Events

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.

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.

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.
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.
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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.