Events

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The recent work of the psychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, allows us to bring the role of dualities in spiritual perception right up to date. He has shown how brain lateralisation facilitates two types of perception. They are asymmetric, both required in right relation for the fullest awareness of the world, which is so often lacking in our times. In this session we will weave in insights from Carl Jung and process theology too.

This two-hour, fully interactive webinar will introduce the harmonic series and the musical intervals produced by it; the way a scale and its associated harmonic scheme and thence, the musical structures that depend upon this harmony, are derived from it; consider the significance and symbolism of the number five (quinta; cinque) and the so-called “fifth element” in the realm of music; discuss the notion of cadence and its role in Western European Art Music structures; explore the role of the Fibonacci Series in musical structure; and analyse and present in performance the music of several composers, beginning, as always, with Johann Sebastian Bach, discussing the interval relationships in Das Wohltemperierte Klavier  Vol. I Prelude in C major BWV 846.

In his book, Two Souls Alas: Jung’s Two Personalities and the Making of Analytical Psychology (2019), Mark Saban looksinto the way Jung uses his memoir to describe the experience of having two personalities. Saban argues there that Jung’s experience of the dynamic between these two personalities informs basic principles behind the development of Jung’s psychological model and indeed Jung’s entire mature psychology. He suggests that what Jung took from this experience was the principle that psychological health required the avoidance of one-sidedness and that this was achieved through the experience of tension between what Jung described as two conflicting personalities.

What is the ultimate nature of reality? In our contemporary scientific culture reality appears to consist of a multiplicity of interacting parts. That multiplicity exhibits some fundamental dualities: being and becoming, particle and field, mind and matter.

On the other hand the main stance of non-duality (advaita in sanskrit) points to the simple fact that in reality there are endless differences, but no separation at all: reality is regarded as an indivisible whole, while the perception of isolated entities is just a mental construct without any cogent ontological foundation (including the idea of a separate ‘ego’ dwelling ‘within’ a single body/mind).