With his music and singing, Orpheus could charm wild beasts, coax the trees and even divert the course of rivers. As one of the pioneers of civilization, he is said to have taught humanity the arts of medicine, writing and agriculture. He rendered accessible many important cults, such as those of Apollo and Dionysus. He appears here as a symbol of our approach, which is to bring the ‘wild’ or forgotten depths of our psyche into harmony with our social life and work and also to bring into practical effect esoteric methods. We need more than ‘worldly’ knowledge but such ‘alien’ material has to be integrated into daily life. The ideal is a harmony of the diverse - a ‘many-splendoured thing’.   

The DuVersity was founded in 1998 by Anthony Blake and Karen Stefano to further the principle of integration without rejection. This principle was developed by the polymath John G. Bennett to open minds to the challenge of embracing multiple kinds of information, transcending specialist confinement, which could then lead to a new way of thinking and understanding. It involved creating bridges between the ‘esoteric’ and ‘mainstream’ mentalities. Bennett was a leading pupil of the radical innovator George I Gurdjieff, while also having a career in industrial research and developing new ideas in natural science and philosophy. He argued that all our knowledge is incomplete and uncertain.

The work of the DuVersity is also centred in dialogue as it has been investigated and furthered by the work of Patrick de Mare and David Bohm. This is because we feel it is of crucial importance for us to learn how to talk with each other and not rely on teachers and authorities. Democracy is fragile and precious and requires that we become able to think together in a way that preserves and even enhances individual differences.

The DuVersity has developed a unique method of self-learning called Psyche Integration that embodies a distillation of techniques taken from the fourth way of Gurdjieff and some more mainstream developments in psychology, such as the active imagination of Jung and the social dreaming matrix of Gordon Lawrence, as well as the median group approach of Patrick de Mare. It involves also techniques of thinking and understanding that draw on Bennett’s researches into learning and the work of Edward Matchett, who spent his life working on the integration of spirituality with practical demands of design in many spheres of human endeavour.

Its concern with methods of thinking includes: the systematics developed by John Bennett and also his invention of structural communication, which has become logovisual thinking; an archival project on video-conversations made with pioneering thinkers from many schools; a series of seminar-dialogues, and logosafaris (journeys of meaning) that have ranged from Peru and Egypt to the South West of the USA (Peublo and Ute sites) and Enchanted Albion.

About the DuVersity

Last updated February 22 2008