3/28 Can Love Last?

Chester Mind-Body Philosophy Seminar Series
Seminar No. 3: Philosophy of Romantic Intimacy
Friday, March 28th, 5:30 to 7:30 PM, at the Cave, 19-1 Bates Road, Chester, Suggested donation: $20. For more info call 526-9186 or email vood@cummings-good.com
In this class we will explore the ancient question concerning the sustainability of romantic intimacy. Does romantic love necessarily fade with familiarity and time, or can it be maintained and even intensified?
Our class will focus on the views of the late Stephen Mitchell, the now legendary psychoanalyst who wrote his late book on this pressing topic. Mitchell's theory is the most optimistic theory by any psychologist we know of, since he argues that romance can in fact be sustained and that the reasons it dies have to do with our unconscious sabotaging of our desires. We mentally reduce the charms of our love in order to protect ourselves from disappointment.
Readings
1. You can read selections from his last great work Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance through Time here at Google Books.
2. There is also a nice review of the book here at Salon.com.
 
 
 
				

3/21 Clowning as a Spiritual Vocation

 

If the clown had language he’d be a poet, if he had politics he’d be an anarchist, if he had religion he’d be a prophet. The clown’s language is gesture. His humor is in the body and he can translate it to us in a language that precedes verbal communication.  Perhaps that is one reason why the humor of the clown can go deeper than the stand up comic. When I laugh at stand up comedy I laugh with my head.  It stops at the shoulders.  When I see a great clown the laughter runs through every pore of my body. Great clown comedy can hurt (oh my stomach), it can make me fall out of my seat and into the aisle of the theater. 

- Kevin O’Keefe

 

The laughing Body and the Trickster Archetype

 

Come to the Cave to clown around, discuss the philosophy of play, experience a little circus yoga, and laugh at the paradoxical nature of political existence.

 

Friday, March 21, 5:30 to 7:30 PM

The Cave

19-1 Bates Road

Refreshments served.

 

3/14 The Metaphysics of Pool

Issues in Twenty-First Century Philosophy

Class no. 2: The Metaphysics of Pool

5:30 – 7:30 PM Friday, March 14

At The Cave (directions)

Exploring the Experiential Body-Mind

“Our body moves as our mind moves. The qualities of any movement are a manifestation of how mind is expressing through the body at that moment. Changes in movement qualities indicate that the mind has shifted focus in the body. Conversely, when we direct the mind or attention to different areas of the body and initiate movement from those areas, we change the quality of our movement. So we find that movement can be a way to observe the expressions of the mind through the body, and it can also be a way to affect changes in the body-mind relationship.” – Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

Reading for class

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, “An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering”

 

3/7 The Sense of Being Stared At

 

The Mind-Brain Problem and the Extended Mind Hypothesis

In our first class, we will look at the heated contemporary debate between neuroscientists, philosophers and biologists over the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain and natural evolution. The key text for this class is Rupert Sheldrake’s paper “The Sense of Being Stared At.”

Sheldrake is an Oxford-trained field biologist who is one of the most controversial thinkers alive, due to his radical theory of the mind and memory as intrinsic to the very fabric of nature. His view of the mind, as a field phenomenon, extended in space beyond the physical casing of the brain, poses a profound challenge to orthodox psychology and highlights what is at stake in this intense debate.

Can you sense whether some one is staring at you? Can you make someone turn around simply by looking at them. In his fascinating essay, Rupert Sheldrake claims that scientific testings proves that the sense in fact exists, and argues that it strongly suggests that the mind actually extends outside the brain. We will explore this argument and relate it to a number of key concepts in this unresolved controversy of twenty-first philosophy.

Essential texts

• Rupert Sheldrake, “The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1” and “Part 2”

• David Chalmers, excerpts from his paper “Facing up to the problem of consciousness”

Recommended materials

 • Rupert Sheldrake, video lecture on new 2005 experimental evidence supporting the extended mind hypothesis.

• Two short papers by Sheldrake elaborating on his morphic resonance theory of reality: “Mind, Memory, and Archetype” and “Society, Spirit & Ritual”

• To read his critics, check out his website where he has posted all of this correspondence with critics and lots of other interesting data.

 

Friday, March 7^th, 5:30 to 7:30 PM 

At the Cave, 19-1 Bates Road, Chester

$20 for 2 hours of yoga and philosophy

For more info call 526-9186.