Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Paragraph 229. Travel with me for a moment or two. Back...Back in time...even further back...to the dawn of the fullness of true self-awareness in our primitive ancestors. What a moment it must have been when humans were able to finally know with … Continue reading The Dawn of Awareness
In the Review section of the WSJ this weekend in an article by Frank Wilczek, he casually suggested that it shouldn't be so difficult to accept, intuitively, that life and mind emerge from matter, as if we were all just somehow mistaken or deluded about the source of life and mind. Wilczek shared the Nobel … Continue reading Emergent Realities
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner addressed important elements surrounding the "poet's, the writer's duty:" "I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of … Continue reading A Universal Spiritual Perspective
"The working hypothesis of this book is that consciousness emerges from neuronal features of the brain. Understanding the material basis of consciousness is unlikely to require any exotic new physics, but rather a much deeper appreciation of how highly interconnected networks of a large number of heterogeneous neurons work. The abilities of coalitions of neurons … Continue reading Quest for Consciousness
The evolution of life on our planet has produced an extraordinary variety and diversity of species, and the paths followed by many of the branches on the tree of life have held sway for millions of years before ending completely or splitting off into whole new species. The ability of each branch to continue into … Continue reading Evolution of Cognition
Michelangelo Buonarroti - The Dream of Human Life Writing about "Life," or rendering artistically the everyday scenes of our temporal existence goes on all the time in every culture and it has become commonplace in our time to read about or to see the results of those efforts everywhere we go. Actually "living our lives" … Continue reading The Fulfillment of Life
In our fast-paced, technologically-driven, and supposedly "hyper-connected" existence in the 21st century, we often do not recognize or appreciate fully the depth of our interconnectedness to all the other living entities, and at times, even less to the natural environment in which we exist, and upon which we are so dependent for our existence. The … Continue reading Empathy and Intimacy
Freedom of the Human Spirit, is a 28-foot-tall bronze figurative sculpture that sits just to the east of Arthur Ashe Stadium. It was created by Marshall M. Fredericks for the 1964 World's Fair. "The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, which may … Continue reading Freedom of the Spirit
"Until the sixteenth century, men in general thought of space and time as though they were limited compartments in which objects were juxtaposed and interchangeable. The human mind believed itself to be perfectly at home in this universe, within which it tranquilly wove its pattern of metaphysics. And then one day this attitude began to … Continue reading The Middle Path
http://sonhonosonho.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/euridice/ "The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history; here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from … Continue reading The Life of the Individual
John's Consciousness 