Synchronicity Matter & Psyche Symposium - Appreciation of a Living Universe
The SYNCHRONICITY: Matter & Psyche Symposium is a home for the transition out of a dying worldview and into conscious appreciation of a living universe. Being held at the majestic Joshua Tree Retreat Center this September, this world-class summit features and pioneers of our understanding of the relationship of cosmos and consciousness including: Rupert Sheldrake, Graham Hancock, Richard Tarnas, Jill Purce, Anne Baring, Marilyn Schlitz, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, Stephen Aizenstat and more.
Just at the moment when our civilization is most threatened by our disconnection from the world, emerging sciences are revealing the truth of the unity of matter and consciousness. Quantum physics, consciousness studies, extended mind research and near death experience show us empirically the interaction of psyche and matter. Today we can know the unity of nature and spirit for ourselves and explore practices allow us to feel the breath of the timeless on our neck. In discovering it, we find the inner center that our culture has lost. In discovering it, we heal.
On September 12-14, 2014, we are deeply honored to present for you Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock. Sheldrake and Hancock’s electronic banishment by TED last spring and the surrounding outcry epitomizes our era’s conflict. In their actions and justifications, TED gave voice to the infantile grandiosity in our culture that denies the possibility of any mystery existing in the world. That inflated psychological state is the root of our cultural and ecological crisis. Your reception of Sheldrake and Hancock’s message brings you into this on-going struggle and helps us overcome this cultural psychological illness.
The Symposium seeks to bring you in touch with speakers, practices and art that open up meaningful frameworks, ecstatic wonder and more authentic awareness. The sickness in our culture comes from our having eaten up all the magic that we should be pouring out into our view of the world. And so we ask you: what is your inner relationship to the world? How do you deny the magic that enters your life? How could you better allow the world’s miraculous mystery into your heart?
Considering such a question brings the deflation of meeting our shadow. Outside of our righteous certainties about the world, lie its imperfect realities. Go there. That’s where the gold is. Once our ego’s ideas about the world have been defeated, we can be present with our questions.
I don’t think spirit is up in the twenty-first century; I think it’s down. So that it affects the way that I experience my body, my images of God, what I’m willing to do and what I’m willing not to do . . . And I don’t like the basic plan, I want an answer. So I’m in that mode which is very intense, very exciting. But it means every day not knowing.”
– Ann Ulanov
The zeitgeist of our era is leading us downward into the imperfect context of our real lives, real loves and the real planet around us. The world needs us to become less detached and more present. The greatest discovery here is the one that C. G. Jung made clear in his observance of synchronicity—that at the heart of the interaction between matter and psyche lays emotion. Meaningful connection of inner states and outer events only happens with the presence of feeling. Consciously appreciating this brings about the most radical re-visioning of our worldview possible because it reveals that we live in a heart-shaped world.
To break out of a view of the world as random, dead and meaningless and find your place in a living mystery is our time’s calling. To bring this into our minds and bodies and hearts is to affect a sacred marriage of the Masculine and Feminine inside of us. And so our goal is for a more embodied wholeness. Our intention is to get as down into the reality of being present with you as we can.
Join with us as we dare to look at the reality of our relationship to the world around us. Come and get intimately caught up in the great mystery. Gaze with us upon a beautiful enigma. Wait! Did you just see it winking back?
For a full listing of speakers and schedule of events at the Synchronicity: Matter & Psyche Symposium, September 12 - 14, check our digital edition, our website at www.sunrunnersw.com, or visit www.matterpsyche.net.