Old New Method Gathering in
MiamiJoin us to explore Dutch Golden Age masterworks and the mysteries of divine limitation…
December 4 – 7, 2025
Join us in Miami for a rich weekend with two parallel investigations: the intimate psychological portraits of 17th-century Dutch masters and the profound limitations of divine intervention. Through museum visits and the reading of a play themed around the Eleusinian mysteries, we will examine how both illuminate the necessity of conscious effort. The Gods cannot do for humans what humans must do for themselves. The seed of our rebirth must be cultivated through our own deliberate work.
Museum Visits
Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time
Our focus will be the Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. The exhibition includes more than 75 works from one of the world’s foremost private collections of 17th-century Dutch art. The Dutch Golden Age produced an unprecedented flowering of intimate psychological portraiture. Unlike the grand mythological and religious scenes of their Italian contemporaries, Dutch painters turned their attention to the inner lives of ordinary people: market vendors, card-playing soldiers, women writing letters, and children absorbed in their studies.
We will study how these master painters used light, shadow, and subtle facial expressions to reveal the psychological complexity of their subjects, from religious contemplation to worldly ambition, from maternal tenderness to scholarly concentration. We will also visit other museums in the Miami area that house works relevant to our studies and use this opportunity to reflect on the themes of inner observation and psychological insight across different periods and traditions.
Portrait of a Man in a Red Coat | Rembrandt | 1633
A work of objective art ought to be a ‘book’… the only difference is that the artist transmits his ideas not directly through words or signs or hieroglyphs, but through certain feelings which he excites consciously and in an orderly way, knowing what he is doing and why he does it.
Flora (Persephone) | Pompei | 15-45 C.E.
Dramatic Reading of the Play Not Even God
In our afternoons and evenings, we will read the script of Not Even God, a dramatic work that explores one of the most profound paradoxes in spiritual development: the limits of what can be given versus what must be earned through conscious effort. The play weaves together three interconnected stories that converge around a single devastating realization: even divine love cannot bestow what mortals must achieve through their own struggle. In one of the stories, when the goddess Demeter attempts to grant immortality to the infant prince Demophoon, by secretly placing him in divine fire each night, her work fails through mortal fear and interference.
Some gifts even god cannot give directly. The play explores how divine love must sometimes withhold what it most wants to bestow, not from cruelty but from wisdom—understanding that certain treasures lose their value when granted rather than earned. Through our reading and discussions, we will examine what it means to receive help that teaches us to help ourselves.
The laws of a game make the essence of the game. A violation of these laws would destroy the entire game. The Absolute can as little interfere in our life and substitute other results in the place of the natural results of causes created by us, or created accidentally, as he can beat the ace of trumps with the deuce.
Old New Method Gathering in
MiamiJoin us to explore Dutch Golden Age masterworks and the mysteries of divine limitation…
December 4 – 7, 2025