The Dante School

a center for self development

The Dante School supports the intellectual, emotional and spiritual development of our students through time-tested knowledge and practices. Meditation, visualization, art, literature, music, scientific research, psychology and philosophy are utilized to enrich your mind, awaken your inner resources, and learn new self-care skills. Students of all backgrounds and levels of experience study with us.

Three Month Training Courses

Inner Peace and Presence
Creative Vision
Guiding Wisdom
Illuminations

Inner Peace and Presence is a set of proven awareness practices that strengthen focus, concentration and inner peace and relaxation. They benefit anyone who depends upon a calm, centered mind to conduct their work and personal responsibilities

Creative Vision is a process of imagery and visualization in which you learn how to benefit from the synthetic knowledge and creative thought process that is the true value of your imagination.

Guiding Wisdom is the skill of gaining access to the part of your brain-mind that is oriented to life’s purpose and can guide you toward that purpose. This wisdom mind is an objective reality that can be directly experienced and drawn upon for clarity of direction and intention.

Illuminations are time-tested meditative practices in which you see and experience more clearly the underlying energetic fabric of your life and of all life. Dominated by our experience of separateness, we can with these practices touch and taste the underlying unity of all things.

Origins of The Dante School

The Medieval mystic-poet Dante’s spiritual journey began in 1307 when he was exiled from Florence with a death sentence on his head. He was never able to return home again. Sometime during his exile, he underwent an emotional and spiritual transformation that lead to his enlightenment. He spent the next eleven years writing his spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, to give "future generations" a map of the enlightenment process that leads "from misery to bliss."

Six hundred years later, the Florentine psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli, a colleague of Freud and Jung, was imprisoned by the Fascist police in Rome at the start of World War Two. A spiritual scholar as well as a leading doctor, he experienced enlightenment in jail and vowed to help free people from their "inner prisons." After the war, Assagioli resumed work on his school of personal and spiritual development, psychosynthesis, consciously drawing upon the map of his inspiration, Dante.

In 1970, looking for a psychology that integrated meditation and spirituality, Bonney and Richard Schaub began to study Assagioli’s work. In 1978, they co-founded the first psychosynthesis institute in New York and have since trained hundreds of health professionals internationally. Their Florentine connection deepened in 1990 when they developed bonds with Assagioli’s original students in Florence and conducted extensive research in Assagioli’s private library. Among many things, they discovered his deep bond with Dante, which lead to their own immersion in Dante. Throughout the 1990s, they also led Sacred Art retreats to Florence, and in 1999 they became faculty members of the postdoctoral psychotherapy training center of Assagioli’s original Florentine institute. Completing a circle, they authored Dante’s Path (Penguin Putnam) and recently taught Dante’s enlightenment path to an audience of Italian psychiatrists and psychologists in the very room of the Florentine palace where Dante and his colleagues gathered over seven hundred years ago.

Recommendations for Dante’s Path

"In Dante’s Path, you may have just taken the first step toward finding peace of mind…" Oprah’s O Magazine

"In today’s troubled world, millions are searching for security and happiness in all the wrong places. Bonney and Richard offer an option - a path that can lead to personal transformation and serenity." Larry Dossey, M.D., pioneer in alternative medicine, author of Healing Beyond The Body, Reinventing Medicine, Healing Words

"Bonney and Richard, with whom I have worked for many, many years, give us both a reassuring and realistic guide to cultivating wisdom and illumination in our daily lives." Frank Lipman, M.D., Manhattan’s leading acupuncturist-physician, author of Total Renewal

"Dante’s Path affirms the key insight of the greatest wisdom traditions: we contain within us the seeds of transcendence and fulfillment. Dante’s Path teaches us how we can achieve our highest potential." Barbara Dossey, Ph.D., R.N., pioneer in holistic nursing, author of Holistic Nursing: A Handbook for Practice, Florence Nightingale - Mystic, Visionary, Healer

"As I got into the Schaubs’ book, I found so much of personal value - enormous help for me on my own journey - that I could not put it down. It is wonderfully helpful." Dr. Arthur Caliandro, senior minister of Marble Collegiate Church.