2009: The New Vitalism

Life University established the Octagon, a new multi-disciplinary platform and environment where important questions can be posed and discussed. Discussion topics are oriented toward the 8 Core Proficiencies Life has established for its students and its larger community.

Its inaugural ‘vital conversation’ in April 2009 was about the New Vitalism, a consideration of the system of thought, observation, and taxonomy that offered a dynamic and coherent cosmology for thousands of years. Faced with the information reductionistic and mechanistic efforts scientific exploration produced through most of the twentieth century, vitalism fell into disrepute, held as valuable only by a number of marginalized non-mainstream professions and systems of healing. With the confounding results of experiments theoretical physics has produced, quantum mechanics and related theories have given rise to new questions that are forcing many to re-examine the coherence of the reductionistic approach to understanding living systems. Life University convened a unique and important group of representatives from various professions to consider the viability of the concept of a new vitalism, an updated visitation of the observations and explanations that not only served as a container for explanations of health and healing, but perhaps more importantly defined the relationships humans had in the ecosystem of our living planet relationships that are also being reconsidered and revisited. Most systems of healing maintain explicit or implicit connection to vitalistic precepts.

Life University convened a group of people to publicly begin to consider these questions and their enormous implications. A followup working summit was held in April, 2010 to develop some operational planning for developing a sustainable model for American health care that is oriented toward vitalistic health principles.

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Conference Proceedings
We have published a Proceedings Document from the conference. For a copy of this, please go here.

Life University wishes to thank NCMIC for its leadership and support of working summit meetings on The New Vitalism that took place in April, 2010. For more information, please go here.