Online Talks
June — November, 2026
While the residential gathering will take place in Ascona, Switzerland, the colloquium officially begins in late June with a series of six online talks designed to open its field of inquiry to a wider public. These talks are free and open to all, and they form an essential part of the event's larger intellectual and cultural life.
Online Talks
Beginning on the Summer Equinox, the online talks will unfold monthly as a public prelude to the winter gathering in Ascona. Each session opens a distinct path into the colloquium’s larger field of inquiry, carrying the conversation toward the in-person gathering that concludes on the Winter Solstice. Talk abstracts will be published soon.
Richard Tarnas
June 21, 2026 — 10 PT/ 1 ET/ 6 GMT
Richard Tarnas, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he was the founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness department. During his thirty years there, he taught courses in the history of ideas, depth psychology, archetypal cosmology, cultural history, and the evolution of consciousness. He has also frequently lectured on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that is widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network. He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and was a long-time member of the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
Becca Tarnas
July 2026 — Day and Time TBD, as this talk may happen live in San Francisco
Becca Tarnas, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She received her doctorate from CIIS, where her dissertation, The Back of Beyond: The Red Books of C. G. Jung and J. R. R. Tolkien, brought depth psychology, literary imagination, and archetypal inquiry into a richly original dialogue. Her work moves at the intersection of philosophy, literature, ecology, and consciousness studies, with a particular gift for illuminating the imaginal dimensions of human experience.
She is an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology and the author of Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader’s Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Her scholarship and public work reflect a sustained engagement with C. G. Jung, Tolkien, archetypal studies, and the ecological imagination, and she is currently researching and writing a biography of Stanislav Grof, co-founder of transpersonal psychology.
Mary Antonia Wood
August 16, 2026 — 10 PT/ 1 ET/ 6 GMT
Mary Antonia Wood, PhD, is a visual artist, mythologist, and educator whose work stands at the fertile intersection of depth psychology, creativity, and the imaginal life. She serves as Chair and Professor of the MA program in Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she has played a significant role in stewarding a distinctive form of graduate education devoted to soul, symbol, and the transformative vocation of art.
Dr. Wood holds both an MA and a PhD in Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of The Archetypal Artist: Reimagining Creativity and the Call to Create (Routledge, 2022), a work that brings scholarly rigor and psychological depth to the question of what it means to create in conscious relation to the archetypal dimensions of imagination. Across her teaching, writing, and mentorship, she has become an important voice in articulating a vision of creativity as both a psychological practice and a mode of soul-making.
With more than twenty-five years of experience as a visual artist, Dr. Wood has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, and her work is held in both public and private collections. She is also the founder of Talisman Creative Mentoring, through which she supports artists and creators in cultivating a more authentic relationship to the deeper sources of their work. Her approach integrates mythology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative traditions in service of a richly textured understanding of artistic vocation, one that joins erudition, imagination, and lived transformation.
Kali Nyima Cape
September 20, 2026 — 10 PT/ 1 ET/ 6 GMT
Kali Nyima Cape, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at Georgia State University. A historian of Buddhist philosophy, she focuses on transnational Tibetan Buddhism, contemplative traditions, women in Buddhism, and the philosophical literature on ultimate reality, meditation, and esoteric practice. Her work brings rigorous historical and philological inquiry into dialogue with questions of embodiment, gender, resilience, and multiple ways of knowing, with particular attention to the fourteenth-century formation of Tibetan contemplative canons.
Cape received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, where her dissertation focused on women and sexuality in esoteric Tibetan contemplative literature, especially Great Perfection (rdzogs chen). Drawing on decades of immersion in Tibetan Buddhist communities across India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and North America, she writes with unusual depth at the intersection of Buddhist philosophy, contemplative pedagogy, feminist and decolonial theory, and the study of religious transformation. Her current manuscript, Yoginīs in Tibet, recovers the neglected history of women in Great Perfection traditions and contributes a vital new perspective to Buddhist studies, gender studies, and the history of consciousness.
Daniela Boccassini
October 18, 2026 — 10 PT/ 1 ET/ 6 GMT
Daniela Boccassini, PhD, is Professor of Italian at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches and writes in Italian and Romance Studies with a particular focus on the medieval and Renaissance worlds. Her scholarship moves across Dante studies, Jungian thought, Hermetic and gnostic traditions, alchemy, ecology, and the imaginal dimensions of culture, bringing philological rigor into dialogue with visionary and symbolic modes of knowing. Educated at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and the University of Milan, she has developed a body of work marked by unusual range, intellectual originality, and deep historical sensitivity.
Her work is guided by two central concerns: gnosis, understood as knowledge grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction, and “wildness,” the indomitable interconnectedness of ecology, culture, and spirit. She is the author and editor of numerous books and essays, including Il volo della mente, Via nova: Emergences of the Beyond from Lascaux to Today, and Oikosophia: From the Intelligence of the Heart to Ecophilosophy. Across her writing, Boccassini traces the esoteric, feminine, and visionary dimensions of Mediterranean and European intellectual history with rare erudition and depth.
Monica Bryant
November 22, 2026 — 10 PT/ 1 ET/ 6 GMT
Monica Bryant, BSc (Hons), MA, is an evolutionary consultant and coach who has been offering archetypal perspectives in support of inner and outer evolution since 1994. She is also a transdisciplinary researcher whose work is grounded in an ecological, holistic, and transpersonal worldview. Her master’s degree in Myth, Cosmology, and the Sacred focused on wisdom-based transformative learning, archetypal psychology, and transpersonal research methodologies. Monica has published articles and book chapters, including “Evolving Together: The Emergence of a New Form of Evolutionary Group” (1999), “Intuition as an Evolutionary Impulse that Expands Wholeness, Wonder, and Wisdom” (2021), and “Evolving through Synchronicity in an Archetypal and Symbiotic Universe,” published in The Playful Universe: Synchronicity and the Nature of Consciousness (2024). Her work draws on a wide range of experience in the fields of human potential, entrepreneurship, and new paradigm science.
A member of the Scientific and Medical Network since 1983, Monica also pioneered the concept of probiotics and inner microbial ecology, building on her Nordic naturopathic background. She trained doctors and natural health practitioners internationally in evolutionary symbiosis, pleomorphism, and regeneration. In the 1980s, she taught at the University of Sussex, where her courses included Culture, Health and Healing and The New Microbiology, incorporating Goethean inquiry and transformative learning. She is currently writing a book based on her historical research into a visionary German polymath who discovered cyclic microbial metamorphoses with multivalent forms.