About the Garden of Noetic Arts
Who Are We?
The Garden of Noetic Arts is a living field for the cultivation of ideas, where scholarship and imagination converge for a common goal. At the center of our work is philosophia — not as academic specialty or mystical affectation, but as the proverbial longing for wisdom. We engage in the age-old quest for truth. To live in this pursuit, while knowing it may never fully resolve, is the basis of modern philosophia—which is open-ended, non-dogmatic, and ever aware of the constructed nature of worldview.
Today, the quest for truth is the stuff of conspiracies and comic books. Science is granted exclusive rights to the truth, religion claims it, while analytic philosophy denies it even exists. The Garden holds to the premise that the longing for wisdom is the quintessentially human longing. We are noetic creatures with noetic needs.
Noetic Creatures
To say that human beings are noetic creatures means that we are beings capable of inner knowing, that is, of insight that goes beyond what can be measured, taught, or reduced to logic or sensory experience.
The term comes from the Greek noēsis (νόησις), meaning direct knowing, perception, or understanding that arises from the Nous—the intuitive intellect, the higher or divine mind. In this sense, calling humans noetic creatures acknowledges that we have capacities for:
- insight that is immediate, not deduced
- perception of meaning, purpose, and value
- symbolic and imaginative cognition
- experiences of deep coherence
- the inner sense that something is true before it is proven
In short: we are not just producers, tool-makers, or problem-solvers. We are meaning-seeking beings, haunted by the invisible, stirred by beauty, and drawn—however obscurely—toward the truth.
Offerings
SCHOLARSHIP AS DEVOTION.
ART AS WITNESS.
The universe whose truth we seek to know is not random or inert; it is a most intricately arranged work of great beauty and great love.
Offerings to awaken and sustain our noetic sensibilities:
Courses and conferences for independent and communal scholarship.
Creative productions for imaginal and novel transmissions of knowledge.
And more…
First Seeds
About the Founder
Founded by Maryam Sayyad, The Garden of Noetic Arts (GNA) is the outgrowth of years of cross-cultural mythological and philosophical comparison, esoteric study, de-colonial engagement, and creative practice.