Photo by Brock Dolman
NATURE AND EROS
May 6 - 11, 2020
With Kerry Brady, Brian Swimme and guest faculty Brock Dolman
This program is for registered California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) students.
It is a collaboration between the PCC department of CIIS and Ecology of Awakening.
As Gregory Bateson once said, “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”. During the industrial era, we have been conditioned to think of nature as green wallpaper that exists as the backdrop to our human endeavors. But in the new evolutionary cosmology, nature is understood as both our primary matrix and our primary teacher. Nature is the source of existence as well as an ongoing wellspring of wisdom for what it means to be human. To come to understand and, most importantly, to live from this knowing requires a profound shift in our perception of reality, a realization that we are an inextricable part of nature, and a profound recognition that we are a mode of cosmic evolution. Nature and Eros is designed to facilitate this shift in consciousness, a shift that is the central planetary challenge of our time – moving from control over nature to mutually enhancing engagement with the enveloping Earth Community.
Photo by Kerry Brady
To do this essential work, we will come together in community for five days in close relation with the land. During our time, the primary teacher will be the vibrant ecosystem with its sensuous hills and creeks, oak and fir forests, coyotes and hawks as well as the distinct configuration of people at this moment in time. As we bring ourselves into a more intimate and immediate connection with the larger Earth Community around us, we invite the deep magic of place to evoke our hidden sensitivities and capacities, re-discovering and re-membering who we are as planetary beings. Throughout our time, we will consciously explore the mysterious and fertile meeting ground between our own creativity and the larger unfolding – between the personal and the cosmological – in order to gain an embodied sense of what it is to live in a fluid dance with the creative force that brought forth the Himalayas, the hummingbirds, and each one of us.
The retreat will take place at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) - an 80-acre research, demonstration, education, advocacy and community-organizing center in West Sonoma County, California that develops strategies for regional-scale community resilience and the restoration of biological and cultural diversity. At OAEC, we will stay in shared guest rooms with full bathrooms and showers and will be treated by local, organic vegetarian meals, a wide array of permaculture systems in action, and OAEC’s extensive gardens, wildlands, pond, and hot tub.
Our time will be divided between group lecture and dialogue and experiential processes such as solo time on the land, council practice, dreamwork, ceremony and perception-enhancing practices that support active engagement with nature, inside and out. We will weave between disciplines including evolutionary science, deep ecology and living systems, somatic psychology, neurobiology, and nondual wisdom.
Photo by Brock Dolman
Learning Objectives:
To recognize our deepest identity as a mode of the universe, forever in flux and intricately woven into the web of life.
To explore what it is to be fully human at this moment in the evolution of the Earth and Universe.
To deepen students' experiences of being engaged, co-active participants in this unfolding journey.
To apprentice to the other-than-human world to increase our ability to think and act like an ecosystem – in relationship and in process with life.
To learn a set of skills and practices designed to increase our innate resiliency, strengthen our ability to navigate change and build our capacity to stay present and available, to ourselves and each other.
Dates and Location
May 6 - 11, 2020; Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
GRATITUDE: After 17 consecutive years of offering this course to CIIS students, we are able to continue having it as part of the PCC curriculum due to the generous support of Meihong Xu and Bill Melton for whom we are most grateful!