‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ John Donne ‘For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.’ Erwin Schrodinger Whether we like to admit it or [...]
Every good story about a search begins with a tale. So, here’s one; it’s a tale about a magician who gave a dinner for his neighbours. There was once a Magician who built a house near a large and prosperous village. One day he invited all the people of the village to dinner. ‘Before we [...]
Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction. —Václav Havel, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994 We are cosmologizing the human. —Henryk Skolimowski, The Participatory Mind Human consciousness has been on a long journey. Our awareness has shifted from the earlier archaic, animistic mode; to the religious and scientific; and then later to an [...]
The spiritual imagination seizes information technology for its own purposes. —Erik Davis, Techgnosis In much of our thinking, the sacred world is divorced from that of secular technologies. And yet the sacred can be equally at home among our technologies since technology, in some form or another, has always been present alongside humanity—from fireplace [...]
Every society has a cognitive structure of permissible knowledge that is managed by an elite and forbidden knowledge that is distributed in black or shadow markets by cognitive outlaws, heretics, revolutionaries, or just plain crazies William Irwin Thompson Our human concepts of truth are always partial, always fragmentary and incomplete, for they are [...]
When we look up into the night sky and see the sparkle of stars, we are awed and enchanted. There is grace, there is wonder, and there is the excitement of the unknown. Everything comes alive with possibility. There is an enchanted world out there, and it beckons to us through a communal mystery. And [...]
O Awaken not the Beauty until the time comes Inscription in Chartres Cathedral Let’s be honest on the matter – as a dominant species on this planet we haven’t been very nice of late to the feminine. And by the word ‘feminine’ I don’t just mean the woman – or even the body of [...]
God is alive, magic is afoot God is alive, magic is afoot God is afoot, magic is alive Alive is afoot, magic never died Leonard Cohen The sense of the sacred does not require any image of the gods. There will be no more gothic cathedrals built to exalt humankind to the heavens; no more [...]
Over the course of history the world has been appearing and disappearing to us. We have attempted to map the world, to frame and understand it, as it slips out of one hypothesis or grand narrative into another. The world as we know it has gone from being flat to round; from being the center [...]
‘It is the tragedy of our time that the average individual learns too late that the materialistic concept of life has failed utterly in every department of living.’ Manly P. Hall We have entered times of incredible change, readjustment, and upheaval. There are many contrary forces pushing through our diverse societies and straining to [...]
‘I am not of the East, nor of the West/Not of the land, not of the sea/Neither of this world, nor of the next/My place is placeless, my trace traceless.’ Rumi What the opening quote by Rumi hints at is that our true dwelling place does not exist in any physical location but [...]
I do not have to justify my quest for spirituality in physical terms. If you ask me to do so, it means that you understand nothing of spirituality. Henryk Skolimowski The way of nurturing and sustaining an ‘interior life’ (the subject of a previous essay) has been present throughout human culture and society [...]
