“The future has an ancient heart” CARLO LEVI Pari Perspectives Ideas in Science, the Arts, Spirit and Community Issue 3 / March 2020 Our Changing World Pari Perspectives Friends of the Pari Center Issue 3 / March 2020 Our Changing World By becoming a Friend of the Pari Center you will continue to receive the Pari Center quarterly journal Pari Perspec- tives. We know many of you would like to become more Pari Perspectives is a quarterly journal involved in supporting the work of the Pari Center. By published annually in September, December, taking out a membership at a cost of 30 euros per annum March and June by The Pari Center. (from the date of purchase) you will be allowing our not-for-profit organization to continue with its established Editors projects and to start new ventures, including this journal. Kristina Aleksandra Janavicius Maureen Doolan The Pari Perspectives journal will be free of charge to all Friends. In addition, those who have purchased a member- Editorial Board ship will receive a discount on any events they may choose Alessandro Barbieri to attend at the Pari Center within the year. Caroline Pawluk Eleanor Peat To become a friend you can register through our website or James Peat Barbieri in person at the Pari Center. Genny Rabazzi Your membership fee will entitle you to: Design and Layout Andrea Barbieri • a digital copy of the quarterly Pari Perspectives • a 10% discount on all events at the Pari Center The Pari Center • access to a Members Area of our website which will Via Tozzi, 7 include blogs, discussion groups, and a library of past 58045, Pari (GR) issues of Pari Perspectives Italy Email: [email protected] Website: www.paricenter.com To Contribute We welcome new contributors. Our main focuses of interest are: Science Religion Spirituality Cover image: Society Photo by NASA on Unsplash Psychology Language The Arts For our guidelines contact us at [email protected] 2 A Message from the Editors Amidst the many depressing examples of poetry and of Russian interference in the election; and terrorism prose written in the 20th century (by Eliot, Auden, Pound, caused death and destruction in such far-flung places as Hughes, Beckett, Orwell, etc.) the following surely ranks as Istanbul, Burkina Faso, Brussels, Florida, and Nice. The one of the bleakest. line ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ was repeat- edly used by commentators to refer to a world suffused in The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats political upheaval and aggression and the awareness of everything perilous in modern life. Turning and turning in the widening gyre Yet each of our contributors, we feel, has a much more The falcon cannot hear the falconer; optimistic take on the now and the future. In fact the late Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; playwright (and statesman) Václav Havel would say that Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, they are talking not about optimism but about hope, and The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere he is adamant that ‘Hope is definitely not the same thing The ceremony of innocence is drowned; as optimism.’ Hope as the transcendent virtue. Hope as The best lack all conviction, while the worst the opposite of despair. Hope is everything to do with the Are full of passionate intensity. human spirit. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situ- The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out ations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it A shape with lion body and the head of a man, is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, on some particular observation of the world or estimate Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it The darkness drops again but now I know transcends the world that is immediately experienced That twenty centuries of stony sleep and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, same as joy that things are going well, or willingness Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for some- William Butler Yeats began writing ‘The Second Coming’ thing because it is good, not just because it stands a a century ago in January 1919 in the wake of the unprec- chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation edented slaughter of World War I, the upheaval of the in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Bolshevik Revolution, and the political turmoil in his native Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is Ireland in which several Irish Nationalists had been execut- not the conviction that something will turn out well, but ed in the struggle for freedom against British rule. The the certainty that something makes sense, regardless poem not only captures the turbulence and violence of the of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and era but the anxiety, disillusionment and despair at a frag- most important form of hope, the only one that can keep mented, broken world. The collapse of civilization could be us above water and urge us to good works, and the only seen in so many facets of life—the weakening of religious true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human faith, the breakdown of the family, the feeling of alienation, spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, the isolation and bleakness experienced by those living in from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, which cities, but most of all fear that the old order had collapsed gives us the strength to live and continually to try new and there was nothing to put in its place. And, in fact, things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours twentieth-century history did turn more horrific after 1919, do, here and now. as the poem forebodes. Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1991 In 2016 the Dow Jones research tool Factiva showed that lines from ‘The Second Coming’ were quoted more Let us be ever hopeful. often in the first seven months of that year than in any of the preceding 30 years. It was a year of political turmoil: Brexit; Donald Trump became President amid accusations Kristina Aleksandra Janavicius and Maureen Doolan 3 The Pari Center Events, 2020 A tribute to The Amateurs What is Consciousness? Mat 7-10, 2020 June 11 - 17, 2020 What if… • Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist? …amateurs hold the key to a transition towards living well • The Inner Science, Experiential Investigation, and together, in harmony with the Earth? Analysis of Consciousness …they like to explore untrodden paths and unknown spaces? • From Other-than-Human Consciousness to the anima …they are driven by passion, curiosity and generosity? mundi Starting from the point of Not Knowing might actually be • Mundane and Mystical: A Panentheistic Perspective on a better position from which to rethink our economy, our C. G. Jung’s Late Thoughts About Consciousness, Ego, way of producing and sharing the things we need in life. and Self New technology is enabling us to produce things by • Consciousness, Life and Quantum Indeterminism ourselves on a very small scale and close to home. In the near future, we might be able to produce many of • Nothingness which Contains Everything the things we need. Amateurism also creates openings to • The Philosophy of Consciousness of the last Century, rethink incumbent power relations—between ages, regions, or, There and Back Again heritages, the ancient, the modern, and the future world. 4 Il Processo della Multiple Universes Trasformazione Aug. 27 - Sept. 2, 2020 27 - 28 giugno 2020 • The Multiverse: Linking Matter and Mind and Stretching the Limits of Science • Fisica e metafisica di David Bohm: la sua vita e le sue • Literature, Creation and Multiple Worlds idee • Quantum Mechanics, the Actual • L’ordine implicato a portata di mano World, and Other Possibilities • Mente e materia tra matematica, • Ad/Dressing the Universe fisica e concezioni del mondo • The Quantum Multiverse: Everett and Beyond • Il dialogo bohmiano • Dendritic Quantum Mechanics • The Hilbert Hotel: A Psycho-philo-poetic Game for Exploring the Multiverse 5 A Message from the President of The Pari Center, Eleanor Peat This year, 2020, is the 20th anniversary of the Pari Center. to our library which will also serve as a workspace for visi- tors who are part of our residential programme of writers, It started with a meeting at the October Gallery in London scientists, artists, researchers, etc. We will be providing organised by David Peat and sponsored by Arts Council more information in the near future once the renovations England. are completed. In his autobiography my father wrote: ‘Following the This year we have a full programme of events. May will see meeting of artists and scientists in London, an active the annual gathering of ‘Weekend among Friends,’ followed debate began on the pages of my Website.