Keynote: Friday, August 13: Feet on the Ground and Head in the Stars, with Jean-Michel Florin
Thursday-Saturday, August 12-14, 1:45-2:45pm: Meeting the Self, the Environment, and the Other through the Work of the Hands, with Chris Marlow
Saturday, August 14, 12:30-1:30pm: Sensing Self-Deception in the Use of Technology, with Gopi Krishna Vijaya
On Saturday, August 14, the Twelve Senses conference was focused on the four higher senses: Hearing, Word, Thought, Ego (the I of the Other).
We humans share the lower (body) senses and the middle (soul) senses with the animals and, in a primitive way, even with the plants. The higher (spirit) senses are unique to human beings. They are what allow people to perceive the utterly invisible: the space between our own I and that of the Other.
The body and soul senses are by now well recognized and described in mainstream medical/therapeutic literature. The senses of the spirit are not, even though everybody has experiences through these sense modalities. To find descriptions of these perceptions, we must turn to philosophy, theology, and the arts. There we find investigations into the essentials of the human experience.
The sense of hearing perceives the nature of a sound. Noise? Animal? Mechanical? Footsteps? Music? We can perceive astonishing subtlety. Hearing is connected to sense of word or language, of course, allowing us to recognize human communication whether we understand the language or not; to listen between the words, or even in the absence of words. The sense of thought enables us to follow another person’s train of thinking, whether the Other spoke just a moment ago or wrote their thoughts down centuries ago.
The highest sense, the sense of ego, has a problematic name. The word “ego” connotes egoism. Exactly the opposite of what is needed in the maturing of this sense! It also can be confused with the consciousness of our own individuality, which actually develops through the lower senses. The sense of ego -- of the I, of the other -- opens the doorway to a holistic perception of the experience of the other. This sense matures through our own inner work. If our perception is clouded by assumptions and judgments and our own subjective likes and dislikes, then our sense of ego will be as blind as if we closed our eyes and tried to see.
The senses of the spirit, supported and developed through healthy sensory processing in soul and body, are the keys to social justice.
Keynote: Sensing Social Justice, with Michael Kokinos
Keynote addresses by Joan Sleigh (Switzerland), Lakshmi Prasanna (India), and Michael Kokinos (Australia) will bring the conference themes to life through the speakers’ deep experience in education, the medical and healing arts, and biodynamic agriculture.
Panel: Encounters at the Margins, with Becky Rutherford, Jeanette Rodriguez, Christina Chang, Korakot Teerasawad, and Ntsikelelo Saul
Workshops
Conference registrants can choose from thirty hours of one-, two-, and three-day workshops organized around themes including Action and Service in the World, Education and Healing, Therapeutics, Meeting All Our Neighbors, Education, Technology, and Freedom, and more.
Special Bonus Content
Conference registrants had exclusive access to two special pre-recorded talks: “Karl König: The Refugee Who Started a World Movement” with Richard Steel, and “Meeting the Other as a Spiritual Path” with Jan Goeschel.
For further details, click on this link: https://www.eventsquid.com/event.cfm?id=12641
