Changing Consciousness
2021-08-22 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Rome) | Online
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Changing Consciousness with Sandra Fiegehen, David Schrum and Stephen Smith€10,00

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Changing Consciousness

with Sandra Fiegehen, David Schrum and Stephen Smith

Sunday August 22, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

Human consciousness is a shared space. As individuals, we are born into an inherited socio-cultural matrix from which almost all of what we think and do derives. As Bohm points out, thought is a material process which pervades and dominates us.

We need to realise that we are participants. We must make a basic shift: from literal thought to participatory thought, a process in which we partake of consciousness. This can then become a kind of “food” which, in our times, we so desperately need.

Dialogue provides the opportunity for listening and sharing, out of which a sense of communion may arise, operating to nourish our spirit and open us to luminous intelligence. Thought may then find its proper, natural place; it is a guest in our house, not a usurper.

– Stephen Smith

Although we most often experience ourselves as separate islands of consciousness operating independently of that which surrounds us, our sense of separateness is constructed and illusory.

This separate self sense is a mere representation of the dynamic and unfolding process of conscious experience, a kind of alienated existence characterized by various degrees of narcissistic wounding acquired throughout the course of our development. We each play out these wounded, ‘separate’ selves in ways that create more suffering, both for ourselves and for others.

How can we find our way to realizing and embodying our common consciousness authentically and creatively? I will briefly explore some key Buddhist principles and how to bring them into practice in daily life.

– Sandra Fiegehen

To understand our lives and to live intelligently, creatively, and compassionately, David Bohm indicates, we must meet those dimensions of mind which for us are hidden. Beyond the surface of our consciousness, as personal memories, attitudes, and dispositions, we come upon that which is subtle: both as a flow of great momentum that is vast and ancient, and as a spacious field which is always new. These depths are common to us all, but we tend to be unaware. How are we to awaken?

Bohm offers us what he terms ‘participatory understanding’. This understanding is not ‘conceptual understanding’, which seeks to have understood and to lodge an understanding in memory. Rather, it is a living movement. It is embodiment; it is presence.

Our journey together is an invitation to explore this deeper inner world.

– David Schrum

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Series

Dr. Sandra Fiegehen is a retired Psychologist presently obsessed with growing raspberries. She has practiced and taught Chan (Zen) meditation for the last 15 years. Throughout her life, she has pursued a variety of psycho-spiritual approaches to the question of who and what she is – and is pleased to report that her investigations have resulted in near-absolute uncertainty.

David Schrum received his PhD in quantum theory at Queen’s University, following which he spent two post-doctoral years with David Bohm at Birkbeck College. Here, he entered Bohm’s world of creative and subtle philosophical approaches to physics and his enquiry into consciousness and what may lie beyond.

David Schrum continues in these explorations, in physics developing a new approach to relativistic quantum theory and, through the dialogue process, going into what it is to bring to light that which lies enfolded within our individual and collective consciousness.

Stephen Smith has been Acting Principal, Academic Director, and for twenty years a teacher at Brockwood Park School in England, where he met Krishnamurti and knew David Bohm personally. His interest in dialogue took a decisive turn when he moved to California in 1994 and began to facilitate dialogue groups. He sees dialogue as a means of mirroring the psyche so that we can move from being thought-bound individuals, embrace the collective, and awaken intelligence.

Dialogue’s Lineage and the Transmission of Participative Consciousness
2021-08-28 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
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Dialogue’s Lineage and The Transmission Of Participative Consciousness with Beth Macy, Mark Ryan and Lee Nichol€10,00

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Dialogue’s Lineage and the Transmission of Participative Consciousness

with Beth Macy, Mark Ryan and Lee Nichol

Saturday August 28, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

Dip with Beth Macy into her research archives of the lineage of Bohm’s dialogue. Pursue with her core aspects of each lineage member’s own early lifetime wounding as well as later cultural and professional alienation, and the impact of these dynamics on lineage members’ resulting contributions to Bohm’s ideas of “participation” in dialogue. And then, explore the meaning as it flows through the whole of the lineage and those to whom dialogue’s participative spiral of meaning unfolds, transforms and re-enfolds.

From the perspectives of the history of thought, Jungian psychology, mythology, and Barfield’s participatory consciousness, panel members will explore the following questions:

What is the potential impact that early trauma and later professional alienation might have had on lineage members’ connection to a higher form of consciousness?

What about Bohm’s assertion that with sufficient capacities of suspension and proprioception an individual could experience direct perception and participation with the intelligence of the universe? Is that really possible?

Bohm also suggests that if a group of individuals have developed this capacity of direct perception, then together their consciousness can form one “consensual mind” which vastly expands the power of participation with universal intelligence.

Did the recurring evolution of participative consciousness which occurred through the lineage happen solely by chance? Or, was there a higher intention that guided each of their efforts? Were their ideas part of one, intentional flow? If so, is that higher intention perhaps still transmitting of an even further evolution of participative consciousness today?

Seminar participants are encouraged to read Beth’s article “The Backstory of David Bohm’s Dialogue” describing the dialogue’s lineage prior to the session: https://paricenter.com/library/pari-perspectives-issue-6-in-memoriam-david-bohm/the-backstory-of-david-bohms-dialogue/

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Series

Beth Macy, PhD, organizational consultant, Bohmian dialogue practitioner

The common thread weaving through Beth’s career has been change, having been a manager, leader, consultant or participant in organizations experiencing difficult issues: organizations from small to large, private to public, non-profit to profit, health care to oil and gas, local to global. David Bohm’s dialogue has been core to her research, writing, consulting and teaching for nearly three decades. Living in the USA (Texas) she is completing a book on the ideas and individuals who influenced Bohm’s methodology of dialogue.

Mark B. Ryan is an historian of American thought and culture, Mark Ryan was Dean of Jonathan Edwards College and a teacher of American Studies and history at Yale University for more than twenty years. Subsequently, he was Titular IV Professor at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico, where he also served as Dean of the Colleges, Regente (Head) of José Gaos College, and Coordinator of the master’s degree program in United States Studies. He holds Ph.D. and M. Phil. degrees from Yale, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from the University of St. Thomas. Mark is author of A Different Dimension: Reflections on the History of Transpersonal Thought (Westphalia Press, 2018), A Collegiate Way of Living (Yale University, 2001), articles in various journals on higher education, and articles in TheJournal of Transpersonal Psychology and related publications on the history of psychology. He is certified by Grof Transpersonal Training as a practitioner of Holotropic Breathwork, served for fourteen years on the Board of Trustees of Naropa University, is past chair of the Board of Directors of Wisdom University, and current Chair of the Jonathan Edwards Trust at Yale.

Lee Nichol, Bohm collaborator, editor, educator

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

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

Lee is currently at work on a new book – Entering Bohm’s Holoflux – to be released in July 2021 by Pari Publishing.

Beyond Bohm 2: Closing Session
2021-08-29 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Beyond Bohm 2: Closing Session

with Leroy Little Bear, Beth Macy, Melissa Nelson, Lee Nichol, Hester Reeve and David Schrum

Sunday August 29, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

It may be “auspicious coincidence” – or otherwise – but the first five of the sessions in Beyond Bohm 2 are in one way or another related to participatory consciousness. This overlap occurred without any intention on the part of the individuals who put together each of the sessions. It is likely then, that this topic will figure into our final summary session, though any of the topics addressed in the preceding weeks may come to the fore – especially in the extended discussion and Q &A with those attending this final segment of Beyond Bohm. And in the spirit of dialogue, something completely new may emerge, unforeseen by any plan or agenda.

Please join us as we gather and look toward the future of Bohm-inspired inquiries and explorations, with an eye toward genuine transformations in consciousness.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Series

Leroy Little Bear, PhD. Blackfoot Native—Professor Emeritus University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Leroy Little Bear was born and raised on the Blood Indian Reserve (Kainai First Nation), approximately 70 km west of Lethbridge, Alberta. One of the first Native students to complete a program of study at the University of Lethbridge, Little Bear graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1971. He continued his education at the College of Law, University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, completing a Juris Doctor Degree in 1975.

Following his graduation, Little Bear returned to his alma mater as a founding member of Canada’s first Native American Studies Department. He remained at the University of Lethbridge as a researcher, faculty member and department chair until his official retirement in 1997.

In recent years Little Bear has continued his influential work as an advocate for First Nations education. From January 1998 to June 1999 he served as Director of the Harvard University Native American Program. Upon his return to Canada, he was instrumental in the creation of a Bachelor of Management in First Nations Governance at the University of Lethbridge—the only program of its kind in the country.

In the spring of 2003, Little Bear was awarded the prestigious National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Education, the highest honour bestowed by Canada’s First Nations community. Little Bear is the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Lethbridge and the University of Northern British Columbia. Along with his wife, Amethyst First Rider, Little Bear brought about the historic Buffalo Treaty between First Nations on both sides of the USA-Canada border in 2014. Little Bear was inducted into the Alberta Order Excellence and the Order of Canada in 2016 and 2019 respectively.

Beth Macy, PhD, organizational consultant, Bohmian dialogue practitioner

The common thread weaving through Beth’s career has been change, having been a manager, leader, consultant or participant in organizations experiencing difficult issues: organizations from small to large, private to public, non-profit to profit, health care to oil and gas, local to global. David Bohm’s dialogue has been core to her research, writing, consulting and teaching for nearly three decades. Living in the USA (Texas) she is completing a book on the ideas and individuals who influenced Bohm’s methodology of dialogue.

Melissa K. Nelson is an ecologist and Indigenous scholar-activist. She earned her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California, Davis. Formerly a professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, she now teaches at Arizona State University in the School of Sustainability, Global Futures Laboratory. From 1993 to 2021, she served as the founding executive director and CEO of the Cultural Conservancy. She now serves as their president emerita. Melissa is the Bundle Holder for the Native American Academy. She is a contributor and co-editor of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also a contributor and the editor of Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008). She is Anishinaabe/Métis/Norwegian and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

Lee Nichol, Bohm collaborator, editor, educator

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

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

Lee is currently at work on a new book – Entering Bohm’s Holoflux – to be released in July 2021 by Pari Publishing.

Hester Reeve’s practice encompasses live art, philosophy, drawing, David Bohm’s ‘Dialogue’ and social sculpture.

She is interested in the relationship between critical thinking and human agency in everyday life, particularly when it is risked through the figure of ‘the artist’ (where what constitutes an artist is broadly conceived and not exclusive to art school training).

Recent public works have been staged at Tanzquartier, Vienna, Tate Britain (working under the umbrella of The Emily Davison Lodge with Olivia Plender) and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Hester Reeve is Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

David Schrum received his PhD in quantum theory at Queen’s University, following which he spent two post-doctoral years with David Bohm at Birkbeck College. Here, he entered Bohm’s world of creative and subtle philosophical approaches to physics and his enquiry into consciousness and what may lie beyond.

David Schrum continues in these explorations, in physics developing a new approach to relativistic quantum theory and, through the dialogue process, going into what it is to bring to light that which lies enfolded within our individual and collective consciousness.

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

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

The Brain and our Encounter with the World

with Iain McGilchrist

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

2-hour session

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

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

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

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

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

Each session is 2 hours

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

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

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

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

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

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

Program

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

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

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

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

John Briggs, PhD, taught for 25 years at Western Connecticut State University. He has taught aesthetics, journalism, and creative writing and served as co-chair of the English Department; he was one of the founders of the Department of Writing, Linguistics and Creative Process and one of the principal developers of the MFA in Professional and Creative Writing. He is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at WCSU. Among his many publications are three books he co-authored with David Peat, Looking Glass Universe (1984), Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (1989), and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (1999). He lives in the New England town of Granville, Massachusetts.

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

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

Shantena Sabbadini graduated from the University of Milan in 1968 and was awarded his PhD in physics from the University of California in 1976. In Milan he researched the foundations of quantum physics, laying the base for what is currently known as the decoherence interpretation of quantum physics. At the University of California, he contributed to the theoretical work behind the first identification of a black hole, the X-ray source Cygnus X-1. In the 1990s he was scientific consultant for the Eranos Foundation, an East-West research center founded under the auspices of C.G. Jung in the 1930s. In that context he produced various translations and commentaries of Chinese classics in Italian and English, including the Yijing and the trilogy of Daoist classics, the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and the Liezi. From 2002 onwards he collaborated with F. David Peat running the Pari Center for New Learning and in 2017 he succeeded his friend and colleague as director of the center.

Shantena leads workshops and courses on the philosophical implications of quantum physics, on Daoism, and on using the Yijing as a tool for introspection. His most recent book in English, Pilgrimages to Emptiness: Rethinking Reality through Quantum Physics, was published by Pari Publishing in 2017.

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

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

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

with Donna Coleman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Thursday September 30, Donna will open our monthly Community Call with a presentation and followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88489296199

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

Dr Donna Coleman is a world renowned concert pianist, recording artist, author, philosopher, and master teacher whose career spans a half-century, of which half has been based in Australia. She is also an accomplished weaver and photographer and an amateur but passionate astronomer and archeologist with a keen interest in the deep history of the US Southwest. As Head of Postgraduate Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, she convened weekly thought-provoking seminars that explored relationships between music and other disciplines. Donna is writing a book entitled Dancing with the Piano, a collection of essays distilled from these sessions and from her many years of phenomenological engagement with her ultimate dance partner, the piano.

Multiple Universes
2021-10-02 17:59 - 2021-10-24 20:00 | Online
Multiple UniversesParallel Worlds in Quantum Physics, Cosmology and Imagination

with Bernard Carr, Geraldine Patrick Encina (Mapuche Descent), Ruth Kastner, Tim Maudlin, Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Muñoz (Otomi-Toltec), Paul Tappenden and Jean François Vézina

Chaired by Shantena Augusto Sabbadini

October 2 – 3, 9 – 10, 16 – 17, 23 – 24, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

Two hour sessions every Saturdays and Sundays

All sessions are live; recordings will be available for any sessions you are unable to attend.

Is the universe we live in unique? What lies beyond the boundaries of the universe we see? Was the process that we believe gave birth to our universe – the Big Bang –a singular event or are universes bubbling up all the time? Do we exist in different worlds and live parallel lives?

Such notions would have seemed outrageous a few decades ago: surprisingly, as evidence begins to converge from different directions, they are close to becoming scientific orthodoxy.

The Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann described a key motive in the evolution of scientific thought as “jettisoning excess baggage”. Ideas that were previously accepted as absolute truth (e.g. the idea that the Earth sits at the center of the cosmos) were later seen to be relative and simply a consequence of our particular perspective. Are we today on the edge of another such radical enlargement of our perspective by abandoning the notion of a single universe?

In this online course we will explore the idea of multiple universes (and multiple realities, multiple selves) in science, film, science fiction, indigenous wisdom, etc.

Program of Event

Saturday October 2The Multiverse and the Limits of Sciencewith Bernard Carr

Sunday October 3Dendritic Quantum Mechanicswith Paul Tappenden

Sunday October 10May The Force Be Between Us Exploring our MultiVerse with the help of Star Wars and Otherswith Jean-Francois Vezina

Saturday October 16Discovering Multiple Possibilities in Quantum Theorywith Ruth Kastner

Sunday October 17Science, Philosophy, Evidence, Explanation and Fine-Tuningwith Tim Maudlin

Saturday October 23Is the Multiverse in the Mind or is the Mind in the Multiverse?with Bernard Carr

Sunday October 24Multiple Universes: Closing Sessionwith Bernard Carr, Geraldine Patrick Encina, Ruth Kastner, Tim Maudlin, Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Muñoz, Paul Tappenden, Jean-Francois Vezina

The Multiverse and the Limits of Science
2021-10-02 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

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

The Multiverse and the Limits of Science

with Bernard Carr

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

2-hour session

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

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

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

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

Dendritic Quantum Mechanics
2021-10-03 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2LsAL9o_kw

Dendritic Quantum Mechanics

with Paul Tappenden

Sunday October 3, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

The advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s brought with it the idea that fundamental physical processes may be stochastic which is to say random but constrained by probabilistic law. Rather than the future being determined in advance, as envisaged by Newtonian mechanics, one actual future is stochastically selected from a range of alternativepossibilities. A way to restore determinism to physics is to replace the idea of a stochastic process with that of a dendritic process where all (possible) outcomes actually occur, each in a different (branch) of a burgeoning quantum multiverse. The idea has been much discussed but remains very controversial. Paul explains some of the conceptual difficulties involved and how the idea may be linked to a non-standard materialist conception of the mind-body relation.

If you are constantly ‘splitting’ into every future previously thought merely possible, in what sense is it you who lives through those futures? An analysis of trans-temporal identity is required. How can the concept of probability apply to multiple coexistent futures rather than the selection of a single actual future from a range of alternative possiblities? A thought experiment involving hypothetical parallel universes helps. If ‘splitting’ is intelligible, what would the implications be for our choices in life if it came to be generally accepted by physicists and philosophers of physics?

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

Paul Tappenden’s first degree was in philosophy and psychology but he has long taken an interest in physics and was particularly fascinated by the philosophical problems associated with quantum mechanics. His PhD from King’s College, London, was an attempt to relate an important current debate in philosophy of mind with ideas in the so-called Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Since then he has taught philosophy of science to physics students in Grenoble, France, and has pursued the ideas in his doctorate in a series of papers, the most recent being in the journal Synthese, 2019.

Multiple Universes in Mesoamerican Cultures
2021-10-09 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-PDg5twUHw

Multiple Universes in Mesoamerican Cultures

with Geraldine Ann Patrick Encina and Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Muñoz

Saturday October 9, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

Drs Mindahi Bastida and Geraldine Patrick will share about the cosmovision of Mesoamerican cultures, where multiple simultaneous worlds are understood to exist. They will draw from different representations of such worlds and will also share personal experiences where they have had a glimpse into such alternate dimensions.

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

Geraldine Ann Patrick Encina (Mapuche Descent) has been a founding member of the Biocultural Heritage Network of Mexico since 2008, is founder and executive director of Earth Timekeepers since 2016, member of several pre-Columbian societies since 2015 and member of the Inter-American Society of Cultural Astronomy since 2013.

She has been a professor at the Intercultural University of the State of Mexico for courses on Ethnoecology and Biocultural Ethics (2007-2010), and at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Lerma (2012-2015) for Interdisciplinary Studies, Complex Systems and Mesoamerican Calendars.

Her research focuses on the ancestral and current ways of conceiving time and natural cycles in Mesoamerica, especially among the Maya, Otomian and Mexica cultures, and since 2016 she has started study groups in four communities in Mexico and Guatemala with teachers, university students and organized farmers and women interested in revitalizing their culture and traditional ways of living with the land. Among her publications are “Biocultural Sacred Sites in Mexico” in the book Indigeneity and the Sacred, article Long Count in Function of the Haab and its Venus-Moon Relation. Application in Chichén Itzá and article Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent. Its Relation to Evening Venus, Rains, and the closing of 13 Bak’tun.

Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Muñoz (Otomi-Toltec) is the Director of the Original Nations Program at The Fountain and a member of the Mother Earth Delegation. He is an executive member of the Alliance Guardians of Mother Earth and a spokesperson of the recently created Grand Council of the Eagle and the Condor. He is also the General Coordinator of the Otomi Regional Council of the High Lerma River Basin, Mexico, that promotes the rights of nature and Mother Earth as well as the rights to self- determination of original nations.

Mindahi has served as a delegate to various commissions and summits on indigenous rights and sustainability, including the 1992 Earth Summit and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD, 2002). He was director of the Original Caretakers Program at the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City between 2015 and 2020 and has been invited to partake in several advisory councils.

He has written on the relation between the state and Indigenous Peoples, intercultural education, collective intellectual property rights and associated traditional knowledge, biocultural sacred sites, and other topics.

May the Force Be Among Us
2021-10-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcEV5fcQCm0

May the Force Be Among Us: Exploring our MultiVerse with the help of Star Wars and other movies

with Jean-Francois Vezina

Sunday October 10, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

Jung defines the Individuation process as an expression of our own originality through collective and universal attraction points called archetypes. But can we imagine that an entire Planet or Universe has his own individuation? If so, how can we synchronise our personal Universe, with the collective one?

Using the archetypal field of Star Wars Episodes 1-9, Ready Player One, Arrival and a surprise movie, we will explore how to ‘travel’ through parallel universes or parallel time and extract valuable information about our Individuation in 2021.

We will use these movies to explore the concept of ‘Symphonicity,’ a new way to see synchronicity on a collective level. and learn how to extract Archetypal Ideas from the projection of our collective archetypical field on the screen that help inspire us in creativity in our lives.

We will then create a game to learn together the necessity of meeting the Unexpected and the necessary chances in our lives by using Arrival and a mystery movie.

This psycho-philo-poetic game is inspired by 20 years of research in my six books which I continue in the article: ‘The Space of Time: Synchronicity as an Act of Creation in Nature and Psyche’ that will be published in the next Pari Perspectives.

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

Jean-François Vezina is a clinical psychologist in Quebec and author of 6 books including Necessary Chances: Synchronicity in the Encounters That Transform Us by Pari Publishing. He was president of the Jungian society of Quebec for seven years and the animator and producer of the radio show Projections: Psychology and Cinema about symbols in the movies. He is also an international lecturer and a musician. www.jfvezina.net/

Discovering Multiple Possibilities in Quantum Theory
2021-10-16 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdDB8ueFnWU

Discovering Multiple Possibilities in Quantum Theory

with Ruth E. Kastner

Saturday October 16, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

In her presentation Ruth will discuss the need for a paradigm change in the way we think about the world. When she says ‘we,’ she means primarily the Western scientific tradition and its attendant metaphysical and epistemological background assumptions, which have led to intractable problems in making sense of quantum theory. Among the assumptions leading us into this cul-de-sac are the empiricist notion that anything real must be tangible, and the Democritan notions that (1) a container called ‘spacetime’ is the delimiter for all real objects and that (2) real entities are separable, localizable ‘things’ that move from place to place in a local manner (as opposed to processes). A further Western background assumption is the notion that all dynamical action occurs in a unilateral fashion: e.g., that a physical quantity (e.g. energy) is emitted by one entity that does all the work and ends up at another spacetime point as a purely passive, secondary effect. The latter can be understood as a ‘Yang-only’ view of interactions, where Yang-type processes are generation, initiation, and creation. In contrast, Yin-type processes include reception, response, and dissolution. The Western paradigm neglects this latter aspect, and one consequence is that it has for many years overlooked an approach to field propagation that could shed new light on the physical meaning of quantum theory.

Ruth will also connect our current quantum conundrum to the insights of physician/psychologist Iain McGilchrist, who has argued that Western culture has emphasized left-brain thinking (based on separation, analysis, and control) and neglected right-brain thinking (based on holism, synthesis, and intuition), which is equally valid and necessary. This holistic aspect includes the mode of possibility, while the analytical, left-brain component sees only actuality. Hans Reichenbach (expressing a minority view among philosophers of science) insightfully remarked that ‘the flow of time is a real becoming in which potentiality is transformed into actuality.’ The paradigm change required by quantum theory includes the recognition that potentiality, or possibility (the intangible level described by quantum states and processes) is just as real as actuality (tangible spacetime phenomena). Thus, quantum theory opens the door to an understanding that the phenomenal level of our experience rests upon a vast ocean of possibility from which creativity and the manifest level of life and experience emerges.

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

Ruth E. Kastner earned her M.S. in Physics and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Maryland. Since that time, she has taught widely and conducted research in Foundations of Physics, particularly in interpretations of quantum theory. She is the author of 3 books: The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Theory: The Reality of Possibility (Cambridge University Press, 2012; 2nd edition forthcoming in Fall 2021), Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles (Imperial College Press, 2015); and Adventures In Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality (World Scientific, 2019). She has presented talks and interviews throughout the world and in video recordings on the interpretational challenges of quantum theory.

Science, Philosophy, Evidence, Explanation and Fine-Tuning
2021-10-17 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt6nO3MTjvA

Science, Philosophy, Evidence, Explanation and Fine-Tuning

with Tim Maudlin

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

2-hour session

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

Various sorts of “multiverse” scenario force us to reflect both on the aims of physics and on the sorts of considerations that can make a theory credible. This topic has been somewhat suppressed in the physics community by the prevalence of operationist and instrumentalist rhetoric (“Shut Up And Calculate”). I will survey the situation with respect to how multiverse theories could address fine-tuning problems, and the challenges that remain in making the principles used for assessing credibility clear and explicit.

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Founder and Director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. His research interests lie primarily in the foundations of physics, metaphysics, and logic. His books include Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity (Blackwell), Truth and Paradox (Oxford), The Metaphysics Within Physics (Oxford), Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press) and New Foundations for Physical Geometry: The Theory of Linear Structures (Oxford). Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory comes out on March 12, 2019. He is a member of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an ACLS fellow.

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

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

Imagined Problems: Real Opportunities

with Susanna Wu-Pong Calvert and Gary Goldberg

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

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

On Wednesday October 20, Susanna and Gary will open our monthly Community Call followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86035064521

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Multiverse in the Mind or is the Mind in the Multiverse?
2021-10-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

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

Is the Multiverse in the Mind or is the Mind in the Multiverse?

with Bernard Carr

Saturday October 23, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

Physics has been triumphant in understanding the vast array of structures in the universe and the forces which link the microscopic and macroscopic domains. This link culminates in the big bang, where the very small (M-theory) meets the very large (the multiverse). The history of physics might also be regarded as the expansion of our consciousness to ever larger and smaller scales. However, at each stage the micro and macro frontiers have been regarded as bordering on philosophy because of the lack of empirical data. So does the merging of the two physics/philosophy borders at the big bang indicate the end of physics or the need for a radically new paradigm. I take the latter view and argue that a feature of the next paradigm must be an expansion of physics to accommodate mind and consciousness. This proposal impinges on two problems on the borders of physics and philosophy: the relationship between physical space and perceptual space and the nature of the passage of time. It is argued that the resolution of both these problems may involve a 5-dimensional model, with the 5th dimension being associated with mental time. This proposal may relate to recent developments in brane cosmology, which is one version if the multiverse proposal. A description of consciousness must also entail a proper understanding of the specious present, the minimum timescale of conscious experience, and this may be associated with other dimensions which arise in M-theory. Higher dimensions may therefore play a vital role in linking physics, the multiverse and mind.

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

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

Closing Panel: Multiple Universes
2021-10-24 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9MqWMqeslk

Closing Panel: Multiple Universes

with Bernard Carr, Geraldine Patrick Encina, Ruth Kastner, Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Muñoz, Paul Tappenden and Jean-Francois Vezina

Sunday October 24, 20219:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST

2-hour session

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

A panel discussion with some of the speakers of the Multiple Universes series will close the event, reflecting on the various perspectives that have emerged in the presentations and comparing different world views.

The session will begin by posing the panelists a few key questions to start the discussion. It will continue as a Q&A session open to everybody. You are invited to have your questions and comments ready, and in formulating them please be mindful of other people’s need to ask their own questions! The best questions are often the most concise ones.

To see the Full Multiple Universes Program

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

Ruth E. Kastner earned her M.S. in Physics and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Maryland. Since that time, she has taught widely and conducted research in Foundations of Physics, particularly in interpretations of quantum theory. She is the author of 3 books: The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Theory: The Reality of Possibility (Cambridge University Press, 2012; 2nd edition forthcoming in Fall 2021), Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles (Imperial College Press, 2015); and Adventures In Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality (World Scientific, 2019). She has presented talks and interviews throughout the world and in video recordings on the interpretational challenges of quantum theory.

Paul Tappenden’s first degree was in philosophy and psychology but he has long taken an interest in physics and was particularly fascinated by the philosophical problems associated with quantum mechanics. His PhD from King’s College, London, was an attempt to relate an important current debate in philosophy of mind with ideas in the so-called Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Since then he has taught philosophy of science to physics students in Grenoble, France, and has pursued the ideas in his doctorate in a series of papers, the most recent being in the journal Synthese, 2019.

Jean-François Vezina is a clinical psychologist in Quebec and author of 6 books including Necessary Chances: Synchronicity in the Encounters That Transform Us by Pari Publishing. He was president of the Jungian society of Quebec for seven years and the animator and producer of the radio show Projections: Psychology and Cinema about symbols in the movies. He is also an international lecturer and a musician. www.jfvezina.net/

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

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

The Consciousness of Neuroscience

with Alex Gomez-Marin

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

Free Online Pari Dialogue

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

On Saturday November 6, Alex will open our monthly Community Call with a presentation and followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89671398135

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

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

The Colour of Sound: Emotional Response to Music Tonality
2021-11-20 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
with Donna Colemanpianist and performance researcher

Saturday November 209:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET

On top of all this I present a fine case of coloured hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the colour sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet . . . has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes a hard g (vulcanised rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. . . . Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Light and sound are waves. Light waves behave differently from sound waves, but they have wave-ness in common. Colour is a result of the refraction (bending, movement) of light. Sound is the result of air being moved. Light and sound also have in common the fact that they are perceived by an entity. It is not inconceivable that a colour perception could evoke or be evoked by a sonic perception, a phenomenon known as synaesthesia.

This two-hour webinar explores the emotional response to sound as potentially distinct and discrete experiences depending upon the key of the musical composition being played, along with the possibility that the listener may hear colour.

In the years 1722 and again in 1744, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote twenty-four preludes and fugues, each in a different key, for the two volumes known as Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Keyboard). The “tempered” scale, which had gradually evolved out of the Medieval church modes, consists of twelve pitches, each of which can be cast as “major” or “minor,” for a total of twenty-four “keys.”

Selected preludes from this collection of forty-eight will be performed, and participants will be invited to make note of any and all perceptions that arise. Discussion of these responses along with general reflections upon various colour theories and the nature of perception will follow. The music of other composers who assign colour to key, in particular, Olivier Messiaen and Alexander Skryabin (Scriabin), and composers who sought to create music with “no key” (Anton Webern, Ruth Crawford) will also be presented for listeners’ responses.

On Saturday November 20, Donna will open our monthly Community Call with a presentation and followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82279864300

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

Recommended Reading:

Visualising Visions: The Significance of Messiaen’s Colours by Håkon Austbøhttps://www.musicandpractice.org/volume-2/visualizing-visions-the-significance-of-messiaens-colours/

Scriabin’s Color Symbolism in Music by Ursula Rehn Wolfmanhttps://interlude.hk/scriabins-color-symbolism-music/

Dr Donna Coleman is a multi-award-winning concert pianist, recording artist, author, performance researcher and philosopher, and master teacher whose career spans a half-century, of which more than half has been based in Australia. She is also an accomplished weaver and photographer and an amateur but passionate astronomer and archaeologist with a keen interest in the culture of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the United States. As Head of Keyboard and of Postgraduate Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, she convened weekly thought-provoking seminars that explored relationships between music and other disciplines. Donna is writing a book entitled Dancing with the Piano, a collection of essays distilled from these sessions and from her many years of phenomenological engagement with her ultimate dance partner, the piano.

photo credit: Peter Paul Geoffrion

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

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

Saturday January 8, 2022

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

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

Free Online Pari Dialogue

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

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

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

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

Lee Nichol, Moderator

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

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

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

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

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Schrum received his PhD in quantum theory at Queen’s University, following which he spent two post-doctoral years with David Bohm at Birkbeck College. Here, he entered Bohm’s world of creative and subtle philosophical approaches to physics and his enquiry into consciousness and what may lie beyond.

David Schrum continues in these explorations, in physics developing a new approach to relativistic quantum theory and, through the dialogue process, going into what it is to bring to light that which lies enfolded within our individual and collective consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musical Borrowing: Theft or Tribute?
2022-01-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ssv-oIe8D4

a webinar produced, presented, and performed by

Dr Donna Coleman

Streaming from Studio OutBach® Santa Fe, situated in the heart of the deep Indigenous history of Native New Mexico, from ancient Paleoindians to Keres- and Tanoan-speaking peoples who were raided by the Comanches.

Wednesday January 269:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT | 6:00pm CET | 4:00am AEST

From the series:

The Quintessence of Music with Dr Donna Coleman

A monthly musical and philosophical journey into the Mind, Heart, and Soul of Sound Organized in Time

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”

Ecclesiastes 1: 10–11

The practice of appropriating a musical phrase, a motivic idea, a concept, or even an entire melodic line as material for a “new” musical composition is as old as music itself. Composers from Johann Sebastian Bach (and before) to the present day have mined hymns, folk music, the clickety-claque of train trucks on the rails, and the work of other composers (who may have borrowed from others themselves!) in the process of creating their own sonatas, cantatas, symphonies, and suites.

This two-hour, interactive webinar asks participants to consider the notion of originality vs plagiarism. If a composer “borrows” material from a pre-existing musical source, at what point can that composer claim that her material is “hers”?

Donna will discuss and perform examples of musical compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ferruccio Busoni, and Charles Ives that make extensive and obvious use of borrowed material. Participants will have the opportunity to present their response to the question: theft or tribute?

On Wednesday January 26, Donna will open our monthly Community Call with a presentation and followed by discussion and Q&A.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!

Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81479605511

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

Recommended Reading:

Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music by Ferruccio Busoni (1907)https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31799/31799-h/31799-h.htmTranslated by Theodore Baker; published 1911 by Schirmer

Essays Before a Sonata by Charles Edward Ives (1918)https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3673/3673-h/3673-h.htmPublished by The Knickerbocker Press, 1920 at Ives’s expense

Donna Coleman is a multi-award-winning concert pianist, recording artist, author, performance researcher and philosopher, and master teacher whose career spans a half-century, of which more than half has been based in Australia. She is also an accomplished weaver and photographer and an amateur but passionate astronomer and archaeologist with a keen interest in the culture of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the United States. As Head of Keyboard and of Postgraduate Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, she convened weekly thought-provoking seminars that explored relationships between music and other disciplines. Donna is writing a book entitled Dancing with the Piano, a collection of essays distilled from these sessions and from her many years of phenomenological engagement with her ultimate dance partner, the piano.

Photo credit: Peter Paul Geoffrion

Dualities
2022-02-05 17:59 - 2022-03-06 20:00 | Online
Dualities: The Marriage of Opposites

with Jena Axelrod, Mauro Bergonzi, Anjali D’souza, Andrew Fellows, Gary Goldberg, Basil Hiley, Ruth Kastner, Shantena Sabbadini, Mark Saban and David Schrum

and 4 Sunday sessions with Mark Vernon onDualities on Spiritual Paths: Oppositions and Contraries in Plato, Dante, William Blake and Iain McGilchrist

February 5 – 6, 12 – 13, 19 – 20, 26 – 27, March 5 – 6 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

10 Two-hour sessions, Saturdays and Sundays

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

Program of Event

Saturday February 5A Conversation about Duality and Non-duality in East and Westwith Anjali D’souza, Andrew Fellows and Shantena Sabbadini

Sunday February 6The Way of Love: Plato and Participation in the Good, Beautiful and Truewith Mark Vernon

Saturday February 12Duo Duels on Non-duality, the Quantum Potential, and the Nature of Consciousnesswith Jena Axelrod and Basil Hiley

Sunday February 13The Way Up and the Way Down: Dante and the One Path from Hell to Paradisewith Mark Vernon

Saturday February 19Connecting the Actuality of Things in Space-Time to the Reality of Possibility in QuantumLand: Convergences in Quantum Physics, Brain Science, Philosophy and Mystical Thoughtwith Gary Goldberg and Ruth E. Kastner

Sunday February 20Contraries and Human Existence: William Blake and Cleansing the Doors of Perceptionswith Mark Vernon

Saturday February 26Beyond Dualistic Mind: Journeying Together on David Bohm’s ‘No Road’with David Schrum

Sunday February 27The Master and the Emissary: Dualities in the Philosophy of Iain McGilchristwith Mark Vernon

Saturday March 5Jung’s Two Personalities: Psychological Implicationswith Mark Saban

Sunday March 6Dualities and Non-Dualitywith Mauro Bergonzi and Shantena Sabbadini

Join us online at the Pari Center to explore the fascinating and seemingly endless topic of dualities where together with experts and scholars we will examine the meaning of dualities in physics, philosophy, spirituality, literature, psychology and reality.

The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.Niels BohrAs quoted by his son Hans Bohr in ‘My Father,’ published in Niels Bohr: His Life and Work.

Beauty is the harmony of opposing things.Sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)

Life is full of dualities. Things coexist, oppose, contrast and parallel every day. Duality teaches us that every aspect of life is created from a balanced interaction of opposite and competing forces. Yet these forces are not just opposites; they are complementary.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary the word dual means ‘with two parts’ and duality ‘the state of combining two things.’ In philosophy ‘mind-body dualism’ was first formulated by the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes who stated that there exists a clear distinction between physical and mental phenomena..

In many of the theologies and religions of the world we also find the pervasive idea that the forces of good and evil are equally balanced in the universe. Another common idea is that of the dual nature of human beings, existing in both body and spirit. Christian dualism refers to the belief that God and creation are distinct and also a belief in the dual personality of Christ (human and divine). Traditional Chinese philosophy similarly believes that there is both an active male and passive female principle in the universe, which is embodied in the symmetric yin-yang.

In 1933, C.G. Jung wrote that duality is a fact of human nature and that we cannot achieve wholeness without integrating the dark or shadow side of the self. According to Jung it is the lack of awareness of our duality and inner contrasts that may lead to uncontrolled outbursts of the shadow, as in the time of the Nazis.

Several political theories also show evidence of a kind of dualistic thinking. In Marxism, for example, we find a dialectical view of the relationship between the theory and empirical practice (praxis) of society and political systems, the thesis and anti-thesis, a continual tension between capitalism and socialism, as well as between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

A key notion of quantum mechanics is the complementarity of incompatible observables, which are both needed to fully describe a quantum system, but cannot be measured simultaneously. An example is the complementarity of position and momentum of a particle and more generally of ‘particle’ and ‘wave’ behaviour of quantum systems.

Duality is explored in such fictional writings as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Romeo and Juliet, The Picture of Dorian Grayand even in the contrasting characters of Harry Potter and Voldemort. Films such as Black Swan and Fight Club explore the dualism of human nature. Batman and Joker are the polar opposites of order and chaos, light and darkness. And it is the two-sided nature of the Force that propels the storyline in Star Wars.

In the visual arts, The Kiss, by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) depicts a nearly indistinguishable man and woman as two figures become one as they emerge from a single block of material. Dutch artist M.C. Escher was fascinated by duality and symmetry.

In Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching we read:

When in the world all appreciate beauty as beauty,then ugliness is already there;when all appreciate good as good,then bad is already there.

Therefore being and non-being generate each other,difficult and easy complete each other,long and short define each other,high and low lean towards each other,voice and music harmonise with each other,before and after follow each other.

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

with Anjali D’souza, Andrew Fellows and Shantena Sabbadini

Saturday February 5, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

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

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

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

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

To see the Full Dualities Program

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

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

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

Shantena Augusto Sabbadini graduated from the University of Milan in 1968 and was awarded his PhD in physics from the University of California in 1976. In Milan he researched the foundations of quantum physics, laying the base for what is currently known as the decoherence interpretation of quantum physics. At the University of California, he contributed to the theoretical work behind the first identification of a black hole, the X-ray source Cygnus X-1. In the 1990s he was scientific consultant for the Eranos Foundation, an East-West research center founded under the auspices of C.G. Jung in the 1930s. In that context he produced various translations and commentaries of Chinese classics in Italian and English, including the Yijing and the trilogy of Daoist classics, the Laozi, the Zhuangzi and the Liezi. From 2002 onwards he collaborated with F. David Peat running the Pari Center for New Learning and in 2017 he succeeded his friend and colleague as director of the center.

Shantena leads workshops and courses on the philosophical implications of quantum physics, on Daoism, and on using the Yijing as a tool for introspection. His most recent book in English, Pilgrimages to Emptiness: Rethinking Reality through Quantum Physics, was published by Pari Publishing in 2017.

The Way of Love: Plato and Participation in the Good, Beautiful and True
2022-02-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
The Way of Love: Plato and Participation in the Good, Beautiful and True

with Mark Vernon

Sunday February 6, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

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

Though Plato is often accused of dualism, the word itself didn’t exist in his time, which points to a subtler and crucial reassessment of what the Ancient Greek philosopher was driving at. He recognised that the body and death are sites of experience within which we can know of their seeming opposites, namely life itself. This realisation is gained by fostering the capacity to love. We will also consider how early Platonic thought developed with Neoplatonic and theistic perceptions.

To see the Full Dualities Program

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.

Duo Duels on Non-duality, the Quantum Potential, and the Nature of Consciousness
2022-02-12 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Duo Duels on Non-duality, the Quantum Potential, and the Nature of Consciousness

with Basil Hiley and Jena Axelrod

Saturday February 12, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

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

Join quantum physicist Basil Hiley and Pari Center’s Jena Axelrod in a dynamic discussion on the structure of our universe, the quantum potential, the nature of consciousness, and the paradigm shift they both see as being necessary in the West.

Nondual philosophy teaches that, ‘the multiplicity of the universe is reducible to one essential reality.’ The conclusion is that reality is a dynamic process accessible and known to people through music, art, transpersonal psychology, Buddhism, physics, and many more, if not all, fields. The Western worldview favours the mechanistic, static, ridgid, and as such has lost the sense of dynamism, and interconnectedness prevalent in most indigenous cultures, Eastern philosophies, and in the science of the quantum potential.

Both Basil and Jena perceive nonduality as a core truth of our reality. Basil approaches the nature of reality, and the quantum potential, from the perspective of math and physics; Jena approaches the nature of reality, and of our unified consciousness from within, via the experiential internal explorations of a psychonaut.

How then might these two seem to converge in their shared worldview—a nondual explanation of the nature of our dynamic reality—when approaching their queries from such disparate angles? Like Bohr’s complementarity, Basil and Jena may evidence that seemingly oppositional explanations of a phenomenon might be the fullest way to describe that phenomenon.

Basil Hiley will introduce us to his latest discoveries on the structure of the universe and how they relate to the quantum potential, a central concept of the de Broglie-Bohm formulation from David Bohm’s 1952 paper, A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables, which was later expanded upon by Bohm and Hiley. Jena will interject as Basil’s mathematical points become too abstract for a lay audience, and will redirect the discussion back toward the real world practical application and meaning of these concepts!

To see the Full Dualities Program

Professor Basil Hiley, collaborator and colleague of David Bohm for over 30 years 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 collaboration 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.

Pari Center Associate Director Jena Axelrod is the founder of Numena Productions LLC, where she directs and produces surreal, enlightening film, television, and web content. Premiering in 2022, the documentary Absurdity of Certaintyfeatures Pari Center co-founder physicist-philosopher Dr F. David Peat.

Jena works as a comedian, best known as Jena Not Jameson on Jackie Martling’s radio show on the Howard Stern channel at SiriusXM. Jena also works as a workshop facilitator for ThriveLoud, and as a Sales Director at Ideal Prediction providing trade analytics services to banks, hedge funds, and cryptocurrency firms.

The Way Up and the Way Down: Dante and the One Path from Hell to Paradise
2022-02-13 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
The Way Up and the Way Down: Dante and the One Path from Hell to Paradise

with Mark Vernon

Sunday February 13, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

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

Dante’s Divine Comedy famously opens with the poet wakening in a dark wood. His life has seemingly taken a wrong turn. But why must he embark first on a journey through hell, before ascending Mount Purgatory, only then entering paradise? What has the way into darkness to do with the way into light? He learns to say ‘yes’ to all of reality, and that the light includes the darkness, even as tragedy is integrated into the comedy of divine life.

To see the Full Dualities Program

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.

Connecting the Actuality of Things in Space-Time to the Reality of Possibility in QuantumLand
2022-02-19 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Connecting the Actuality of Things in Space-Time to the Reality of Possibility in QuantumLand

Convergences in Quantum Physics, Brain Science, Philosophy and Mystical Thought

with Ruth E. Kastner and Gary Goldberg

Saturday February 19, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

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

In their joint presentation, Ruth and Gary will examine convergent trends across multiple disciplines indicating a fundamental paradigm shift is necessary and underway. The dominant Nominalistic perspective focuses only on phenomena that are detectable through empirical observation of discrete ‘things’ and ‘events’ situated in space-time, and sees reality as exclusively constituted as such, maintaining that potentiality is not real. There is a fundamental ‘threat’ inherent in such a worldview. What is ignored—to our peril—is the underlying matrix of relational reality, an ‘Implicate Order’ that sculpts out the possibilities that are offered for actualization out of a primordial flowing continuum, a hidden potent realm of streaming quantum process that we will call ‘QuantumLand’ for reasons that will be explained.

As Hans Reichenbach insightfully remarked, ‘the flow of time is a real becoming in which potentiality is transformed into actuality.’ Through time-dependent process, the possibilities generated in the hidden relational quantum realm presage the physical actuality of our manifest phenomenal world. Billions of years of biological evolution have conferred an ‘Actuality Instrument Panel’—ie. our physical senses, that allow us to function—to ‘fly on instruments’, so to speak, through this veiled reality—as embodied, but fundamentally relational creatures.

A further assumption of the Western modern worldview is the notion that all action occurs via ‘billiard-ball’ mechanism, with isolated entities (ie. lone ‘monads’ without communicative capacity) traveling unilaterally through space-time, thus precluding the possibility of any real, two-way communication—ie. ‘trans-action’—between constituents. According to this ‘modern’ perspective, there is no mediating factor in between entities and the only logic applicable is classical and binary. The Laws of Non-contradiction and Excluded Middle are in full force, dictating intolerance for uncertainty. Charles Sanders Peirce, over 100 years ago warned of the dire deficiencies of this rigid perspective which he called ‘Necessitarianism‘, with its championing of ‘hard determinism’, and the denial of so-called ‘generals,’ ‘potentiality’ and ‘free will.’ Necessitarianism is a ‘Yang-only’ understanding limited to the proliferative processes of generation, initiation, and creation. Precluded are Yin-type selective processes: reception, response, growth and dissolution. Yang involves an exclusive focus on ‘things’, ‘relata’ that then come into ordering relationship. Yin involves the ordering relations themselves.

Modern Western science continues to be dominated by ‘Yang-only’ prioritizing of relata over relations, placing ‘things’ over the ‘connections’—the importance of which is minimized in the Yang mindset as being ‘mind-dependent’ and thus NOT real. One important consequence is that an approach to field propagation that could shed new light on the physical meaning of quantum theory has been, for many years, overlooked. What exactly is quantum theory trying to tell us about where we ‘moderns’ have gone wrong in our understanding of how the cosmos operates? A viable alternative understanding places Yang and Yin processes into a configuration ofbalanced mutual complementarity rather than conflictual opposing polarities, best understood by recognizing negotiated ‘transaction’, of communicative interaction and informational exchange via relation, as real and of fundamental significance. Drawing on emerging concepts in brain science (the functional specialization of the two cerebral hemispheres in accordance with the divided brain theory of Iain McGilchrist), in philosophy (the turn toward ‘panpsychism’—implying that everything is conscious) and in mystical thought (the referenced yinyang concept of Chinese origin, Kabbalistic principles, beliefs of indigenous cultures, etc), we develop the hypothesis implying that:

Everything is conscious and has ‘free will’ to some extent (consistent with the Born Rule and ‘nomic grounding’),

Consciousness is linked to agency

Agency is linked to transaction understood as bidirectionally negotiated communicative interaction in which there is an actualenergetic exchange consistent with the principle of mass-energy-information equivalence ( see https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794 ) between an ‘emitter’ and an ‘absorber’, with the Possibilist/Relativistic version of the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics implying that the available phenomenal level of our actual experience rests upon a vast oceanic continuum of possibility out of which the creative, the unanticipated, and the whole of physical actuality arises through a process occurring in QuantumLand involving an exchange of ‘active information’ via a hidden interaction involving an ‘offer wave’ from an ‘emitter’ entity traveling forward in time connecting with a ‘confirmation wave’ from an ‘absorber’ entity traveling backward in time to the originating ‘emitter.’

This, we believe, is the ultimate message that quantum theory is attempting to drive home.

To see the Full Dualities Program

Ruth E. Kastner earned her M.S. in Physics and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Maryland. Since that time, she has taught widely and conducted research in Foundations of Physics, particularly in interpretations of quantum theory. She is the author of 3 books: The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Theory: The Reality of Possibility (Cambridge University Press, 2012; 2nd edition forthcoming in Fall 2021), Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles (Imperial College Press, 2015); and Adventures In Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality (World Scientific, 2019). She has presented talks and interviews throughout the world and in video recordings on the interpretational challenges of quantum theory.

Gary Goldberg obtained a B.A.Sc. (bachelor of applied science) in electrical engineering science at the University of Toronto and his M.D. at McMaster University. He completed specialty training in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and subsequently sub-specialized in Brain Injury Medicine. He has worked and taught at academic medical centers in Philadelphia, Toronto, Pittsburgh and Richmond, Virginia during the course of a nearly 40-year career in brain injury rehabilitation. He retired from active clinical participation in September, 2020 to turn to other personal activities. He has sustained an abiding interest in how neuroscience, physical science, as well as interpersonal experience and systems of belief examined through a semiotic relational lens have informed his work as well as his understanding of the human condition. He currently serves as a Scientific Advisor to the Pari Center for New Learning.

Contraries and Human Existence: William Blake and Cleansing the Doors of Perceptions
2022-02-20 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
Contraries and Human Existence: William Blake and Cleansing the Doors of Perceptions

with Mark Vernon

Sunday February 20, 20229:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

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

Sight is found in the struggles of life, William Blake realised, as his own life was lived between heaven and hell, innocence and experience, vision and labour. Opposites are the energy of the imagination and bring the power to see through surfaces. Blake offers maps that chart the transformation from the narrow sight of Ulro to the full embrace of Eternity. We will also consider the role of dualities in Romantic philosophers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

To see the Full Dualities Program

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.

The Future Scientist - A Conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
2022-02-23 18:00 - 19:30 | Online
Watch the recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpr0QP4Qcvk

A Conversation between Rupert Sheldrake and Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín

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

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

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

In this second session of the conversation series on “The Future Scientist”, Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín will be in conversation with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.

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.

After a brief discussion of the issues raised by dogmatism within mainstream materialism and accusations of heresy by orthodox institutional science, in this second conversation we will address weak points in contemporary science in areas that might be more promising for breakthroughs, accelerating a change of paradigm already under way, and leading to a more comprehensive and inclusive worldview.

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

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.

Beyond Dualistic Mind: Journeying Together on David Bohm’s ‘No Road’
2022-02-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Online
with David Schrum

Saturday February 26, 2022

9:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT | 18:00 CET

2-hour session

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

The Heart Sutra, taken from ancient Buddhism, concludes with this evocation of awakening, “gone, gone, gone to the farthest shore….”

‘This shore’ and ‘the other shore’, nowadays, have become common metaphors in spiritual discourse, ‘this side’ (here) representing the field of fragmented mind with its conflict of opposing dualities; ‘the other side’ (there) reflecting wholeness; the gap between these two signifying the great divide between this and that. But, as sages and mystics also have indicated, when one reaches the other side, he/she may find that it is this side—that always it has been this side, but now is differently perceived. This journey to perception is the journey beyond duality.

But what is this voyage—practically, beyond metaphor, beyond verbal description and explanation? What might it be to touch onto the ‘other shore’ as an actuality? David Bohm worked to open these questions at depth. Over the years, through talks, writings, and conversations, he shared an invitation to enquiry into and observation of ourselves in a movement that is away from nothing but, rather, is into what is. What he sought to open is a journey intimately within, which might well be characterized as “here, here, here upon the innermost shore.” Such exploration takes us beyond concepts, words, and their dualities. It leads us to preverbal territories which are in their nature without maps. It brings us to be way-finders on ‘no road’.

Here is the field that we propose to open to together—tentatively, subtly—considering both what Bohm and others have offered, and that which we may come upon ourselves.

To see the Full Dualities Program

David Schrum received his PhD in quantum theory at Queen’s University, following which he spent two post-doctoral years with David Bohm at Birkbeck College. Here, he entered Bohm’s world of creative and subtle philosophical approaches to physics and his enquiry into consciousness and what may lie beyond.

David Schrum continues in these explorations, in physics developing a new approach to relativistic quantum theory and, through the dialogue process, going into what it is to bring to light that which lies enfolded within our individual and collective consciousness.
