Beauty, Cosmic Consciousness and the Meaning of Existence

This Salon is for aesthetes, dreamers, and visionaries; for those who like to ask big questions and who are curious to dive deeper. 

We will talk about aesthetics (specifically what beauty is, and pathways of knowing it), cosmology (including chaos theory), quantum mechanics, and consciousness – the nature of mind itself. These inter-related topics will be made accessible and relevant for our lived experience, and presented to help us answer the most fundamental question of all: the meaning of why we exist. 

I propose that Beauty is not only vital for the human soul, but that understanding it offers us the keys to unlock Heaven on Earth. As well as being an academic, I am a futurist, writer, speaker, and revolutionary. My intention with this salon – as per my entire life’s work – is to inspire, provoke, move, awake and transform. Since I employ trans-disciplinary praxis, I have included a mix of poetry, prose, philosophy, music and science in the pre-Salon materials.

Sample questions:

• What is Beauty? How do we know we are in its presence?
• Can Beauty ever be Objective, or is it always in the eye of the beholder?
• What happens when we synthesise maths and poetry?
• What is consciousness, and how does it relate to cosmology?
• Why do we experience beauty in life and the universe? How can evolutionary biology make sense of this?
• How could Beauty help change the world?

Recommended Readings

* All articles/videos etc are extremely short* — 1. Article on Plato’s Beauty — 2.  David Bohm speaking about the Implicate Order — 3. Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats — 4. Read the short section, “A flash-back in Paradise” from chapter one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned — 5. Movement III by Robert Koch — 6. “Time Passes”, an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse — 7. Pendulum Wave — 8. Article on Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetics

• https://medium.com/@michaelpuleo2/platos-views-on-beauty-487ec35346db
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wy9kS8ob2Y
• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn
• https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9830/9830-h/9830-h.htm
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jEGbSESZI
• https://genius.com/Virginia-woolf-to-the-lighthouse-time-passes-3-annotated
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DZFi0SUzmI
• https://blog.oup.com/2019/08/friedrich-schiller-on-beauty-and-aesthetics-philosopher-of-the-month/

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