The Cycles of Life
“The Book of the Heart: Embracing the Tao” (Loy Ching-Yuen)
“In moments of darkness and pain remember all is cyclical. Sit quietly behind your wooden door: Spring will come again.”
–Loy Ching Yuen (Chinese Taoist T’ai Chi Ch’uan Master, 1873-1960)
The Moment of Insight
“At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being.”
–Rupert Sheldrake (English Biologist, Researcher and Author, 1942-)
A Dangerous Luxury
I get really concerned about a lot of the discussions on websites. Particularly when they have something to do with health and wellness: things that really matter a lot. There’s a lot more to helping people than quoting some facts and statistics, and a personal anecdote or two.
Here’s something written over three decades ago, and is even more true today:
“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
–Herbert Marshall McLuhan (Canadian Communications Theorist and Educator, 1911-1980)
Unified Through Enlightenment
“Men of vision caught glimpses of truth and beauty shining aloft like stars: and in these glimpses was a new hope for the unification of mankind through enlightenment.”
–Sir Robert Falconer (Canadian Academic, Bible Scholar and, from 1907-1932, President of the University of Toronto, 1867-1943)
The Evolution of Intelligence
Here we have a conventional approach to the notion of intelligence, by someone whose work I have always admired. But on this I think that he is wrong. I constantly see evidence of multiple types of intelligence in all kinds of animals. To be sure, it is not the kind of cognitive skill picked up “standardized testing” but it is “high intelligence” all the same.
What do you think?
“Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the 50 billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.”
–Ernst Mayr (German-born American Evolutionary Biologist, 1904-2005)
A Genuine Quote?
I’ve been collecting insights and quotations since I was a child, and I’ve always felt that it was a good idea to try and make sure that they are genuine. I recently heard someone recommend a piece of software that contains thousands of quotes for every occasion. Trouble is that hundreds of them are wrong. For example, I’m pretty sure that the psychologist Marty Seligman isn’t a Serbian tennis player born in 1973…
Here’s one that I’ve seen published and re-published:
“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
It is quoted in The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World By Bjørn Lomborg, and is said to be from an Assyrian Tablet, c.2,800 BC
It’s a nice quote, but I’m thinking that it’s probably apocryphal – how many people could write back then?
“The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World” (Bjørn Lomborg)
The Deep Connection
“This deep connection between the individual human organism and the cosmos suggested by various esoteric traditions has been expressed in the famous statements ‘As above, so below’ or ‘As without, so within’. The observations from modern consciousness research have shed new light on this ancient mystical concept….
Transpersonal psychology has discovered that in holotropic [‘tending toward wholeness’] states it is possible to identify experientially with just about any aspect of physical reality, past and present, as well as various aspects of other dimensions of existence. It has confirmed that the entire cosmos is in a mysterious way encoded in the psyche of each of us and becomes accessible in deep systematic self-exploration.”
–Stanislav Grof (Czech-born American Physician, Psychiatrist, Writer and a Founder of Transpersonal Psychology, 1931-)
Creator of Philosophies and Poems
I’m not at all sure about his use of the term ” Superior species,” but nonetheless he makes a point worth considering!
“Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives.”
–Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (French Philosopher, Critic and Historian who was a leading exponent of positivism and wrote the six-volume Origins of Contemporary France, 1828-1893)
Look to Find the Essence of Things
“When you see things in your world – a part of nature, another aspect of life – that appear separate from you, just look at them deeply. Look INTO them. Do this for a long moment and you will capture their essence. And then you’ll meet you, waiting there.”
–Neale Donald Walsch (American Writer, 1943-)
Have You Yet Heard the Voice of Gaia?
“Increasing numbers of us have heard the Gaian voice and seen in our experience ways of being together that celebrate and affirm life. More and more we are in conversations where we speak of the great forces of life – love, purpose, soul, spirit, freedom, courage, integrity, meaning. The new story is being born in these conversations. We are learning to give voice to a different and fuller sense of who we are.”
–Margaret J. Wheatley (American Writer and Expert in Organization Behavior and Systems Thinking, 1944-)
