Special
Events > Beyond the East-West Divide (Talk)
The Two and the One:
Beyond the East-West Divide
Speaker: William Stranger
Sponsored
by UNSRC S.E.A.T.
(United Nations Staff Recreation Council
Society
for Enlightenment and Transformation)
We seek to inspire, inform, enlighten and uplift your spirits.
Date: Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Time: 1:00 pm
Place:
United Nations Visitor's Entrance
Level 1B, Dag Hammarskjöld Library (43rd St. and 1st Ave.)
Meeting Room S-2727FC, Secretariat Building, New York, NY 10017
— map
Attendees not in possession of a UN grounds pass should arrive
at the visitor entrance 30 minutes early for security clearance
and issuance of visitor's ID.
RSVP to Peter Dawkins at pdawkins@unicef.org
if you wish to attend; please indicate whether you will need a
UN visitor's pass.
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About the talk — Our globalized world remains deeply
divided between two opposed and opposing visions of reality: the
ancient sacred view, traditionally ascribed to the Orient, that
all experience ultimately resolves into a subjective or interior
mystical unity; and the modern secular view that all experience
ultimately reduces to the processes and patterns of objective
“matter”. Although the latter view — a product of the scientific
and political materialism emerging from the post-Renaissance West
— appears to be globally dominant today, the conflict itself rages
on unchecked in every sector of our culture, and (most especially)
within every individual. William Stranger, founder and editor
of DharmaCafé Books and DharmaCafe.com,
has spent his life examining the nature and the implications of
this conflict, and the basis for achieving a cultural synthesis
replacing contradiction with paradox and opposition with
transcendence.
In this lecture William will focus upon five unique Western thinkers
who bridged the East-West divide: the psychiatrists E. Graham
Howe and Iain McGilchrist, the literary critic Hugh l’Anson Fausset,
the poet Lewis Thompson, and the spiritual master Adi Da Samraj.
He will explain how the synthesis they achieved is essential to
the realization of both personal happiness and global political
sanity.
About
the speaker — William Stranger is the founder and editor of
DharmaCafe.com,
an online magazine, and DharmaCafé Books, a new imprint dedicated
to publishing literature on consciousness and culture that is
distributed by Random House. He has been a peace activist since
the 1960s. After becoming a disciple of Avatar Adi Da Samraj,
in 1973, William participated in the founding of The Laughing
Man magazine, widely regarded as the father of all contemporary
ecumenical spiritual magazines. Over the past 35 years he has
spoken at a variety of ecumenical and peace fora, including the
Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Raul Wallenberg
Institute of Ethics, the State of the World Forum,
and the Hague Appeal for Peace. He is also the co-founder
of the Calistoga
Institute, a California based policy institute dedicated to
optimal well-being, cultural regeneration, and inherent unity.
William’s background in the history of consciousness, classical
spirituality, and postCartesian political, scientific, artistic,
cultural paradigms, along with his work as activist, author, literary
agent, and publisher, has given him broad knowledge of today’s
nascent cultural renaissance.
About the UNSRC — the United Nations Staff Recreation
Council is an organization comprised of an Executive Committee
and fifty-six clubs (including the Society for Enlightenment and
Transformation), governed by and responsible to the laws of the
Constitution of the UN Staff Recreation Council, the Secretary-General
of the United Nations, and the General Assembly of the United
Nations.
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