Developing Freethinkers & Leaders of the New Renaissance
We live in an anomalous time. Our time is a historical anomaly in the sense Thomas Kuhn describes it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but not limited to the world of science. No existing paradigm is any longer adequate or even applicable in meeting the challenges and solving the problems humanity confronts today.
Throughout history, an Eternal War has been waged between the evolutionary forces of Liberty and the devolutionary forces of Tyranny. What is anomalous today is that the whole world is involved in a single struggle either to ascend to liberty and freedom, or to descend to tyranny and subjection, on a global scale never seen before.
For liberty to win, the individuals who are partakers of the forces of liberty must be masters of inner freedom. They must be existentially internally free, and intellectually and psychologically liberated.
Therefore, the leader of today and tomorrow must be a freethinker who is internally free and who can think trans-paradigmatically such that he or she can construct new ideas and models hitherto unthought of.
The leaders of today and tomorrow must be men and women of intellectual courage, honesty, and integrity who are responsible and sovereign with psychological maturity and interpersonal artistry for developing creative polycentric collaborations with other leaders.
The possibility of a new 21st-century Renaissance is upon us. The Renaissance was one of the most creative periods, yet we must remember that “renaissance” means “revival” or “rebirth”.
Albeit relatively few, the freethinkers of the Renaissance, such as Pico della Mirandola or Giordano Bruno, revived the pre-medieval philosophies and sciences of the Greek, Roman, and Hermetic philosophers, and rebirthed a whole new post-medieval set of ideas that gave birth to modernity.
Similarly, in Mastering Inner & Outer Freedom, we re-examine and re-connect with the founding philosophy of the United States as expressed in The Declaration of Independence and the philosophical thoughts of some of the great thinkers whose ideas influenced the Founding Fathers.
We will also study the Eastern philosophical thoughts and practices of inner freedom, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism that can be integrated into an integral philosophy of inner and outer freedom for the 21st century.
The aim of Mastering Inner & Outer Freedom is to provide each participant with a uniquely individual path of Inner Freedom/Individual Sovereignty and Outer Freedom/Integral Sovereignty within the evolutionary stream of psychological maturation, intellectual liberation, and spiritual awakening.
The substance of Mastering Inner & Outer Freedom include:
- Developing a Free, Trans-paradigmatic Mind.
- Understanding Liberty vs. Tyranny & Beyond.
- Examining Infinite Game & Eternal War.
- Exploring Sovereign Individual & Sovereign Integral.
- Learning from the creative original minds of Freethinkers such as Giordano Bruno, Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Alexander von Humboldt, Robert Ingersoll, & Friedrich Nietzsche.
- Learning from the enlightened minds of awakened masters such as J. Krishnamurti, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ralph Emerson, Walter Russell, & Franklin Merrell-Wolff.
- Study and examination of The Declaration of Independence as the exemplary literature of liberty in conjunction with the ideas of such thinkers and sages as Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Epicurus, Giordano Bruno, Benedict Spinoza, John Locke, & others.
Mastering Inner & Outer Freedom consists of 6 three-hour sessions, each consisting of a lecture and a Socratic dialogue, 1 session per month, for 6 months.
Mastering Inner & Outer Freedom is led by Yasuhiko Genku Kimura.
Yasuhiko Genku Kimura is an integral philosopher and former Zen Buddhist priest, recognized for his virtuosic original and pragmatic integration of the Eastern and Western thoughts.
“Yasuhiko Genku Kimura is a brilliant synthesizing philosophical mind, bringing the East and West together in a manner so original and so deep that such a synthesis as his has rarely been seen. Mr. Kimura has my Yale professors F. S. C. Northrop’s sweeping philosophic vision and Paul Weis’s deep metaphysical insight . . . Through his writing, he uniquely recaptures the quintessentially American wisdom of Emerson and Whitman, which is quite remarkable, considering that he is from Japan, not from the United States. . .”
-Glenn A. Olds, Ph.D., Philosopher, University President, Advisor to U.S. Presidents, Ambassador to UN Economic Council
All lectures will be video-recorded to which the participants will have access freely.
Upon registration, the Course Reading List will be provided.
The homework will consist of studying the required reading materials on the list as well as individualized meditation practice.
Tuition $600
Dates:
The Course starts on Saturday, July 17, 2021 and ends on Saturday, December 4, 2021
July 17, August 14, September 11, October 9, November 6, December 4
Time: 10:00 AM — 1:00 PM ET