Inscendence
A participatory enquiry into awareness, presence and place
Pari, Italy · 31 May – 7 June 2027
Who is Inscendence for?
Most people who come to this have read a great deal.
They have followed the arguments about consciousness and matter, about the sacred, about what has gone wrong between people and the living world. They have sat in rooms where these things were discussed well. And somewhere along the way they have started to suspect that reading and discussing, however good, are not going to get them where they are trying to go.
They would also like a week in a beautiful place. Not as a consolation, and not instead of the thinking — but because a hillside in early summer is a better place to find something out than a seminar room is.
That combination is harder to find than it should be. This week is an attempt at it.
What actually happens?
The days have a shape but they are not a timetable.
There are sessions — mornings and late afternoons, mostly — and between them the week keeps going. How you walk through the village. What you do with your attention at the table. Whether you write, and what you write with. We will make suggestions about all of it, and some of the more interesting things are likely to happen in the gaps rather than in the sessions.
Some of what you will do:
Attend to one plant, over several days. Not to identify it, but to know it — which is a different verb, and takes longer. This is Goethe’s method, and the claim it makes is not a small one: that sustained, disciplined attention to a particular living thing yields knowledge, not merely feeling, of a kind that measurement does not reach. Whether that survives contact with a Tuscan hillside is part of what we are asking.
Work with fire. Making it by hand, slowly, with attention — which turns out to be less about the fire than about what a group becomes when it does something difficult together without hurrying.
Practices for the body and the senses. Ways of being in a body, ways of using awareness, ways of letting the world in. These are the ground the rest of it stands on, and they run through the week rather than sitting in a slot.
Writing, and other ways of responding. Given time and some guidance, because an experience you have not put into any form tends to fade within a fortnight.
There is theory. It sits behind what is happening rather than in front of it, and it arrives when the experience has raised the question.
What there is not: a position we are asking you to adopt, or a set of conclusions to leave with. We are more interested in what the week turns up than in what we already think.
Why Pari?
Pari is a small hill village in southern Tuscany, [DISTANCE/DIRECTION] from Siena. Stone, narrow streets, a view that goes a long way. The Pari Center has been working here for [NUMBER] years on questions at the edges of physics, psychology and the sacred, which is why the week is here rather than somewhere merely lovely.
Place is not the setting for this week. It is one of the things being enquired into — the built village as much as the hillside, the history in the stone as much as the plants in the verge.
Inscendence will run in other places in time, including in Britain. It begins here.
Who's running it?
We, Alistair Duncan and Jonathan Code, met at a conference at the Pari Center in 2024. During a coffee-break conversation, we discovered a common curiosity in the mysterious impact that fire-lighting can have on the psyche. That conversation sparked (pun intended!) an ongoing friendship and dialogue that has resulted in the creation of Inscendence..
Jonathan teaches at [INSTITUTION] and has written three books. He also lights fires by hand and works with plants in a way that owes more to Goethe than to botany. Alistair spent twenty-five years in corporate learning before turning to Heidegger, geopoetics and contemplative practice, and now runs enquiries in wild places. Neither of us is the practical one or the theoretical one; we each carry both, and we carry them differently.
That difference is the point rather than a difficulty to be managed. Two people working from distinct traditions, in one place, for a week, without first agreeing a common line — where those approaches cut across each other is where we expect the interesting things to be. We are not planning to smooth them out.
This is the first time. We are not pretending otherwise, and it is part of why we are doing it.
If you are curious about the week and have questions, please click here to email us.
Join us
Here are the key practical details. More information on the Pari Center page, click button below.
- Dates
- Monday 31 May – Monday 7 June 2027
Begins with dinner at 17:00, ends after lunch on last day - Place
- Pari, Grosseto, Tuscany
- Group
- Twenty people
- Cost
- €1,800 single occupancy
€1,650 private room with shared bathroom
€200 deposit secures your booking - Included
- Seven nights, all meals at the village restaurant,
wine and coffee with lunch and dinner, all sessions and materials
The week is some way off. If you would like to hear how it takes shape — and to know first about other gatherings we run — leave your email and we will write occasionally. Not often.
We will use your address only to send occasional news about Inscendence. You can unsubscribe at any time and we will not pass it to anyone.