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Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Hear Animus Mundi: The Spirituality of the World

Pacifica Graduate Institute posts details for its Climates of Change and the Therapy of Ideas conference, 21-24 April 2016 at its Ladera Lane Campus in Santa Barbara.

According to the conference description:
As an interconnected and vital community, we come together to engage new ideas that 'see through' existing paradigms. We will gather to listen, to learn, and to work together to spark innovative action. In this calling, we are deeply inspired by James Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, toward creating a future that undertakes a critical 're-visioning' and 're-imagining' of our world. He urged us to create a therapy of ideas, to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old patterns differently.'  This landmark conference brings together leading archetypal psychologists, scholars, cultural critics, and artists to turn our ‘therapeutic' attention toward re-imagining the economies and ecologies that will shape our world and future generations." 
Thomas Moore, one of the presenters, will speak about:
Animus Mundi: 
The Spirituality of the World 

"As the culture quickly becomes more secularized, the state of religion and spirituality is in crisis. Suddenly we have to re-imagine what religion is all about or give up on it. We are moving toward a more soulless world because the soul thrives on the holy — a recognition of a non-human dimension in all we do. Today many people prefer to speak of spirituality rather than religion. Understandably, they want a more personal and more sophisticated way of being spiritual. Many may seek this through their psychotherapy. We are moving toward a new definition of religion and new ways of finding sacred forms, rituals, teachings and methods. One important development is including concerns of the soul as well as the spirit. Soul and spirit are increasingly the focus in many psychotherapies. We can find models for re-visioning religion in C.G. Jung, D.H. Lawrence, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Thomas Moore, Ph.D., received his degree in religion from Syracuse University. Before that he was a monk for thirteen years. He is the author of Care of the Soul and nineteen other books, with four new publications coming out in 2016. He has been a psychotherapist for forty years and lectures widely on depth psychology, religion/spirituality and the arts. He was a close friend of James Hillman for 38 years. He is also a musician, translator and writer of fiction. For more information, visit careofthesoul.net."

Thomas Moore also offers this  pre-conference workshop:
Thursday 21 April 2016
9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Fee: $75

Psychotherapy as Religious Ritual
"Jung’s Red Book is a model for doing psychotherapy, both with oneself and with others. The key is a connection and dialogue with transcendent figures, such as Jung’s Philemon. Hillman insisted that we not treat imaginal figures as symbols standing for concepts but rather as having their own independent imaginal reality. He says, “Psychology as religion implies imagining all psychological events as effects of Gods in the soul and all activities do with soul, such as therapy, to be operations of ritual in relation to these Gods.” This workshop explores how to make therapy less conceptual and more a direct relationship with figures of the past, dream events, and current mythologies and dramas of the psyche. It assumes “religion” to mean maintaining a potent relationship with the imaginal realm and finding portals to the mysterious others that play a formative role in the psyche."

Continuing Education Credits are available for Moore's presentation.

Conference Schedule
Thursday, April 21     5:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Friday, April 22          9:00 am - 9:00 pm
Saturday, April 23      9:00 am - 9:00 pm
Sunday, April 24        9:00 am - 1:00 pm

Conference Fee
General Admission $525
Special Admission (Full-Time Students, Pacifica Alumni, and Seniors) $475
Active Pacifica Students $450

Barque coverage 
14 Dec 2015 "Share ideas with each other for the anima mundi"