Living In A Unified Field
“Scientists – now familiar with field theory, ecological dynamics and the transactional nature of perception – can no longer see man as the independent observer of an alien and rigidly mechanical world of separate objects. The clearly mystical sensation of self-and-universe, or organism-and-environment, as a unified field or process seems to fit the facts.”
–Alan W. Watts (English-born American Philosopher, Writer, Speaker and Expert in Comparative Religion, 1915-1973)
“Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion” (Alan W. Watts)
Collective Wisdom
“Between four and six thousand years ago the ancient peoples in Europe built stone circles and decorated them with interlocking scroll loops. Similar motifs appear all over the world. The psychologist Carl Jung said such images are archetypes or universal structures in the collective unconscious of humankind. Could such a collective wisdom perhaps be expressing its intuitions of the wholeness within nature, the order and simplicity, chance and predictability that lie in the interlocking and unfolding of things?”
–John Briggs (American Distinguished Professor and Co-Chair of the Department of English Language, Comparative Literature, and Writing at Western Connecticut State University) and F. David Peat (English Physicist, Author and Director of the Pari Center for New Learning, 1938-)
“Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness” (John Briggs)
Common Pattern of Perception
“In the thick of our views exists a common pattern of perception…. the pattern is a weave of united processes. We now need to see this ‘weave’ in the human nervous system and the cosmos’s system alike. The wider and sharper our vision becomes – and the more flexible our definitions of these systems become – the more the conceptual boundaries between the beholder (brain) and the beheld (universe) will overlap.”
–Todd Siler (American Visual Artist, Educator, Inventor and Author, 1953-)
A Geography of Spirit
“There is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples.”
–Linda Hogan (Native American Poet and Writer, 1947-)
“The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir” (Linda Hogan)
Experiencing the Dance of Existence
“The world was spinning like the most delicately tinted of bubbles, all light It was the mind of humanity that I saw, but this was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere. Nor was it a question of higher or lower… I watched a pulsing swirl of all being, continually changing, moving, dancing, a controlled impelled dance, held within its limits by its nature, and part of this necessity was the locking together of the inner pattern in light with me other world of stone, leaf, flesh and ordinary light…
And on this map or plan that showed how myriads of ridiculously self-important identities were reduced to a few, was another, different, but, in some places, matching pattern, of a stronger, rarer light (or sound) that varied and pulsed and changed like the rest but connected direct, made a link and a bridge, a feeding channel, between the outer (or inner, according to how one looked at it) web of thought or feeling, the pulsating bubble of subtle surrounding color, and the solid earthy watery globe of Man. Not only a link or a bridge merely, since this strand of humanity was open like so many vessels open to the rain, but part of the shimmering web of fluid joyful being, which was why the scurrying, hurrying, scrabbling, fighting, restless, hating, wanting little patches of humanity, the crusts of lichen or fungi growing here and mere on the globe, the sea’s children, were, in spite of their distance from the outer shimmering web, nevertheless linked with it always, since at every moment the glittering tension of singing light flooded into them, into the earthy globe, beating on its own delicious pulse of joy and creation.”
–Doris Lessing (Iranian-born South African Expatriate Writer and, in 2007, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1919-)
“Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (Vintage International)” (Doris Lessing)
The “Paranormal” Is Normal
“Psychic phenomena are normal in the sense that they are common: for example, most people have made other people turn round by staring at them, or had seemingly telepathic experience with telephone calls . . .. But because these experiences do not fit in with the materialist mind-in-brain theory, they are classified as paranormal, literally meaning ‘beyond the normal’. In this sense, ‘normal’ is defined not by what actually happens, but by the assumptions of materialists… If psi phenomena exist, which I think they do, they are normal, not paranormal; natural, not supernatural. They are part of human nature and animal nature, and they can be investigated scientifically.”
–Rupert Sheldrake (English Biologist, Researcher and Author, 1942-)
“Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery” (Rupert Sheldrake)
Experiencing Meanings
“Human beings are essentially creatures who have the power to experience meanings. Distinctively human existence consists in a pattern of meanings. Furthermore, general education is the process of engendering essential meanings.”
–Philip H. Phenix (American Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian, Philosopher, Educator and Arthur I. Gates Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, 1915-2002)
Realizing Enlightenment
“Enlightenment is not an attainment: it is a realization. When you wake up, everything changes and nothing changes. If a blind man realizes that he can see, has the world changed?”
–Dan Millman (American Writer, Philosopher and Former World Class Trampolinist, 1946-)
Spiritual Power
“Spiritual power is a force which history clearly teaches has been the greatest force in the development of men. Ye, we have been merely playing with it and never have really studied it as we have the physical forces. Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness, and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of spiritual forces which have hardly been scratched.”
–Charles Proteus Steinmetz (a.k.a. Carl August Rudolph Steinmetz, German-born American Mathematician, Electrical Engineer and Inventor, 1865-1923)
Suffering, Hope and Transcendence
“Suffering is the leveler that reminds us of our common mortality, that none of us is exempt from the difficulties of human life. When suffering and despair come together, they provide us with the opportunity to affirm hope, love ourselves, and to say, against all odds, ‘And yet I will love, and yet I will hope.’ It is then that we learn transcendence; it is then that we know the beauty of oneness, of being part of the network of connectedness.”
–Carol Pearson (American Director of the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, a Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Maryland and Coauthor of the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator, 1944-)
“The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By” (Carol S. Pearson)
