Treehouse Talks:
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike

From 6:30-8:15 pm, Friday June 8, 2012, join us at the Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge St.).

3 PEOPLE x 3 TOPICS = 1,000 IDEAS

All Treehouse Talks are free for anyone who would like to come. Would you like to keep up with what’s happening at the Toronto Reference Library? You can sign up for their enewsletter, which comes out every two weeks. Previous Talks

JUNE'S SPEAKERS:

JEFF WARREN

What are thoughts made of? In a series of guided meditations author Jeff Warren will help audience members tease apart the elements of thought, introducing them to their own unique patterns of thinking and feeling, every bit as individual as their fingerprints. Jeff Warren is a writer, broadcaster, public speaker, and all-purpose enthusiast. His primary subject is the mind – the cutting-edge of neuroscience and philosophy – made fun and accessible. He is the author of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Random House 2007), an acclaimed travel guide through sleeping, dreaming and waking consciousness that critics called “exhilarating,” “enchanting,” “audacious,” “hilarious,” “mind-blowing” and even “visionary,” though perhaps that was a typo. His piece on the fashionable jungle psychedelic ayahuasca won Gold Medal at the National Magazine Awards and has been anthologized in the 2011 Best Canadian Essays. Jeff’s writing has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, from The New Scientist to The Walrus to the Globe and Mail. He is a former radio producer for CBC’s The Current, Ideas and Tapestry. His latest greatest passion is teaching people how to shift their experience of reality, aka meditate. Jeff Recommends
  • Becoming Animal by David Abram. A wild descent into your preverbal body, the part of you that connected and danced with nature before complex technology came along and dissociated you. Gorgeous, shamanic – utterly transformed my experience of walking through the woods.
  • I recommend the practice of walking around the world and seeing everything alive as a person. Look at trees the way you’d look at people at a dinner party – with anticipation, like they may have something to teach you. Look at cats this way. At beetles. Soften your gaze and open the back of your throat and see what kind of vague intimations come flitting up and in. Yeah, it sounds a bit like New Age bullshit, but it was once a way of living for most of humanity. Try it and see what happens.

GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

This Talk will involve the delivery of a ‘rap’ on the Harper Government as mirroring U.S. Republican Party policies and tactics. It will include a discussion of ways to make opposition to government more effective rhetorically. George Elliott Clarke, O.C., O.N.S., is a lauded poet and writer. He is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature, serving currently as the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. George Recommends:
  • An Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei by Pain Not Bread (Roo Borson, Kim Maltman, Andy Patton), Brick Books, 1999. The intersection of politics, poetry, social relations, and nature observation is beautiful, truly humanistic.
  • Battle of Algiers (1966), an Italian cinema verite recreation of the struggle of Algerians to be free of French colonialism/imperialism, 1958-62. The film is a great testament to human desire for liberty. Drink Punt e Mes while watching….

A Third Speaker will be Announced Soon

COMING UP

Treehouse Talks will be on hiatus over the summer, and will be back in September!

OUR SPONSORS:

PREVIOUS TREEHOUSE TALKS

2012 Sessions

2011 Sessions

2010 Sessions

ALL VIDEOS PHOTOGRAPHS
TOP