Fritjof Capra and Amelia Barili share thoughts about Science and Spirituality in this “Emerging Consciousness” seminar at Mount Madonna Center, in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Below is a description of the seminar.
The troubled times we live in carry within them an enormous potential for growth and transformation. To successfully meet this challenge we need clarity of vision and the inner strength to bring forth the changes we yearn to see in the world.
In the seminar from which this fragments are taken, we explore together that potential through a blend of ground-breaking analysis, ancient wisdom and lived experience. The subjects discussed include:
* the emergence of a new consciousness in times of crisis and instability
* a new understanding of life based on recent discoveries in science, which integrates life’s biological, cognitive, and social dimensions
* its correlation to teachings from the wisdom traditions of India and China
* how globalization can be reshaped to make it compatible with the demands of human dignity and ecological sustainability
* and at a more personal level, how to incorporate spiritual practices in your daily life to learn and to heal yourself as you serve others
This seminar brings renewed vision and hope as well as embodied wisdom techniques that will help clear your mind so you can focus most effectively on the task at hand.
FRITJOF CAPRA, Ph.D., is a preeminent thinker of our times. Author of four international best-sellers, including “The Tao of Physics”, “The Web of Life”, “The Turning Point” and “The Hidden Connections”, physicist and ecologist Fritjof Capra, is well known for the clarity of his vision at integrating science, spirituality and concrete steps for social change. He has been the focus of more than 50 television interviews, documentaries, and talk shows in Europe, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Japan. Dr. Capra frequently leads environmental management seminars for top executives of international corporations. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California and is on the faculty of Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies in the UK.
AMELIA BARILI, Ph.D., is an award winning UC Berkeley professor and writer, and long time teacher of Classical Yoga and Qigong, who has brought her teachings on personal transformation to many audiences including her university students. To offer them a direct experience of the links between personal and global transformation, she created with Fritjof Capra the course “Globalization and the New Civil Society” with a strong component of “service learning”. Capra and Barili also designed and taught together “Deep Ecology in Arts and Science”. For her work in inspiring students and serving immigrant communities through the “service learning” component of many of her courses, Amelia Barili has been distinguished with the prestigious University of Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Public Service.
Barili is a Berkeley professor and teacher of contemplative studies, classical yoga and qigong who teaches through a combination of intellectual discussion and direct experience. She has dedicated her life to study the mind, body and spirit connection.
She studied yoga in India thirty years ago and graduated with a degree to teach yoga in India. The yoga that she teaches is based in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. It integrates all the limbs of yoga, the philosophy as well as the physical and the meditative practices to facilitate embodying consciousness.
She has studied and teaches several forms of Qigong. Qigong is a system of spiritual development and healing that comes to us from China, and has been tested, like yoga, for several thousands of years. They are empirical sciences that study the mind-body connections. Qigong can be translated as cultivating vital energy. Gong means practice, and qi – like the prana to which yoga refers- means “vital energy”. Both, yoga and qigong, complement each other and help us understand more deeply the subtle web of connections between our physical body, our mind and our spirit, and to experience them as the unity that they truly are. Amelia Barili teaches them together and is writing a book about these millenary practices and how they can help us understand and experience our body as a vast energy network, and as a moving field of consciousness.