oases Saturday breakfast – Sat 2 June with Dr Geoff Lacey

Powerful technologies have enabled people to utilise vast energy resources for industrial development. A consequence is global warming. Geoff Lacey addresses the causes of and responses to this crisis of our way of life. He argues that we must recover an organic view that respects the quality of wildness in the natural world. He recalls the arguments of E.F. Schumacher, in Small is Beautiful, that for every activity there is a certain appropriate scale. He present images of many sustainable human activities on the local scale. It is at the local site that we engage directly with our environment and learn to understand it; we establish the outlines of a future economy; and we affirm the value of nature in its all its wildness.

About Geoff Lacey

Dr Geoff Lacey who grew up in Shepparton, Victoria, began his working life as a civil engineer. He has been active in many environmental issues and was a pioneer teacher of environmental engineering in Australia. He is now based at the University of Melbourne. His recent books include Still glides the stream: the natural history of the Yarra from Heidelberg to Yarra Bend, and Reading the land (both by Australian Scholarly Publishing).

Recent publications

Sufficient for the day: towards a sustainable culture, Yarra Institute Press, Melbourne, 2011. In this book Geoff Lacey looks at the causes of and responses to the current crisis of our way of life. Taking global warming as a key indicator of our dilemmas, he looks at how things became the way they are and offers a vision of the way forward.

Further workshops on a Tuesday eve from June 5-July 17:

1. Cultural roots of global warming (June 5th 2012 from 7:00 till 9:00)

2. People and nature: the organic view (June 12th 2012 from 7:00 till 9:00)

3. Ecology of the city and its surroundings (June 19th 2012 from 7:00 till 9:00)

4. The sustainable city (June 26th 2012 from 7:00 till 9:00)

5. Enhancing local self reliance (July 10rd 2012 from 7:00 till 9:00)

6. What constitutes the good life? (July 17th 2012 from 7:00 till 9:00)

Workshops: $5 per session or $25 for the series with a light supper

Click for more information. To RSVP or to find out more, please contact info@oases.edu.au or 9819 3502.

The realm of myth exists beyond time and space and daily reality. It is a symbolic world that dwells within us at a level deeper than our normal consciousness. And yet, it can be openly and vividly engaged in ways that expand the possibilities of every aspect of our lives. But to reach these depths and heights, we must pledge our commitment, our theatricality, our excitement. We must not bore the gods–ourselves.

When we energetically and dramatically encounter this mythic realm and the beings who dwell there, we understand that our individual lives–our personal stories–echo the events and truths of their lives and stories. We reflect these mythic beings and they reflect us. Experiencing this mutual recognition gives us access to more vigor and energy, a greater sense of joy and release, and an even deeper commitment to the unfolding planetary story. We begin living with the doors and windows of ordinary life wide open to the depth world.

“The Hero and the Goddess–the Odyssey as Mystery and Initiation”        Jean Houston

Memories of Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh still echo through the rebuilding efforts taking place and their way of life. Photos and film by Rodney Dekker, Melbourne photographer and documetnary maker. Watch Tides of Resilience.

Ways to live in community in a changing world – Lisa Moore

I aim to document the process and commitment of being a contributor and member of the Murundaka co-housing community project requires. We are a community committed to developing and living by sustainable practices. As l am a part of the community that l’m documenting there are tensions that exist between the role of participant and documenter/researcher.  And in documenting our life here there is a limit on how much you can observe and participate.  Making that judgement call on when to do so to is mostly up to me (also ethical guidelines and moral values feed into this) and can be hard at times.

It is interesting to note that l am expected by the community to record communal events as they happen, if l’m there.  This l’m doing using multi modal methods including video, audio, meeting notes, interviews, personal diary, photographs, drawings and the written word to record our daily living experiences.  In the last 2 months I have added a newsletter that l edit fortnightly in to the mix. My next challenge is to bring all of this together in a coherent fashion that will constitute an academic (enough) thesis/document.

‘Last stop folks’, announces the tram driver

The tram empties, almost

Six remain seated, staring straight ahead

Tuned in and tuned out

Bastions of absence, oblivious

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The following article discusses this further:

Now that everyone is connected, is this the death of conversation?

“I first noticed it in a restaurant. The place was strangely quiet, and at one table a group seemed deep in prayer. Their heads were bowed, their eyes hooded and their hands in their laps. I then realised that every one, young and old, was gazing at a handheld phone. People strolled the street outside likewise, with arms crooked at right angles, necks bent and heads in potentially crippling postures. Mothers with babies were doing it. Students in groups were doing it. They were like zombies on call. There was no conversation.

Every visit to California convinces me that the digital revolution is over, by which I mean it is won. Everyone is connected. The New York Times last week declared the death of conversation. While mobile phones may at last be falling victim to etiquette, this is largely because even talk is considered too intimate a contact. No such bar applies to emailing, texting, messaging, posting and tweeting. It is ubiquitous, the ultimate connectivity, the brain wired full-time to infinity.

The MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle claims that her students are close to mastering the art of sustaining eye contact with a person while texting someone else. It is like an organist playing different tunes with hands and feet. To Turkle, these people are “alone together … a tribe of one”. Anyone with 3,000 Facebook friends has none.

The audience in a New York theatre now sit, row on row, with lit machines in their laps, looking to the stage occasionally but mostly scrolling and tapping away. The same happens at meetings and lectures, in coffee bars and on jogging tracks. Children are apparently developing a dexterity in their thumbs unknown since the evolution of the giant sloth. Talk is reduced to the muttered, heads-down expletives brilliantly satirised in the BBC’s Twenty Twelve.

Psychologists have identified this as “fear of conversation”. People wear headphones as “conversational avoidance devices”. The internet connects us to the entire world, but it is a world bespoke, edited, deleted, sanitised. Doubt and debate become trivial because every statement can be instantly verified or denied by Google. There is no time for the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Socratic dialogue, the skeleton of true conversation.”

Read full article – The Guardian, 26 April 2012.

oases breakfast – Sat 5 May with Dr Nicholas Coleman

About Nicholas

Dr. Nicholas Coleman has studied the world’s religions and lived the spiritual life for over forty years. In 1990 he received his PhD in philosophy of religion from the Cambridge University Divinity School for original research into traditional metaphysics and the mind of God.

Dr Coleman is Head of Religious Education at Wesley College, Melbourne, and Vice-President of the Australian Association for Religious Education (Vic), Deputy Director of the Interfaith Centre of Melbourne and VCAA State Reviewer for VCE Religion and Society.

Recent publications

Nicholas is active in Interfaith Dialogue and is a well-known speaker on topics in philosophy, religion, spirituality and education. Dr Coleman’s books on philosophy and religion include:

1. From Dust to God (forthcoming) 2. Preliminary Studies of Religion (Science Press, 2006) 3. The Worlds of Religion (McGraw-Hill, 1999) 4. The Journey of the Soul (Leftbank, 1997) 5. Perennial Philosophy Today (Leftbank, 1994, 1996)

RSVP or for more information

Please contact info@oases.edu.au or 9819 3502.

The accompanying text describes the background and inspiration to Napertje Napertje.

- photography for oases elective unit ‘Framing the Self’, 2011