Each year, many lively and thoughtful leaders, colleagues and participants, in Project Renaissance and in related technologies and programs, gather for this series of extraordinary events — events which Project Renaissance hosts each year in the Washington DC area. It is a small, relaxed conference whose attendance is usually under 40 participants, in a beautiful facility which comfortably holds that number. Really high-calibre people come together from all over the country and from countries overseas, human beings with whom it's a delight to share space and ideas and perceptions.

Highest-quality presenters are drawn to this Conference because, as with the original Socratics and Stoics, high-quality feedback from a quality audience helps them further develop their own perceptions and understandings, in the fields which most galvanize them and are most vital to them.

The start of all this was our discovery decades ago that nearly every creativity-evoking and creative problem-solving method — and there are hundreds of these in successful professional use around the planet — can also serve as a dynamite technique and way of promoting better, deeper, easier and more effective and rewarding learning. And most of the techniques used in the context of accelerated learning can also serve as dynamite ways to solve problems! Creating and Learning, as phenomenological fields, overlap about 95%. There is also about an 85% overlap between these fields and the methods of achieving and heightening human potential.

The Double Festivals have been pioneering new ways to facilitate the transmission and mutual transmission of information, the mutual building of understandings new and old. Our unique conferencing format assures that everyone — participants as well as the presenters — emerges from these sessions with a richer, fuller and more rewarding understanding of the topic than when we went in.

Partake in unique experiences and events where you can rub elbows with some of the people you've read about, heard about, exchanged email with, exchanged exciting and meaningful insights with in ImageStream@yahoogroups.com and elsewhere.
 

What the Double Festival does:

The Double-Festival format, like the best colloquium format, arranges to enable everyone to be a Socrates to each other and to themselves. We practice what we preach in the way of both creativity methods and accelerated learning methods, most of which are in fact forms of Socratic Method. There are reasons why Socratic Method — the examining of and responding from one's own first-hand perceptions and awarenesses in context of any subject, topic or question — historically has always given rise to so amazingly much high genius. We take advantage of these reasons. You get to take advantage of these reasons.

Some sessions of the Double Festival are directly highly interactive, built upon the involvement of the participants. Other presentations at the Double Festival have much rich formal content. This lets us get at highly substantive matters and issues. To render such formal input sessions fully as involving and meaningful to participants, we wrap up each formal presentation or lecture with a facilitated group thinktank on the main issue(s) that emerged during that presentation.
 

Each of our Double Festivals features:

• Highly interactive discovery and learning sessions.
• Some amazing but solid substantive input sessions concluded by a facilitated thinktank wherein everyone — facilitators included — discover more on the key issue(s) of that session.
• Implosion sessions — panels of topically related presentations followed by a facilitated thinktanking process on the core issues that have emerged.
• Grand Panel of the Whole — everyone, presenters and participants both — on Sunday afternoon of this weekend event, thinktanks together on the main issues to have developed throughout the Festival.
• The kinds of wonderfully illuminating and mutually supportive developments that naturally result when everyone seeks Socratically to draw themselves and each other out, in depth and detail and at length, on their noblest and deepest awarenesses on whatever is the topic.

The new insights, the illuminations, the profound palpable sense of relief to be at last and meaningfully heard on meaningful, significant matters! Be drawn out, in depth and at length and in detail, on your subtlest and deepest awarenesses on the topic. Be amazed at how this opens up and develops your awarenesses and understandings, not only on that topic but generally. That is what conferences and symposia were originally meant to do, and this is what the Double Festival, almost alone among conferences thus far, is in fact doing. How?

One of the many methods we employ, both at our Double Festivals and at our other trainings, is a modern form of Socratic Method that draws forth and engages the deeper wisdom of every participant. YOU will be contributing valid and useful original insights to topics and fields, some of which you may never even have heard of before!

• For one core element in modern forms of Socratic Method, please see the simple, step-by-specific step instructions for Dynamic Format.
• To see why this involving approach is so much more productive of learning, understanding and other good effects, please see the article on Feeding the Loop.
• To see some of the mechanics of HOW we infuse modern Socratic Method into the very fabric of our conferences, colloquia and training events, please see the article, The Art and Science of Hosting Conferences.
• To see some of the mechanics of HOW we infuse modern Socratic Method into the very fabric of each annual Double Festival, please see our Guidelines for Presenters.

Those are some of the mechanics of how we do it. That "it" is a much more profound and transfiguring experience than you may have been able to find anywhere else.

The Double Festival is also an interface between the many methods, findings and insights which Project Renaissance has discovered and those found in other fields and disciplines. Together with other co-inquirers, we are seeking to find higher synergies which can achieve more together than our various techniques and programs can separately. Together we know that "the fuller truth is found further on." Our Double Festivals are an especially designed instrument for discovering where our various methods and programs can combine into yet higher orders of effect and human benefit.

The heartening and satisfaction of solid information, much of it verified in your own direct experience... the excitement of brilliant insights understood, the crackle of exciting new ideas forming, the warmth of other good people co-discovering convergences of meaning and goals and universes of understanding... these are all part of what you will directly experience, together with acres of new information, new perceptions, new appreciations, new skills.

You will love your experience learning, growing, enriching, co-learning, co-discovering, participating in Double Festival. Make this superbly enhancing experience your own, and in good company with the quality mix of professionals and bright laymen our events consistently attract.

Check the Events Calendar for announcements and registration information for this year's Double Festival.

See also:

• The Art and Science of Hosting Conferences
• Archives of previous years of Double Festival
• Guidelines for Presenters

The Unfolding, Drawing-Out Process
Historic Socratic Method led to such miracle leaps of understanding that its practitioners thought all knowledge was already within each of us. We've discovered the key psychological and physical principles behind what made Socratic Method so very productive of genius. Learn here new, easy, effortless and even more powerful ways than the historic method, to Socratize one another, your staff, your friends and co-workers, your family — and even yourself!

Sensitive Faculties
Einstein's "Deep Thought" discovery technique was but the tip of an iceberg. (If he'd had the new versions of his own method, he'd have found that elusive unified field theory!) Better still, "you don't have to be an Einstein" to easily and productively use these new forms, to discover your own great answers and to make your own discoveries. That 99.99% of your brain and perceptual faculties which were out of reach, no longer are. "Use it or lose it" — you absolutely no longer need to be gradually losing it, and much of what you thought was gone, isn't!

Other Direct Avenues
Explore with us also some of the other, highly various ways to work directly with features of the brain, senses and physiology to improve the quality of ability, performance and experience.

Some of the Specifics

Participants will discover effective answers of their own to a wide range of their most difficult questions, problems and issues.

Participants will gain understandings and skills which enable them to go on making their breakthroughs far beyond the walls of this intensive "hands-on" training.

Participants will acquire new ways and skills and ranges of learning — ways to build, almost effortlessly, years' worth of proficiency in only days in almost any topic, subject or skill (including athletic and/or artistic skills, and including human interactive skills) and with greater depth of understanding and ease of retention. These are not memory techniques; their focus truly is understanding.

Become able to continue making breakthroughs without end in your work and career. Acquire skills and practices of creativity and ingenuity which let you literally transform almost any situation you address, immediately and for the long term.

For those so inclined, there are even ways to pursue, far more effectively, technical invention and scientific discovery. (See some of these ways laid out step-by-step in the great book, Discovering the Obvious: Techniques of Original, Inspired Scientific Discovery, Technical Invention, and Innovation.

We'll be using more effective tools for positively exploring the human dimension. (This is, though, not a therapy course. We are informal but not unbuttoned.)

Discover a lot of solid reasons to think far better of yourself. This is not a self-esteem program where everyone goes around telling you how wonderful you really are. Instead, you simply discover that fact for yourself, in terms of what you are accomplishing.

Duration of Training
Five days is ideal when this training is of a group on the job, ensuring successful transfer of skills and understandings beyond the workshop into ongoing useful application. The briefer, two-and-a-half to three-day training, provides almost as much content, but individuals need maturity and self-direction to ensure such successful transfer in their own jobs, lives and careers.

Arrangements
Where we've made all the arrangements and borne all the costs, this year's tuition is $495 per participant, with some special discounts for groups, mature family members, organizational colleagues, and for participants from our earlier workshops. We also arrange with other groups and organizations, anywhere in the world, and there, of course, costs vary.

Looking for Trainers
We are seeking to train professional socrateurs to provide the Beyond-Einstein Training and/or related Project Renaissance trainings, consulting and other services locally on an ongoing basis in every part of the world. The Beyond-Einstein Training experience is an important part of the necessary preparation, as is some quality experience in other programs and/or disciplines involving human potential. The annual special two-day Trainer Training in Maryland, in May, relating to our annual conference (see Upcoming Events) is the other main ingredient. Counterparts to these experiences can sometimes be arranged as special events elsewhere in the world. See also To Become a Trainer.