UNSRC S.E.A.T.

Society for Enlightenment and Transformation

We seek to inspire, inform, enlighten, and uplift your spirits.

Tuesday June 11th 2013 at 1:00pm United Nations Visitor's Entrance Level 1B, Dag Hammarskjld Library (43rd St. and 1st Ave) Meeting room S-2727FC, Secretariat Building, New York, NY 10017 ATTENDEES NOT IN POSSESSION OF A UN GROUNDS PASS SHOULD ARRIVE AT THE VISITOR ENTRANCE 30 MINUTES EARLY FOR SECURITY CLEARANCE AND ISSUANCE OF VISITORS ID.

William Stranger
The Two and the One: Beyond the East-West Divide
Our globalized world remains deeply divided between two opposed and opposing visions of reality: the ancient sacred view, traditionally ascribed to the Orient, that all experience ultimately resolves into a subjective or interior mystical unity versus the modern secular view that all experience ultimately reduces to the processes and patterns of objective matter. Although the latter viewa product of the scientific and political materialism emerging from the postRenaissance Westappears to be globally dominant today, the conflict itself rages on unaddressed and unabated in every sector of our culture, and most especially within every individual. William Stranger, founder and editor of DharmaCaf Books and DharmaCaf.com, has spent his life examining the nature and the implications of this conflict, and the basis for achieving a cultural synthesis that replaces contradiction with paradox and opposition with transcendence. In this lecture William will focus upon four unique Western thinkers who bridged the East-West dividethe psychiatrists E. Graham Howe and Iain McGilchrist, the literary critic Hugh lAnson Fausset, the poet Lewis Thompson, and the spiritual master Adi Da Samraj. He will explain how the synthesis they achieved is essential to the realization of both personal happiness and global political sanity. William Stranger is the founder and editor of DharmaCaf.com, an online magazine, and DharmaCaf Books, a new imprint dedicated to publishing literature on consciousness and culture that is distributed by Random House. He has been a peace activist since the 1960s. After becoming a disciple of Avatar Adi Da Samraj, in 1973, William participated in the founding of The Laughing Man magazine, widely regarded as the father of all contemporary ecumenical spiritual magazines. Over the past 35 years he has spoken at a variety of ecumenical and peace fora, including the Parliament of the Worlds Religions, the Raul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics, the State of the World Forum, and the Hague Appeal for Peace. He is also the co-founder of the Calistoga Institute, a California based policy institute dedicated to optimal well-being, cultural regeneration, and inherent unity. Williams background in the history of consciousness, classical spirituality, and postCartesian political, scientific, artistic, cultural paradigms, along with his work as activist, author, literary agent, and publisher, has given him broad knowledge of todays nascent cultural renaissance.