Friday, September 26, 2014

Travel the World, right here at the CLL


Around the World in 80 Days (or Less!)


Are you consumed by wanderlust? With classes beginning as soon as next week, let the CLL satisfy your globetrotter desires. From language classes to multi-cultural cooking, film and jewelry making - a unique travel experience awaits you… right here in your own backyard!


CLL Southern Movie
Film Lovers, Rejoice!


POP QUIZ! 
  • How did church music influence Southern politics and country music?
  • Which of America’s wars had the most casualties?
  • According to the American Film Institute, who was the greatest movie hero of the 20th Century?
  • In their Articles of Secession, what part of the Declaration of Independence did every state in the Confederacy quote?
  • On what Atlanta Street was “Driving Miss Daisy” filmed—and why is that important?
Find out the answers, by registering today! 

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Mediterranean Cuisine 
In this class, you learn to create a variety of appealing small plates with big flavors from France, Spain, Greece, Italy and beyond. Put your creativity to work, challenge yourself to learn something new, and make your next party a special event where you too can relax and enjoy!
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CLL Small Bites
More from Armchair Travels
CLL Latin American Cooking
Flavors of Latin America
Oct. 20: Indulge in taste delights from Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, Argentina and more in this hands-on class.

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More from Armchair Travels
CLL Italian Cooking
Speak Italian While You Eat Italian
Oct. 23: Make delicious Tuscan specialties and learn conversational Italian in the same class!

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More from Armchair Travels
CLL Chinese Brush
Chinese Brush Painting and Meditation
Oct. 21: Come and enjoy a quiet meditation to begin your creative process and learn the timeless beauty of an ancient art form.

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Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Create Your Own Spa Experience at the CLL

Relax. Renew. Rejuvenate.


September is national self-improvement month, and the CLL is here to help you relax and restore your mind, body and spirit. We have one-day workshops, evening and weekday classes for every schedule. So, no matter how busy you are, you can take time to re-energize this fall!
Vitruvian Man
"Touch for Health" Series

Are you looking for a natural way to feel better? Touch for Health techniques have helped millions of people naturally renew their healing energies and achieve optimum health, function, and performance. These workshops are one-day only, don't miss out:

(Bonus for healthcare and mental health professionals: Touch for Health Series classes offer 2 CEUS for CNA/RN/LVN and MFT/LCSW)
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Stress Break Massage Series
Stress can hinder healing, but utilizing massage can be beneficial and restorative. Whether practiced in a chair at work or during a hospital recovery, Stress Break massage techniques can reduce stress and promote healing. Explore gentle Swedish massage, therapeutic massage and trigger-point work.

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CLL couples massage
More from Spa
CLL Scientific Nutrition
Scientific Nutrition
Sep. 24: Discover how a correct diet can help people heal a variety of health related problems.

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More from Spa
CLL focusing
Focusing: A Pathway to Wellness
Oct. 11: Learn to focus, a self-help technique that will help you to experience a deeper sense of the relationship between your body, mind, emotions and spirit.

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More from Spa
CLL Chinese Brush
Chinese Brush Painting and Meditation
Oct. 21: Come and enjoy a quiet meditation to begin your creative process and learn the timeless beauty of an ancient art form.

Register Now

Friday, September 12, 2014

Save the Date: CLL Arts & Crafts Fair


Discover great handcrafted holiday gifts for friends and family at the SBCC Center for Lifelong Learning (CLL) Arts & Crafts Fair and celebrate the CLL’s first birthday! More than 50 CLL teachers and students will be selling artwork and crafts created in CLL classes. You can also enjoy great music all day from our talented music class teachers and students. This continues the great tradition of “Adult Ed” Holiday Crafts Fairs.

CLL e-Gift Cards will also be available at the CLL Arts & Crafts Fair so you can give the gift of learning this holiday season. The CLL information/registration office will be open for those interested in enrolling in CLL Winter 2015 classes, which begin on January 12, 2015. Classes start throughout the term!

Date:            Saturday, November 15, 2014
Time:           10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Location:      Wake Campus, 300 N. Turnpike Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93111
Admission:    FREE

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Carpe Diem

Don't wait until tomorrow; seize today!


Carpe Diem! Fall term has started, and the CLL is offering a variety of classes to help you start learning what you’ve always dreamed of doing. Is there something you have always wanted to learn, but pushed off until tomorrow? Don't delay, you can learn something new today! Classes include one-day workshops, evening class series, and more! 
Time Management
Time Management: How to Manage Your Best Resource

Date: Saturday, September 20
Time: 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.

When it comes to managing time, decision-making skills will determine how you manage your time and ultimately how you will achieve your goals.

Let the CLL provide you with a set of proven time management tips and tools to help you make decisions that will lead to more effective, efficient results in all areas of life. 

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Dance the Salsa! 

Date(s): 9 Fridays, beginning September 19
Time: 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

Are you ready to Salsa? Stop watching everyone else have fun on the dance floor. Get out there and join in! Learn basic timing, rhythm, partnering, and footwork and leave class knowing everything you need to know to have a great time salsa dancing. No dance experience needed and no partner required. What are you waiting for? Sign up and let's salsa!
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CLL Salsa Instructors
More from Carpe Diem
CLL Guitar
Playing the Guitar for Beginners and Beyond
Sep. 15: Learn simple accompaniment for songs as well as chords, rhythm techniques and left-hand and right-hand coordination.

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More from Carpe Diem
CLL Keelboat Sailing
Basic Keelboat Sailing
Sep. 24: Learn to sail a 24’ sail boat in light to moderate winds and sea conditions in familiar waters.

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More from Carpe Diem
CLL orchestra
Orchestra: A Class for All Levels
Sep. 15: Develop individual musicianship skills and techniques while learning how to be part of a musical ensemble. Topics will include achieving an artistic unified sound, following a conductor, taking rehearsal notes, and performance conduct.

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Friday, September 5, 2014

A Conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.

A Conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.:Visionary Biologist and Author, to Deliver 35th Anniversary Mind & Supermind Lecture at the New Vic, Sept. 8

On September 8th, SBCC Center for Lifelong Learning (CLL) welcomes visionary English biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. for the 35th Anniversary of the CLL’s Mind & Supermind lecture series. Sheldrake is known for his theory of “morphic resonance” and is named among “The 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People in 2014” by Watkins Books, London. The lecture will take place Monday, September 8th at 7:30 p.m. at The New Vic Theatre. Limited tickets are also available for a VIP Meet and Greet.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 papers in scientific journals and 11 books, including, Science Set Free. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, and from 2005-10 was Director of the Perrott–Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He lives in London.

Sheldrake’s theories are sometimes controversial, as demonstrated in the discussion of his TEDx talk. One theory posits that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even when all normal sensory clues are eliminated.

The SBCC Center for Lifelong Learning caught up with Sheldrake this week during his Central Coast tour.

SBCC Center for Lifelong Learning (CLL): Are you a scientist? A biologist? A parapsychologist?
Rupert Sheldrake: I am a scientist, and more specifically a biologist. I started my research career working on the development of plants and the ageing of cells, then I worked in an international agricultural research institute in India on crop physiology. In 1981 I published my hypothesis of formative causation in my first book, A New Science of Life, principally about the causes of form in living organisms, based on my hypothesis of morphic resonance and memory in nature. I have been doing research on morphic resonance ever since.
As part of this research, I became interested in the bonds between members of social groups and realized that the morphic field of the social group could lead to telepathic connections between members of the group. I then investigated telepathy in animals, starting from this biological perspective, and later investigated telepathy and other unexplained powers of humans, particularly telepathy between mothers and babies and telepathy in connection with telephone calls. I have also researched the sense of being stared at, which I think is a normal biological phenomenon that probably evolved in connection with predator-prey relations. Prey animals that could tell when a hungry predator was looking at them would stand a better chance of escaping than ones that couldn't.
Some of these areas of research overlap with parapsychology, but I am a biologist not a parapsychologist. Unlike parapsychologists I do not start from laboratory studies, but from biological phenomena and from natural history.
CLL:  Do you have evidence for your hypotheses?
Sheldrake: Yes. For the hypothesis for morphic resonance, several other scientists and I have tested it in the realms of human and animal behavior over the last 30 years. This evidence is summarized in the third edition of my book A New Science of Life (2009), called Morphic Resonance in the US, and I propose 10 new tests in the Appendix to this book. In addition, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence from experiments with crystals, cell cultures, fruit flies, rats and humans which I summarize in The Presence of the Past (1988; new edition 2011).
For my hypotheses about the extended mind and telepathy, much evidence is summarized in my papers on these subjects, and in my books Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At.
CLL: What are “morphic fields”? How do they fit into your hypothesis of formative causation?
Sheldrake: The hypothesis of formative causation states that the forms of self-organizing systems are shaped by morphic fields. Morphic fields organize atoms, molecules, crystals, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, ecosystems, planetary systems, solar systems, galaxies. In other words, they organize systems at all levels of complexity, and are the basis for the wholeness that we observe in nature, which is more than the sum of the parts.
According to the hypothesis of formative causation, morphic fields also contain an inherent memory given by the process of morphic resonance, whereby each kind of thing has a collective memory. For example, crystals of a given kind are influenced by all past crystals of that kind, date palms by past date palms, giraffes by past giraffes, etc. In the human realm this is similar to Jung's theory of the collective unconscious.
In the realm of developmental biology the morphic fields that shape the growing organisms are called morphogenetic fields; in social organization they can be called social fields; and in the organization of mental activity they can be called mental fields. But all these kinds of fields are particular kinds of morphic fields, and all are shaped and stabilized by morphic resonance. For a fuller description of the hypothesis of formative causation see my books A New Science of Life, which is quite brief and somewhat technical, or my book The Presence of the Past which is longer, but less technical, and more complete.
CLL:  What do you enjoy about your work?

Sheldrake: I can work freely and follow up any leads I find interesting because I work independently. I have been exploring unexplained areas of animal and human behavior, such as the feeling of being stared at from behind, which most people brush aside. I have done over 20,000 simple trials that suggest this is indeed a very real phenomenon.
CLL: Why do you think it is that people seem to be able to sense when someone is staring at them?

Sheldrake: This depends on the way in which perception works. I suggest that when we are looking at somebody or something the image we form is not located inside our brain but projected out to the place where it seems to be. In other words, our mind reaches out to touch what we are looking at. This means that we can affect what we are looking at. So if we look at somebody from behind, and they do not know we are there, they can feel this unseen gaze if they're in a sufficiently receptive state. A fuller discussion of this phenomenon is given in my book The Sense of Being Stared At.

CLL: How can pet owners, students, and other interested people get involved in your research?

Sheldrake: In the participate section of my website there are several online experiments which I invite anyone who is interested to try.


Join visionary biologist, morphic resonance researcher and author, Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., as he discusses research on the extended mind and social media, Monday, September 8, 2014 from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the New Vic Theatre, Main Theatre, 33 W. Victoria, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101. There will be a VIP reception from 6:30 to 7:15 p.m. The reception includes reserved seating for the lecture, and the chance to meet Sheldrake while enjoying wine and refreshments. General admission for the lecture is $10; VIP reception admission is $50. Lecture registration http://bit.ly/1qlZ5I7; VIP Meet and Greet registration http://bit.ly/1tyyJUi. For more information, contact infoCLL@sbcc.edu

CLL in the News: CASA Magazine

In Today's CASA Magazine, on the cover and pg. 9!