Wednesdays September 21, 28, and October 5
Time: 6-8 pm ET/New York City time
Admission: $160 Patreon members / $175 general admission

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

Students can register after the start time and receive a streaming link to class recordings via email.

Creativity is productive—we’ve learned this through the cross-cultural study of communities and social groups that have cultivated the body and mind to produce what is currently called “the creative download.” People and small groups of creative people have changed culture through creative interventions and innovations.

This course is a survey of selected communities of “downloaders” or people who have cultivated their extreme creativity to produce art, technologies, or engage in spiritual practice. What types of practices and behaviors do they utilize? How do these practices enable their creative processes? These questions and others will guide the course.

Author and professor Diana Walsh Pasulka has spent the past ten years with people engaged in various forms of creative genius. She met and studied with people whose technological products save lives and others who are artists, authors, and musicians. She has used these techniques in her own life and helped her students reach their goals by teaching them these techniques and protocols. Her students have been accepted to Yale, U.C. Berkeley, Duke University, and others have expanded notions of employment by becoming sustainable farmers and entrepreneurs.

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research examines miraculous events within Catholic history to new religious movements. Recent books include American Cosmic: Religion, UFOs, and Technology (Oxford University Press 2019) and The Resurrected: Spiritual Initiations in the 21^st Century (forthcoming with St. Martins’ Essentials). She is widely published, recently in Tank, Vox, Vice, and is a featured speaker at conferences, on podcasts, radio, and television. Memorable engagements include the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, a keynote speech at Rice University, and regular presentations at Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research. She is lead investigator on an ongoing study of Catholic manuscripts about saints, levitation, and bilocation, in partnership with The Vatican Secret Archive. In 2009 she was principal investigator for a multi-year program funded by the Department of Education (Teaching American History) to create innovative curriculum in the state of North Carolina to engage students and teachers in learning about the history of the United States.