Workshop – Elemental Transformation: Changing How We Work with Change

Workshop – Elemental Transformation: Changing How We Work with Change

Unfortunately, the workshop has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled this Summer; keep an eye out here for the announcement! Form / Re-Form / In-Form / Trans-Form Elemental Transformation: Changing How We Work with Change A hands-on/minds-on workshop with Frank Chester and Seth Miller Saturday, March 20th 9 am – 5 pm Live Oak Charter School Petaluma, CA Pre-registration is required. All workshop materials provided....

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The Art of Nature: Alchemy, Goethe, and a New Aesthetic Consciousness

The Art of Nature: Alchemy, Goethe, and a New Aesthetic Consciousness

Are you fascinated by the beauty of forms in the natural world?  Do you sense something amazing at work out there, like an intelligence that lies just beneath the surfaces of things?  Then I invite you to read a new essay that explores the building of a new aesthetic consciousness that seeks to connect us...

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Consequences of the discovery of perspective in art

Consequences of the discovery of perspective in art

The “discovery” of perspective was a radical point (pardon the pun) in the development of art, and was intimately tied in with a whole shifting of consciousness during the time of the Renaissance and forward, having correlative expressions in the increasing reliance upon an “objective” perspective from which to view the world.  Science in...

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Coincidence, Randomness, and Meaning

Coincidence, Randomness, and Meaning

Maybe you've had this experience:  You are thinking about an acquaintance that you haven't thought about in a long time and at that moment the phone rings.  "What are the odds that it's Jerry?" you think to yourself.  And when it IS Jerry on the other line it seems somehow magical, amazing, beyond mere...

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Musings on the rise of the intellect in ancient Greece

Musings on the rise of the intellect in ancient Greece

I’ve always been struck by the historical uniqueness of ancient Greece.  The most amazing and radical transitions were experienced by the culture(s) present around the Aegean sea during only a few centuries.  The most striking thing about the transformation was the rise of a thinking that started to take itself as its own object. ...

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Musings on Paleolithic Art and Consciousness

Musings on Paleolithic Art and Consciousness

I’m actually somewhat uncomfortable calling Paleolithic renderings “art” – not because they don’t meet some standard set of criterion, but because of the very nature of the ‘calling’ itself seems to go against the experience of the makers of the art.  See, there again, an assumption: “the makers of the art”, which includes a...

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Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo: A Beginning Comparison

Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo: A Beginning Comparison

A cursory Google search (2009) didn't turn up anything promising in regards to comparing Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo.  Hopefully this will help: Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo: A Beginning Comparison Summary: This longer essay summarizes the basic elements of the spiritual-cosmological worldviews of two of the most important modern, integrative spiritual thinkers: Rudolf Steiner and...

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Informal review of Being, Evolution, and Immortality: An Outline of Integral Philosophy, by Haridas Chaudhuri

Informal review of Being, Evolution, and Immortality: An Outline of Integral Philosophy, by Haridas Chaudhuri

My general impression of this work was that Chaudhuri was writing in a very philosophical style about a topic which is far more than philosophical.  The extent to which he took pains to delineate some various philosophical perspectives so that he could present the viewpoint of the integral yoga surprised me; I'm not sure...

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Response to Ken Wilber and “Embracing Reality” by Brad Reynolds – A Critical Perspective

Response to Ken Wilber and “Embracing Reality” by Brad Reynolds – A Critical Perspective

Embracing Reality offers two things, something of a semi-biographical contextualization of the development of Wilber's thoughts and writings, and a series of more-or-less detailed summaries of those same works.  For anyone who is not familiar with the different phases of Wilber's thought, this is a nice reference work, and was most edifying for its picture...

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Francisco Varela and Ethical Know-How

Francisco Varela and Ethical Know-How

This post is about bringing forth a different way of speaking about ethics, which is usually bogged down with a load of ridiculously unquestioned Western philosophical THOUGHT baggage, which keeps ethics locked nicely away in principles which themselves are never acted, only known. For this reason, Varela's idea that perception is based in ACTION is...

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Conversation, Conversion, and Transdisciplinarity

Every conversation can lead to conversion; to a new context, a different way of perceiving, a step out of habitual patterns of thinking that we unknowingly carry with us or alternately identify as self.  As one who attempts to live with Morin's "new way of thinking", one is never converted; one can only be...

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