Date/Time
Date(s) - Fri 12 Oct 2018
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location
Psychosynthesis Trust
To a young child the world teems with lively intent, everything has a story path. A tree is lonely, a cloud is cold and a stone wants to join its friends on the opposite side of the stream. Nothing is literal. All is creative possibility, an imaginative intermingling between child and world.
In our culture, not many of us hang on to this enchanted existence into adulthood.
We grow up and spend more time indoors than out. Technology mediates our interaction with the environment. Education promotes rationality over dreaming. The feeling of being embedded in the world atrophies. Imagination shrinks back from the senses, stuffed within, an ‘inner imagination’. The ubiquitous ‘Inner Child’ an interiority of imagination related to our personal biographies, no longer a perceptual interaction with the animals, plants and trees.
However, in pre-modern cultures, the enchanted perspective of childhood was not a naïve phase prior to adulthood. It was nourished to maturity through initiation rites that built upon rather than denied participation with the presences of the natural world.
What if our childhood enchantment is some kind of psychic inheritance from our hunter-gatherer ancestors? An inheritance obscured by cultural shifts, beginning with the advent of agriculture 12,000 years ago and then speeding up during the industrial revolution 300 years ago and now racing ahead at full pelt into the digital future.
Might the repression and estrangement from this enchanted inheritance be a root cause of our modern alienation? And how might we recover our lost childhood perception, as a recollection of our ancestral sanity?
The talk will reflect on the above themes as we follow Allan and his dog Milly on a walk to the edge of the city and into the depths of the ancient Epping Forest, where they seem to slip out of the twenty first century altogether…
Booking opens mid July at: https://psychosynthesistrust.org.uk/all-events/