of music and mathematics; the ultimate nature of reality as seen from these various disciplines; limitations to knowing, and questions of the origin of the universe. Topics move towards questions that stretch the limits and boundaries that are currently placed around science, the sacred and the arts. We will discuss, and hopefully experience, the underlying unity that was initially present in the spirit of the arts, the scientific mind and the spiritual quest. We shall seek to “re-member” such one simple memory — indeed, we have taken as our maxim a quotation from Carlo Levi “The future has an ancient heart.”

Presentations

The Art of Seeing: Rediscovering the Four Senses HermeneuticMary Attwood

The Humanities as an Emergent Level of ExplanationJohn Krakauer

The Return of Hermopolis as Healing MemoryMervat Nassar

The Journey is the Goal and Beauty is our Guide John Pickering

Towards a Postmaterialistic Worldview: Contributions from Contemporary Science and Eastern and Western PhilosophyJordi Pigem

Dante, Blake and the Revelation of UnityMark Vernon

Information

Additional Information about the event – the pdf

Additional Information about the Pari Center – the pdf

Terms and Conditions – the pdf

Benign Anarchy!
2023-09-09 18:00 - 2023-09-16 13:00 | Pari, Italy
Benign Anarchy!

A gathering of members of AA and NA(mainly Irish!) but open to anyone interested in Dialogue..as developed by David Bohm and also Martin Bubers “I-Thou

Dates: September 9 – September 16, 2023

Organizers: Tom C., Rose R., Jim C.

Location: Pari, Italy

Price: 890 euros for single occupancy, 730 for shared occupancy (two-bedroom apartment, shared bathroom)

which includes:

a 7-night stay in private accommodation;

breakfast, lunch and dinner at the local restaurant featuring locally sourced produce and traditional dishes;

programmed activities and materials;

refreshments provided at mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks.

Event: The event starts on Saturday September 9 at 19:00 with a welcome dinner and ends on Saturday September 16 after lunch.

Registration and Information: Please contact Tom tcallagyp@gmail.com or Eleanor eleanor@paricenter.com or Chiara chiara@paricenter.com

About the Event:

A Pari gathering/retreat for members of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) plus family and friends will be held in Pari, Tuscany from September 9-16, 2023 (Saturday to Saturday).

The format will be a combination of closed AA and NA meetings and meditation, and some open meetings which everyone can attend.

It is hoped to have discussion groups/workshops on the history of AA and NA; the influence of Carl Jung on Bill W; a talk on Bill W. and Jimmy K. by Irene C.; the deep wisdom of the 12 Steps and the profundity of the 12 traditions.

It is hoped the golden thread running through our week will be‘The Language of the Heart.’

All of the above in magical Pari—the creation of David Peat and Maureen Doolan. Here we will have wonderful Italian food—and—talk, talk, talk in the outdoor café, with music and dancing in the square, soaking in the sulphur springs, and joy and laughter!

Participating in an event at the Pari Center means not only attending meetings but living for a week in a medieval village, mingling with the local population, eating local dishes, 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.

Additional information about the Pari Center – pdf

Galileo at 400
2023-10-31 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recordings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v66cS8XoQ2A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4btmqCOYhpk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOeqgq4ymIY

Galileo at 400

Looking Through 21st Century Telescopes

with Avi Loeb, Dean Radin, David Lorimer, Athena Potari, Marjorie Woollacott

Curated by Àlex Gómez-Marín

Free Program in 3 Parts

Tuesday October 3110:00am PDT | 1:00pm EDT | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

Part 1 – The Assayer – To Watch the recordingA reading together of Galileo’s seminal book with Àlex Gómez-Marín and James Peat BarbieriFriday October 20 at 12:00-13:30 EDT, 17:00-18:30 BST, 18:00-19:30 CEST

Part 2 – Exploring Outer and Inner Spaces- To Watch the RecordingA conversation between Avi Loeb and Dean Radin with Àlex Gómez-MarínWednesday October 25 at 13:00-14:30 EDT, 18:00-19:30 BST, 19:00-20:30 CEST

Part 3 – Expanding the Scope of Science with the Galileo CommissionA dialogue between David Lorimer, Marjorie Woollacott, Athena Potari, and Àlex Gómez-MarínTuesday October 31 at 12:00-13:30 EDT, 17:00-18:30 GMT, 18:00-19:30 CET

In this online series we will revisit Galileo’s book, The Assayer, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of its publication this very month of October.

Written as a letter in a controversy about the nature of comets, such a foundational text in the history of modern science deserves to be more widely known and read. It contains one of the first and clearest articulations of the scientific method, the famous claim about the mathematical intelligibility of nature, and Galileo’s emphasis on epistemic humility in the face of dogma and authority. Remarkably, in the book we also find Galileo’s programmatic exclusion of consciousness from the purview of science, whose consequences we are still wrestling with today.

Celebrating “Galileo at 400” shall inspire us to dare to look through current “telescopes” in order to continue exploring our inner and outer spaces while expanding the scope of science as we know it.

Galileo’s indelible legacy can be grasped directly from his own words. We encourage attendees to get first-hand experience with The Assayer before the event, via the free material linked below.

REFERENCES

(1) ABRIDGED ENGLISH TRANSLATION: G. Galilei, in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, S. Drake, C. D. O’Malley, Transl. (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1960). You can read it for free here: https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/certainty/readings/Galileo-Assayer.pdf

(2) ORIGINAL TEXT IN ITALIAN: G. Galilei, Il Saggiatore [Works of Galileo Galilei, Part 3, Volume 15, Astronomy: The Assayer] (Giacomo Mascardi, 1623). You can read it for free here: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666740/

Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University and a bestselling author (in lists of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, L’Express and more). He received a PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at age 24 (1980-1986), led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983-1988), and was subsequently a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1988-1993). Loeb has written 8 books, including most recently, Extraterrestrial, and nearly a thousand papers (with h-index of 119 and i10-index of 543) on a wide range of topics, including black holes, the first stars, the search for extraterrestrial life and the future of the Universe. Loeb is the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (2007-present) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and also serves as the Head of the Galileo Project(2021-present). He had been the longest serving Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy (2011-2020) and the Founding Director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (2016-2021). He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. Loeb is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) at the White House, a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies (2018-2021) and a current member of the Advisory Board for “Einstein: Visualize the Impossible” of the Hebrew University. He also chairs the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative (2016-present) and serves as the Science Theory Director for all Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In 2012, TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space and in 2020 Loeb was selected among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade. Click here for Loeb’s commentaries on innovation and diversity.

Personal website: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Dean Radin is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and chairman of the genetic engineering company, Cognigenics. He earned an MS (electrical engineering) and a PhD (psychology) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in 2022 was awarded an Honorary DSc (doctor of science) from the Swami Vivekananda University (an accredited university in Bangalore, India). He served for five terms as President of the Parapsychological Association (PA), a professional society affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)), and in 2023 received the PA’s Outstanding Career Award.

Before joining the IONS research staff in 2001, Radin worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and SRI International. He has given over 750 talks and interviews worldwide, and he is author or coauthor of some 300 scientific and popular articles, four dozen book chapters, and nine books, four of which have been translated into 15 foreign languages: The Conscious Universe (1997, HarperCollins), Entangled Minds (2006, Simon & Schuster), Supernormal (2013, RandomHouse), and Real Magic (2018, PenguinRandomHouse).

David Lorimer, MA, PGCE, FRSA is a writer, lecturer, poet, editor and spiritual activist who is a Founder of Character Education Scotland, Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network (www.scientificandmedical.net) and former President of Wrekin Trust and the Swedenborg Society (www.swedenborgsociety.org.uk). He has also been editor of Paradigm Explorer since 1986 and completed his 100th issue in 2019. He was the instigator of the Beyond the Brain conference series in 1995 (www.beyondthebrain.org) and has co-ordinated the Mystics and Scientists conferences every year since the late 1980s.

Originally a merchant banker then a teacher of philosophy and modern languages at Winchester College, he is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Survival? Death as Transition (1984, 2017) Resonant Mind (originally Whole in One) (1990/2017), The Spirit of Science (1998), Thinking Beyond the Brain (2001), The Protein Crunch (with Jason Drew) and A New Renaissance (edited with Oliver Robinson). He has edited three books about the Bulgarian sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov): Prophet for our Times (1991, 2015), The Circle of Sacred Dance, and Gems of Love, which is a translation of his prayers and formulas into English. His book on the ideas and work of the Prince of Wales – Radical Prince (2003) – has been translated into Dutch, Spanish and French. His new book of essays, A Quest for Wisdom was published in 2021.

David is also Chair of the Galileo Commission (www.galileocommission.org) which seeks the expand the evidence base of science of consciousness beyond a materialistic world view.

In 2020 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award as a Visionary Leader by the Visioneers International Network and the 2021 Aboca Human Ecology Prize. He is a Creative Member of the Club of Budapest. His website is www.davidlorimer.co.uk

Dr. Athena Potari is Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, specializing in Political Philosophy, and her MA in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is recipient of the Academy of Athens Award of Philosophy (2020), author of A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities published by the Galileo Commission, and Member of the Galileo Commission Committee. In 2019, she founded Athenoa, a School of Hellenic Philosophy based in Athens, Greece where Hellenism is approached as a living wisdom tradition whose very essence consists in the inextricable combination of science, reason and spirituality. Her work aims to revive the deeper spiritual and experiential dimensions of Hellenic Philosophy, combining discursive rigor and embodied spiritual and meditative practices with the aim of awakening to our true Self.

Marjorie Woollacott, Ph.D., was Professor, and chair of the Dept. of Human Physiology, and member of the Inst. of Neuroscience, at the U. of Oregon for 35 yrs. She is Co-director of the Galileo Commission, President of the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Sciences (AAPS) and Research Director for the Intl. Assoc. of Near-Death Studies (IANDS). She has received over 7.2 million dollars in research funding and published more than 200 scientific articles on her research in medicine, meditation and spiritual awakening. Her book, Infinite Awareness (2015) pairs Woollacott’s research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power.

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.

Does Quantum Theory Reveal an Underlying Wholeness to Reality?
2023-11-04 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Buy the recording

The Science of Wholeness 1/6: Does Quantum Theory Reveal an Underlying Wholeness to Reality? (with Dr. Jonathan Allday)€10,00

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Does Quantum Theory Reveal an Underlying Wholeness to Reality?

with Dr. Jonathan Allday

Saturday November 4, 202310:00am PDT | 1:00pm EDT | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

2-hour session

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

In the 1970s, a series of books, such as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, explored the supposed synergies between quantum theory and the wisdom traditions. These well-meaning books spawned something of an industry and associated quantum hype where quantum theory was portrayed as supporting, or worse justifying, certain worldviews.

Typically, these approaches drew on the Copenhagen interpretation, the idea that the mind causes quantum state collapse and the physics of entanglement and related them to the experience of non-duality, wholeness and immersion in a universal mind characteristic of spiritual insight.

It is now time to look back on these ideas in the light of 50 years further thought on quantum theory and its philosophical implications and to draw some more nuanced conclusions. In the words of Eddington[1] “I have not suggested that either religion or free-will can be deduced from modern physics; I have limited myself to showing that certain difficulties in reconciling them have been removed.”

[1] Eddington “New Pathways in Science”, 1935, p306

To see the Full The Science of Wholeness 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 2020 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.

The Big Questions in Science with Rupert Sheldrake
2024-01-11 18:00 - 19:30
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5BQ0rMvDz8

A dialogue between Dr Àlex Gómez-Marín and Dr Rupert Sheldrake

Thursday January 119:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

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

In his 12-part online course, recently launched in an online on-demand format, Rupert Sheldrake argues that the sciences are being constricted by ten assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. In this course he turns the dogmas into questions and examines them scientifically in the light of advances in the sciences themselves. For example, the dogma that nature is mechanical becomes the question “Is nature mechanical?”; the dogma that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?”; the dogma that minds are confined to brains becomes “Are minds confined to brains?” This mind-transforming course is based on Rupert’s award-winning bestselling book The Science Delusion (called Science Set Free in the US) and makes these ideas accessible to scientists and non-scientists alike. Alex and Rupert will discuss some of the ways in which the sciences could be liberated and revitalized. Their discussion will be followed by Q&A. This event is free of charge but participants need to register in advance.

Link to the event: https://advaya.life/courses/the-rupert-sheldrake-course

Please use the 20% single course discount code 20-PARI.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 100 technical papers and twelve books, including Science and Spiritual Practices. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and philosophy at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and director of studies in cell biology. From 2005-2010 he was director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, for research on unexplained human and animal abilities. He is currently a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and also of Schumacher College, in Devon.

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.

The Rupert Sheldrake Course

Explore the big questions in science in this 13-week self-paced course.

Are you ready to deepen your understanding of cutting edge science? This course will radically change your view of what is real and what is possible. Embark on an enlightening exploration with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, challenging the core beliefs of contemporary science.

What’s Included:

13 Modules and 14 Sessions: Uncover the depth of Dr. Sheldrake’s thought-provoking content spread across comprehensive modules and engaging sessions. You’ll explore groundbreaking research into topics like Free will, The consciousness of nature, The mind, The mystery of psychic phenomena, How dogs know when their owners come home, How memory works, The potential of alternative medicine, and more.

Cutting Edge Science: Learn from the distinguished Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist, and author of more than 100 technical papers and twelve books, published in 28 languages. Dr. Sheldrake is a leading authority in pushing the boundaries of scientific inquiry.

Curated Readings and Resources: Access carefully selected readings and resources that deepen your understanding and provide additional context to the course content.

Live Q&A: to be scheduled in February to add a new element to the course

Flexible Formats: Both video and audio formats are available.

In this course, Sheldrake turns the ten fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions and shows how all of them open up startling new possibilities for discovery.

Link to the event: https://advaya.life/courses/the-rupert-sheldrake-course

Please use the 20% single course discount code 20-PARI.
