The Loss and Recovery of the Sacred
2022-11-20 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Rome) | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/e22uwZFa30o?si=ghyq7F8dDHl-nA3s

The Loss and Recovery of the Sacred

with Anne Baring

Sunday November 20, 20229:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

2-hour session

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

Jesus said that men do not put new wine in old bottles, lest the bottles break and the wine is lost. There is new wine pouring into our culture from different sources: new bottles are being created to hold it. This talk will explore aspects of the new wine and the new bottles. It will also explore when, where and how we lost a vital aspect of the sacred, together with visionary imagination and experience. In focussing so much on the rational mind, we have lost touch with the heart and the soul. For increasing numbers, religion has become meaningless. God has been pronounced dead—an outgrown superstition. But while the image of the sacred may die, the Sacred cannot die. After an interval marked by cultural and social disintegration, chaos and despair, a new image may appear, unheralded, from the depths of the human psyche. We are living at such a time, in the final stages of an old era and the birth of a new one.

To see the Full Recovering the Sacred Program

Anne Baring b. 1931. MA Oxon. PhD (Hons) in Wisdom Studies Ubiquity University 2018. Jungian Analyst, author and co-author of 7 books including, with Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess; Evolution of an Image; with Andrew Harvey, The Mystic Vision and The Divine Feminine; with Dr Scilla Elworthy, Soul Power: An Agenda for a Conscious Humanity. Also a book for children, The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time. Her most recent book The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul (2013, updated and reprinted 2020) was awarded the Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize for 2013. The ground of all her work is a deep interest in the spiritual, mythological, shamanic and artistic traditions of different cultures. Her websites are devoted to the affirmation of a new vision of reality and the issues facing us at this crucial time of choice. www.annebaring.com and www.anne-baring.com

The Future Scientist - A Conversation with Dr. Jordi Pigem
2022-11-23 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs1FuPevbtQ

A Conversation between Dr. Jordi Pigem and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday November 239:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

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

You are not a robot. And yet it is necessary to say the obvious. Under the spell of techno-capitalism, machines are made in the image of people, and people in the image of machines. At the same time, the distinction between true and false is waning as virtual worlds are proclaimed by academic and technocratic celebrities as a sort of “reality+”. The artificial is the new natural. And the Orwellian, the new normal. In this installment of The Future Scientist we will draw attention to the roots, falsehoods, and perils of “post-truth” in the context of the so-called fourth industrial revolution — to distract and confuse, to discipline and punish, such are the means of totalitarianism, now overpowered by digital media. If not dark, the mirror of science has become rather blurred. Who to trust, and why? The post-pandemic challenges of global control and dehumanization apply not only to science, but also to education, health, and the economy. Despite the accelerated proliferation of scientism (and precisely because of this), science still has a vital role to play. A post-materialist view of consciousness and of life may bring back the critical free thought we have missed, and the joy we have lost. In the context of the covert philosophies and confounded ideologies that scientists profess, and also in the context of actual science itself, we will attempt a vital conversation in the minor key.

This event is free and open to everyone.

Join the event at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84980605546

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

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

Jordi Pigem holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. He devoted his doctoral work to the intercultural thought of the philosopher and theologian Raimon Panikkar, being also the author of the edition and introduction of Raimon Panikkar, Ecosophy: the wisdom of the Earth (2021). From 1998 to 2003 he was a professor of Philosophy of Science in the Masters in Holistic Science at the Schumacher College in England. He currently teaches several courses in Spanish universities. He is the author, amongst other books, of the following Spanish titles: Pandemic and post-truth: Life, consciousness and the fourth industrial revolution (2021), Thus speaks the Earth (2021), Angels or robots: the human condition in the hyper-technological society (2018), and Vital intelligence: a postmaterialist vision of life and consciousness (2016). He was granted the Philosophical Award of the Institute of Catalan Studies in 1999, the Essay Award of Resurgenceand the Scientific and Medical Network in 2006, and the prestigious Joan Maragall Award in 2016.

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

The Future Scientist Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recovering a Sense of the Sacred – an Evolutionary Imperative
2022-11-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/hM2TknIlvNE?si=_A5jk7EnW27grTzg

Recovering a Sense of the Sacred – an Evolutionary Imperative

with David Lorimer

Saturday November 26, 20229:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

2-hour session

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

Scientific materialism and modern consumerism have led to a widespread loss of a sense of the sacred where Nature is regarded as dead and a resource to exploit for monetary gain. Correspondingly, the human being is understood in mechanistic terms, and the vision of transhumanism and technocracy is a future ‘upgrade of the human operating system’ where we are, in the memorably chilling phrase of Yuval Noah Harari, simply hackable animals. The very nature of what it means to be human is now at stake, and a recovery of a sense of the sacred with respect to both humans and Nature is now an evolutionary imperative. This entails resisting the transhumanist agenda of universal surveillance and control, and forging a beneficial relationship both with Nature and emerging technologies with human flourishing at the centre; also recognising the centrality of our transcendent nature that gives us access to deeper structures of reality. In the words of King Charles III, the watchword is Harmony.

To see the Full Recovering the Sacred Program

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

Weaving a Web of Meaning: How Recognizing Our Deep Interrelatedness Lays a Path to Sustainable Flourishing
2022-11-27 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://youtu.be/T_dUhQE6TlM?si=JlXotccW7_WMoCpj

with Jeremy Lent

Sunday November 27, 20229:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

2-hour session

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

Our dominant worldview tells us we’re split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world. This worldview has passed its expiration date: it’s based on a series of flawed assumptions that have been superseded by modern scientific findings. In this talk, based on themes from his recent book, The Web of Meaning, author Jeremy Lent will discuss how another worldview is possible—recognizing our deep interrelatedness with all of life.

Showing how modern scientific knowledge echoes the ancient wisdom of earlier cultures, the talk weaves together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom.

To see the Full Recovering the Sacred Program

Jeremy Lent, described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as ‘one of the greatest thinkers of our age,’ is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His award-winning books, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, trace the historical underpinnings and flaws of the dominant worldview, and offer a foundation for an integrative worldview that could lead humanity to a flourishing future. He has written extensively about the vision of, and pathways toward, an ecological civilization and is founder of the Deep Transformation Network.

The Future Scientist - A Conversation with Dr. Shantena Sabbadini
2022-12-13 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjlv-_aPMas

A Conversation between Dr. Shantena Sabbadini and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Tuesday December 139:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

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

In this final instalment of The Future Scientist series we will be in conversation with the former director of The Pari Center, Dr. Shantena Augusto Sabbadini. We will discuss the I Ching, also known as The Book of Changes, which Dr. Sabbadini translated to English together with Rudolf Ritsema, the former director of the Eranos Foundation. The I Ching is a divination system, a formidable three-thousand years old manual, whose language defies Western rationality. It is not a philosophical text, nor a prediction machine. Rather than guessing the future, the I Ching allows us to read into the present moment, weaving together context and chance as an organic whole at the moment of observation. Causality gives way to synchronicity; and yet, meaningful randomness sounds like an oxymoron to the contemporary left-hemispheric scientific mind. Integrating the principles of yin and yang, structure and action, form and energy, and chaos and order, the I Ching offers us a doorway into the imaginal world, closer to the language of dreams. In ending, inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s foreword to the I Ching translation by Richard Wilhelm, we will conclude our series by asking the oracle about the future scientist.

This event is free and open to everyone.

Join the event at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82101234528

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

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

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 Yijingand 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.

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

The Future Scientist Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Scientist: A Recapitulation
2022-12-21 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZoyZM4-94g&t=1s

A Recapitulation and Conversation between the Audience and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday December 219:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

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

The Future Scientist conversation series is reaching an end. After a whole year of monthly encounters with prominent, deep, and visionary scholars, the project will complete the first phase of a greater journey. In this last event of the year, at the heart of the winter solstice, Alex will revisit the initial intention of the series, briefly recapitulate each of the twelve sessions we have had so far, and seek comments and feedback from the participants in an extended Q&A. He will then introduce the rationale for bringing The Future Scientist to a close and evolve it into The Future Human conversation series, which will begin in January 2023 as a natural continuation of the 2022 quest. Paraphrasing one of our very mottos, this will be a virtual encounter to understand where the series is going and to reimage where we hope it might go.

This event is free and open to everyone.

Join the event at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86553137353

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

The Future Scientist Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
2023-02-18 17:59 - 2023-03-08 20:00 | Online
Entanglement: Physics, Mind and Worlds

with Emily Adlam, Jonathan Allday, Basil Hiley, José Latorre, Dean Radin, Vandana Shiva

Curated by Jonathan Allday

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

6-two-hour sessions every Saturday and Sunday

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

Given the recently awarded 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger “for the experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”, the mysterious notion of entanglement has come back with renewed force not only to the Olympus of mainstream science, but also to the lives of laypeople, recapturing our imagination as to the fundamental interconnected nature of the cosmos.

In a spirit of celebration, this online series brings together world-experts to discuss what entanglement entails, from a theoretical perspective, along with the experiments that have confirmed “spooky action at a distance” and closed increasingly implausible loopholes that might provide another explanation.

The conversation will also address the impact of entanglement beyond physics, and its promise for technological applications in quantum computing.

We intend to cover in relative depth some of the following questions: What is entanglement? What experimental evidence is there for entanglement? Is entanglement the distinctive difference between classical and quantum physics? How does entanglement impact on conventional notions such as ‘part’ and ‘whole’? Does entanglement point to a different conception of space and time? How might entanglement impact on areas of conventional science – e.g., quantum biology, consciousness studies? Is entanglement anything more than a useful analogy in areas of less conventional science – e.g., parapsychology? Has entanglement been anticipated in the worldviews of other cultures? Does entanglement radically undermine the prevailing materialist western worldview?

As physicist David Bohm proposed, “the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. . . . At some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.”

Program of Event

Saturday February 18Entanglement for Amateurswith Dr. Jonathan Allday

Sunday February 19Quantum Computingwith Prof. José Latorre

Saturday February 25Spooky Action at a (Temporal) Distancewith Dr. Emily Adlam

Sunday February 26My Entanglement with Entanglementwith Prof. Basil Hiley

Saturday March 4Entangled Minds and Matterwith Dr. Dean Radin

Sunday March 5Living in a Non-Local World: Entanglement Meets Ecologywith Dr. Vandana Shiva

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.

José Ignacio Latorre
2023-02-19 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Sunday February 19, 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.

José Ignacio Latorre got his PhD in Particle Physics at Univ. Barcelona. He was a Fullbright Fellow at MIT (USA) and a postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He then became associate professor at the Univ. Barcelona and, later, full professor in Theoretical Physics.

He has written over 100 papers on Particle Physics and Quantum Information and has directed 12 PhD thesis.

He was a founder of the Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual.

He produced two documentaries, one of them on the last voice of the Manhattan Project.

He works on Ariticial Intelligence and was a founder of the NNPDF collaboration.

He is a partner at Entanglement Partners.

To see the Full Entanglement program

Spooky Action at a (Temporal) Distance
2023-02-25 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
with Dr. Emily Adlam

Saturday February 25, 2023

9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

2-hour session

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

Since the discovery of Bell’s theorem, the physics community has come to take seriously the possibility that the universe might contain physical processes which are spatially nonlocal, but there has been no such revolution with regard to the possibility of temporally nonlocal processes. In this talk, I will explore what temporal nonlocality might mean for physics. I will begin by arguing that temporal locality is incompatible with relativity and I will consider what kind of temporal nonlocality is suggested by relativistic considerations. I will introduce the temporal Bell inequalities, and discuss how temporal nonlocality is related to retrocausality. Finally, I will describe how accepting temporal nonlocality might change scientific explanations and open up new possibilities for research in physics. The talk will be followed by audience discussion of possible objections to temporal nonlocality and areas of science that might be affected by temporal nonlocality.

Emily Adlam is a postdoctoral associate at the Rotman Institute for Philosophy of Science, associated with the University of Western Ontario. Adlam received her PhD in relativistic quantum information from the University of Cambridge. Prior to that she completed the Perimeter Scholar’s International programme in theoretical physics, and she did her undergraduate degree in physics and philosophy at the Univeristy of Oxford. Adlam works on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related issues in the philosophy of physics. Adlam is particularly interested in approaches to physics which go beyond the time evolution paradigm – encompassing a range of possibilities like temporal non-locality, retrocausality, and all-at-once laws.

To see the Full Entanglement program

My Entanglement with Entanglement
2023-02-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
My Entanglement with Entanglement

with Prof. Basil J. Hiley

Sunday February 26, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

To see the Full Entanglement program

The Future Human - A Conversation with Satish Kumar
2023-03-01 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yswI-Y8Xs9g

A Conversation between Satish Kumar and Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday March 19:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm 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.

The second conversation in this series will be on Wednesday March 1, 2023 with Satish Kumar. Our conversation will orbit around “Love”.

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

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

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

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.

Entangled Minds and Matter
2023-03-04 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Entangled Minds and Matter

with Dr. Dean Radin

Saturday March 4, 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.

Methods for investigating mind-matter interactions were proposed by Sir Francis Bacon at the very origins of empiricism, over three centuries ago. Systematic scientific studies began about a century ago. In this talk, I will briefly review the modern experimental literature on “psychokinetic” effects, then I will present in more detail experiments I have conducted involving random physical systems based on quantum indeterminacy, photon polarization, scattering, and entanglement, the molecular structure of water, growth of plants and stem cells in vitro, and influences on human mood and physiology. I will also discuss the epistemological challenges in conducting these kinds of studies, as well as the practical and philosophical implications of mind-matter entanglements.

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 biotech 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).

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 690 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).

To see the Full Entanglement program

Living in a Non-Local World: Entanglement Meets Ecology
2023-03-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Living in a Non-Local World: Entanglement Meets Ecology

with Dr. Vandana Shiva

Sunday March 5, 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.

I will discuss the implications of the concept of nonlocality and hidden variables to our understanding of life in the real world. Making a concrete analogy between quantum systems and humane societies reveals a way of being-in-the-world that is not only more Beautiful and True but also Good. I will argue that the revolutionary discoveries of the quantum revolution inform and inspire current revolutions in ecology, agriculture, and politics.

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

To see the Full Entanglement program

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.

Incredible Minds
2023-04-22 17:59 - 2023-05-07 20:00 | Online
Incredible Minds: Exploring Actual, Virtual, and Possible Minds Across Living Matter

with Paco Calvo, Lars Chittka, Audrey Dussutour, Michael Levin, Julia Mossbridge, Matthew Segall

Pari Center Online Series

April 22 – May 7, 20239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

6-two-hour sessions every Saturday and Sunday

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

Do plants have feelings? How blind are we to their own internal experiences? Perhaps they offer an untapped opportunity to reconsider how we understand ourselves. What about bees? Do we appreciate their unique cognitive abilities, both as a group and as individuals? Their brains may grant them a kind of consciousness akin, or not, to ours. And, what about cells? How does bioelectricity contribute to their collective problem-solving? Given the evolution of their multiscale competencies, one can marvel at the relentless manifestation of such accomplishments throughout development, every time a batch of chemicals becomes a metacognitive human. Let us also ask whether synthetic life forms could have minds, or whether they only behave as if they did. Can we tell? How do slime molds, a sister group to fungi and animals, live and thrive in worlds as complex as our own. We can use such creatures to learn to think critically and better understand science itself. What, if anything, is then uniquely human about our minds? Does our desire for improvement hinder the very possibility of self-transcendence? Here’s a challenge: to continue learning about us and the world while loving everything as it is. Is the cosmos really a fluke accident sprinkled with improbable biological organisms with epiphenomenal minds? It is ironic that some conscious intelligences (mainly academics) insist on explaining themselves away. An alternative cosmology, and no less scientifically compatible, can root mind and life in cosmogenesis from the very beginning. Thus, at the end of the day, all such alien minds living in all such alien worlds may be more natural, and even more incredible, than we are led to believe. Join us to explore and enjoy them all.

Program of Event

Saturday April 22Planta Sapiens: The Incredible Minds of Plantswith Dr. Paco Calvo

Sunday April 23The Mind of a Beewith Dr. Lars Chittka

Saturday April 29The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis: What Bioelectricity Outside the Brain Means for Understanding our Multiscale Naturewith Dr. Michael Levin

Sunday April 30Human Thinking and Human Beingwith Dr. Julia Mossbridge

Saturday May 6The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the Peoplewith Dr. Audrey Dussutour

Sunday May 7Mind and Life in the Cosmoswith Dr. Matthew David Segall

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)).

The Mind of a Bee
2023-04-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
The Mind of a Bee

with Dr. Lars Chittka

Sunday April 23, 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.

Most of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. Chittka illustrates how bee brains are unparalleled in the animal kingdom in terms of how much sophisticated material is packed into their tiny nervous systems. He looks at their innate behaviors and the ways their evolution as foragers may have contributed to their keen spatial memory. Chittka also examines the psychological differences between bees and the ethical dilemmas that arise in conservation and laboratory settings because bees might feel and think.

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

Lars Chittka is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee and Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College of the University of London. He is also the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary. He is known for his work on the evolution of sensory systems and cognition using insect-flower interactions as a model system. Chittka has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of animal cognition and its impact on evolutionary fitness studying bumblebees and honeybees.

The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis: What Bioelectricity Outside the Brain Means for Understanding our Multiscale Nature
2023-04-29 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Fm7jLNrpg

with Dr. Michael Levin

Saturday April 29, 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.

Each of us takes a remarkable journey from physics to mind: we start as a blob of chemicals in an unfertilized quiescent oocyte and becomes a complex, metacognitive human being. The continuous process of transformation and emergence that we see in developmental biology reminds us that we are true collective intelligences – composed of cells which used to be individual organisms themselves. In this talk, I will describe our work on understanding how the competencies of single cells are harnessed to solve problems in anatomical space, and how evolution pivoted this scaling of intelligence into the familiar forms of cognition in the nervous system. We will talk about diverse intelligence in novel embodiments, the scaling of the cognitive light cone of all beings, and the role of developmental bioelectricity as a cognitive glue and as the interface by which mind controls matter in the body. I will also show a new synthetic life form, and discuss what it means for bioengineering and ethics of human relationships to the wider world of possible beings. We will discuss the implications of these ideas for understanding evolution, and the applications we have developed in birth defects, cancer, and traumatic injury repair. By merging deep ideas from developmental biophysics, computer science, and cognitive science, we not only get a new perspective on fundamental questions of life and mind, but also new roadmaps in regenerative medicine, biorobotics, and AI.

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

Michael Levin received dual undergraduate degrees in computer science and biology, followed by a PhD in molecular genetics from Harvard. He did his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, and started his independent lab in 2000. He is currently the Vannevar Bush chair at Tufts University, and an associate faculty member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard. He serves as the founding director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. His lab uses a mix of developmental biophysics, computer science, and behavior science to understand the emergence of mind in unconventional embodiments at all scales, and to develop interventions in regenerative medicine and applications in synthetic bioengineering. They can be found at www.drmichaellevin.org/

Human Thinking and Human Being
2023-04-30 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Human Thinking and Human Being

with Dr. Julia Mossbridge

Sunday April 30, 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.

This talk is about the radical idea that if there is anything uniquely human about our minds, it doesn’t actually matter. Our desire to feel special, better-than, and different-from other forms of intelligent life is not inspiring, beneficial, or supportive of transformation or self-transcendence. In contrast, the ability to love all that is, exactly as it is without suffering is rare among humans and apparently more common among non-humans. This is likely because we are keenly aware of all that could be improved in the world. The question I pose is, how can we learn even more about how the world can be improved while also learning to love everything exactly as it is? How can we think our way into human being?

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the People
2023-05-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
The Use of Slime Molds in Promoting Science for and by the People

with Dr. Audrey Dussutour

Saturday May 6, 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.

Slime molds are remarkable single cell organisms that belong to the Amoebozoa, a kingdom usually considered to be a sister group to fungi and animals. Slime molds are model organisms to study problem-solving in aneural biological systems. Although they lack the complex hardware of a true brain, they live in a complex ecological niche and face the same decision-making challenges that animals are faced with: they must feed, mate and adapt to changing conditions. Hence, in the first part of my talk, I will present various examples of problem-solving in slime molds. Surprisingly, slime moulds are also model organisms to conduct citizen science projects. They are easy to culture, safe, nontoxic and hypoallergenic living organisms. Thus, in the second part of my talk, I will demonstrate how slime molds can be used to 1) increase the public’s understanding of science and research, 2) raise awareness about societal challenges and 3) develop critical thinking.

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

Audrey Dussutour, a French born ethologist, is a CNRS Senior Researcher at the Research centre on Animal Cognition in Toulouse (Paul Sabatier University, France). She studies collective behavior and cognition, working with ant colonies and slime molds. Her topics of interest include decision-making, learning and integrative nutrition. She has made important contributions to these fields through meticulous behavioral experiments. In 2021, Audrey was awarded a Medal by the CNRS and given the French Order of Merit by the President of the French Republic, for her involvement in outreach activities. An example of her outreach efforts includes a citizen science project involving 350 000 schoolchildren with the aim to engage kids in science. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet onboard the ISS and schools were asked to run the same experiment to observe if slime molds behave differently in microgravity.

Mind and Life in the Cosmos
2023-05-07 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Mind and Life in the Cosmos

with Dr. Matthew David Segall

Sunday May 7, 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.

Contemporary physical cosmology describes a universe wherein the emergence of biological organisms can only be a fluke accident. Worse, the very scientific minds who claim to have discovered the laws of physics are forced to explain away their own conscious intelligence as an anomaly so vanishingly improbable in an otherwise dead, dumb cosmos that it requires the invention of an infinite number of unobservable multiverses to explain it (or rather, to explain it away). This talk will explore an alternative but no less scientifically compatible cosmology that roots mind and life in cosmogenesis from the get go. Such an alternative allows us to coherently understand how our own type of human consciousness—which seems so alien to the universe described by materialism—is in fact just as natural as radiating stars and blooming flowers.

To see the Full Incredible Minds program

Matthew David Segall, PhD, is a transdisciplinary researcher, author, and teacher applying process philosophy across the natural and social sciences, including the study of consciousness. He is a faculty member in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness graduate program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA. He is the author of several books including Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021) and Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (2023). Follow his work at Footnotes2Plato.com

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

The Future Human - A Conversation with Graham Hancock
2023-05-23 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3f5Hp9111c

A Conversation between Graham Hancock and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Tuesday May 239:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

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 guest, the session 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.

The fifth conversation in this series will be on Tuesday May 23, 2023 with Graham Hancock. Our conversation will orbit around “humanity’s ancient past”.

Graham Hancock is the writer and presenter of the 2022 hit Netflix documentary TV series Ancient Apocalypse and the author of the major international non-fiction bestsellers The Sign and the Seal (1992), Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), The Message of the Sphinx (1996), Heaven’s Mirror (1998), Underworld (2002), Supernatural (2005), Magicians of the Gods (2015), and America Before (2019), and also of the epic adventure novels Entangled and War God (written between 2006 and 2014, both have psychedelic sub-themes). His books have sold more than seven million copies worldwide and have been translated into thirty languages. His public lectures, radio and TV appearances, including several major TV series, as well as his strong presence on the internet, have put his ideas before audiences of tens of millions. He has become recognised as an unconventional thinker who raises resonant questions about humanity’s past and about our present predicament. In January 2023 Hancock was voted No 23 in the Watkins list of “The 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People”.

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 Future Human - A Conversation with Dr. Merlin Sheldrake
2023-05-24 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
A Conversation between Dr. Merlin Sheldrake and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

Wednesday May 249:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST

This event is LIVE and FREE. A monthly virtual encounter to reckon whence and whither humanity.

Following an hour-long lively and spontaneous dialogue between Alex and his guest, the session 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.

The fifth conversation in this series will be on Wednesday May 24, 2023 with Dr. Merlin Sheldrake. Our conversation will orbit around “the entangled lives of fauna, flora and funga”.

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation.

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.

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
