Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/08/22 - 10/15/22
10:30 am PDT - 3:00 pm PDT
Categories
2022 International Jean Gebser Society Conference
Note: Please register using the PayPal link below. You will be sent a zoom link prior to the conference starting, not immediately upon registration.
The Presence of the Future in Us
Saturdays, October 8 and October 15 starting at 10:30am Pacific Time
Gebser writes:
What is of immediate importance is not the future in its temporal and external aspect, but its presence in us. [EPO 299—see extended excerpts below]
It is human to think about things to come. The instinct for survival is the instinct for hope—that night will turn into day, that dreaming will unfold into waking, that children will be born and grow up in a world that holds together, that life is purposeful and worth living in our loving and being loved. The religious instinct discerns the naturalness of our dying in the wholeness of the whole. As Gebser said, the presence of the future in us is not merely temporal and external but is all-pervasive in our being human.
We live in troubled times, the ends and beginnings of times that lack certainty, with planetary changes, transformations of awareness, at scales of magnitude without precedent in human experience. These mutations are beyond the comprehension of any individual or society. Anxieties about the future are intensifying dramatically among the young. Things are heating up.
Honest conversations must now take place about the immediate effects of planetary climate changes that are coming faster than we think.
What language is workable, now, in the deluge of real and increasingly well-faked information flows? Facts and values blur and slip. How does the true differ from the false?
As our means of research extends exponentially so does the call to new depths and dimensions of awaring of the future within each of us and among us. Gebser speaks both of primordial anxiety and of primordial trust. With the latency of the future in us, he emphasizes that “everything hinges on knowing when to make things happen and when to let things happen to us.” Yet our human knowing is always exceeded by the unknown and unknowable.
What lenses are available to us for veritioning, for discerning truthfully and transparently the actual living of our lives, through all our relationships—the most intimate and the planetary—in the concretion of the spiritual?
Our 2022 conference invites us to engage in vibrant conversations.
Here is a link to last year’s online conference videos:
2022 Agenda
Saturday, October 8
10:30am Pacific Time
Ancestral Figurine
John Dotson
Sculpting, for me, is a spiritual practice. I can talk about this process freely, but the meaning of the work cannot be verbalized or classified in analytical terms. The mental is included, of course—proportions matter, basic measurements are made, and craft is vital. Mythic elements are equally significant, and even more affective are the magical stirrings. But the originary powers in the work are archaic, primordial. In my presentiation, I will speak—at best, in something of a ritual chant—to an emergent sculpture named Ancestral Figurine. It is comprised, as is all my work, of many sub-sculptures that appear as episodes or curvatures of time. Day by day now, hour to hour, we are beholding the apocalyptic transmutation of planetary life. The Greek word apokalyptein means to “uncover, disclose, reveal,” and in an immediate, embodying way, Ancestral Figurine serves as vessel for the convergence of past-future-presencing, or as Gebser says, the “at-once.”
John Dotson is a graduate of Northwestern University, and has taught widely, at Santa Catalina School in Monterey, at UC Santa Cruz–Ext and UC Irvine–Ext, and elsewhere. He has brought forth books of poetry and prose, plays, visual art in multiple modes, sculpture, and performances in various media. A long-term work, Singing in My Chains: Hearing Dylan Thomas at the Birth of an Age, is forthcoming. John co-facilitated Gebser conferences in Monterey, 2012, and at Asilomar, 2019. He is president of the Monterey Friends of C.G. Jung.
11:30am Pacific
Future Presencing: Gebser’s Project, Part 2
Michael Purdy
There are some interesting similarities between the era when Gebser was writing his major work, The Ever-present Origin, and the present era. The era in which he was writing was similar, in some ways, to our present scene. He had a world war, the atom bomb, and the afterglow of a world war. Now we have a planetary climate crisis, war in Ukraine, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, and a perspectivally fragmented public in the USA that cannot seem to agree on much, or get much done.
Question: Will the center hold, is their faith enough–and what about a will to action? If the future is “now”: Where are we going? What is the how of our future–rather than the why or what? Gebser is about how we contribute to the emerging consciousness. This presentation will look at the origin of the future in the present (Nietzsche), describe the phenomenology of the fullness of the present, and finally consider how we go forth from the future presencing.
Michael W. Purdy (PhD Ohio University), Emeritus Professor, Governors State U. (of IL). He has authored articles for the International Journal of Listening, (including two articles in 2015), and Integrative Explorations (Gebser) Journal (and editor). Listening and Qualitative Research, in Listening and Human Communication in the 21st Century (Blackwell, 2009); Listening and the Non–Technologized Self in Cultura De Guatemala and Transparency and communication: Dialogue in financial reporting and media communication in Communication, Comparative Cultures and Civilizations (Hampton, 2008). This year he also posted articles (Listening Ecology: Tuning into the Environment, Saving the Planet & Listening Sanity) for the Global Listening Centre, Kalkata, India (http://www.globallisteningcentre.org).
12:30pm Pacific BREAK
1:15pm Pacific
Nurturing the Presence of a Future in Our Children
Robert Mitchell
“We no longer live in the Present, but in the darkness of the potential of the Future.” The darkness of the potential future is nowhere more evident than in our children, yet it is the educational system—as much as the parents and the community—that is charged with nurturing the presence of the future in them. In the United States, as well as other nations, there are three different visions of the future emerging in what and how we teach young people in our schools. 1) the dominant vision is secular, techno-modernist transhumanism, where technology imposes itself on defining the future; 2) a competing model is regressive Religious-Nationalism, a semi-democratized theocracy; 3) a Jungian-Gebserian model can be propagated through the individuated personality of the teacher, a holistic classroom methodology, and a curriculum that teaches recapitulation theory and the cultural continuum of humanity as envisioned by Jean Gebser.
Robert Mitchell is an educator, independent scholar, and writer. He taught secondary math, English and history in both private and public schools in Mexico, Illinois, California, and Maryland for 27 years. He currently lectures and writes on Developmental Individuation, Holistic Education, and the Culture of Democracy.
2:15pm Pacific Time OPEN DISCUSSION
Saturday, October 15
10:30am Pacific
Original Love:
An Interpretation of Gebser in Light of Our Changing View of Mother Earth
Glenn Aparicio Parry
What does love have to do with Jean Gebser’s unfolding structures of consciousness? Everything, it seems. Our original, archaic consciousness was indivisible from a loving Mother Earth. The first hint of disconnection gave birth to a magical consciousness that sought to reunite us with all of nature through vibration, prayer, song, and later language; mythical consciousness arose so that we could remember our oneness with all living things through story; and rational consciousness was initially born as an expression of love, beauty, and harmony. It is only when rational/linear consciousness became sufficiently degraded that we began to imagine the human as separate and transcendent from nature. It was that separation that gave birth to the illusion of linear time and irreversible human progress independent from the progress of Earth. Such hubris has put our own survival and that of many other species in jeopardy. An integral consciousness that remembers the arc of evolution and reimagines what it is to be human is now imperative. Gebser’s vision (similar to other visionaries that were his contemporaries such as Sri Aurobindo and The Mother) implies a future human—and a future redefinition of love that is based not on romantic love between humans, but on love for all living things. Such love will be no longer identified with the physical human body but the body of Mother Earth. The current trend of gender fluidity is a harbinger of this greater shift now underway, foretelling a time when the future human will be non-gendered, one with the Earth and cosmos once more.
Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is the two-time Nautilus award winning author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Press, 2015) and is currently working on Original Love, the third book in the trilogy. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the president of the think tank: Circle for Original Thinking www.originalthinking.us and is the host of the Circle for Original Thinking podcast. Parry organized and participated in the groundbreaking Language of Spirit Conferences from 1999–2011 that brought together Native and Western scientists in dialogue, moderated by Leroy Little Bear. He regularly moderates dialogues for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, of which he is a member. He is also an avid outdoorsman who enjoys hiking and fly fishing. He lives in northern New Mexico in a fairly remote area amid wild horses together with his wife Tomoko, dog Momo, and cat Cappuccino.
11:30am Pacific
Lost in Translation:
A Dire Call to Embrace Experiencing and Becoming
Jessie Shaw, MSOM
Embracing a belief, a person, a place, an event can be a bodily movement or metaphor that takes up less than a minute or extends across the span of one’s life. From the Greek word brakhion—’upper arm’, it suggests enveloping not at arm’s length, but close in, right next to one’s heart. This presentation will explore how an ongoing embrace of ‘experiencing’ and the ever-unfolding ‘becoming’ open up possibility of the ‘futuring’ flowing through, in, and around us.
We seem hopelessly lost in translation…under the spell of analytic maps that leave out that which is most critical, of step-removed assertions that mask deep truths, and of mechanistic AI models unable to capture the complexity and beauty of organic systems and the ‘between-ness’ that is implicit in them.
Experiencing is a re-merging with the flow and undulating abundance of the ever-present origin. It is the diaphaneity made possible in the magical/mythical embrace. It is the Gestalt wholeness made visible with the re-cultivation of the amorphous gems and processes of the right hemisphere. It is the morphing possibilities that arise with the commingling of the observer and the observed and how the psyche of the observer matters. It is the Gods/esses admonishing us to remove our shoes for not only is the ground holy but they want us to feel the earth.
Jessie Shaw is an acupuncturist-herbalist with a clinical practice in NYC. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and has an MBA from NYU Stern’s School of Business and an MS in Oriental Medicine. She is the Creative Director at Creative Mind/Generative Change, an international mindfulness-coaching organization run by Stephen Gilligan, PhD and is also a Creative Mind Certified Coach and Trainer. Jessie has published a book about her ten years of study with Peruvian shaman, Don Theo Paredes, PhD, and has co-created a comprehensive course with Lorie Dechar about Jean Gebser’s states of consciousness and their in-depth healing capacity. She lives primarily in New York City but considers Colorado her second home.
12:30pm Pacific BREAK
1:15pm Pacific
The Contemplative Experience of Future Time Presence
in Jean Gebser and Sri Aurobindo
Jean Michel Borgeaud
This paper explores various modalities of the mutations of consciousness that are inherent in Jean Gebser’s contemplative inner realization of “the diaphanous.” These openings to Origin relate to Sri Aurobindo’s foundational experience of mental silence in the psychology of Integral Yoga.
I draw parallels between Gebser’s ever-present origin and Aurobindo’s Supermind, or total being, endeavoring to reveal itself in time through incarnated psychic beings. Human souls are immanent emanations of ever-present Divine individualities, or jivatmans.
Both Aurobindo and Gebser view mutations as the unfolding of what is inherent or enfolded in consciousness. The diaphanous in Gebser parallels the mental silence of Aurobindo. Both diaphaneity and mental silence open up timespace toward a trans-historical, aperspectival, “imageless future”—they are both being born and have already been given birth through the integral or supra-mental consciousness that is ever-present within us.
Jean Michel Borgeaud was born in Paris in 1981 from a Brazilian mother and a Swiss father, and raised in a family of musicians, where he started playing the violin at a young age. At the Rudolph Steiner school, he added a practice of yoga and meditation to continued formal musical training during his adolescence. After graduating from the Haute Ecole de Musique de Sion in Switzerland as a violinist, he pursued his musical education at the Guildhall School of Music in London. While working as a musician in Europe, he was initiated into the tradition of Kriya Yoga and travelled several times to India for long periods of time, eventually graduating as a Yoga therapist from the Bishnu Ghosh College of Physical Education founded by the brother of Paramhansa Yogananda. His work as a voice teacher and singer inspired a profound interest in psychotherapy. He then moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to study and become a licensed psychotherapist with a focus on Integral Spiritual Therapy, which led to him entering the East-West Psychology department of the California Institute of Integral Studies. He currently runs a private practice as a psychotherapist and teaches meditation and Yoga, while completing his last semester of coursework for his MA in East West psychology with a concentration on Asian Transcultural Studies at CIIS.
2:15pm Pacific OPEN DISCUSSION
Excerpts from Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin—Part Two: Manifestations of the Aperspectival World, An Attempt at the Concretion of the Spiritual; Chapter Two: The New Mutation; Part 1. The Climate of the New Mutation, pp. 294–300.
On the basis of the initial manifestations of the new consciousness …, we can undoubtedly take for granted that many today are in a position to achieve this mutation, particularly since there have been individuals in earlier times who have achieved this integral mutation. For those individuals today on whom, incidentally, everything most likely depends, it does not matter whether the full abundance or plenitude that unfolds as a new reality of the world via the achieved mutation is borne by mankind which has endured the demise of the rational world, or by a mankind (insofar as it can still be called mankind) which has had to endure the end of the earth as it has existed until now—that is, a complete mutational transformation of the earth.
It is important for us to take note of this, since if we do not understand this constellation, our deliberations here will lose their inherent value for our lives. The forms and concomitant manifestations which the mutational breaking forth in earthly events will assume are predominantly, indeed, primarily dependent on us, the bearers of the mutation on the terrestrial plane.
Whether the mutation can take place to us and in us, and this means to our present mankind, or whether it will be fulfilled on a later mankind—this lies to a great extent in our hand, although our participation and responsibility must not be construed in anthropocentric terms. Stated in another way, the question of the “how and when” of the mutation is inseparable from the other question: will we be privileged, by our perseverance, to participate in the (co)formation of the emerging new mutation through our conscious completion of the necessary coming-to-awareness? Or stated yet a third way, what is of immediate importance is not the future in its temporal and external aspect, but its presence in us.
Cost
Note: Payments are being received by Monterey Friends of Jung on behalf of the Gebser Society for the 2022 conference. The email address used for the payment will be sent a zoom link prior to the start of the conference.