THE 10 thINTERNATIONAL HUMANITIES CONFERENCE
ALL & EVERYTHING 2005, IN RETROSPECT
WEDNESDAY evening, March 9
through SUNDAY noon, March 13, 2005.
2005 saw a gathering of fifty delegates from ten countries for the tenth International Humanities Conference, All & Everything 2005. The conference took place over a five day period from March 9 to 13, 2005, at the Best Western Hotel Marijke, Bergen, Netherlands. Bergen is a small town near the sea about 40 kms. from Amsterdam.
Countries represented were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The morning sessionsconsisted of the presentation of papers expressing contemporary thinking about the legacy and teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff. Papers included
“Gurdjieff and Hypnosis”,
“Gurdjieff and the Study of Dreams”,
“Gurdjieff and Astrology “,
“Kundalini – Kundabuffer”,
“Our Three Bodies” and
“The Second Conscious Shock: From Ouspensky to the Tales”.
The afternoon sessions were given over to seminars on chapters in the All and Everything trilogy. These were Chapter 17, “The Arch-preposterous” and Chapter 18, “Beelzebub’s Tales About His Second Descent onto the Planet Earth,” from Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, and Chapter 1, “Introduction” from Meetings with Remarkable Men.
Evening cultural events included:
a performance by the Den Norske Gurdjieff Stiftelsen group of excerpts from Peer Gynt,
a piano concert by Wim van Dullemen performing “The Nine Hymns of a Great Temple,”
a key work in the musical oeuvre of Gurdjieff/De Hartmann, and
the viewing of and listening to portions of the new DVD, Harmonic Development: The Complete Harmonium Recordings 1948-1949, compiled and produced by G. J. Blom who also attended one of the dinners. This DVD included a short movie made by Evelyn Sutta of several automobile trips taken by her and others with Gurdjieff during the summer of 1949. The conference banquet was held on Saturday evening.
At the final “Where do we go from here”session, the delegates decided to have an eleventh conference in 2006, and a site committee was selected to research several possible locales. The site since selected is the Corus Hotel Harlow (The Green Man) just north of London, and the dates of the conference will be April 19-23, 2006.