Reflections On The Realisation Festival '23
"We, astronomers, are nomads, merchants, circus people, / All the earth our tent."
During the pandemic, in the summer of 2021, I met a group of friends for the very first time, in Provence, after we first encountered each other in the virtual salons of Interintellect. We spent a week together in the French countryside. Shortly after we returned to our homes, I wrote them a letter entitled “Eternity in a week”.
Yesterday I returned back to my home in The Hague, after having spent a weekend in St. Giles in the English countryside attending The Realisation Festival.1 My experience was in some ways similar to what I experienced with my group of friends a few years ago, and it made me think about The Realisation festival as “Eternity in a weekend”.
I took my inspiration from the Greek film “Eternity and a Day” (1998), directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos, telling the story of a dying writer trying to finish the works of a 19th-century poet. He meets a little boy on the street, who is an illegal immigrant from Albania, and goes on a journey with him to take the boy home. The movie viscerally conveys the feeling of melancholia2 and explores lost and forgotten time, and from that perspective, it doesn’t describe the overall feeling of joy I felt during The Realisation Festival. However, the similarity sits in the in-depth exploration of time3 and human connection and how language unites us and bonds us when we can find our own words.
Alexandre : Why did I only feel at home... when I was able to speak my own language? My own language, when I could find the lost words... or bring the forgotten words out of silence.
If I had to describe my own experiences at the Realisation festival in only a few words, I would choose openness, unlearning, and the sacred.
Openness
By openness, I mean a form of generosity, a feeling of safety and comfort, and a sense of trust in our conversations with each other. We were 120 participants in total, and it felt like a very intimate, small gathering of people who didn’t seem like they were meeting for the very first time. Openness, in the form of allowing ourselves and others the luxury of asking questions that comfort and discomfort us. Openness to the different ways in which our lives could unfold.
Unlearning
The gathering in 2023 was described by Perspectiva as a focus on Unlearning and Reimagining Difference.
“The illiterate of the 21st century,” Toffler wrote, “will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
I am reminded often of Toffler’s words, and I don’t yet have a sense of what we unlearned on a collective level, but I know what I unlearned on a personal level during my time in St. Giles. I unlearned a form of rigidity, an inability to move freely in this world. I have been trying for a while to unlearn my petrifying cautiousness, and I can honestly say that this festival brought me back to another way of moving through the world, one that is more trusting.
The Sacred
Iain McGilchrist’s4 talk about his book “The Matter with Things” was as inspiring, nurturing, important, and engaging as I was imagining it to be.
In ‘The Matter with Things’, McGilchrist tackles the big questions: Who are we? What is the world? How can we understand consciousness, matter, space, and time? What happens if we neglect the sacred and divine?
In the talk, among many other things, he spoke about time, the brain, consciousness, philosophy, and the sacred. During a discussion of chapter 28, entitled “The Sense of The Sacred”, my mind immediately jumped to Mircea Eliade5’s “The Sacred and the Profane”.
For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.
Mircea Eliade
In the past years, I had a conflicting relationship with the sense of the sacred. Sometimes I would find it in Rebecca Elson’s poetry, other times on a hike exploring Rigi and Mythen, and many times in busy dreams and overwhelming serendipities. On other days, however, the profane was heavily omnipresent.
A Very Brief Conclusion
This short reflection is a scattered recollection of some of the things that I was left with after experiencing a unique weekend tucked away in the English countryside with strangers that very soon became friends and close confidants. I learned, and unlearned, and I will continue to relearn. There is still so much to share, and to delve into, but for the time being, I will leave you, reader, with a poem that I always return to:
We Astronomers by Rebecca Elson
We astronomers are nomads,
Merchants, circus people,
All the earth our tent.
We are industrious.
We breed enthusiasms,
Honour our responsibility to awe.
But the universe has moved a long way off.
Sometimes, I confess,
Starlight seems too sharp,
And like the moon
I bend my face to the ground,
To the small patch where each foot falls,
Before it falls,
And I forget to ask questions,
And only count things.
Thank you Perspectiva team and St. Giles House for the memories and learnings, unlearning, and sudden realizations that I will always remember and cherish.
The Realisation Festival is an annual agenda-setting event that seeks to advance societal transformation in a soulful way. It is at St. Giles House, in Dorset, in collaboration with Perspectiva.
“In my film, time is the central theme. As Heraklitos said: What is time? Time is the small child playing with pebbles on the edge of the sea. […] In the film we also see short, other experiences of the man, and you get the feeling that he consists only of these short experiences (“des breves rencontres”), except for this last, real experience of his life (“Ia seule, vraie rencontre”).” Source: Photogenie.
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least in the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.