White Robed Monks of St. Benedict

NOTE: Under the copywrite of Neti Net Media, LLC. and with permission,
the following abstracts appear from the Program and Research Abstracts prepared for
the Science and Nonduality Conference,
held in San Rafael, California, USA, October 21-25, 2009, Thank you.

3.0000 Culture and Humanities

3.0100 3.0100 Anthropology

3.0200 3.0200 Art and aesthetics

3.0201 Aesthetic convergence: The attraction to nonduality in word and image
B. Kalivac Carroll
While word and image themes have become relatively common, what compels artists to fuse the verbal and perceptual remains less ubiquitous. Sociopolitical intentions, psychological factors, and a purely visual aesthetic are all commonly asserted and valid explanations of why artists combine word and image. However, this paper examines a deeper motive. This thematic focus considers how attraction to prior unity fuels a convergence of the visual and verbal in much modern art and literature. Examples include art in the 2008-2009 Guggenheim exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, which the author researched on site in New York City for a week. In examining art that consciously expresses the impulse to fuse the visual and verbal, a dynamic hybrid aesthetic becomes apparent. Both ekphrastic writing and mnemosyne, a word pointing to the parallel between literature and visual art, illustrate this impulse. In addition, a broad spill of aesthetic phenomena and topics are relevant, including the use of font and script in visual art, perceptual narrative in literary art as well as narratological perception in visual art, and the "shock of the new" in modern art history, such as the cubist invention of collage, Fluxus intermedia, digital art, and other mergings of word and image in modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary work. These convergences occur also within sacred or cultural contexts, such as the melding of spoken and visual arts in the Buddhist genre of folk literature known, as pien-wen, and the Ethiopian visual and textual scroll used in shamanistic healing rituals. Both are powerful examples used in this paper, along with the unusual phenomenon of spiritual teachers whose work includes making art, such as the work of Zen Master Hakuin in 18th century Japan, and the arts of Adi Da Samraj in modern art.
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3.0202 Convergences: Hybridity and Metaphors of Consciousness
Janice Lee
Robert Romanyshyn proposes that the original presentation of reality itself is metaphorical, that what is seen is always inextricably bound up with how one sees. Necker's cube, as a metaphor for consciousness, also offers itself as a metaphor for reading, for narrative, and for hybridity. It recalls the consequences effacing the creation of an impossible perceptual world occurring in a physical one. In terms of using consciousness as a metaphor for reading a hybrid work, I regard consciousness here as consciousness of something else, always having an object which is not consciousness itself, as that process in which meaning is revealed, or, consciousness as intentionality as meaning. I assume here that all models of consciousness are metaphorical, that metaphots form the basic ground of human consciousness, that metaphors succeed precisely because they fail, that perceived reality is itself metaphorical, and that narrative/ reading/ hybridity/ textuality all become intertwined with models of consciousness. Consciousness, like a hybrid work, occupies an intermediate order of being, between ideas and mechanisms, partaking of the characteristics of both realms, yet fully fitting within neither.
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3.0300 Criticism

3.0400 Deconstruction

3.0500 Education

3.0501 Changing our Minds: Re-Forming Healthcare by Challenging Dualisms Embedded in Nursing Education
Teddie Potter (Nursing, Minneapolis College)
RATIONALE: The critical issues facing our current health care system will not be solved with a massive influx of capital nor will they be erased with restructuring. Any solution will prove temporary unless our story about health and healing shifts. The biomedical story is fraught with dualisms. These include but are not limited to mind-body, patient-caregiver, and nature-human dichotomies. Each of these dualities profoundly impact and limit human healing potentials. OBJECTIVE: To break free of this paradigm, the current history of nursing is deconstructed. My research explores the way this story socializes new nurses into dualistic ways of thinking/being. The current story's assumptions and limitations are illuminated and the deleterious impact on patient care and nursing is discussed. METHOD: This transdisciplinary study deconstructs the history of nursing in current fundamental textbooks. The assumptions and ideologies embedded in these texts provide the earliest socialization to the role of the nurse therefore critique is imperative. A new story of nursing is then constructed based on themes from historical narratives of healers. Nursing did not begin with Florence Nightingale in 1850. It originated with the earliest indigenous healers. Indigenous healers teach that health is intimately bound to community, environment, and nondualistic ways of knowing/being. RESULTS: The new story of nursing emphasizes cultural, cognitive, and environmental relationships based on partnership. These three foci hold tremendous potential for shifting our response to health and health care. CONCLUSION: Provider education strongly influences whether there will be a paradigm shift in health care. Nondualistic theory and practice need to be incorporated into provider curriculum in order for health care to be transformed.
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3.0502 Religion, Science, and Education: A Curriculum in Perennial Philosophy
Adam Daniel Stulberg (poeticinterconnections.org)
Religion and science are the two dominant worldviews of our day; and in education, as in greater society, they are largely treated as antithetical and segregated. This situation is reflective of the dual perspective inherent in traditional Western philosophy, on which our scholastic culture is based. My research maps the design and testing of an interdisciplinary curriculum devoted to synthesizing religion and science. The perennial philosophy of religious mysticism (Vendanta Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism) and the most recent discoveries, in physics/mathematics (quantum theory, fractal geometry, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, etc.) reveal a similar reality, characterized by dynamic interconnection and holism. This reality is intuited by many students, and in need of academic corroboration. Coursework integrating spirituality and science can provide this support, allowing for the possibility of a new, comprehensive, NONDUAL metaphysics for the 21st century.
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3.03503 Beshara: An education in unity
Nikos Yiangou, Jane Carroll, Maren Gleason (Beshara Foundation) How can we be educated in the unity of existence? How can our intellectual grasp of the insights of science help us find our real place in the oneness of being? How can the desire for completeness, the longing for liberation or the love of beauty be directed? Mystics and visionaries in many traditions have expressed the state of being where the self is at one with all existence. How can these teachings be accessed without becoming caught up in the forms and limitations of personal belief? Beshara offers an education in the unity of being. It is an education in the true sense of drawing out what is real in each of us and not of being taught by others. This education is inclusive and seeks to expand, not limit, how we see ourselves in the context of this world, where all the faculties of the self can be integrated so that the intellect, emotion and intuition find their proper place. By coming together to study with intention the great teachings which have been left to us, we find they bring out what we already know in ourselves, what is corroborated at the heart of each religious or spiritual tradition, what impacts us in great art and what is indicated in the science of consciousness. The Beshara Foundation offers courses of study, gatherings for conversation, weekend seminars and nine-day courses — all directed towards an understanding of the unity of existence. Drawing in part on traditional sources of wisdom, this education is independent of any religious or spiritual order. There are no leaders or teachers; the emphasis is on the direct understanding of each individual to find their real self without intermediary. PO 2
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3.0600 Ethics and Legal Studies

3.0700 Hermeneutics

3.0800 Information Technology
3.09 Literary Criticism

3.0900 Literary Criticism

3.1000 Miscellaneous

3.01100 Music

3.01200 Mythology

3.1300 Postmodern approaches

3.1400 Religion

3.1500 Sociology

White Robed Monks of St. Benedict
Post Office Box 27536
San Francisco CA 94127-0536 USA
Phone: 415-292-3228
e-mail:webmaster@whiterobedmonks.org
Page URL: http://www.whiterobedmonks.org/nonduality/2009abstracts/003.html
Copyright © 2009 White Robed Monks of St. Benedict

3.0100	3.0100 Anthropology

3.0200	3.0200 Art and aesthetics

3.0201	Aesthetic convergence: The attraction to nonduality in word and image B. Kalivac Carroll While word and image themes have become relatively common, what compels artists to fuse the verbal and perceptual remains less ubiquitous. Sociopolitical intentions, psychological factors, and a purely visual aesthetic are all commonly asserted and valid explanations of why artists combine word and image. However, this paper examines a deeper motive. This thematic focus considers how attraction to prior unity fuels a convergence of the visual and verbal in much modern art and literature. Examples include art in the 2008-2009 Guggenheim exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, which the author researched on site in New York City for a week. In examining art that consciously expresses the impulse to fuse the visual and verbal, a dynamic hybrid aesthetic becomes apparent. Both ekphrastic writing and mnemosyne, a word pointing to the parallel between literature and visual art, illustrate this impulse. In addition, a broad spill of aesthetic phenomena and topics are relevant, including the use of font and script in visual art, perceptual narrative in literary art as well as narratological perception in visual art, and the "shock of the new" in modern art history, such as the cubist invention of collage, Fluxus intermedia, digital art, and other mergings of word and image in modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary work. These convergences occur also within sacred or cultural contexts, such as the melding of spoken and visual arts in the Buddhist genre of folk literature known, as pien-wen, and the Ethiopian visual and textual scroll used in shamanistic healing rituals. Both are powerful examples used in this paper, along with the unusual phenomenon of spiritual teachers whose work includes making art, such as the work of Zen Master Hakuin in 18th century Japan, and the arts of Adi Da Samraj in modern art.
	Return to Index

3.0202	Convergences: Hybridity and Metaphors of Consciousness Janice Lee Robert Romanyshyn proposes that the original presentation of reality itself is metaphorical, that what is seen is always inextricably bound up with how one sees. Necker's cube, as a metaphor for consciousness, also offers itself as a metaphor for reading, for narrative, and for hybridity. It recalls the consequences effacing the creation of an impossible perceptual world occurring in a physical one. In terms of using consciousness as a metaphor for reading a hybrid work, I regard consciousness here as consciousness of something else, always having an object which is not consciousness itself, as that process in which meaning is revealed, or, consciousness as intentionality as meaning. I assume here that all models of consciousness are metaphorical, that metaphots form the basic ground of human consciousness, that metaphors succeed precisely because they fail, that perceived reality is itself metaphorical, and that narrative/ reading/ hybridity/ textuality all become intertwined with models of consciousness. Consciousness, like a hybrid work, occupies an intermediate order of being, between ideas and mechanisms, partaking of the characteristics of both realms, yet fully fitting within neither.
	Return to Index

3.0300	Criticism

3.0400	Deconstruction

3.0500	Education

3.0501	Changing our Minds: Re-Forming Healthcare by Challenging Dualisms Embedded in Nursing Education Teddie Potter (Nursing, Minneapolis College) RATIONALE: The critical issues facing our current health care system will not be solved with a massive influx of capital nor will they be erased with restructuring. Any solution will prove temporary unless our story about health and healing shifts. The biomedical story is fraught with dualisms. These include but are not limited to mind-body, patient-caregiver, and nature-human dichotomies. Each of these dualities profoundly impact and limit human healing potentials. OBJECTIVE: To break free of this paradigm, the current history of nursing is deconstructed. My research explores the way this story socializes new nurses into dualistic ways of thinking/being. The current story's assumptions and limitations are illuminated and the deleterious impact on patient care and nursing is discussed. METHOD: This transdisciplinary study deconstructs the history of nursing in current fundamental textbooks. The assumptions and ideologies embedded in these texts provide the earliest socialization to the role of the nurse therefore critique is imperative. A new story of nursing is then constructed based on themes from historical narratives of healers. Nursing did not begin with Florence Nightingale in 1850. It originated with the earliest indigenous healers. Indigenous healers teach that health is intimately bound to community, environment, and nondualistic ways of knowing/being. RESULTS: The new story of nursing emphasizes cultural, cognitive, and environmental relationships based on partnership. These three foci hold tremendous potential for shifting our response to health and health care. CONCLUSION: Provider education strongly influences whether there will be a paradigm shift in health care. Nondualistic theory and practice need to be incorporated into provider curriculum in order for health care to be transformed.
	Return to Index

3.0502	Religion, Science, and Education: A Curriculum in Perennial Philosophy Adam Daniel Stulberg (poeticinterconnections.org) Religion and science are the two dominant worldviews of our day; and in education, as in greater society, they are largely treated as antithetical and segregated. This situation is reflective of the dual perspective inherent in traditional Western philosophy, on which our scholastic culture is based. My research maps the design and testing of an interdisciplinary curriculum devoted to synthesizing religion and science. The perennial philosophy of religious mysticism (Vendanta Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism) and the most recent discoveries, in physics/mathematics (quantum theory, fractal geometry, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, etc.) reveal a similar reality, characterized by dynamic interconnection and holism. This reality is intuited by many students, and in need of academic corroboration. Coursework integrating spirituality and science can provide this support, allowing for the possibility of a new, comprehensive, NONDUAL metaphysics for the 21st century.
	Return to Index

3.03503	Beshara: An education in unity Nikos Yiangou, Jane Carroll, Maren Gleason (Beshara Foundation) How can we be educated in the unity of existence? How can our intellectual grasp of the insights of science help us find our real place in the oneness of being? How can the desire for completeness, the longing for liberation or the love of beauty be directed? Mystics and visionaries in many traditions have expressed the state of being where the self is at one with all existence. How can these teachings be accessed without becoming caught up in the forms and limitations of personal belief? Beshara offers an education in the unity of being. It is an education in the true sense of drawing out what is real in each of us and not of being taught by others. This education is inclusive and seeks to expand, not limit, how we see ourselves in the context of this world, where all the faculties of the self can be integrated so that the intellect, emotion and intuition find their proper place. By coming together to study with intention the great teachings which have been left to us, we find they bring out what we already know in ourselves, what is corroborated at the heart of each religious or spiritual tradition, what impacts us in great art and what is indicated in the science of consciousness. The Beshara Foundation offers courses of study, gatherings for conversation, weekend seminars and nine-day courses — all directed towards an understanding of the unity of existence. Drawing in part on traditional sources of wisdom, this education is independent of any religious or spiritual order. There are no leaders or teachers; the emphasis is on the direct understanding of each individual to find their real self without intermediary. PO 2
	Return to Index

3.0600	Ethics and Legal Studies

3.0700	Hermeneutics

3.0800	Information Technology 3.09 Literary Criticism

3.0900	Literary Criticism

3.1000	Miscellaneous

3.01100	Music

3.01200	Mythology

3.1300	Postmodern approaches

3.1400	Religion

3.1500	Sociology