Courses and Workshops
The Center will be offering three courses during 2012. These courses and workshops reflect the Center's vision and philosophy. Courses will run in the morning and late afternoon, leaving time after lunch for a siesta, quiet reflection or a walk in the surrounding countryside. Generally because new ideas can be a little exhausting the Monday morning will be set aside for sightseeing, such as a visit to Siena.
We are happy to help those who wish to gain continuing education or professional development credits and will contact their organizations if requested.
Accommodation and all meals, traditional Tuscan cooking, are included in the price of the courses. To register for a course, participants must send in a non-refundable deposit.
To be placed on our mailing list or for further information please write to info@paricenter.com.
New Paradigms, New Science and Gentle Action May 24- 30, 2012
This course/ workshop will explore the paradigms and stories that are told by science and ask what impact they are having on our lives, society and values. Are we beginning to see the world in new ways? Is a new form of thinking emerging? How are the visions of the artist and the scientist related? Are we moving towards a new integration of knowledge? How does this change the way we think about ourselves and our society? The course also explores David Peat's ideas on Gentle Action and Creative Suspension.
The scientific ideas involved will be explained and explored in a non-technical way. This course is suitable for anyone interested in the history and evolution of ideas, and in obtaining a deeper understanding of modern science. New Paradigms has been offered every year since 2001 and has given rise to many stimulating and productive discussions.
For more information and to register
Art Science and the Sacred June 14 -20, 2012
This course/workshop will explore the deep connections, as well as the boundaries, between the arts, science and the sacred. It will explore the ways in which the artist and the scientist engage the universe and encounter mystery. It will touch on the sense of awe and wonder that many scientists experience about the cosmos. It will look at ways in which the arts have sought to portray, symbolize and point to the sacred. It will enquire into the nature of creativity.
For more information and to register
Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind September 6-12, 2012
The course/workshop will explore the nature of synchronicity and the connections between our subjective, internal world and the objective, external. The week will introduce some key ideas from depth psychology. Archetypes as the structuring principles of the psyche are compared to notions of an underlying implicate order to reality as discussed by the physicist David Bohm. The therapeutic encounter will be viewed as an alchemical vessel in which “frozen accidents” to the psyche can be melted and transformed by generating psychic heat. In the field of literature we will meet James Joyce’s notion of an epiphany – that moment when meaning coalesces into the world – and the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote of inscape, the authentic and individual voice within the natural world that speaks to us directly.
For more information and to register