1. Psychosynthesis and Culture Oslo Norway September 27 th 2015

2. Andreas Eng

4. Culture – we are immersed in culture from cradle to grave. Cultural practices shape our experience of pregnancy and birth, dying and death, and the great unfolding adventure of life in between these thresholds.

5. Assimilation Integration

7. Compassion

8. Cultural worldviews have a powerful (yet usually unconscious) impact on how we construct and organise our perceptions of belonging, connection, and identity.

9. It is crucial that we develop our capacity to encompass different cultural identifications, rather than simplistically minimising (or even denying) cultural difference. Affirming we are all human beings must not be at the expense of acknowledging diversity.

10. The practice of Disidentifying

11. ‘I know who I am, sufficiently, and I am willing to be more than my attachment to my world view, so when I meet you I am curious and enlivened by the prospect of who you are, and I expect to be changed by the encounter and I welcome that, and I hope that in meeting me, you might also be open to being changed.’

13. Treaty of Waitangi signing

16. Contestable realities

17. What happens when a dominant narrative of assimilation is imposed on everyone, silencing alternative stories, disappearing other realities, banishing minorities to the margins and the ghettoes?

19. So, not denying, nor drowning in white liberal guilt, or romanticizing and idealizing indigenous and marginalized cultures, because these are other common reactions people in dominant majority subject positions can have.

20. This is doing a difficult piece of cultural work. It’s about identifying how much power and privilege you carry from your cultural heritage in terms of dominant and minority subject positions, in whatever cultural context you live.

21. What are your stories?

22. What could psychosynthesis, with its cultural ancestry of psychoanalysis, Western ‘depth’ psychology, Eastern ‘height’ psychology, and North American transpersonal psychology, contribute to bicultural partnership?

23. Interconnected wholeness immanence & transcendence

25. ‘All my relations’. This construction of identity affirms we are all participating in the act of Creation, in the evolution of the Universe, and that we are connected with all life. Identity is located in both immanent and transcendent realms.

26. The fundamental process of meaning-making itself could be explored. This is a profound disidentification.

27. POSTMODERNISM An unfolding cultural vision that suggests human knowledge is subjectively and locally determined, cannot be fully objectively known, and that reality is not a solid self-contained ‘given’ but rather, is participatory, indeterminate, and multidimensional.

28. The first Apollo image of Earth

29. Disidentifying, stepping back and compassionately making space around defensive dualities, tolerating being confused, uncertain, reactive and scared, are essential skills to be well-resourced for cultural work.

30. You need to practise letting go of the certainties of your own primary cultural worldview, and look at your assumptions about power and privilege.

31. Youth need something to make them dream, to engage in a life of significance through struggle and sacrifice in comradeship.

32. Youth need a positive personal dream, with a concrete chance of realization. They need a chance to create their own local initiatives.

35. Utoya

36. Our response is more democracy, more openness, more humanity. But never naïveté. - Jens Stoltenberg