DO YOU EXHIBIT AN EXAGGERATED INTEREST in words like rhizomatic, planetary & regenerative?  Then a Nura Learning course may be just the thing for you!  But what on Earth (pun intended) is Nura Learning?

Here is what their admittedly sparse website says:

“Nura Learning is rooted in the philosophical and spiritual tradition of an integral education, meaning an approach to learning that involves the whole person: mind, body, and soul. It also means, in the spirit of Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, and Teilhard de Chardin, an education that holds the whole planet in mind."

Let us benignly overlook the (probably incidental) absence of the word “heart" in their definition of a whole person.  And let us also overlook the (probably deliberate) exclusion of Ken Wilber's name from their list of key figures in integral education.  Instead of focusing on what is absent, we should look at what is present in the Nura Learning project.

It comes to us primarily through Jeremy Johnson.  You may know him from his contribution to Perspectiva Press' Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds or from his work on Mutuations, Integral Leadership Review or the former Growing Down Podcast. 

Jeremy is spearheading -- if that is not too aggressive a term -- a project to make available online the kinds of philosophically acute, practice-oriented and ecologically-contextualized education previously found in the centers of the human potential movement such as Auroville, Lindisfarne, Esalen & Findhorn.  At the heart of the movement is a new relationship to time and the cultivation of participatory planetary consciousness within individuals and communities.  This shift, they believe, is essential to any real cultural transformation and awakening.

Although Nura Learning has previously hosted courses on Magic and Weird Studies (incidentally also the focus of the October Parallax Course from Layman Pascal & Scout Wiley), their new program is based on Jeremy's forthcoming book FRAGMENTS OF AN INTEGRAL FUTURE. 

It is also the name of the course.

Starting September 5th, it will feature Jeremy J. & his partner -- the somatic therapist astrid montuclard -- guiding participants through the following modules:

Rhizomes, Mycelia, Lichen and the Planetary Imaginary; Earth Soma: Inner Ecology, Trauma Healing, and Initiation; This Globe, Which Does Not Exist: From Globalization to Planetization, Life, Death and Rebirth as a Metamorphic Being; Planetary Mythmaking: Seven Stories from the Future; Embodying Ecological Paradigms; Medicine Bundles for a Time Between Worlds.

Put aside the obvious fact that these are smart, well-informed people oriented toward big-and-small picture transformation.  Just look at the kinds of words that are being deployed.  Or check out the imagery on the website. 

A lot of this comes down to aesthetic attunement.  We are trying to draw together certain people and cultivate certain psychological faculties that are resonant with a stylistic call heard around the world. 

Habitable metamorphic and metaphoric futures?  Ecological embodiment and integrative soulmaking?  Rhizomatic planetary imaginaries?  These words themselves are part of an important signaling & coordinating process that may end up being as, or more, important than the technical plausibility of our claims. 

So when you sign up for this course, do not be embarrassed if the motive is simply that you are turned on by the aesthetics...