What would the world look like if we as human beings were able to think in the way a plant grows? Imagine gaining such flexibility of thought that our ideas were no longer rigid, static and object-like, but grew, transformed, and when necessary, died away. And as with plant form, what if our thoughts and actions revealed the living qualities of the world we inhabit? What a revolution! This is the revolution that the poet and scientist Goethe began with his approach to understanding nature. It is a way of wakefully entering into the living forces of the world and learning to think and act in harmony with them. This revolution can provide a strong infusion of living thought and responsible action into our culture.

To learn an approach that reveals life in nature and in ourselves demands mobilizing new forces within ourselves. In this course we will work each morning with projective geometry exercises to focus our thinking, bring it into movement and open ourselves to living thought forms. The two other sessions each day will be dedicated to the study of plants as a pathway into the living qualities of nature and human thinking.

 

HENRIKE HOLDREGE is a mathematician and biologist and co-founder of The Nature Institute.  Henrike researches and teaches in the areas of projective geometry, phenomenological studies in physics, mainly in the area of light and color, and astronomy. In teaching projective geometry, Henrike is interested in leading adults—also those who “never liked math”—into unfamiliar thought territory. She sees the phenomenological method of Goethean research as a way of finding the spirit in the world, a spirit from which we have become disconnected through modern culture and science.

 

CRAIG HOLDEGE

 

CRAIG HOLDREGE, a biologist and educator, is the founding director of The Nature Institute in upstate New York. He is keenly interested in the interconnected nature of things and in discovering qualities of wholeness in nature. Craig also critically examines new developments in genetics and biotechnology from a contextual perspective. His newest book, co-authored with Steve Talbott, is entitled Beyond Biotechnology. He is also the author of The Giraffe’s Long Neck: From Evolutionary Fable to Whole Organism and the editor of The Dynamic Heart and Circulation. He was a high school biology teacher in Waldorf schools for twenty-one years.