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)
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-)
Synchronicity and Coincidence
“Synchronicity…means a ‘meaningful coincidence’ of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected. The emphasis lies on the word ‘meaningful’.”
–Marie-Louise von Franz (German-born Swiss Jungian Psychologist and Author, 1915-1998)
Faith in Meaning and Necessity
“We had within us something stronger than reality or probability and that was faith in the meaning and necessity of our action.”
–Hermann Hesse (German-born Swiss Novelist, Poet and, in 1946, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1877-1962)
What’s NOT the Answer?
“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
–Jim Carrey (Canadian Actor and Comedian, 1962-)
Meaning and Communication
“In communication, meaning unfolds into the whole community and unfolds from the community into each person. Thus, there is an internal relationship of human beings to each other, and to society as a whole. The explicate form of all this is the structure of society, and the implicate form is the content of the culture, which extends into the consciousness of each person.”
–David Bohm (American-born Theoretical Physicist and Philosopher, 1917-1992) and F. David Peat (English Physicist and Writer, 1938)
A Recipe for Paradise
“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution — then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.”
–Aldous Huxley (English Novelist and Critic, 1894-1963)
Art Is The Science of Human Destiny
“Art is naturally concerned with man in his existential aspect, not in his scientific aspect.
For the scientist, questions about man’s stature and significance, suffering and power, are not really scientific questions; consequently he is inclined to regard art as an inferior recreation.
Unfortunately, the artist has come to accept the scientist’s view of himself. The result, I contend, is that art in the twentieth century — literary art in particular — has ceased to take itself seriously as the primary instrument of existential philosophy. It has ceased to regard itself as an instrument for probing questions of human significance.
Art is the science of human destiny.
Science is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of nature; art is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of man. At its best, it evokes unifying emotions; it makes the reader see the world momentarily as a unity.”
–Colin Wilson (English Novelist and Writer on Philosophy, Sociology and the Occult, 1931-)
“The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination” (Colin Wilson)
The Feeling of Meaning
“Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic ‘feeling’ about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes ‘pick up’ accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.”
–Colin Wilson (English Novelist and Writer on Philosophy, Sociology and the Occult, 1931-)
Meaning
“It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.”
–Peter Demianovich Ouspensky (Russian Philosopher, 1878-1947)
