Reality Through Fiction
Sharing Truth With Narrative
A one-week writing retreat in the Mediterranean to explore how the art of storytelling can help us discover, develop, and share insights on the nature of consciousness and reality.
The Gist
What
An opportunity to escape the day-to-day, explore big ideas, and discover how storytelling can bring those ideas to life.
Where
The Mediterranean island of Sardinia, Italy (exact venue to be finalized).
When
Late September or early October 2027 (exact dates to be finalized).
Who
Beginning writers to published authors who have ideas worth exploring and a desire to bring those ideas to life through fiction.
The Details
Introduction
As with all things, it starts with an idea. Perhaps you’ve had an insight about the nature of consciousness, the workings of the universe, or what it means to be human. Maybe you’ve recognized a paradox that conventional thinking doesn’t seem to resolve. Or perhaps you have an intuition that something about reality isn’t quite what we’ve been taught to believe, doesn’t work the way you had thought. Whatever the case, you’ve encountered an idea that matters to you.
Now what? One option is to write it down as a factual exploration. Explain your thinking, lay out the arguments, offer evidence, and hope that others will be intellectually compelled by your reasoning. And some people will. But for ideas that shake the foundations of what we believe, there’s another approach that may be even more effective:
Tell a story.
Narrative fiction is a powerful tool to explore ideas in ways that exposition cannot. It invites people into experiences rather than simply presenting them with conclusions. It allows us to encounter unfamiliar possibilities through the lives of characters we come to understand and care about, to let new ideas sneak past the instinctive resistance to change and let readers to consider them in a non-threatening mental space.
Just as importantly, the process of writing narrative doesn’t just serve to communicate what the author already knows. It can help us see our ideas from other perspectives and discover what we don’t know. When we create characters who are different from ourselves, place them in unfamiliar situations, or construct worlds where the rules of reality work differently, we are forced to think beyond the boundaries of our existing understanding. A good story serves its author as profoundly as its reader.
And of course, it’s worth remembering that much of today’s scientific reality began as yesterday’s science fiction.
This retreat is about that journey: taking an idea, exploring its implications, discovering where it leads, and finding a compelling way to give it life through narrative. Our focus will be ideas relating to consciousness, awareness, and the nature of reality, but we won’t be evaluating which ideas are correct. We’ll be there to explore possibilities, question assumptions, and discover what happens when we give imagination permission to take us somewhere unexpected.
Who Is This For?
This retreat is for people who are curious about the nature of things and want to explore that curiosity through creative writing.
You might be someone who has spent years thinking about consciousness, reality, and the human experience… or you might be someone who had a profoundly unusual experience, an unexpected insight, or a sudden “aha!” question come to you a few months ago. You may have been writing for years… or perhaps this has simply been a path waiting for the right invitation to explore. Whether you have a novel, short story, or script underway and want to develop it more fully or simply enjoy questioning assumptions and are intrigued by what might happen when those questions meet the art of storytelling, you’re prepared for this retreat.
You don’t need a scientific background. You don’t need to be a published author. You don’t even need to arrive with a story in mind. You should, however, bring an idea, intuition, question, or paradox you’d like to explore. It needn’t be fully developed or even carefully articulated, though; sometimes the best stories begin with nothing more than a persistent “What if?”
As for writing experience, you should be comfortable expressing yourself in prose, although formal training and publication credits aren’t prerequisites. If you can reliably put nouns, verbs, and adjectives together in a comprehendible and pleasing way, you’re ready for this. Bonus points if you know what a gerund is without looking it up. More important than credentials are curiosity, imagination, a willingness to experiment, and the ability to engage respectfully and compassionately with people whose ideas/perspectives may be different from yours.
Activities will be conducted in English. The retreat is open to people of any age, although participants under the age of 18 must attend with a parent or other responsible guardian.
The Retreat Experience
This may be some of the hardest work you’ve ever found relaxing.
The retreat will not be a conventional classroom experience, nor is it a week of solitary writing with occasional interruptions. It will be a week spent with amazing people on the beautiful island of Sardinia, surrounded by the natural beauty of the Mediterranean, exploring ideas, discovering new ways of thinking, and transforming insights into stories.
Structured activities will be used to explore topics such as character development, narrative structure, worldbuilding, conflict, perspective, and the particular challenges of incorporating philosophical ideas into fiction without turning the story into a lecture. Individual consultations and group discussions will be grounded in the cultivation of a safe, comfortable space focused on constructive, respectful feedback, always with the goal of helping each other develop our own unique voices. And of course there will be plenty of time for independent writing, personal reflection, and—because the most useful conversation often happens while taking a walk, enjoying a meal, or watching the sun settle over the Mediterranean—social interaction.
Consciousness and Perspective
What will make this retreat particularly unique are the activities specifically designed to help us step outside habitual patterns of thinking and perceiving: meditation, remote viewing, exercises exploring use of intention to influence physical systems, and other practices associated with exploring consciousness and alternative perspectives. Through this, we’ll explore new ways of thinking about the things we think we know, create opportunities for personal discovery, and provide new material for imagination and storytelling.
Note: The retreat will not involve the use of mind-altering substances, such as hallucinagens or plant medicines.
Before And After
Our exploration won’t be limited to the week in Sardinia. Before the retreat, we’ll offer a few optional online sessions to help participants identify and begin developing their ideas, become acquainted with one another, and possibly even play with some of the techniques we’ll use during our time together.
If your goal for the retreat is to create a short story, you may indeed be finished at the end. But if you have something larger in mind, a novel or perhaps a full-length script or screenplay, that week is likely just the beginning. We’d like to help participants carry their work forward rather than leave their inspiration behind when they return home, and so after the retreat we’ll provide optional online opportunities to support participants who want to continue developing their writing.
We’ll share more about these options once the dates are finalized.
What You Will Bring
Certainly the most important thing you will bring to the retreat is an open, inquisitive, and playful mind. Beyond that, here are a few things that will be important to your success.
- Something for writing. For many, this will be a laptop (we’ll provide the WiFi), but if you are “old school”, it could be a notebook. And perhaps it will be both, as sometimes paper and quill is the right tool for the job even if it ultimately finds its way into digital form.
- One or more ideas, questions, quests, or concepts to serve as the focus of your writing. While you can arrive and hope that inspiration strikes you there (we will certainly aim to foster an inspirational space), we will dive right into writing, so it’s best to come with an idea to serve as the foundation for that… even if that foundation changes part way through.
- The usual travel items… personal items, electrical adapters, and perhaps a bathing suit. This is a Mediterranean island, after all.
Beyond that, we should have you covered – lodging, food, and everything you will need for the activities.
What You Will Take Away
That will depend, in part, on what you bring. Some participants may leave having developed a complete short story. Those focused on creating something longer may finish the week with the elements of a novel or screenplay, such as a detailed outline, a set of characters and their respective arcs, a deeper understanding of the core ideas, and certainly a bit of prose as well.
You may discover that the idea you came to explore looks rather different by the end of the week, or that the story you thought you wanted to write isn’t the story that most needs telling. Those are worthwhile outcomes too.
Our aim is for every participant to leave with a stronger foundation for their creative work, new tools for exploring and expressing ideas, and a clearer sense of where to go next.
Opportunities For Publication
We also want to provide opportunities for stories developed through the retreat to reach audiences. Each participant will be invited to contribute work, e.g. a short story or an excerpt from something longer, for a special issue of Pari Perspectives that will be dedicated to the writing that emerges from the retreat.
In addition, ICRL Press will welcome manuscripts developed through the retreat for review and potential publication.
While these are not guarantees of publication, they are opportunities that reflect our dedication to helping participants bring the ideas we explored together to wider audiences.
Location, Dates, and Practical Details
We’re still finalizing the arrangements, but our intention is to hold the retreat on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, Italy, in late September or early October 2027. The retreat will be one week, with lodging, meals, and organized activities included in the registration price. We expect the cost to be in the range of a few thousand U.S. dollars per person, with the precise amount depending on the venue and final arrangements. Participants are responsible for their own travel arrangements to the island, although we will coordinate airport transfers.
Depending on the final venue accommodations, the number of available places at the retreat will be between 12-20 people.
We will update this page once the date and cost details have been finalized.
Registration
While we are still arranging the final pricing and location details, we are excited that this is going to happen. If you are too, and are pretty sure that the late September/early October 2027 timeframe and cost of a few thousand USD will work for you, there’s no reason to wait to sign up.
There are two ways to express your interest.
Option 1: A $200 deposit secures your place and gives you a $100 early-preregistration benefit, i.e. your $200 payment will count as $300 toward the final retreat price. Recognizing that the final details could shift, your deposit will be 100% refundable, no questions asked, until at least three months after all those details have been confirmed.
Option 2: If the retreat is appealing but you’re not quite ready to put down a deposit, that’s perfectly okay too. You can register your interest without making any payment and we’ll email you as soon as the arrangements are finalized. This option doesn’t guarantee a place or include the $100 early-registration benefit, but it does ensure you’ll be among the first to receive the details.
A quick note: We use a service called Zeffy to handle registrations because they ensure that 100% of your payment goes to ICRL instead of credit card companies. The one downside is that they default to making an additional donation to Zeffy in the process. This optional addition does not go to ICRL and can be eliminated by just selecting “Other” in place of their default suggestion of 15% and then leaving the Zeffy donation amount blank.
Vasileios Basios is a physicist, conducting interdisciplinary research on the foundations of complexity science and nonlinear systems, self-organization and complex matter. During his formative years, he was tutored by Ilya Prigogine, at ULB where he received his PhD, and by Emilios Bouratinos on meditation and philosophy. He is currently interested in the complex interface between action and information. Other interests include the history of ideas in science and their role in the transformation of science beyond the prevailing naïve, materialistic, mechanistic-reductionist world-view. With others from PEAR, he initiated the Mind-Matter-Mapping Project and has since published several essays for ICRL. He is also a member of the Board of the Scientific and Medical Network and the Steering Team of the Galileo Commission. Vasileios is inspired by the prospect of introducing self-reflection into the practice and understanding of science, and the emergence of a Self-Reflexive Science of Consciousness.
Bob (Brahmatirtha) was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1949, completed his B.S. in Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1971, and received his M.S. in Geology from Rutgers University in 1975. After a twenty-year career serving as a geologist and vice-president of a large regional environmental company, he currently works as an environmental consultant to state governments. He has been a member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute since the inception in 1976, giving a presentation at their First International Conference on Life Comes from Life in 1977, and working on a multitude of projects with R.L. Thompson (Sadaputa) from 1995 through 2008. He is also a certified court mediator. He now serves as the Director of the Bhaktivedanta Institute for Higher Studies.
Ian Cook is a Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he directs the UCLA Depression Research and Clinic Program at the Semel Institute and was the inaugural holder of the Joanne and George Miller and Family Endowed Chair in Depression Research at the Brain Research Institute. He has been a part of the PEAR/ICRL family since 1980, when he was among the first undergraduate students to conduct research at the PEAR lab. He graduated from the Yale School of Medicine and pursued his residency training and research fellowship at UCLA. His research has focused on understanding the relationships among the mind, the brain, and the body, and in translating developments in technology into more effective treatments for disorders of mood and cognition.
degree from Hollis University and has accumulated a diverse work experience, spanning multiple disciplines: education, technology, business and law, predominately in support and administrative roles. She currently works for the College of New Jersey in its Office of Disability Support Services. Lynn Ann has been an administrative assistant to ICRL’s President since 2011, and has extensive familiarity with the organization’s structure and activities, along with a deep commitment to its mission.
The largest dataset collected at PEAR used Random Event Generators, or REGs. These devices were essentially electronic coin flippers that produced a series of 1’s and 0’s; operators were instructed to influence the machines to produce more 1’s than 0’s or vice versa.
