MEETING FOR MEANING

DuVersity event, May 20-23, 2011
Marist Centre, Stroud, UK

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

Goethe

Contextual Overview (October 2010)
This provides ‘background thinking’ for those who want some historical perspective.
The human mind, in its various collectives or ‘cultures’, has been subject to multiple impacts of new information over the last hundred and fifty years or so. Cultures are largely arch-conservative dreamscapes of belief and custom and it is arguable that none of them, even as they exist today, is capable of integrating into themselves the new maps of reality. And, of their populations, only a fraction may be capable of maintaining their own identity while absorbing what is new; the rest are simply immune or in denial (superstition may be equated with clinging to old maps of reality and rejecting new and improved ones). For those of us who feel and accept the challenge given by the ever-mounting evidence of the limitations and distortions of our perceptions, there is an ever-present need to find out what we can trust in ourselves and of ourselves. This should not be a ‘new superstition’ or by adopting some exotic belief but through attentive experience at the edges of our familiar reality.