I do a variety of lectures, workshops and presentations that involve a wide-ranging play with ideas, concepts, experiential explorations, questions and group interaction. Following are some I am currently offering.
To book one of these contact me:
Sam Keen
16331 Norrbom Rd
Sonoma, CA 95476
Phone: 707-996-9010
E-mail: sam@samkeen.com
What’s Next? Reviewing and Revisiting Your Life
Periodically, we need to review and revision our lives. Every decade of our life-cycle brings new tasks, goals, pleasures and horizons. When the trauma of divorce, illness, tragedy or sudden good fortune strikes us, or when we gradually become dissatisfied, bored and depressed, it is time to take stock of our past and look for a new vision to guide us toward a more hopeful future. In this workshop you will explore:
Where you are in your life-cycle.
What you have accomplished and experienced thus far.
What’s old, stale, worn-out, boring.
What new, Interesting, exciting,appealing.
What decisions you need to make.
What destructive patterns you repeat.
What debts of gratitude you have not repaid?
What future you foresee for yourself.
What hasn’t happened yet.
What promises and potentials are still unfulfilled.
What your legacy will be.
Your dreams, values, visions.
To help in this review and revision assemble objects that might be useful to a biographer who was going to write the story of your life. Photos from different times. Diaries that show how you have changed over the years. Newspaper clippings about your accomplishments. Objects that were especially important to you. Songs that moved you. Bring a blank book and colored pencils.
The Warfare System and Beyond
I do a number of different types of lectures and seminars that focus on propaganda, the hostile imagination, the faces of the enemy, the myriad ways in which we think other people to death. I have written about this in Faces of the Enemy, have done a PBS documentary by the same name and have recently issued an expanded edition of the book featuring a chapter on The New Enemy and a DVD with three slide lectures: The Art of Making Enemies, The New Enemy, Beyond Enmity, all of which are subjects on which I am currently lecturing and doing seminars. In all of these lectures and seminars I use political cartoons and propaganda art from many countries and eras to show the recurring images that peoples, tribes and nations have always used when they wish to dehumanize their enemies. Some lecture/seminars on this theme
The Art of Making Enemies
Demystifying the rhetoric of war. Deciphering propaganda. Exploring the psycho pathology of enmity and the archetypes of the hostile imagination, the images used to dehumanize enemies and justify discrimination, warfare, and genocide.
The New Enemy. 9/11 and Beyond
Confronting Islamic terrorists. Why do they hate us? How do they view us? How do they view themselves. How do we view them? How do we view ourselves?
Our Clandestine Love Affair With Violence
Exploring our cultural fascination with the myth of redemptive violence. Contrary to popular opinion, far from hating violence, we are involved in a perverse love affair with political, personal and symbolic forms of violence because they satisfy certain essential human needs. In short, our mythology of violence is a pseudo-religion that provides us with a dramatic view of life, a world that is understandable and the (illusory) possibility of eliminating evil
Killing for God: Jihad, Holy War
A lecture illustrating the unholy relationship between religion and warfare, the ways in which warfare is always turned into a crusade, a holy war, a battle against an evil empire and religious institutions cooperate in the process of sanctioning the killing of enemies. It also raises the question of what religious institutions might do to end the habit of using violence as a tool of political policy.
Men, Women and Warfare
A lecture making use of images of the ways men and women appear in the war and peace propaganda of various nations to examine the relationship of gender to violence. Why is it that war is nearly always a man’s game? What do men pay for being warriors who are expected to kill and women for being exempt from military service? Is the warfare between the sexes a result of male specialization in violence and the female specialization in nurturing? Would we be a more peaceful species if males and females shared the burden of violence more equally?
Taming the Monster: Deconstructing the Warfare System
How might we go beyond the myth and practice of war? Wake up from the nightmare of violence? See through the illusion created by the propaganda of warfare? Create a moral equivalent of war? Who are the individuals and NGO’s that are already creating alternatives to war?
The Sacred Journey
In this workshop we will explore:
A reverent way of being in the world.
Religion without superstition.
Spirituality without sentimentality.
Personal epiphanies
The endless path of the unfathomable psyche
Approaches to the unknowable God.
Recovering a Sense of the Sublime.
The Return to Enchantment.
Reclaiming Your Body: Stories that Sicken, Stories that Heal.
Human beings are biomythic animals, storytellers, myth makers, spinners of tales. The stories we tell, our conscious and unconscious myths,inform our minds and bodies, give shape to our lives and predispose us to contract certain diseases. By discovering the somatic aspects of our myths, they way they shape our bodies, form our character armor, structure our use of energy, dis-ease us, we can begin to recover the power to heal ourselves.
In this workshop we will explore some of the following topics:
Personal history. What disease scripts did you get from your family? What did you learn about the body, about sensuality and sexuality, from your parents? What meanings were assigned to special diseases?
Social and political myths. What religious, economic and cultural myths are informing your life and death styles? What price do you pay in health and happiness for living by the myth of competition, success, progress?
Somatic cryptology. How do you decipher the messages of your pain and disease? How do you listen to the voices of your illness?
The art and techniques of self-healing. How do you use creative imagination, memory, visualization, dreams, meditation, touch to change your disease scripts and enter into a more healing relationship with your self?
Educational Objectives
To increase the ability of participants to listen to the voice of dis-ease, to decypher the message of pain, to discover the unconscious life-scripts that cause conflict, stress and illness.
Session l and 2. An introduction to the theory of human beings as biomythic animals and an extrapolation of the importance of this for medicine and self-healing.
Sessions 3,4 Will be a practical, existential exploration of the body-myths by which we live.
Session 5 will concentrate on the creation of a personal apocothary, a repertoire of healing practices.
Christianity Revisited
This seminar was occasioned by my hearing too many Hindu chants, too many assurances that our good fortune is deserved because of our good karma and our tragedies due to bad karma redeemable in our next reincarnation, Too much unexamined Eastern spirituality reminded me that Carl Jung warned us not to throw away our familiar traditions too easily. These days Christianity suffers from an excess of cheap criticism. It is easy to reject literalism, fundamentalism and the antics of TV evangelists. In this workshop we will examine the more poetic, mystical, psychologically sophisticated, liberal strands in the Christian tradition to see what treasures we might find buried under our own hearth.
Recommended reading:
N.O. Brown Love’s Body
Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God
Philosophy For Everyday Life: Living the Questions
Human life is a quest. We are on a journey the end of which is not in sight. Searching, longing, questioning is in our restless genes. The practice of philosophy is a way of life that results from falling in love with questions—the great mythic questions that can never be given definitive answers. Who we are and what we will become is determined by the questions that animate us, and by those we refuse to ask. Bring your urgent questions to this seminar and join me in exploring:
What is the purpose of my life?
What ought I to do?
For what may I hope?
Whom do I love? Why?
What curtails my freedom?
How can I escape from the constricting social, political, sexual, and economic myths that were imposed on me by my family and culture?
To what cause, ideal, faith may I surrender without destroying the integrity of my self?
What does it mean to experience the sacred?
How can I live a spirited life in a world dominated by a secular-technological-economic vision of reality?
What is my credo? My philosophy of life?
Your Life, Your Story: Composing an Autobiography
Your Life, Your Story: Composing an Autobiography
Human beings are biomythic animals, storytellers, myth makers, spinners of tales. The meaning of our lives is found in the stories we tell about ourselves. Carl Jung once said that the most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living? In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the author/ities, of our own lives. When we pay no attention to our personal histories we surrender our minds and spirits to some secondhand authority, some official myth maker. In this workshop you will:
Explore the myths, scripts, stories, and hidden assumptions that shape and control your life.
Share stories about your heroes, enemies, wounds, gifts, fears, and hopes.
Re/member the people, places and pivotal events that informed your life.
Recover childhood dreams and project your fondest hopes into the future.
Create an outline of your autobiography, a narrative of what your life has been about.
Please bring a large journal in which you can draw and write, a box of crayons or colored pencils, and photograph album containing pictures from various times and places in your life. You may want to read Your Mythic Journey by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox. Jeremy Tarcher Books.
Psychotherapy and the Spiritual Journey: Healing the Ego, Healing the Spirit
In this workshop we will explore:
Ways the psyche is in-formed and mis-informed by the stories, scripts and myths that are imposed on us by our families and our culture;
How psychotherapy can aid us in re-membering our “fated” past and free us to create a more satisfying future;
The nature of spirit as the human capacity to transcend the psyche, to go beyond the limits imposed on us by the myths and social conditioning that have in-formed us;
The disciplines necessary for undertaking a spiritual quest; constructing a spiritual bullshit detector;
Mapping the geography of the spirit;
The limits of psychotherapy and psychotherapists;
The nature of spiritual author-ity, companionship and guidance.
Fire in the Belly Revisited
In this workshop we will explore:
Men and women post 9/11
Gender and the politics of anxiety
New metaphors and myths
Metrosexual men and executive women
The New Woman Warrior
Women in body bags
The future of gender, the future of war
Corporate Cultures, Corporate Myths
Corporations, no less than tribes or nations, are shaped by myths, stories and rituals of which they are largely unconscious and which may be either creative or destructive. (Think of myth not as mistake or fabrication but as the unconscious information, the cultural software, the social DNA that provides the basic information that governs the growth and decay of a group of people.) Unexamined corporate myths often result in the choice of inappropriate means for unclear goals, high levels of anxiety and stress, low levels of creativity and stagnation. In this workshop we will examine:
The myth that informs your corporation
Stories, rituals, rites of passage and insignia of power
Stories your company–corporation tells about itself
Corporate goals, visions, values
What you sacrifice for success?
How you deal with conflict
Standards by which you judge a corporation to be healthy
Kinds of power
When should a corporation change? Merge? Die? How may it be reborn?
What kind of future do you desire?
Bring a portfolio of stories, gossip, a willingness to think about business and corporate life in new ways, and a playful spirit.