In this seminar, Baiba Baika draws on her Masters dissertation and her on-going research – Journeying Beyond the Fear of Dying: Psychedelic-Assisted Guiding of the Dying Through the Transition and Beyond. Baiba addresses the oldest and biggest fear of humanity – the fear of facing one’s own mortality.
‘The Irish word for fairy,’ writes William Butler Yeats, is sheehogue [sidheóg], a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee [daoine sidhe] – fairy people. Who are they?’
Who indeed! Who are the Shee?
The search for the answer reveals many constantly shifting answers. Fallen angels, ancient gods, nature spirit, hallucination, unreal, verifiably material and very real, cheeky wee fellas in breeches, aliens, terrifying monsters. Conscious beings all around us, separated by the merest veil of consciousness, visible to mystics, dreamers and lucky children. One might as well ask: Where are the Sidhe? There is no final answer. The search is the answer; an enchanting, bewildering, endless journey of discovery.
In this course, Simão explores some of the core issues around dreaming and the relationship between the dreamer and her dreams. Each session focuses on a specific set of approaches to dreams, both religious and psychoanalytic, private and communal, creative and playful.
The Book of the Sun represents the culmination of Ficino’s life and work. Published in 1494, five years before his death, it is a supreme example of the very synthesis of astrology, religion and philosophy for which Ficino strived all his life and illustrates his ability to convey the deepest mystical experience within a lucid, authoritative prose.
Exploring the Weird is Weird. Investigating wormholes in the fabric of the space-time continuum opens wormholes in the fabric of the space-time continuum. That is my summary of Ness HighWeird.
Some writers are influential enough to have their own adjective – Shakespearean, cervantino, Dickensian, Kafkaesque, Orwellian. (Douglas Adams should have one, but Adamsian sounds odd). Charles Fort is honoured not only with the adjective Fortean but also with the noun Forteana. What is, what are, Forteana?