Talks and downloads

 

This page contains a variety of material for you to listen to or read.

 

 

Contact Magazine

 

You can view recent issues of the magazine online:
Contact Magazine issue 57, Spring 2012
Contact Magazine issue 55, Summer 2011
Contact Magazine issue 54, Spring 2011
Contact Magazine issue 53, Autumn 2010

 

 

Brother Martin of Shantivanam: ‘A New Story of Creation’

Brother Martin was a close friend and disciple of Father Bede Griffiths, who in 1955 set up the world famous Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in Tamil Nadu, where the Benedictine rule of life was practised in an Ashram Setting. Here it was possible to combine unique eastern insights and Christian wisdom. This has generated a spirituality that has a powerful and universal appeal. Bede's books, The Golden String, Return to the Centre and Marriage of East and West have become spiritual classics of our time. Father Bede spoke to a packed top studio at Colet House 20 years ago and we have been delighted to welcome Brother Martin several times since then. His accessible teaching enables an understanding of ‘the search for truth at the heart of all religions’ at a time when it has potentially never held so much relevance.

His subject this time focuses on a retelling of the creation story with the convergence of Hindu and Biblical cosmogony.

14 July 2011, 72 minutes.
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Rupert Spira: ‘Contemplations on the Nature of Experience’

Contemplations on the Nature of Experience with Rupert Spira in which we explore the perennial non-dual understanding that lies at the heart of all great religious and spiritual traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana and Dzogchen Buddhism, Mystical Christianity, Sufism, Zen etc., as well as the Western philosophical tradition of Parmenides, Plotinus and many others, and which is also the direct, ever-present reality of our own intimate experience. This is a contemporary, experiential approach involving silent meditation, guided meditation and dialogue, and requires no affiliation to any particular religious or spiritual tradition. All that is required is an interest in the essential nature of experience and in the longing for love, peace and happiness around which most of our lives revolve.

19 June 2011, 120 minutes and 113 minutes.
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Peter Fenwick: ‘Science, Spirituality and Unity’

For some time Western science has been looking closely at the mechanisms which underpin the construction of our world. The picture that is emerging is that the brain is infinitely more plastic than we had ever thought, as there is now, for example, evidence that the blind can feel with their visual cortex, and in certain cases can hear with their visual cortex. The deaf can see with their auditory cortex. These concepts would have been very foreign only ten years ago.

This new found brain plasticity suggests that many of our old ideas about rigid and localised brain structures may have to alter. Even our ideas about a personal sense of self and its capacity for agency are coming closer to those of the Shankaracharya.

Spirituality has been shown to have a protective action, reducing illness and increasing longevity. Compassion is now central to our understanding of care for the sick. The unity of Advaita is the foundation of Colet House where there is a confluence of the streams from Gurdjieff, Mr Ouspensky, Dr Roles, Rumi and the Shankaracharya. Members of Colet have been very fortunate in being able to experience these different streams and to recognise that each leads to the mountain top and towards the Atman. Self development has always been central to the ethos of Colet and it is essential that we develop and maintain the right conditions for this to continue. So what should a school in the 21st century look like, how much of the teaching should now be informed by science and although the goal is clear can the path be made clearer.

Dr Peter Fenwick is Emeritus Consultant Neuropsychiatrist, Maudsley Hospital and Honorary Consultant Neurophysiologist, St. Thomas's Hospital. He is a President of the Scientific and Medical Network and President of the Horizon Foundation. A long-term member of the Study Society, he joined the Management Committee in 2010 and was elected Chairman in 2011.

Delivered at the 2011 AGM of the Study Society, 10 April 2011, 83 minutes.
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Philip Marvin: ‘The Awakening Art of Shakespeare’

A workshop on Shakespeare and Advaita


Shakespeare's plays are consciously constructed vehicles through which we may come to a new understanding about ourselves. Their enactment of an outer drama is simply a magnification and reflection of the inner drama governed by law and love which we all experience.

In this workshop we will explore The Tempest, the last play Shakespeare wrote, barring some later collaborations. Key scenes will be enacted followed up by in-depth study in groups. Emphasis will be laid on the different levels of meaning that may be discovered and the hidden life of the play which can only be accessed by hearing the sounds and experiencing the rhythms of language in the present moment.

Philip Marvin is currently completing an MA dissertation at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford and has run a very successful series of Day with Shakespeare seminars for the past ten years in which professional actors have performed and different study techniques have been experimented with. He has studied and attempted to apply the principles of Advaita philosophy over some 36 years. The inspiration behind the study of Shakespeare has always been the unity of the Self, the source of all great art and certainly the wellspring from which Shakespeare drew. It is to that eternal presence that his magical art may return the alert audience.

For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 29

24 October 2010.
Part 1 - 51'17"
Part 2 Workshop - 58'15"
Part 3 - 11'22"
Part 4 Workshop - 60'25"
Part 5 Epilogue - 38'01"

 

 

Iain McGilchrist: ‘The Master and his Emissary’

In his remarkable and absorbing book, The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheres have not only different specialities but different perspectives on the world. Making full use of the multi-faceted experimental research into the brain in the last two decades, he suggests that the left hemisphere’s main aim is self-interested manipulation, and it is narrowly-focussed, yet at the same time obsessed with theory at the expense of reality. It lacks empathy, construes our minds and bodies, as machines, and is unreasonably certain of itself. And it is in denial about its limitations. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, while having a much broader and more generous stance towards the world, lacks the necessary certainty to counter this onslaught. Traditionally the two hemispheres have worked together, but McGilchrist believes that in modern times the left hemisphere has grabbed more than its fair share of power, resulting in a society where self-obsession, greed and plodding rationality hold sway, at an enormous cost to human happiness and the world around us.

Iain McGilchrist is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and has three times been elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He intended to read theology and philosophy at Oxford, but was hi-jacked into reading English literature, and published Against Criticism in 1982. He retrained in medicine in order to understand better the ‘mind-body problem’, and has been a neuroimaging researcher at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. He has mis-spent the last twenty years gestating this book, which relates the bihemispheric structure of the brain to the history of Western culture and its present predicament.

23 September 2010, 110 minutes.
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James Austin: ‘Zen-Brain Reflections: the Mechanism, Experience and Transformation.’

Jim Austin, an American Academic neurologist, found himself in Kyoto Japan over twenty years ago. Realising that Zen produced personal transformation he set out to study the brain mechanisms which underpinned these changes. He worked with a teacher in Japan, spending time in the Zendo and achieved his own Kensho experience. He is Emeritus Professor of Neurology at the University of Colorado and has written three highly acclaimed books including Zen and the Brain, giving the physiological brain mechanisms of the Zen experience and Zen-Brain Reflections, published in 2006, which moves rapidly from this neurological ground into the meaning, poetry and experience of Zen. He has a profound understanding of the neurology through the personal transformation to the wider philosophical experiences of Zen.

Delivered at a joint meeting of the Study Society and the Scientific and Medical Network, 3 March 2010, 113 minutes.
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Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake in dialogue: ‘Science, Consciousness and Spirit’

The study of consciousness is now one of the most exciting areas of science, and one where the limits of materialistic thinking have become most apparent. It also opens the door to explore the deeper and more experiential dimensions of faith such as mysticism and compassion. In this dialogue Rupert and Matthew will explore the frontiers of modern research and discuss how thinking about the nature of the mind can illuminate spiritual experience, and how spiritual experience can in turn illuminate our understanding of ourselves and of other forms of consciousness within the universe.

Delivered at a joint meeting of the Study Society and the Scientific and Medical Network, 6 April 2009, 120 minutes.
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Nigel Hamilton: ‘A Sufi Perspective: The role of dreams during the process of spiritual transformation’

21 January 2008, 78 minutes.
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John Clarke: ‘A Metaphysical Thirst’

19 November 2007, 74 minutes.
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Dr Denis Alexander: ‘Science and Faith in 2007 - Where are we now?’

11 January 2007, 60 minutes.
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