Subject: Wishing a very happy birthday to CCI’s founder, Jack Petranker!

Dear CCI students and supporters,

Today marks the 80th birthday of Jack Petranker, the Center for Creative Inquiry’s founder! To honor him, we’d like to take this opportunity to share a bit about his founding vision for CCI and reflect on its history and growth.

In 2000, Jack created CCI as a vehicle to explore new ways of applying key insights of the TSK vision and making them more widely available. Since the beginning, CCI’s approach has always been fluid and shifting in the explorations and connections it seeks to make. In the early years, CCI focused on possible interactions with the academic world of organization studies, hosting two conferences on the Dynamic of Time and Organizational Change. Later, from 2006-2012, the focus shifted to possible interactions with academics in the emerging field of Consciousness Studies, with retreats at Ratna Ling Retreat Center on First Person Perspectives in the Study of Consciousness.

From 2007 to 2016, CCI also offered a continuous online course of study in the TSK Vision that introduced or supported the practice of hundreds of participants, as well as regular retreats. From 2016-2018, Jack began developing Full Presence Mindfulness, a unique approach to mindfulness grounded in the TSK teachings. After offering both online and in-person teacher training programs in the Full Presence Mindfulness approach, new instructors have been sharing this field-centered way of practicing mindfulness since 2020.

Today, Jack is still deeply involved with teaching and guiding CCI as both the Senior Teacher and a member of its board of directors. A new online class led by Jack will take place next month, in addition to in-person events in Berkeley and retreats at Ratna Ling Retreat Center and in Europe.

From all of us at Center for Creative Inquiry, thank you for your inspiring leadership, Jack! Happy birthday, and many more!

Online Program

Out of Your Head and into Your Life

With Jack Petranker

April 25-May 9, Saturdays from 10-11:30am PT, Three weeks

Online Via Zoom

Cost is $100

We mostly live in a world built up out of the stories we tell and the judgments we make. We dwell on the past and worry about the future, judge ourselves and others, and cope with anxiety and emotionality. We cut ourselves off from being truly alive.

In this program, we will explore ways to challenge those patterns. The point is not to introduce new practices or have special experiences, but to see the world with new eyes. When we do, we can free ourselves from bias, agitation, and disappointment.

Jack Petranker is the founder of the Center for Creative Inquiry and its Senior Teacher. A close student of Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku for more than four decades, he is the author of One with the World: A Path to Living with Presence and Appreciation.

In-Person Programs

Renewing the World in Every Moment

With Jack Petranker

Thursday, April 16, 2026, 5:00 - 6:30pm PT

Location: 2210 Harold Way, Berkeley, CA 94704

This event is FREE and open to the public!

This series of talks are based on Time, Space, and Knowledge Vision guided by the unifying theme of letting go. Often, we hold too tightly to the grip of linear time, the solidity of fixed boundaries, or the certainty of a self-centered knowledge. These habits and points of views shape how we experience the world and how we limit “our own” freedom. Through guided reflections, silent practice, and explorations with music and sound, each session opens a new way of being. The series culminates in an integration and discussions of these insights.

Living Without Stress

A retreat at Ratna Ling Retreat Center

With Jack Petranker and Gretchen Donovan

July 31 – August 2, 2026

Location: 35755 Hauser Bridge Road, Cazadero, California

Cost is $900.00

Ratna Ling brings together two powerful and expert teachers to help you find more freedom and ease in your life!

Tension and stress don’t arise only from busy calendars—they come from the deeper ways we’ve learned to interpret our lives, our responsibilities, and even our sense of self.

In this powerful weekend retreat at Ratna Ling, Jack Petranker—a direct student of Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche for 45 years and editor of over a dozen of Rinpoche’s books—guides participants in gently uncovering the hidden patterns that keep us striving, fixing, and feeling like life is just happening to us. Special Guest Yoga Teacher Gretchen Donovan will guide us with practices for relaxation, strength, and flexibility. Through restorative yoga, sensory appreciation, and accessible inquiry practices, you’ll begin to relax into experience as it actually is, rather than how you’ve been conditioned to manage or control it. You will discover that deep relaxation doesn’t depend on controlling experience. You simply need to inquire more deeply what is happening right now … and now … and now.

For the inquiring, thoughtful seeker who feels overwhelmed, overextended, or quietly wondering, “Is this the life I really want?” This program offers a clear and compassionate path forward. You’ll learn how to meet each moment with greater openness, discernment, and ease—returning to your everyday world with a new way of relating to stress that doesn’t require more effort or time, but rather a shift in understanding. You will leave with the rare ability to be “ordinary in extraordinary ways”–fully present, grounded, and able to respond wisely to what life brings, without forcing change or pushing yourself to be different.

Join Jack and Gretchen in discovering a natural freedom available in every situation.

How to Be More Fully Alive

Learning to Surf the Dynamic of Time

With Jack Petranker

TSK Retreat, Neu Plaue Germany

September 20 – 26 2026

At the edge of the future, time sparkles; in the richness of feeling and energy, time glows. When we find such special places and learn to let them expand or deepen, we discover time coursing through our bodies and illuminating our minds: a dimension wholly inseparable from our own being.

Tarthang Tulku, Dynamics of Time and Space

We know that our lives unfold in time, but that is a limited way of seeing. We are not in time—we are time.

Because we do not see this, we lose the opportunity to be free. We tell a story that unfolds in time, and that story becomes our identity. Now we are trapped by the past—a frozen, rigid way to live.

[Identity does not have to be tied to the future. There can be a living past, and there can also be shared destiny. Identity can be alive. But it often turns into a definition.]

In this retreat, we will ask what it means to be time. We will explore how the past takes over our lives, and how to break free of the limits it sets. Working with passages from Chapters 10 and 11 of Dynamics of Time and Space, we will experiment in our moment-to-moment experience with ways to base our lives on a future that is never shaped in advance—a realm of perfect freedom.

Give the gift of creative inquiry

Looking for the perfect gift to inspire your children, cousins or grandkids? Our NowHere guidebook brings together contemplative practice, emotional awareness, connection with nature, and relational presence to support the development of the qualities we most need in ourselves—and in the next generation.

In Visible Mind is a guided reading meditation designed to help you discover your present moment without expectation, with practices based on Full Presence Mindfulness and the Time, Space, Knowledge Vision.

Visit the Creative Inquiry Shop

The Center for Creative Inquiry (CCI) explores alternate forms of knowledge and inquiry and their potential to bring about fundamental change at the individual, cultural, and social level.

CCI headquarters is located in downtown Berkeley, California, USA.