Angkhorisation and the New Human

At the temples each day, Andrew Harvey opens us to what Angkor continues to radiate about how the sacred can be embodied, and to the birth of the new human and the civilisation it will create out of the death of the old.

Andrew will explore the possibility that Angkor’s deepest power is not in what it asks us to worship but in what calibrated brilliance it awakens in us. Angkor dares us to become humble and royal human beings capable, even at this late terrible and amazing moment of our evolutionary journey, of pouring ourselves out calmly, precisely, wisely and joyfully in the service of beauty, truth, universal compassion and justice for all human and sentient beings. Angkor inspires us to unite all our inner and outer powers to birth the new human and the civilization it will create out of the death of the old. Angkhor inspires us to hospice the old as we midwife the new.

The experience of Angkor can become a subtly ecstatic experience of what Andrew calls Angkorisation: not a nostalgic return to an ordered ancient world, but the awed discovery of how the sacred can become radically and radiantly embodied in every aspect of human life. The temples are not the destination; they are the pathway to an illumination of the light.

The Activation of the Body of Light

The Light Body is understood across many mystical traditions as the luminous dimension of our being—the embodiment of heightened consciousness, love, and our multidimensional nature. Banafsheh will lead us in an exploration of what it means not simply to imagine ourselves as beings of light, but to activate, embody, hold, and radiate that light through the physical body. Working through the chakras and their associated elements, we will engage practices that help dissolve density, expand consciousness, awaken the subtle body, and open us more fully to our innate luminosity.

The activation of the Light Body is intimately connected with ascension: the process of expanding into higher states of consciousness while bringing more of our spiritual wholeness into embodied human experience. True ascension is not about leaving the body or transcending our humanity. It is about allowing greater light and consciousness to permeate the body and become expressed through every dimension of our lives. The body becomes the portal: the sacred vessel through which consciousness, love, and light can be grounded and expressed.

Drawing on Sufi teachings, Taoist energy anatomy, and the ancient Iranian Mazdean/Zoroastrian tradition, Banafsheh Sayyad will lead us to explore the body as a meeting place of spirit and matter, light and form, Earth and cosmos. Central to this journey is Sama—the Sufi dance of whirling—as a profound practice for opening to light, embodying it, and transmitting it. Through Sama, movement, sacred dance, breath, meditation, energetic practices, we will cultivate greater coherence between body, heart, and mind, deepen our capacity for presence and intuitive knowing, and explore how the chakras can become gateways for receiving, embodying, and transmitting light. Ultimately, the activation of the Light Body is an activation of love.

The Circulation of the Light

There are many pathways to the activation of the light body. Jim Garrison will explore one in particular – The Secret of the Golden Flower, an ancient Taoist text traditionally attributed to the teacher of Lao Tzu who wrote the Tao de Ching. In The Secret of the Golden Flower, the teaching is on how to circulate the light in the body in synchronicity with the rhythms of the heart, which it refers to as the ‘center of conditions.’

As important as the text itself is the issue that the psychologist Carl Jung took up in his Preface to The Secret of the Golden Flower when it was translated and published into German by the German Sinologist Richard Wilhelm in 1929. Jung observed that the Eastern spiritual traditions were all framed within an understanding of the unity of existence, one of the principal symbols of which is the Tao. In the West, Jung noted, there is no Tao, no container for the opposites, no overarching principle of unity, there are only the polarities. Polarities without an overarching container of wholeness leads to excessive conflict and violence because without a sense of unity, the only real relationship between the polarities is one of conflict and domination of one over the other.

Given world events in our time, this is a question worth pondering. The Secret of the Golden Flower holds an answer that is both illuminating and challenging. It has to do with light.

Holding and integration

A week like this stirs a lot of professional and personal material. Integration sessions matter because trauma work — and intergenerational trauma work especially — is not absorbed through information alone. Learning about inherited grief, collective memory, and the body’s long memory of harm can activate the very material professionals are being trained to treat, particularly for those whose own families and communities carry that history. Dr Annie Wilson, Clinical Psychologist, will provide participants with the opportunity, through structured time, to process what has surfaced. A facilitated integration session creates a deliberate, boundaried space to notice what has landed personally, separate one’s own history from the client’s, and convert abstract theory into practice that can actually be sustained.