Projects

Below is a sampling of the projects sponsored by the Radius Foundation:

The Rediscovery of Islamic Pattern Genius: An Integrated Exploration of the Geometrical, Cosmological, and Cultural Meaning of Five- and Ten-Fold Symmetry in Traditional Islamic Design

In 2007 Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt demonstrated that the tiling on a 15th century shrine in Isfahan was an example of a quasicrystalline pattern, a geometrical structure that was not understood in the West until the 1970’s. The Radius Foundation is sponsoring a book-length work that will unfold the metaphysical and cosmological meanings of these patterns in five- and ten-fold symmetry, explaining their expressions of a profound understanding of God, His creation, and our place in it.

Click here for more details.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Sixteen Lectures (audio DVD)

This collection of lectures by Seyyed Hossein Nasr represents some of the major themes of his life’s work, including the spirituality of Islam and Sufism; interreligious dialogue; pure metaphysics; tradition, nature, science and the sacred; and sacred art and music.

Please click here for the track list and here for a review of the DVD.

Shakespeare’s Spirituality: A Perspective: An Interview With Dr. Martin Lings

This film is the last surviving footage of the renowned Dr. Martin Lings. Ira B. Zinman, the producer and director, interviews Dr. Lings about his lifelong devotion to the works of William Shakespeare. Lings demonstrates that many themes in Shakespeare’s works cannot be correctly understood without reference to the esoteric meaning contained in them, and shows how the true function of art is not merely to educate but to give us a “taste of wisdom, each to his own capacity.”

Please click here for a review.

Click here to purchase this DVD

The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology by Wolfgang Smith

Modern science bills itself as the great demythologizer, and it claims to show us the world the way it really is. The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology demythologizes modern science.

Please click here for a review and the table of contents.

Click here to purchase this book on Amazon

Translation of De la philosophia perennis au pérennialisme américain by Setareh Houman

The Radius Foundation has commissioned the translation of this important work on Perennialism in America from French into English.

Visual Reality: A Multi-Media Exhibition Paul Stiles, University of Dundee

Visual Reality is two things: both a new theory about the connection between observation and reality, and a project aimed at using cutting-edge visual technologies to present that theory to the public. The theory attempts to expose a false assumption about reality that lies at the center of modern thinking, affecting virtually all disciplines, and to put forth an alternative model with equally widespread implications. The project offers a primarily visual (as opposed to textual) proof of these claims, in the novel form of a public exhibition, such that any educated person can understand the theory and its implications.

Stage One: Introduces the distinction between the visual world and what we call “the real world.”
Stage Two: Describes the nature of the visual world, prior to any conclusions about what is real within it.
Stage Three: Describes our prevailing theory of what is real in the visual world, and identifies its limitations.
Stage Four: Shows how an alternate theory has popped up throughout history, from cave paintings to medieval cosmology to the double-slit experiment.
Stage Five: Presents a unified theory of perception, one that places light, the brain, and the mind on a single template.

All the World’s a Mirror: Deconstructing Being, Time, and Text by Samuel Zinner

This wide-ranging study in physics, linguistics, literature theory, and comparative mysticism offers a view of all of existence as a sort of quantum entanglement of consciousness, language, and spacetime in which actuality-potentiality, absolute-relative, being-non-being, can exist only together, which means every binary involves what are ultimately but artificial distinctions. Such contrasts consist of two modes of single phenomena, and though they are useful, they are nevertheless not to be taken overly literally. Yet even the literal and non-literal are just further examples of two appearances of the same thing. Mysticism involves not altered or higher states of consciousness, but a dialectical transcendence of consciousness (and language) by means of itself. Consciousness and language can be either self-limiting or self-transcending. The same paradigm applies to religion, which can become ever more legalistic or transcend itself in the boundless apophatic, which paradoxically can be known only from within the limits of the finite. Integrating ancient philosophy and modern theoretical physics, All the World’s a Mirror asks whether current String Theory’s penchant for increasing the number of cosmic dimensions might be a misguided intensification of a Bohmian holographic illusion. If Bohm’s model is correct, a more adequate understanding of existence would involve decreasing, not increasing, the number of dimensions. And in the end, it may be that on the most fundamental level the universe could be lacking in dimensionality, and even temporality, altogether. If the world may be likened to a holographic mirror, image may be all that exists, and existence be but an image. Illusion may be the sole reality, and reality the sole illusion.