A Festival for the Soul

Why we need to experience what we feel and know

*Editor’s note: This is a re-post from Jonathan Rowson’s substack, ‘The Joyous Struggle’

I’m writing on the train home from The Realisation Festival, which is an event I am partly responsible for, and helped to bring into being. The festival is a joint venture between Perspectiva and St Giles House and this year we welcomed a hundred and twenty people. The poet John Keats wrote that “Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced” and I felt that this weekend. Maya Angelou’s line: “People will forget what you said, and what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel” also came to mind.

Angela Horan-Andersone was in my small group (one of twelve at the festival). She is a self-defined “professional mother (of 6!) and grandmother”. In one of our group conversations, she observed that the festival had lots of “points of emotional contact”, which I took to mean encounters, ideas, or sensations that result in laughter, tears, confusion, envy, longing, and much else besides. Angela’s framing was actually a point of emotional contact for me. Through her turn of phrase, I could feel that these points of contact are the active ingredients that hold the meaning and value of the event, and they are the means through which the festival helps people to realise things in every sense of the term (see below).

The venue is St Giles House in Dorset, and both the house and the landscape have personalities of their own, almost as if they are participants in their own right. We were all there ostensibly for the purpose of ‘unlearning and reimagining difference’, and our speakers and workshop leaders were invited accordingly as you can see here. But as the saying goes, ‘it’s rarely about what it’s about’.

There needs to be an invitation with structure, and some overarching purpose, but the more fundamental inquiry is what happens when you share space and time with fellow humans in a beautiful place, and how the personal and shared experiences are channeled into the world beyond the event. The unofficial programme of the festival included strangers becoming friends, solidarity and camaraderie in the camping, joy in improvised music, and an impromptu dance with the wind. The final night is always party time, and some of us, as if enacting a mid-summer ritual, plunged into the stream after midnight as fugitives from the sauna, yelping with moonlit delight.

St Giles House, Dorset

In 2020 we could only have an online event, in 2021 Covid restrictions limited us to a maximum of thirty, we did eighty in 2022 to test the waters, and then one hundred and twenty this year. 120 might prove to be our optimal number due to the balance of capacity and intimacy, and a desire to stay below The Dunbar number(150). I share some further personal reflections about this year’s event towards the end of this post, but first I want to share an overview of the purpose of the festival, which I felt we realised in 2023.

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The festival came into being after Lucy Guard of the JJ Trust (one of Perspectiva’s funders) introduced me to her neighbour (in the countryside/within a few miles sense of the term) Nick Shaftesbury in 2017. Nick has a fascinating personal post-tragic storyand is in many ways an accidental Earl. He wears his inheritance lightly but takes his responsibilities seriously. We hit it off immediately, and we soon started plotting with Pippa Evans, Mark Vernon, Ed Haddon, and latterly Minna Salami and others. Covid complicated matters and it took a while to figure out what we wanted to do, but we alighted on a three-day non-profit event that would be about and for the soul.

Nick Shaftesbury at Realisation in 2022. © Amanda Lockhart for Realisation Festival 

Like all such partnership projects, personal chemistry, trust and a joint sense of calling are critical, and it helped that we had the idea of Bildung as a pattern that connects us. Bildung is a concept of transformative civic, moral, and aesthetic education - sometimes called education of the whole person, education of the sentiments, or education of the soul. The term has more than one origin but is derived partly from the writings of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (for a Perspectiva overview, see pages 14-16 here) and therefore from the festival venue. The idea of Bildung profoundly influenced European thought for centuries, including Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man after the French Revolution and the reign of terror that followed, but it has been relatively neglected in the UK.

Before I met Nick or even knew about the third Earl, the relevance of Bildung for today’s challenges was developed in my invited essay for CUSP and in talks by our co-founder and Trustee Tomas Bjorkman. The direct translation of Bildung is ‘formation’ and the original includes elements of education, enculturation, and also the sense of fulfilling one’s nature or purpose in response to the challenges of a particular historical and societal context.

Realisation is our anglophone rendering of Bildung and has three related meanings: roughly to get real, to become real, and to make real. Realisation is the simple but often profound ‘aha’ experience of becoming aware of something or beginning to understand it, the philosophical or spiritual (eudaimonic) sense of realisation of the self, and the achievement of making ideas manifest, for instance, to realise a personal dream. When there’s no time to talk about Bildung or Realisation the shorthand is simply that we have created a festival for the soul, which I tried to explain in my opening remarks this year. There is plenty to say about the idea of the soul, and its neglect. We do not use it in an explicitly religious sense, nor do we disavow that meaning of the term. By soul we mean no more and no less than the experience of being human (Mark Vernon’s formulation).

The festival speaks to the soul through its design, setting, and activities. The natural beauty of the place does a lot of the work, but we also have a rule that we don’t use phones in or around the main areas of the house, our small group processes allow for the need to give and receive attention, and we foreground art, music, humour, and improvisation as a fundamental part of the setting. We also encourage people to bring their whole selves and meet each other soul-to-soul for the intrinsic value of connecting, rather than CV-to-CV for any extrinsic benefit. In the spirit of the festival, people are less likely to ask each other “What do you do?” which is often a status-seeking inquiry. Instead, in the words of regular festival attendee Damian Hallam we are more likely to ask: “What is your world?” which is a soul-seeking inquiry. We do seek to make the event intellectually stimulating, but the intellect is not sovereign. The aim is not just to inform and challenge but to touch, move, and inspire.

Perspectiva is a charity so it matters that the festival is for the benefit of society. I have tried to ensure that our inquiry is always grounded in a gravity of purpose that goes beyond individual attendees and is befitting of this historical moment. I make this case in my essay: What’s the point of the realisation festival? some of which I’ve adapted in what follows.

We call it a festival of ‘unlearning and reimagining’ because we believe the overarching early 21st-century conundrum is not so much about problem-solving or policy innovation, but primarily a challenge of perception and imagination. The most fundamental task is to help each other to reorient our life and work through a sensibility that is prefigurative of the better aspects of our emerging future. We prefer not to over-specify the alternative view, but in my own language, it might be thought of in terms of a post-conventional aesthetic. That aesthetic includes an orientation to life that is

• post-tragic (meaning and agency on the other side of despair)

• post-extrinsic (driven by new societal purposes)

• post-rational (open to ways of knowing that transcend and include the intellect),

• post-exploitation (reflective about the uses and abuses of power)

• post-tribal (whole-hearted togetherness in a world of love and power; an expansive ‘We’ is sought, but neither presumed nor coerced).

Yours truly speaking at Realisation in 2021

This year I felt pride through association while watching friends and colleagues Pippa Evans, Mark Vernon, and Indra Adnan excelling in their different ways, and I was pleased to help one of Perspectiva’s young associates Zoya Ahmed ‘decolonise the dancefloor’ by displacing Nick Shaftesbury as the DJ in ‘the bat cave’, the disco under the house.

My personal highlight this year (2023) was interviewing Rory Stewart because I prepared for the session carefully, we had some technological challenges to overcome (he was beaming in from Cape Cod) and the positive feedback from attendees felt heartfelt. I find Rory fascinating because he’s lived such a full and impressive life and communicates so well, but also because I see him as a kind of upper-limit on mainstream political thinking. If someone of his calibre is not ‘getting’ the need for transformation of societal purpose and priorities, then we are in even more trouble than I imagined. Most of the conversation was warm and convivial, and Rory was remarkably candid about his frustration with his own performativity, vivid about his time in Afghanistan and Iraq, thoughtful about his ‘politics of walking’, and touchingly open about his spiritual life.

But there was some heat too, not least when we discussed his reaction to Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. I feel this The Rest is Politics interview is emblematic of the different realities of what might loosely be called ‘old and new politics’. Many will see Rory’s position as reasonable, it is in line with some of the best conservative thinking, and there is good reason to be suspicious of revolutionary perspectives and schemes. Nonetheless, his response to Kate can also be seen as a defence mechanism in the psycho-therapeutic sense, and I became frustrated when he tried to wheel it out again. Rather than confront what follows politically from the reality of ecological and social limits he focuses on one version of one woman saying it (but it’s a much wider issue), recasts it as being primarily an anti-growth position (when it isn’t), frames it in the least flattering sense (with a dubious calculus about per capita income), and then explains why it really won’t work. Rory is right to highlight major political challenges in any approach that is not premised on rising living standards, but his response serves to displace the emphasis on limits in what I think is a gratuitous way. Still, I’m grateful for his time and generosity of spirit, and we’ll share the video online shortly.

Kubra Gümüsay’s charisma and forthrightness also made an impression, though not through any single thing she said. Her tone and emphasis felt so different from the Iain McGilchrist keynote the previous evening (which I chaired) that at one moment I found emotions catching up with me. Iain was typically brilliant, spoke quite openly and with characteristic discernment about God, and received rapturous and sustained applause. That’s all good! Yet as the publisher of The Matter with Things, I am now too close to Iain’s work to be sure of what we can reasonably expect from it in terms of reenchanting and renewing the world.

The Saturday morning panel, with (left to right) Mark Vernon (chair), Tomiwa Owolade, Kubra Gümüsay, and Tom Shakespeare

It is hard to specify the emotional connection between chairing Iain’s talk and listening to Kubra without sharing the context of my whole life, but I’ll try. For months now I have been carrying the question of how conversations form in the public space, the language that is used (her key concern), where attention goes and why, the purpose of Perspectiva, the relationship between crisis and possibility, the anthropology of adulation in the public sphere (and there was a lot of adulation of Iain at the festival), the different and sometimes competing perspectives of men and women, and what follows for my own responsibility toward Perspectiva’s time, attention and limited resources. On Saturday morning I felt all of that all at once and buckled under the weight of it. I had to delegate my small group chairing responsibility and miss the workshops so that I could recover and rejoin by late afternoon. This kind of experience is not unusual at the festival, where it seems many come to take stock, to feel what they had previously only thought, and to begin to realise who they are.

There is much more to share, but it’s time to take some rest.