Oliver Sacks is the scientist-as-artist, a rare species nowadays but one that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century and that almost single-handedly he has kept alive. His sensibility is Victorian in the best meaning of the word: reformist, literary, historical—empirical of course but speculative as well, in the tradition of the grand theorists of that less specialized time. As a neurologist, Sacks is a clinician above all, an unusually close listener to his patients’ symptoms and stories. He prefers to look through a wide-angle lens rather than a microscope. His impulse is to amplify his observations, to look beyond the minute workings of the brain to the varieties of human experience itself, something he has done much to map out in the medical case histories that comprise the core of his finest writing.

This isn’t to suggest that he doesn’t value the groundbreaking research of neuroscience’s current pioneers, who are in the process of adding, in steady increments, to our understanding of memory and perception, but rather that his particular mission, as I suspect he sees it, is to apply their findings philosophically, to the soul.

Although this introduction appears at first to fall closer to the empiricist and scientific rather than philosophical and esoteric spectrum, I would argue that this description of one of our most important observers of the human condition may well serve as a role model for much of what we teachers and students do at UPR.

The philosophy and psychology we teach and study also moves in a continuum of human knowledge and condition, one which in the broader world moves from the strictly material and empirical through the subjective, speculative, esoteric to mystical nature of what it means to be fully human.

We here are constantly judging and being judged as to where on this continuum we live and work. It should be clear enough that this university, arising from and connected to the Philosophical Research Society, celebrates the esoteric and mystical as it is reflected in the wisdom traditions of world cultures. It is also clear that as such, our identity confronts a historical tendency away from the wisdom traditions in favor of scientific and empirical knowledge, both increasingly reductionist in character.

What Oliver Sacks represents is, I would argue, an effective and accurate measure of how to confront that reductionism. His work holds out the possibility of a sacred, even mystical element that we here regard as both true and necessary if humanity is to survive and be fully human. And what is the salient quality that Sacks displays? It is wonder, that underpinning of all genuine philosophic inquiry, and that quality or temperament that makes us human. But we also have to recognize that this new book is entitled Hallucinations, which are defined as sensory experiences of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders, or by hallucinogenics, or by what sacred peoples call entheogens, or “being with the god.”

Sacks understands that in these disorders and extreme alterations of what we call “normal,”  there are signs and symbols of experience that are sometimes evocative of the transcendental. Here, for example, is a description from  the writer Elissa Schappell describing her experience of a seizure:

I am suddenly serene … rising. There is the unseen life, the illuminated world, shimmering, flooded with more light than seems possible, rushing into my palms and the soles of my feet, the air liquid with light, so much I should be able to scoop it into my hands like water. It fills the corners of the room, runs down the walls. I am ecstatic. I don’t want it to end. Not now, not yet, just as I’m about to understand something.

As onlookers we are terrified by the sight of a seizure, and yet what are we to make of this description? For Sacks, this is the journey he is celebrating as a physician, and one we too can celebrate. Greenberg ends his review with this paragraph:

This chasm between actual and socially accepted experience is exactly what Sacks, with his gift for listening to his patients, is able to pick up. Throughout his long career, the transcribing of his patients’ experiences has been a kind of necessity, the truest way to comprehend and “come to terms with them emotionally.” This unique attentiveness has not only amplified our understanding of the range of human experience, it has elevated his investigations into the realm of art.

I would argue that the range of human experience here is not just in the realm of art, but also in the realm of philosophy and transformative psychology as well, and that Sacks is a genuine role model for the work of this university because he begins with a respect for the empirical but is drawn by wonder and temperament to a higher plane, one which we also seek to occupy.

by Richard Geldard, Ph.D.

Saturday, March 16, 2013
10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Open to the public

Please mark your calendars and join us for a full-day workshop
with renowned psychotherapist Jonathan Young and writer Anne Bach.

The Search for Meaning Through Stories and Psychotherapy

(Approved for 6 hours of continuing education for psychotherapists)

The Search for Meaning through Stories and Psychotherapy
Initiatory tales can be guides to developing a sense of purpose, and belonging. This is a workshop on how the search for meaning shapes adult psychological life. We will demonstrate methods for drawing insights from legends and folklore, such as the tales of the search for the Holy Grail. We will show how to analyze the structure of quest stories for key metaphors – to reveal how strengthening a sense of meaning can help with life-stage transitions. This day is useful for counselors, teachers, writers, clergy, and those interested in archetypal perspectives on their own quests for meaning

Jonathan Young – psychologist and storyteller — assisted Joseph Campbell at seminars and served as founding curator of the Joseph Campbell Archives and Library. Dr. Young now gives presentations internationally on the mythic imagination.

Anne Bach, M.S., MFT is a specialist in uses of writing in psychotherapy and personal exploration. She has led groups in a variety of clinical settings — and has been a presenter on the psychological uses of writing at major conferences. She is also a noted literary consultant and has done trainings for professional writers in film, advertising, and creative non-fiction. Her artful facilitation of writing exercises provides a comfortable forum for reflection.

Fee with CEUs 

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As we approach this crucial election, I want to reflect for a moment on the influence of one of our founding thinkers on the issues before the American electorate. Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely known for his concept of self-reliance. For many years, the idea of self-reliance has been the Great American Idea, and for many it meant to “do your own thing,” to have the freedom and independence to pursue whatever you wanted in this great country where anyone could achieve his or her personal dream of success and happiness.

But like any superficial reading of a great text, “Self-Reliance” never meant to be a licence to pursue our dreams at the expense of others or to accept what some conceived to be Darwin’s evolutionary notion of “the survival of the fittest.” Emerson has even been mistakenly connected to the egocentric assertions of Ayn Rand, whose ideas have lately been resurrected by the American Right Wing.

We are all familiar with the dangers of simple-mindedness and superficial understanding, and Emerson himself said that Americans had an unfortunate tendency toward superficiality, and he spent his lifetime and creative energy in the selfless effort to correct that fault in our character.

In my latest book on the thought of this great thinker, Emerson and the Dream of America, I have continued what I believe was Emerson’s goal of providing a mature and truthful vision for the future of America. The true meaning of self-reliance is the spiritual principle of self-trust, the realization that we possess within our nature the strength and capacity for finding our true path in life and even for discovering the very ground of our being. And what is true for
us as individuals is also true for the nation.

Chapter four of Emerson and the Dream of America is entitled “The New Self-Reliance,” and I said in part, I entitled this chapter “The New Self-Reliance” because it is clear now that since Emerson’s first assertions of this theme one hundred forty years ago, we may have assimilated personally and culturally some of the language and substance of his intention, but we have yet to manifest his words in matters of national character. To some extent some of the spiritual and self-development movements have absorbed this material and have formulated and reformulated its essence and principles into systems of enlightenment and self-recovery. What remains is the actual work and its realization to a larger sphere.

Unfortunately, this narrower development has also evolved into the presence of self serving gurus merchandising what can never be sold or merchandised. Emerson himself has been reduced to a purveyor of slogans and aphorisms empty of meaning outside their context.

And yet there remains a powerful essence coming from the man’s words that has been absorbed and may now being put to work in the culture.

What presents itself in this election is a clear choice between a true understanding of Emerson’s vision and a false one based on a superficial understanding of it. Emerson wrote of an America with an understanding of achieving the dream of equality and justice as the hallmark of spiritual maturity and not an America bent on the selfish principle of “every man for himself.” If America was the land of opportunity, as the cliche has always been expressed, the dream was meant for every citizen, with a level playing field which supported a genuine understanding of equality of opportunity, not only before the law but also in the minds and hearts of all Americans. That we are still a great distance from that goal makes it doubly important that we not slide back now into the darkness of greed and selfish grasping for ourselves at the expense of others. And it is Emerson, more than any other American writer and thinker, who described for us not only why America is uniquely placed to achieve this dream, but also exactly how each one of us can proceed to embody it.

As a matter of public record, I might mention that right after the election of 2008, Penguin Books published a small book containing President Obama’s Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” We know that “Self-Reliance” is a meaningful document for the president, and the publication is also a recognition of the place of Emerson’s essay in the American pantheon of great texts.

Emerson & Universal Mind

Lecture & Workshop Facilitated by Professor Richard Geldard

Throughout his long and well-documented career, Ralph Waldo Emerson kept a personal journal, begun at age sixteen and concluding when he was seventy-four. The sixteen volumes of the journals plus his enormous published work leave a fascinating  and comprehensive record of his vision of a universal mind within which all matter and life participates. This lecture will present Emerson’s exploration of this core principle of Idealism: its source, its nature and its availability to us as seekers after the true ground of our being.

Following the free lecture, starting at 2:00 pm we will hold a $20 workshop for those interested in examining the passages quoted in the lecture in order to give participants a greater opportunity to discuss and explore the content with Professor Geldard more personally and in greater depth.

NEW!  A related E-Book entitled, “Emerson and Universal Mind” is now available for ordering online.

DECEMBER 1st, 2012

Free Lecture:  11:30 AM – 12:30  PM
$20 Workshop:   2:00 – 4:30  PM

Free parking available on site.
To RSVP please email: rsvp@uprs.edu

Prof. Richard Geldard is a faculty member at UPR teaching pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He is the author of ten books, including studies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Greek philosophy and culture. He is also a frequent lecturer. In June, 2003, and September, 2003, he was a featured speaker at Faneuil Hall in Boston as part of the Emerson Bicentennial Celebrations. In June, 2005, he was the Keynote speaker at the re-instatement of the Delphic Games in Delphi, Greece. In September, 2009 he gave the Flora Levy Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is a Professional Member of PEN America

“Spend an hour with Richard Geldard and he will lead you to the inner sanctum and hand you over to the Master. Emersonianism is the American religion. It is not a church or a cult; it is a spiritual discipline, a Way. It teaches the infinitude of the private person, of each private person, of you yourself with your laptop and cellphone. Emerson was a great teacher in his day, but Richard Geldard can get him to you now.” – Robert Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

>> DOWNLOAD MP3

The Greeks held to an ideal of “a perfect mind in a perfect body” and the Olympics were made into an occasion for the display of physical perfection. The earliest Olympic games among the Greeks were held at least as far back as 8th c. BCE in Olympia on the Peloponnesos peninsula. Women and slaves were not allowed in these games, which were held in honor of Zeus. The earliest games in Olympia for women go back to the 6th c. BCE and took the form of running races to gain the privilege of being a priestess for the goddess Hera. A parallel contest for the men was conducted to choose a consort for the priestess to aid in the religious rites.  Being a display of the body beautiful, the tradition of physical nudity was introduced to games in the 8th c. BCE, perhaps by the Spartans, and was adopted early in the Olympics. This celebration of the beauty of physical form also took a cultural turn, with famous sculptors vying to outdo each other in depicting the athletes in their sculptures.

The various city-states of ancient Greece participated in these games,  for which any warring states stopped their conflict to follow the Olympic Truce, so that participants and viewers received safe passage and the human ideal represented by the games was honored over regional or personal differences. From an early stage (and perhaps from the inception), the games were held every four years, a unit of time known as the olympiad, which was used in state reckonings. The ancient Greek Olympics continued after Greece came under Roman rule, until the late 4th c., when the Roman emperor Theodosius I put a stop to them as part of a suppression of paganism in favor of making  Christianity the state religion.

In modern times, the first significant attempt to revive the Olympics occurred in Revolutionary France between 1796-1798. There were a few more attempts in between but the modern Olympics was initiated after the founding of the International Olympic Committee by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1890. The first modern international Olympics were held in Athens, Greece in 1896. Fourteen nations with 241 athletes participated. The tradition of holding the games once every four years was also revived. Based on earlier articles of the British Olympic Foundation, the International Olympic Charter was adopted. This charter aimed to maintain the spirit of friendly celebration of the powers of the human body in joyful competitive sports in which the spirit of goodwill predominated over success and failure. Since the 1896 Athens Olympics, there have been 27 Olympics in four year intervals with three interruptions due to World Wars I and II. Though the Summer Olympics are considered the main international event, there are also Winter Olympics, now in two-year intervals from the Summer Olympics.

With the present Olympics, London U.K. has hosted the games thrice and altogether 43 nations have hosted the games and most nations of the world participate. Los Angeles has hosted the games twice, in 1932 and 1984. The largest number of records in athletic performance have been and continue to be broken during these games, in keeping with the spirit of physical perfection of the human being worldwide which they are meant to showcase.

From a pan-Grecian recurrent memorialization of an aspect of the human ideal, we have moved into a global celebration. The Olympics today represents a planet-wide acknowledgment of the human urge to perfection, enacted at the physical level. Similarly, UPR, a contemporary wisdom academy, celebrates in its curricula and educational programs an integral ideal of perpetual human progress. Though physical skill is certainly a universal aspect of this ideal, UPR exists to further the powers of mind and spirit which inhabit the body and are in profound need of development and exercise if we are to live harmoniously together as human beings on and with the earth. UPR mines the wisdom traditions of the world, including that of ancient Greece, India, China, East and West Asia and other cultural heritages and engages these with new emergent knowledge paradigms to seek solutions to the problems of our times. Our Master’s programs in Consciousness Studies and Transformational Psychology are meant to prepare global citizens with the skills and capacities to navigate the planet towards a more sustainable and holistic future.

Inspire 2 Inspire, LLC presents

MOSAIC OF MUSIC

featuring
Veera Khare Asher, Soprano
& Invited Guests

JAZZ | POP | BROADWAY | OPERA

Sunday, August 26th, 2012
2:30 pm – 5:00 pm

UPRS Auditorium
3910 Los Feliz Blvd.
Los Angeles, 90027

FREE PARKING

Admission Prices by Suggested Donation:
Adults $25 | Students & Seniors $15 | Kids $10
No Advanced Ticketing Required

As a faculty member of the University of Philosophical Research, Dr. Richard Geldard lectures on The Birth of Consciousness in Early Greek Thought and Emerson and American Idealism at the University of Philosophical Research. He holds a doctorate in Dramatic Literature and Classics from Stanford University and is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.

Below is his concept of what Myron might have thought:

Imagine, if you will, the Olympic Organizing Committee for the 2012 Games in London deciding that, as part of their preparations for the games, they will invite a spirit from the ancient games to be a guest.

After some debate, they decide to ask the great Classical sculptor Myron, whose signature piece, The Discus Thrower, has graced the modern games throughout the modern era.

The committee presents Myron with a modern Greek guide to help him navigate the current games who can speak to him in his foreign tongue (the Greek language revitalizes itself every 400 years).

At the opening ceremonies, Myron finds almost nothing that he understands from his years spent at the sacred sanctuary in Olympia. He is relieved of his confusion only when his guide shares with him that the torch that is being carried into the stadium was lit months before within the same ancient sanctuary.

Myron, unfortunately, is quite dismayed that, not only are women present at the London games, but are active participants, even in the discus and javelin events. The guide also tells Myron not be surprised to see women competing in wrestling and boxing.

As the opening ceremonies come to an end, Myron is pleased to hear something familiar—translated, of course by his guide—the charge to the athletes to follow the rules, not to cheat and to compete with honor and respect for one another and the Olympic movement.

At the gymnastics arena, our ancient visitor studies the male competitors carefully and finds himself quite satisfied that the human form still manifests the godlike ideal celebrated in his own sculptures of bronze. He sees poise, control, coordination, and skill, as well as courage under great pressure in each of the contestants.

Later, at the great stadium, he holds a discus in his hands like a cherished object, feeling its weight and shape. He is grateful that, at least this object has been passed down as a token of the sacred experience he once portrayed in his art.

Asked by his guide which Olympic events were the most popular in his time, Myron smiles and replies that, without doubt, the trials of combat, especially wrestling and boxing. Many ancient texts describe heroic feats of strength and endurance over many hours, with special honors given to victories in three or four Olympiads.

Myron explains that, in recognition of special performance, officials of the victor`s city authorize that a section of the city`s defensive walls be torn down to create a special entranceway for the victor. And even though the laurel leaves soon fade, the city will honor the returning hero with lifetime lodging and food. They may even commission a statue, and in special cases, make a gift of it to the sanctuary at Delphi.

As the games come to an end Myron asks his guide if all hostilities in the world cease in order to allow athletes and audiences to travel in safety to the London Olympics as they did to the ancient games. “Alas, no,” the guide explains, “the world no longer respects the games as they once did.”

Myron says that when he returns to the world of shadows, he will report that the new world order has forgotten much, but that in most events, through much effort and dedication, there is an understanding of what remains to be achieved, that there is something higher, deeper to be realized and understood and that all is not lost, not yet.

Origins of the Olympics