Conference Presentations
“Evil”: In the Mind, Not the Soul
by:
Dr. Christopher T. Burris
when:
Saturday, September 27, 2014 - 10:00 to 11:00
held at:
Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Wilfrid Laurier University 120 Duke Street West Kitchener, Ontario N2H 3W8
Spiritual/religious understandings of “the good” commonly center on self-transcendence, manifest intrapersonally as self-control, and interpersonally as love. This backdrop helps make sense of spiritual/religious understandings of “evil” that center on self-enhancement, manifest intrapersonally as moral compartmentalization, and interpersonally as hate. Love and hate, in turn, serve important psychological functions within various spiritual/religious frameworks. At the same time, creative subversions can also manifest, for not all love is seen as “good,” nor is all hate seen as “evil.” Understanding “evil,” then, necessitates attending to what’s happening in the mind, not (just) the soul.
Christopher T. Burris is a social psychologist and a Professor of Psychology at St. Jerome’s University, in the University of Waterloo. He has forty peer-reviewed journal articles and several book chapters to his credit dealing with a range of topics including love and hate, religion and spirituality, evil and sexuality, and consciousness and the self. He was recipient of the Early Career Research Award from Division 36 (Psychology of Religion) of the American Psychological Association, and his recent work on religious belief and disbelief has received media coverage by outlets such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Chronicle of Higher Education. When not “playing academic,” he can usually be found hovering behind binoculars, looking for birds.
Celebrate Your Divinity
by:
Dr. Orest Bedrij
when:
Saturday, September 27, 2014 - 11:00 to 12:00
held at:
Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Wilfrid Laurier University 120 Duke Street West Kitchener, Ontario N2H 3W8
Moses (1460 BC) brought the ‘splendor of the splendid’ message from God, that all life is One-Infinite-Being, the “I AM WHO I AM.”
The Hindu Vedanta also confirms One-Infinite-Life: “Why will you wander in the wilderness! You who are seeking God! Yourself are he! You need not search! He is you, verily!”
Jesus Christ (1980 years ago) by developing our inbuilt perfectibility: purity of heart, love, living and acting out of selfless compassion realized his own divinity. Jesus knew that: “The kingdom of heaven is within you, and whosoever shall know himself shall find it.”
The Holy Prophet Muhammad (1380 years ago) also freed himself from the dungeon of optical delusion of consciousness (like the Buddha, Laozi, and many Hindu Saints) by knowing himself. Muhammad stated: “He who knoweth his own self, knoweth God.”
Albert Einstein (40 years ago) realized: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Recently Abraham Heschel, Polish-born American rabbi and one of the foremost Jewish theologians and truth-seekers of the 20th century put it this way: “How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it! How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.”
You are the Light of the world: You are the Absolute Most High in human body.
Now at SHEN (Spiritual Heritage Educational Network) Orest Bedrij, a multidisciplinary scientist brings fresh light, depth, and universal principle evidence to the central themes of Heschel’s “ultimate embarrassment” and Einstein’s “optical delusion” of our consciousness. Integrating the latest rigorous scholarship of physics and mathematics, sacred writings of the world’s richest and most diverse spiritual traditions and personal direct experience, Dr. Bedrij ascends to the splendor of the Absolute, the One-Infinite-Light that makes all things conscious in every atom, worm, galaxy, seraphim, and the eternal “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” He states, “The time has arrived in which we have to realize we are all parts of a single living being and develop new kinds of responses and relationships.” Dr. Bedrij, In his presentation, will facilitate a personal experiential opportunity to enter the luminous clarity Nirvana-High, ultimate wellness and ’truth of truth’ state (union of peace, compassion, and unchanging eternal timelessness) in you and through you,
Dr. Orest Bedrij is an author and multidisciplinary researcher into the foundation of nature, at the Institute for Advanced Study of ‘1’. At the age of twenty-nine, he was IBM’s technical director at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He was responsible for the development and integration of the Space Flight Operations Facility that controlled the first soft landing on the moon. For the past forty-five years, Dr. Bedrij has been doing research into the unity of nature, the science of awareness, and into the physics and philosophy underlying ultimate reality and the laws of physics, i.e., searching the answers to our questions about why nature is the way it is and who we really are by way of physics and direct experience.
An Uncultivated Life is not Worth Living
by:
Dr. Peimin Ni
when:
Saturday, September 27, 2014 - 13:30 to 14:30
held at:
Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Wilfrid Laurier University 120 Duke Street West Kitchener, Ontario N2H 3W8
Socrates famously claims that “an unexamined life is not worth living” and that we should "let no day pass without examining yourself." Confucius has a similar teaching, but he puts more emphasis on cultivating the person than on obtaining objective knowledge. The dimension of cultivation is characterized by later Confucians as gongfu (kung fu)—not narrowly understood as martial arts, but broadly as efforts for developing, embodying, and manifesting moral and spiritual virtuosities. While the Socratic life aims at increasing intellectual awareness, the Confucian life puts more emphasis on becoming loving and caring, because the human heart more than the mind defines who we are. These different orientations may be accountable for the very different directions that the two respective cultures, Chinese and Western, have subsequently developed. In this presentation, I will try to explain the Confucian view of what it means to be, or rather to become, a human being, and how this view affected the characteristics of the traditional Chinese view of education.
Peimin Ni 倪培民 is Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Fudan University, China and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut, USA. He has taught at the University of Hawaii and the University of Hong Kong as a Visiting Professor, served as the President of the Association of Chinese Philosophers in America, President of the Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy, Editor-in-Chief of the ACPA book series on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy, and was invited to be a plenary speaker at World Public Forum “Dialogue of Civilizations” numerous times. Ni has authored several books, including On Confucius (2002), Confucius—Making the Way Great (2010), and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and some articles in New York Times, mostly on comparative studies of classic Confucianism and Western philosophy. He is also an accomplished Chinese calligraphy artist. His calligraphy is featured on the cover of several academic journals and books, including Dao: a Journal of Comparative Philosophy.
Stress Free Communities are Harmonized Communities
by:
Dr. Shiv Talwar
when:
Saturday, September 27, 2014 - 14:30 to 15:15
held at:
Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Wilfrid Laurier University 120 Duke Street West Kitchener, Ontario N2H 3W8
According to ancient spiritual wisdom, stress free communities are and integrated and harmonized communities and a stress free mind is a globalized mind.
Stress is defined as the response of the body-mind complex to the perception of a gap between one’s actual state of being and a preferred state. For example, I like to be healthy but I am not; I want to be rich but I have no income; I want to be loved but no one loves me; I am loved but I am afraid that those who love me may not love me anymore; I am rich but I am anxious about losing my money; etc. Wisdom traditions assert that there is no end to our likes, wants, dislikes, aversions, fears, anxieties, and sense of being limited to achieve the desired or avoid the undesired.
Stress robs us personally of our physical health, mental health, learning ability and thinking ability. Collectively it robs us of our relationships and behavior. There are untold personal, familial and social implications of lingering stress. We lose our freedom becoming mental slaves of our stressors.
Wisdom traditions regard narrow selfishness as the root cause of stress. It considers self-centredness as promoting alienation and a narcissistic “me first” attitude distancing us from family, society, sense of commonality, common good, and belonging. We feel fragmented from rather than integrated with others. If at all a sense of “us” develops, it is immediately accompanied by a strong “us” vs “them” attitude.
Modern neuroscience agrees with ancient spiritual wisdom in concluding that the neo-cortex, the seat of thinking ability in our brains gets hijacked by amygdalae, the centers of instinctive emotions in the limbic part of the brain. Not limiting itself to warnings about the personal, family and social ravages of stress, wisdom traditions assertively prescribe stress management processes the regular practice of which engages the neocortex in mediating the activity of the amygdalae enabling a balance between our intellects and emotions.
In this presentation, Shiv Talwar presents a statistical study on the relationship of high stress and strong sense of belonging in 33 census metropolitan areas of Canada based upon data published by Statistics Canada. The study shows a strong correlation between increasing stress and decreasing sense of belonging. In addition, he shares the experience of Spiritual Heritage Education Network (SHEN) in offering stress management workshops in the community in their efforts towards community health, wellness, integration, sense of belonging and harmony. These workshops use a process based both upon ancient wisdom and modern neurophysiological sciences.
Human history amply shows that humanity is badly fragmented. Dr. Talwar experienced the tyrannical consequences of human fragmentation during the partition of India in 1947. As a result of this experience, he is possessed with the problem of integrating the human family. After a lifetime of learning and searching, Dr. Talwar discovered the ultimate integrative solution in the core spirituality characteristics of the world wisdom traditions. They seek the truth and attempt to live by it. The summit of their spiritual discoveries is the truth of the metaphysical unity of all existence.
Being a professional civil engineer, Dr. Talwar has a problem solving approach. His professional life was spent in the academy teaching the building of bridges across spatial gaps, now his retirement is focused on building bridges across wide chasms across hearts and minds of diverse humanity. For this purpose, he founded an organization called Spiritual Heritage Education Network Inc. (SHEN) in September, 2000. Dr. Shiv Talwar has been the president of SHEN since its inception.
Your Ideas on All-Inclusive Spiritual Education
by:
Today's Family & Spiritual Education: Youth, Mothers & Presenters
when:
Sunday, September 28, 2014 - 09:30 to 10:30
held at:
Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Wilfrid Laurier University 120 Duke Street West Kitchener, Ontario N2H 3W8
A diverse panel of six comprising of two young adults, two mothers and two invited conference presenters will interact with each other and with the participants at large in a round table discussion on the focus question: "What is your foremost idea on all-inclusive and universal spiritual education to integrate our increasingly diverse community and the world at large fast becoming a global village?" The panelists are requested to reflect on the focus question and come prepared with a list of ideas arranged in order of significance.
The panel will proceed in two parts each of 1/2 hour duration: the panelists interacting with each other in the first part followed by the panel interacting with the other participants in the second.
The first part will consist of two rounds. In the first round, each panelist will take two minutes to briefly share the foremost idea on their list. They are requested to avoid repetition by going to the next one on their list in case the foremost idea is already presented. Having listened to the first round, the panelists will have an additional two minutes each to react to the first round or to presenting another idea.
The first part will be followed by a 1/2 hour engagement of the panelists by the participants of the conference at large in a Q & A session.
The ideas presented may relate with the focus question in ways such as:
- Objectives to be achieved at schools, colleges and universities levels,
- Curricula at different levels,
- Integration with the regular curricula,
- Teacher Training,
- Methodologies,
- Strategies of orderly implementation, and
- Dos and don'ts of all-inclusive and universal spiritual education.
Progress and Knowledge: Spiritual Considerations from Ibn Khaldun
by:
Dr. Ali Zaidi
when:
Sunday, September 28, 2014 - 11:30 to 12:30
This presentation draws upon the work of the 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun and discusses his ideas on the role of intuitive, spiritual perception as aiding and abetting rational, empirical knowledge. Ibn Khaldun asserts that while all human communities are capable of achieving social order, social order alone does not lead to happiness, for which a religious law and a spiritual perception of the inner nature of things is required. Ibn Khaldun's work reminds us that there are different kinds of knowledges and that human progress does not lie in material development alone.
Dr. Ali Zaidi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies and a co-Coordinator of the Muslim Studies Option at Wilfrid Laurier University. A social theorist interested in questions of religion, secularism, globalization and modernity, he engages with the assumptions underlying secular, social, scientific and religious knowledge of the human condition. His book Islam, Modernity and the Human Sciences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) undertook a comparative analysis of Western and Muslim debates about social knowledge and the truth-claims that are made from religious and secular points of view. Currently, he is working on issues related to Qur’anic hermeneutics, secularism and blasphemy. His work has appeared in Theory, Culture and Society, International Sociology and the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences.
In Winter 2013, he was a Visiting Professor in Pakistan at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Previously, he spent a term in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden, The Netherlands, and in 2006 he was an Invited Junior Fellow at the Summer Academy on ‘Islam and the Repositioning of Religion’, at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany.
Dr. Ali Zaidi, an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University (http://.wlu.ca/globalstudies), discusses his academic and research specializations, as well as shares insights into the Global Studies program itself.
What and where is the mind?
by:
Lois and Kuruvila Zachariah
when:
Sunday, September 28, 2014 - 14:15 to 15:15
held at:
Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Wilfrid Laurier University 120 Duke Street West Kitchener, Ontario N2H 3W8
George Wald, 1967 Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology asserted that
…Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality - that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff…
We start with some observations about mind-stuff: What is Mind? Where does it exist? What does it do? Can I care for, improve and safeguard my mind and thus act in coherence with planetary networks of life and matter?
Mind and meaning come first and life uses them to evolve interactive patterns of relationships.
Two great universities, Harvard and Princeton were the settings of insights regarding mind: we comment on experiences of Wilder Penfield, Richard Alpert.
Most remarkably, mind-stuff is believed to manifest in three organs, not just the head. We comment on the mind of the brain, the mind of the heart and the mind of the gut.
We conclude with remarks on Mind and the Self.
We, Lois Zachariah (b. 15 June 1941) and Kuruvila Zachariah (b. 10 March 1934) are grandparents of four. We taught biology and did research at the University of Waterloo and Conestoga College. For several years we studied and were mentored in Ignatian spirituality by Jesuits at Guelph. Today, we are engaged in spiritual direction, in workshops and as retreat directors, integrating our interests in science, in ecological networks and in prayer.
Jewish-Muslim Relations, Globalization & the Perennial Philosophy
by:
Dr. Atif Khalil
when:
Sunday, September 28, 2014 - 15:30 to 16:30
on:
September 27-28, 2014
held at:
Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Wilfrid Laurier University 120 Duke Street West Kitchener, Ontario N2H 3W8
Since World War II, Jewish-Muslim relations have almost entirely been mired in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. One of the results of this heavy politicization of relations has been the curtailment of any serious or fruitful dialogue between the mainstream, established Jewish and Muslim communities of the West. The lecture will bracket out the political issues which have been a cause of mutual distrust and consternation to explore the remarkable affinities between these two strikingly similar traditions, through the framework of the Perennial Philosophy and the legacy of the medieval Judeo-Islamic Tradition.
Dr. Atif Khalil is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge's Department of Religious Studies where he teaches courses on Islamic theology, philosophy, mysticism and world religions. His main area of research lies in Sufi thought, with secondary interests in comparative mysticism, inter-religious relations and the perennial philosophy. His articles have appeared in Studies in Religion, the Journal of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Sacred Web, the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies and the Muslim World. While a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, he co-founded the Judeo-Islamic Contemplative Circle with Rabbi Aubrey Glazer to create an apolitical space for Jews, Muslims and others to meditate over Jewish and Muslim mystical texts together in a spirit of ecumenical dialogue and friendship.