The School of Being Assembly is a recurring gathering of members, invited thinkers, and community – a space for conversation, creation, presentation, and pycho-social enquiry – how we live, what we value, and what the social and ethical conditions of modern life are asking of us.
The Assembly
A Framework for Gathering, Discourse, and Shared Inquiry
The Proposition
There is no shortage of information about how the world is changing. There is a real shortage of space in which to think carefully about what that means – for how we relate to each other, how we work, how we raise children, how we age, how we grieve, how we find meaning in conditions that don’t always encourage it.
The Assembly isn’t a conference. It isn’t a festival. It isn’t a lecture series, though it may include elements of all three. It’s a gathering – in the old sense – of people who want to think together, rather than simply be informed. It takes its model from traditions that predate the seminar and the TED talk: the forum, the agora, the salon, the village meeting. Places where the conversation was the point, and where the quality of that conversation depended on the quality of attention everyone brought to it.
It draws on the practice and the spirit of events like Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering programmes and Yuval Noah Harari’s public dialogues – gatherings that have demonstrated, at scale, a genuine public appetite for serious engagement with difficult questions. The Assembly works at a different scale and with a different emphasis: more participatory, more local, and more oriented toward practice than performance.
“The School of Being Assembly is predicated on the simple idea that collaborating, thinking, and creating together – honestly and with conviction – is in itself a social good. It is a congregation of members, invited thinkers, and a creative community. It is an open and vibrant space to celebrate how we live together and what we genuinely value, while exploring what the social and ethical conditions of modern life ask of us, and how we can respond.”
What the Assembly Does
Each Assembly gathering is built around a central question – one drawn from the Anima Sobria Papers series or proposed by the community – and structured to move from provocation to exploration to synthesis. Not resolution. The point isn’t to arrive at answers but to arrive at better questions, and to do so in the company of people who are genuinely trying.
Format Principles
Every Assembly event combines at least two of the following formats. The combination is chosen to serve the specific question being explored.
The Address
A single invited speaker – philosopher, psychologist, social historian, contemplative practitioner – gives a 30 to 45 minute address on the central question. Not a lecture in the traditional sense: the address is structured as a provocation, intended to open ground rather than cover it. Q&A follows, facilitated and shaped to prevent the usual dominance patterns.
The Dialogue
Two thinkers in conversation, on stage or in the round, with active facilitation. The model here is closer to the philosophical dialogue than the panel debate – the point is genuine exchange, not competing performances. Suitable for questions where productive tension between perspectives is itself the content.
The Circle
Small group discussion in facilitated circles of eight to twelve people, using a structured but open protocol drawn from Council practice and Bohm Dialogue. Each participant has a genuine turn to speak. No crosstalk. Active listening as the shared discipline. The Circle is the Assembly’s core format – everything else serves it.
The Exhibition
A curated selection of work – visual art, text, film, sound – that holds the question from a different angle. Not illustration of the theme but genuine inquiry through a different medium. Always accompanied by a short printed or digital guide that frames the work in relation to the Assembly’s question.
The Practice Session
A facilitated experience of a specific contemplative or somatic practice – mindfulness, voice work, movement, journalling – led by a practitioner and explicitly framed in relation to the Assembly’s theme. Not a workshop in the self-improvement sense: an embodied encounter with the question.
The Open Table
Informal gathering after the main programme – food, drink, unstructured conversation. Essential. The conversations that happen here are often the most honest. The Assembly doesn’t end when the facilitation ends.
Themes and Questions
The Assembly takes its questions from the terrain of the Anima Sobria Papers and the School of Being’s ongoing inquiry into cultural regeneration and psychosocial well-being. Each season’s programme is built around two or three central themes, explored across multiple events in different formats and with different guests.
Inaugural Season · 2026 – 2027
The Weight of Attention
What does it mean to attend, genuinely and fully, to the people, places, and things we share our lives with? How has the attention economy changed the quality of our relationships? What practices – individual and collective – might recover what has been lost?
After Abundance
How do individuals and communities adapt when material assumptions are disrupted? What happens to identity, to values, to social cohesion, when the conditions that shaped them change? What have we lost and what – possibly – have we recovered?
The Perceived Other
How do we actually hold space for difference – cultural, generational, political, neurological – without requiring sameness as the price of belonging? Where do the genuine limits of community tolerance lie, and how are they negotiated honestly?
Who We Invite
The Assembly’s guest programme is deliberately eclectic. It doesn’t privilege academic credentials over lived experience, or institutional recognition over genuine depth. The criterion is simple: can this person say something true, in plain language, that opens a room of people to think more honestly about the question at hand?
Guest Categories
Philosophers
Practitioners and academics working on ethics, consciousness, politics, and the philosophy of everyday life. Not household names necessarily – people who think clearly and speak plainly.
Psychologists
Clinical and social psychologists, psychotherapists, and attachment theorists. Particular interest in community resilience, trauma-informed practice, and the psychology of change.
Contemplatives
Practitioners from diverse traditions – Buddhist, Sufi, Christian contemplative, secular mindfulness – who can speak from genuine practice rather than doctrinal advocacy.
Social Historians
Historians of everyday life, labour, community, and culture. People who can locate the present in its actual history, rather than the mythologised version.
Artists
Makers working in any medium who are genuinely in dialogue with the Assembly’s themes – not illustrators of ideas but independent inquirers arriving from a different direction.
Community Practitioners
People with direct experience of building and maintaining community under difficult conditions – mutual aid organisers, cooperative developers, community architects, facilitators.
The best guest is not the most famous thinker on a topic. It is the person who, in this room, with this question, can create the conditions for genuine thinking to happen.
Conversations are in progress with practitioners in the tradition of public philosophical dialogue exemplified by Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering programmes, Harari’s public dialogues with institutions like the Royal Institution and WEF forums, and the dialogue practice developed by the School of Life and the Forum for the Future. The Assembly is in active discussion with several senior practitioners across these lineages.
Venues and Partnerships
The Assembly moves between venues – deliberately. Different spaces carry different social meanings and attract different communities. Moving between them is itself a statement about who the Assembly is for: everyone who is genuinely curious, regardless of their usual cultural context.
CCCB
Primary institutional partner. The CCCB’s programme already aligns closely with the Assembly’s themes. Its spaces – from the Pati de les Dones to the seminar rooms – offer scale and symbolic weight for flagship events.
Design Hub Barcelona
Excellent for events combining the Practice Session and Exhibition formats. The building’s architecture and the museum’s collection of material culture make it a natural host for events on craft, making, and the human relationship with the designed world.
Ateneu Barcelonès
The historical resonance of the Ateneu – Barcelona’s great civic cultural institution – suits the Assembly’s ethos exactly. Its library, reading rooms, and theatre offer intimacy and depth. Suitable for Circle and Dialogue formats.
Fabra i Coats
A former textile factory now a creative space, bringing the Assembly to a working neighbourhood with a different demographic. Suitable for larger open events and those combining exhibition with dialogue.
Escola Massana
Barcelona’s art and design school. Partnership potential for events connecting craft, education, and the question of how skills are transmitted between generations.
Residencial / Outdoor
For residential Assembly gatherings – deeper immersions of two or three days. The landscape itself becomes part of the practice. Ideally within one hour of Barcelona by train.
Partnership Strategy
The Assembly approaches venues as genuine partners – not simply spaces for hire. In return for reduced-rate or in-kind venue provision, the Assembly offers: programming that aligns with the host institution’s own cultural mandate, a community of thoughtful and engaged participants, documentation of events for shared promotional use, and long-term association with a growing cultural initiative rooted in Barcelona.
Target institutional frameworks for funding and support include Barcelona Cultura, Agenda 21 Cultura, the EU Culture Fund (Creative Europe), and the Institut Ramon Llull for multilingual European programming. The Assembly is explicitly a non-profit cultural initiative and all documentation will be prepared accordingly.
The Community of Members
The Assembly is anchored by a community of members – people who join not simply to attend events but to participate in an ongoing inquiry. Membership is not exclusive. It is a commitment: to show up with genuine attention, to contribute to the collective thinking, and to carry something of the Assembly’s spirit into the rest of their lives.
1 What Membership Offers
Priority access to all Assembly events, including residential gatherings. Access to the Anima Sobria Papers as they are published, with the option to participate in editorial discussion. Invitations to Circle gatherings between main events – smaller, more intimate, member-only. A network of people who are genuinely trying to think more carefully about how to live.
2 How Members Participate
The Assembly belongs to its community in a practical sense. Members propose questions for future events, suggest guests, and contribute to the facilitation of Circle gatherings once trained. The long-term vision is a self-sustaining community of practice – one that no longer depends on a single organising institution but on the commitments of its own members.
3 Intergenerational Intention
The School of Being has always been explicitly intergenerational. The Assembly inherits that intention. Events are designed to bring different generations into genuine conversation – not age-segregated programmes but mixed gatherings where the different kinds of experience carried by a twenty-five-year-old and a seventy-year-old are both genuinely needed by the conversation. This is harder to design than it sounds, and it is one of the Assembly’s defining commitments.
A community that only ever gathers people who are already like-minded is a support group. What the Assembly is after is something more demanding – a genuine community of inquiry, where difference is the resource rather than the problem.
Promotional and Communications Framework
The Assembly’s communications are of a piece with its values. They are direct, honest, and unglamorous in the best sense – they describe what is actually on offer without inflating it. The tone is the tone of the Anima Sobria Papers: unhurried, curious, essayistic, confident without being promotional.
1 Digital Presence
The Assembly is hosted as a distinct section of the School of Being website (grev.eu/school), with its own visual identity within the Anima Sobria house style. Each event has a dedicated page combining a brief essay introducing the central question, practical information, and a registration pathway. Event pages are written to be worth reading regardless of whether the reader attends.
2 Pre-Event Reading
Every Assembly event is accompanied by a short pre-event reading – typically two to three pages – that introduces the central question in plain language and suggests two or three texts for those who want to go deeper. Distributed digitally to registered participants one week before the event. This is not required reading but an invitation. It distinguishes the Assembly from events that assume no preparation and from academic events that assume too much.
3 Documentation
Each event is documented – audio, photography, brief written summary – and made available to members and to the public in a form that is genuinely useful rather than merely archival. Where guests consent, recordings of Addresses and Dialogues are released as audio, edited for listening. Circles are never recorded: their intimacy is protected.
4 Languages
The Assembly operates primarily in English, Catalan, and Spanish. Flagship events are designed to be accessible across all three languages, with facilitation and introductory materials provided in each. Residential events may include French and German programming where guest or participant composition supports this.
A Proposed First Season
The following is a sketch of the inaugural Assembly season: six events over nine months, each building on the last. This is a working proposal – intended to be revised in genuine dialogue with partner institutions and with the first wave of members.
Opening Assembly: The Weight of Attention
Inaugural public event. Address by invited philosopher or psychologist working on attention and relation. Circle groups with facilitation. Open Table to close. Free entry, advance registration. Designed as an introduction to the Assembly’s way of working for a broad audience.
Circle Evening: What Do You Actually Value?
Members-only Circle gathering. Six to eight facilitated circles of ten people, each exploring a single question drawn from the first event. No guest speaker. The members themselves are the resource. Facilitated by trained Circle leaders from the School of Being community.
After Abundance: Making, Scarcity, and the Skilled Hand
Combined exhibition and dialogue event. A curated exhibition of work by craftspeople and makers working with recovered, limited, or reclaimed materials. Dialogue on stage between a social historian of craft and a contemporary maker. Practice session: a ninety-minute introduction to a manual skill. Open to the public.
The Perceived Other: Difference and Belonging
Public Assembly event in a neighbourhood venue. Address by a community practitioner working at the intersection of migration, belonging, and civic participation. Open Circle in the round for up to sixty participants. Conducted in Catalan, Spanish, and English simultaneously where possible.
Deep Assembly: A Weekend Gathering
Two-day residential Assembly for members. Address, Circles, Practice Sessions, and unstructured time. Set in a rural or coastal location within one hour of Barcelona. Numbers limited to forty. A deeper immersion in the practices and questions the Assembly has been developing over the season.
Closing Assembly: What Have We Learned?
Public closing event for the inaugural season. Not a summary but a genuine reckoning – what did the season’s inquiry produce? What questions remain? What has shifted, in the thinking of those who participated? Structured around testimony from members alongside invited reflection from the season’s guests. Open to the public.
The Assembly is a modest proposal. It doesn’t promise transformation. It promises a room, a question, good company, and enough silence for something genuine to emerge. In the current conditions – of noise, speed, distraction, and managed consensus – that may be more radical than it sounds.
We are looking for partners, members, and guests who share the conviction that thinking together, honestly and without agenda, is among the most useful things a community of human beings can do.