Mystics and Scientists: Order out of Chaos: Possibilities for Transformation?

16 April 2010 - 18 April 2010

Venue: Winchester

Venue: University of Winchester

The Mystics and Scientists conferences have been held every year since 1978. They are dedicated to forging a creative understanding of the complementary roles of scientific and mystical approaches to reality. 

This year the conference considers the ways in which order and creation may emerge from chaos and disorder, and relates this to the possibilities for transformation available in the disordered world we inhabit.

The conference considers creative emergence out of crisis and chaos in cosmology, in spirituality, in economics, in music, in psychotherapy and evolution.

 

View pdf leaflet including book form and details of venue and accommodation

 

 

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

FRIDAY  16th April: Opening Wine Reception followed by dinner and introductions

David Lorimer: Can we Pre-empt Chaos through Transformation?

SATURDAY  17th April

Prof. Stuart Kauffman, MD, PhD: Reinventing the Sacred: Emerging Complexity in a Creative Cosmos

My aim is to reinvent the sacred. I present a new view of a fully natural God and of the sacred, based on a new, emerging scientific worldview. This new worldview reaches further than science itself and invites a new view of God, the sacred, and ourselves — ultimately including our science, art, ethics, politics, and spirituality. The process of reinventing the sacred requires a fresh understanding of science that takes into account complexity theory and the ideas of emergence. It will require a shift from reductionism, the way of thinking that still dominates our scientific world view. To believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly, is a proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of "God". From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself.

Stuart Kauffman was born in 1939.  Trained in Philosophy at Dartmouth College and Oxford University and a Medical degree from University of California, San Francisco, CA.  Professor at the University of Calgary, where he is the Director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics since 2005. Dr. Kauffman is also an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Kauffman’s interests includes self-organization in evolution, the order of origin of ontogeny, the origin of life, evolution on rugged fitness landscapes, dynamical criticality in cells, the cancer attractor hypothesis plus differentiation therapy and the cell as a far from equilibrium open thermodynamic system that may maximize power efficiency. He is the author of The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization, Investigations and Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.

David Steindl-Rast, PhD, OSB: How do we Find our Bearings?

When we attune ourselves to the One, we find our bearings; we get a clearer sense of who we are and in what direction we need to move; we find that we are being guided -- not by outside rules and regulations, but by our deepest innermost desire.

Born in Vienna, Austria, David Steindl-Rast studied art, anthropology, and psychology, at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (MA) and the University of Vienna (PhD).  In 1953 he joined a newly founded Benedictine monastery in New York, Mount Saviour, of which he is now a senior member. After 12 years of monastic training and studies in philosophy and theology, Brother David was sent by his abbot to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue.  Together with Thomas Merton, Brother David contributed to the renewal of religious life, especially through the House of Prayer movement.  He co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies in 1968 and received the 1975 Martin Buber Award for his achievements in building bridges between religious traditions.  For decades, Brother David has divided his time between periods of a hermit's life and extensive lecture tours. His books include Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer; A Listening Heart; and Belonging to the Universe (with Fritjof Capra).  Currently, Brother David serves as founding advisor of www.gratefulness.org.

Professor Wolfgang Michalski, PhD: Financial Crises in a Historical Perspective

There has been a sequence of financial crises since the 16th century – the complexity has changed but not the underlying characteristics. 1857 was  the first really global crisis, sparked by one rogue trader, similar to failures of Barings and Societe Generale. His speculation was in railway stocks, one bank went bust and other banks couldn’t prolong credit to industry or farmers, who were also impacted by the wheat crisis due to the end of the Crimean War. A shipment of gold set off from California to New York to relieve the crisis but there was a hurricane that caused the boat to sink. When the news got through the American stock exchange crashed, triggering collapses in London, throughout Europe and into Asia.

Professor Wolfgang Michalski is Managing Director of WM International, - a company providing strategic intelligence and policy advice to business, governments and international organisations. He received his PhD in 1964, qualified for full professorship in 1970 and has held a professorship of economics at the University of Hamburg since 1972. He is an internationally recognized expert in the analysis of longer-term economic, social and technological developments and their implications for decision making. For more than 20 years (1980-2001), Wolfgang Michalski served as Chief Advisor to the Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with particular responsibility for the analysis and evaluation of emerging economic and social policy issues and related strategic challenges, both at domestic and international level. His publications include 12 books and more than 150 papers which have been translated into more than ten languages.

Barnaby Brown: Order and Chaos in Musical Improvisation

Barnaby Brown explores three metaphysical concepts through music, deepening our listening experience of epic works from Celtic, Sardinian and Bulgarian traditions:
1. Everything is made out of opposing forces (in medieval Welsh music theory, out of 1s and Os).
2. Gradual changes lead to turning points, where one force overcomes the other.
3. Change moves in helixes, or overlapping waves and ripples, not in circles.

Barnaby Brown is dedicated to revealing the ancient artistic traditions of Scotland’s music. He champions an early music approach to ceòl mòr, the ‘great music’ of the Highland bagpipe. He also leads the revival of the northern triplepipe, the ‘organ’ of the Celtic Church and precursor to the bagpipe in Britain and Ireland. As a performer, animateur and scholar with a passion for illuminating uncharted musical territory, Barnaby Brown contributes regularly to television and radio programmes. He made his mark giving solo performances at the Edinburgh International Festival and William Kennedy Piping Festival and works internationally as soloist, collaborator, workshop leader and lecturer. Since 2006, Barnaby Brown has taught Composing & Arranging, Listening Skills, and Teaching Musics of the World at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He is editor of the Siubhal Series, promoting the single malts of orally-transmitted Scottish music

SUNDAY  18th April

Dr. Marie Angelo, PhD: Sorting the Seeds: Psyche's Alchemical Transformation

What do you do when a jealous goddess sets you an impossible task that you can’t refuse: a huge chaos of tiny seeds all to be sorted out by the next day?  The mythic Psyche, to whose tale this initiatory experience belongs, did the unexpected – which turns out to be the very way to succeed.   Archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s insight that the real stories of psychology naturally belong to Psyche, introduced a personifying, animating perspective which enables us to connect with such transformative tales and ourselves experience their effects.    After all, one of Psyche’s names is ‘Soul,’ yours and mine included.   In this illustrated talk we’ll be ‘re-storying’ some transformative ideas on bringing order out of chaos by exploring Psyche’s first task in its alchemical setting of the living cosmos, hermetic correspondences and, of course, the immortal quest. 

Dr. Marie Angelo is a chartered psychologist, transpersonal psychotherapist, and long-term student of the transformative, alchemical world of traditional images.  Her doctorate  ‘The Imaginal Tree: Active Imagination as Education’ (University of Sussex 1992) inspired both her innovative MA Transpersonal Arts & Practice at the University of Chichester, and her new ‘Splendor Solis Academy,’ now developing distance learning and private courses via her website for Imaginal Studies, www.imaginalstudies.org   Publications available on the website include: ‘When the Gods were Intelligent – and Education was Enchanting,’ ‘This Thing of Brightness: the feminine power of transcendent imagination’; and ‘Splendor Solis: inviting the image to teach.’ 

Dr Simon Conway Morris: If Evolution is Predictable, What Does it Tell us about its Deep Structure?

Contrary to received wisdom I argue that the outcomes of evolution are much more predictable than generally envisaged. Evidence for this stance comes from not only evolutionary convergence, but also molecular inherency and versatility, and the
forces that shape the Tree of Life in a far more deterministic way than realized. Darwin understood the mechanism, but now we need to know what deeper structures constrain the possibilities.

Simon Conway Morris holds a chair in Evolutionary Palaeobiology in the University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of St John's College. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990. His first book,The Crucible of Creation (Oxford), summarized some of his work on the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian "explosion", whilst his more recent Life's Solution (Cambridge) addresses the importance of evolutionary convergence. He has made numerous television and radio appearances, and in 1996 delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. He is involved with the science/religion debates, and when he cannot believe his ears opens a bottle of wine and reads that prophet of sanity, G. K.Chesterton.

View pdf leaflet including book form

Chairs:

David Lorimer

David Lorimer  is Programme  Director of  the Scientific and Medical Network and Vice-President of Wrekin Trust. He is editor of The Spirit of Science, Thinking Beyond the Brain and Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality. His book on the Prince of Wales’s philosophy and work – Radical Prince -  has been translated into French, Spanish and Dutch.

Peter Fenwick

Peter was educated at Trinity College Cambridge where he obtained an Honours Degree in Natural Science. His clinical medical training was carried out at St Thomas's Hospital in London. After obtaining experience in neurosurgery he specialised in psychiatry. He is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Consultant Neurophysiologist at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and Honorary Consultant in Neurophysiology to Broadmoor Special Hospital. He has published numerous scientific papers on brain function and also several papers on meditation and altered states of consciousness.