Maureen Doolan and the late David Peat founded The Pari Center 20 years ago, in Pari, GR, Italy with the aim to advance the integration of knowledge, the arts, science, ethical values, community and spirituality.
The Pari Center specializes in promoting the work of David Bohm and C.G. Jung and building on David Peat’s respect for Indigenous Knowledge and his concept of Gentle Action.
The film traces the rise and fall of the deterministic universe. Contrast the basic philosophic difference between the certainty that characterized the thinking of humankind through the nineteenth century with the fall of certainty in the twentieth.
The nineteenth century was marked by a boundless confidence in the power of progress. Newtonian physics showed that the universe was a gigantic clockwork mechanism that functioned according to rigid laws that could be predicted with confidence far into the future and then came the quantum universe.
David leads us to his philosophy of Gentle Action offering creative alternatives to society's dependence on quick-fix solutions.
How can we build a better world for our families, our businesses, our institutions, society and ourselves? Gentle Action provides clear answers: rather than treating situations as external to ourselves, the keys to the issues we face today demand solutions from within. F. David Peat’s shows we can exercise more effective, creative and non-invasive action from the local to the international level.
F. David Peat was a quantum physicist, writer, and teacher who founded The Pari Center in 2000. He wrote more than 20 books which have been translated into 24 languages, as well as numerous essays and articles. In 1971-72, he spent a sabbatical year with Roger Penrose and David Bohm, and thereafter his research focused on the foundations of quantum theory and on a non-unitary approach to the quantum measurement problem. Peat continued an active collaboration with Bohm and in 1987 they co-authored the book Science, Order and Creativity. David Peat died, in Pari, in 2017.
Absurdity of Certainty film director Jena Axelrod took the first class of The Pari Center 20 years ago and left with an image of this film in her mind. The spirit of the place, the content of the material, the smell of basil in the air, all point toward a world of holism, integration, a synchronous and holographic universe.
Pari is built on a hilltop surrounded by olive groves, vineyards and the heavily wooded countryside of the Maremma region of Tuscany. The surrounding land is generally poor and rocky and there is a saying that, ‘The poorer the soil, the better the oil’ and this certainly holds true for the local oil.
The land around Pari has been occupied since prehistoric times. Later, the Etruscans and later the Romans, made use of the curative properties of the sulfur hot springs, located below the village.
