21 February 2009
21 February 2009
Board of Administrators: Vitor Rodrigues; President, Hans-Peter Weidinger, Bernadette Blin-Lery, Elena Francisc, Ingo Jahrsetz and Beata Bishop
Newsletter Editor: John Drew, Newsletter Executive: Erich Meier
Dear Friends – here are some references to the 11th Eurotas Conference, Milan 15-18 October 2009. Please put these dates in your diary. More information will be available soon, but you can access the eurotas.org website and the eurotasitaly2009.eu site for further information.
Please fill in the forms to apply for the Conference for accommodation and meals and also to offer a talk, workshop or discussion subject. There are also bank payment details.
The key dates are
More details on the websites and in a future Newsletter
Here is some initial information about the EUROTAS Conference so that you can put the dates in your agendas and begin to think about contributions to it.
The draft Programme is very much a draft at this stage although the presence of Stan Grof and Erwin Lazlo is confirmed.
Thursday 15th October (Click Table Header to sort!)
Friday 16th October
Saturday 17th October
Sunday 18th October
So let us stand as realistic visionaries: with this sort of
Conferences, we are helping the construction of the new Humankind. We are living among us
the solution for today's crisis. So please come to Milan, Italy, and participate with what you have, what you do and mostly who you
are. We welcome you.
Vitor Rodrigues,
PhD President of EUROTAS
Dear Friends
Yes, we are dreamers, awake dreamers that want to contribute with words and acts in such a context (our post-modern life in this post-modern world) in order to develop a sacred respect, dignified silence, apologetic awareness of our condition as human beings, sympathetic brotherhood and compassionate love for all.
Eurotas and Om, Association for Medicine and Transpersonal Psychology, are building from these preliminary remarks to organize the 11th Eurotas conference entitled: Beyond the Mind (toward a consciousness of unity. From a culture of competition to a culture of sharing). The conference will be held in Milan from the 15 to the 18 of October 2009.
We are sending out the following call for papers and we will be pleased to receive your proposals.
Arrivederci a Milano.
Pier Luigi Lattuada, M.D, Ph.D
President of Om Association
CALL FOR PAPERS
At the previous Eurotas conference it was suggested that future conferences should emphasise experience rather than intellectual work alone. We shall try to get the right balance; we believe that the issue is not words nor experience per se, but the opening of the heart. So please, bring your heart and dare to open the door.
We welcome proposals for talks, workshops or for participation in a working group.
The length of talks will be half an hour and workshops two hours.
Working groups will also be two hours duration but the format will differ from that of workshops: Between three and six presenters will introduce themselves, their work and the topics (introductions to be no more than ten minutes each). The remaining time should be devoted to sharing experience and ideas with all participants. The intention is to establish something similar to that which the world cafè connotes.
Please, send us your proposals as soon as possible. The latest date for submission is April 30th.
The 11th Eurotas Conference Scientific Board will reply before the end of May.
For registration please refer to the Registration-Form on the Euotasitaly2009 website
For Registration and Payment:
Please subscribe soon and send your remittance to bank account:
Associazione Om
Banca Popolare Commercio e Industria
Agenzia Milano-Olona
Via Olona 11
I - 20123 Milano / Italy
SWIFT: BLOPIT22
IBAN: IT61 K050 4801 6330 0000 0010 009
Beyond the mind, 11th Eurotas Conference
P.L.Lattuada M.D., Ph.D
The history of the transpersonal movement is quite peculiar.
Transpersonal psychology developed in the seventies in the Bay area around San Francisco. Even before been really known it passed through many divisions and sharp disagreement, to such a point that Ken Wilber, a milestone of the transpersonal thought, went off the movement accomplishing the wrench many years ago, as he considered it already on the way of a final and hopeless decline.
The transpersonal movement has been much criticized. Some of its detractors describe transpersonal psychology as a movement of characters talking about spirituality, often arguing between themselves on the real meaning of this word, people a little absent minded, confused in magic and mythological prerationalist thought.
For others the representative of transpersonal movement avoid the hard and ordinary psychological work to seek refuge in non ordinary states of consciousness, often induced by drugs, showing in such a way a eco-primitivism retro-Romantic, to use Wilber’s words (http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/interviews/interview1220.cfm/), that prevents them to speak with exponents of other psychological theories looking to more actual dimension of consciousness.
Still for others, the most misunderstanding, transpersonal psychologist moves in a dangerous area closely with new age arguments. They would say: “they talk with spirits” “They believe in angels”, for them transpersonal psychologist ignore real problems, they regress to the oral phase of development through meditation and mantras murmuring.
However many detractors do not know what they are talking about, as they never met a transpersonal psychotherapist. Others, like Ken Wilber and Claudio Naranjo base their opinion on the experience of the transpersonal movement at the beginning, perhaps they hardly know that in Europe there is a transpersonal movement in good health, counting two international associations, one of them the EUROTAS strong of 24 national associations, including authors such as John Rowan, Laura Boggio Gilot, Vitor Rodrigues, Arturo De Luca, Ingo Benjamin Jahretz, Beata Bishop, Vladimir Maykov, Jure Biechonsky, Bernadette Blin, Judith Miller and myself, just to name a few of them, which published ten or so books and scientific works describing original approaches. Maybe transpersonal critics never had a chance to know all of this.
Perhaps even less known is the transpersonal movement from Brazil, where since the seventies it has been developing in the academic circle bringing forth methods and models absolutely innovating. We are talking about Pierre Weil’s pioneering work, culminated in the foundation of the Universidade da Paz in Brasilia. Or to mention the Eliezer Crequiera Mendes’s extraordinary contribution with his psycotranstherapy and David Akstein with Terpsicoterapia or professor Armando Leite Neves with his transpersonal analysis.
At last is right to mention the contribution of the most viable Psycosintesis, with centres spread all over the world under the drive of fervent minds such as Massimo Rosselli and Piero Ferrucci, just to name some of them.
Let us cite, at the end, the bio-trans-energetic, a wide and articulated transpersonal methodology founded in the early eighties by Marlene Silveira and Pier Luigi Lattuada, my self, who since then worked it out in more than twenty-five thousand hours of clinical work and twelve published books.
Reading carefully the texts and actively participating to the annual eurotas conferences, with delegates from more than 30 countries, and most of all, from the direct and heartily acquaintance of the transpersonal movement representatives, it is possible to deeply understand the essence and vital cultural pregnancy of the phenomenon we are talking about.
For example it would be possible to understand that a unitary vision can only result from an unitary sight, and an unitary sight descend from an unitary state of consciousness which some call consciousness of unity. This consciousness seem to be characterized as a state of being reachable when it is possible to overstep the ordinary mind, usually curbed in a dual vision, due to attachments and personal conflicts. It would then be easy to understand, may be with the support of an encyclopaedic knowledge about quadrants, circles and spirals, that the point is the descent of the mind inside the heart, something easy to be said but endless to be accomplished.
It would then be possible to understand that the word transpersonal does not belong to one or the other but it is available to whoever is truly stepping on a heart bounded road.
This word belongs to the hero journeying toward home, through valleys of passion and ignorance, peaks of intuition and fits of enthusiasm, nights of the soul and never ending awakenings, deaths and rebirths, in the humble attempt to free ourselves and to water to the spring of being, whom somebody calls God, others Self and others heart.
This spring sometimes seems relentlessly drained, other gush plentiful, sometimes seems unreachable others unveil forever present here and now.
In these rare moments of presence, when we are bestowed a sip, the transpersonal dimension reveals itself with its copious and astonishing wealth. In front of such a dimension just stay in religious silence and devotional surrender, compassion for our self and our fellow creatures, with consciousness of the linked unity of everything.
In such a dimension it is unambiguously clear that the access to the unity is possible when we disappear to ourselves, when we have the courage to loose and find ourselves, beyond the mind, which is in the transpersonal kingdoms.
From such a dimension we are often driven away from the icy wind of arrogance, from the avid bite of power, from the wicked thirst of self-importance. The hero coming back from the journey in such a dimension must remember: “not two, one”.
Then, beyond the mind, namely beyond the attachment to our limited personal view, there is the transpersonal vision which appears deeply complete, realizing that the integral vision is absolutely transpersonal.
Beyond the mind, meaning beyond the narcissistic identification with one’s own model, the different psychological models appear to pertain to the linked flow of consciousness expressing the present humankind condition.
Beyond the mind, to say beyond judgement, the travelling hero shyly dear to open the doors.
In the eleventh eurotas conference to be held in Milan from the 15 to the 18 of October 2009 delegates of the transpersonal movement from more than 30 countries will discuss and share ideas, models and experiences, to map out a hearty route for education, science, companies and social organizations.
Doors are open to delegates of psychoanalysis, behavioural and humanistic psychology, to representatives of the academic scientific world, organized religions, as well as political institutions and finally to good will people.