ABOUT NOSTOS
Our mission & its roots
Our rich cosmologies
The old mythologies and cosmologies of the West – and especially those embedded in the writings of Classical philosophers like Plato and Plotinus – are rich, complex and beautiful. They reveal to us a world in which everything is not only alive but has purpose and intentionality of its own. A world into which each soul chooses to be incarnated, for a reason, and to express a unique way of being human through relationship with and participation in that intimately entangled, animate universe.
These ancient wisdom traditions communicate timeless truths which help us to understand our place in the cosmos, and to uncover the deeper meaning of human life. They show us how the powers of imagination, creativity and contemplation can connect us not just to our own souls and the natural world – but also to the Divine, while furnishing tools to live by and a system of ethics that’s free of cant and dogma.
Acts of restoration
These rich traditions have, for two and a half millennia, inspired and nourished contemplatives, mystics and other seekers of truth, but they themselves are no longer the primary foundations for meaningful spiritual practice. At the Nostos Institute, we want to revive and reimagine these traditions for our rapidly changing world.
Many of us are very familiar with the spiritual void at the heart of the contemporary West, but we can’t find the answers we’re looking for in patriarchal religions that are wedded to an excess of dogma, embedded in institutions that are often difficult to trust or respect. On the other hand, it’s hard to find alternative European traditions that are coherent and authentic, and which offer us the rigour and depth we yearn for. Because of this lack, spiritual seekers have increasingly turned to Eastern traditions which have their roots in very different lands, cultures and histories. Others have tried to satisfy themselves with practices that have been lifted out of these traditions, such as meditation, bodywork and breathwork. But activities that are primarily aimed at wellbeing or ‘self-improvement’, divorced from the context of community, ethics, an identified cosmological worldview and focused sense of the sacred, can’t fill our need for deeper meaning and purpose.
A container for our longings
The Western philosophical heritage that we’re reclaiming at the Nostos Institute is a container for our deepest longings, for transforming the way we understand the world and the nature of reality. It has underpinned forward-looking, open-minded thought in the West (and beyond) for more than two thousand years, and it invites us to learn how to lean into the sacred without at the same time abandoning the faculty of reason. It offers up an abundance of insights from the long line of remarkable wayfarers who’ve trodden parts of this path before us, but it also stresses the importance of gnosis: each individual’s direct understanding and experience of the divine – and through this the embrace of our own unique, purpose-filled and creative life.
A mythopoetic, contemplative, mystical wisdom
The originality and power of our Nostos program arises from the marriage of this long lineage of Western philosophy and spirituality to the perspectives and practices provided by contemporary Jungian and post-Jungian depth psychology – because wisdom is born from the depths, and from an ability to discern what lies beneath and beyond the surface both of consciousness and of physical reality. Wisdom comes from curiosity, from embracing creativity, from an understanding of myth, dreams and the rich symbolic languages that saturate our surroundings and reveal the world of meaning that always seems to lie just out of reach. It also arises from a perception of the world as alive and just as full of soul as we are. Wisdom centres the imagination, above all. And so our unique curriculum offers up a practical wisdom to live by: a mythopoetic, contemplative, mystical wisdom, rooted in nature and the wild beauty of the sacred cosmos.
The voice of the sacred in the hooting of an owl
The ideas and practices that we work with at the Nostos Institute don’t require us to live according to the tenets of one book and repel all others, everything reduced to rules, or to believe in one truth to the exclusion of all others. They require us rather to find joy in the mystery of not-knowing. To look up at the richness of the night sky and recognise the divine in the twinkle of a star and the shape of the constellation it belongs to; to stand still in the forest and hear the voice of the sacred in the hooting of an owl. They require us not to slavishly follow but to take responsibility and think for ourselves. To embark on a journey of discovery, to wake up. To remember who we are. These ideas and practices, then, speak to our longing to rediscover our mythic ground, to re-enchant ourselves and find a sense of deeply embodied belonging to this beautiful, animate Earth.
Beauty, Truth & the Good
At the Nostos Institute, we welcome anyone who wants to learn about these traditions. We’re committed to the practice of philosophia – literally, the love of wisdom – and to exploring fundamental questions about the nature of reality, existence, knowing and the ways in which we form our values. But our content, although firmly grounded in the scholarly and professional expertise of our teachers and the validity of our sources, is neither overly abstract nor heavily academic. Rather, it’s focused on a search for the images, stories, ideas and grounded, embodied practices that call us to know ourselves – and then, with joy and with commitment to the old Platonic ideals of beauty, truth and the good, to transform our lives.
What Nostos is not
Although our ethos is one of curiosity and open-minded enquiry, it’s important to stress that this project is not about offering up a universal pick-and-mix bag of traditions or of ‘anything goes’. This isn’t in any way to suggest that we’re not inclusive: the Nostos Institute welcomes everyone, whatever your spiritual orientation or religious background. There are many paths which can lead to a genuine apprehension of the sacred; we can learn from them and they’re worthy of respect. But today, many of us remain spiritually unhomed, and what we’re looking for is a new path: a creative but challenging and coherent system of study and practice, rooted in a pre-existing Western tradition which already has a long lineage.
In some ways, we’re going back to basics, to the early philosophical ideas which influenced so many other spiritual traditions – to see if we can forge from them a different path: one that’s relevant to our current reality, and the challenges and opportunities of the world we find ourselves in today.