"To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again." - Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Nature." Every year, particularly for those living in regions which experience the full range … Continue reading Consciousness in the World: Memory and the Extended Mind
"By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but nature more, To mingle with the universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. Dark-heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime, the image of Eternity,--the throne of the Invisible!" - George Gordon Noel Byron from Childe Harold's … Continue reading The Throne of the Invisible
"The reflective understanding of reality has seemed to me helped by the incursion into the present moment of remembered situations from which one gains his bearings and his stance as a human being. Thus the re-collective understanding of one's actual experience is intimately connected with the reflective understanding of reality...Above all else, then, I trust … Continue reading Consciousness in the World: Ancient Ideas Still Resonate Today
As I was stirring slowly to consciousness this morning, reluctant to relinquish sleep as the light peeked through the curtains, I wandered in and out of awareness for some time, drifting between a lucid dream and my resistance to let it go. The image above which I took some years ago while on a camping … Continue reading When A Tree Falls In The Forest…
Life presents each of us, at various times throughout, with a number of opposing energies, and depending on how we navigate our paths, the trajectory through which our lives unfold, and what our intentions are as we traverse those paths, we come to view the events which compose our lives as either obstacles or opportunities. … Continue reading Obstacles and Opportunities
Those of you who have followed along here with me, and who have read faithfully all along about the various life experiences which took place throughout my accumulation of years so far, know that there has a been a fair amount of diversity in the character and quality of those experiences, and hopefully everyone who … Continue reading When Life Falls Apart
"Brightly colored brain scans are a media favorite as they are both attractive to the eye and apparently easy to understand, but in reality they represent some of the most complex scientific information we have. They are not maps of activity, but maps of the outcome of complex statistical comparisons of blood flow that unevenly … Continue reading Coming To Grips With Consciousness
Ever since I first started to understand what it meant to BE a father, I have wanted to be one. My own father was a particularly good role model in most aspects of parenting, and while he ruled over our ultimate accumulation of eight children in our family with a fairly strict hand by today's … Continue reading Consciousness in the World: Being a Dad
"If we turn our contemplation away from our outer world and to the inner one, as the sages advise, a different reality becomes evident. Like light, consciousness has no place, and no shape. It is invisible, yet illuminates everything. It is unimpeded by time and space...While the physiological basis of consciousness is not yet understood, … Continue reading Philosophy of Consciousness
"If we seek genuine psychological understanding of the human being of our own time, we must know his spiritual history absolutely. We cannot reduce him to mere biological data, since he is not by nature merely biological, but is a product also of spiritual presuppositions." - -Carl Jung from a presentation at the C. G. … Continue reading Body, Mind, Spirit
John's Consciousness 