Great Throughts Treasury

"What higher grades of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking? It is said that to a sage, the leaves on the trees are like the pages of a sacred text, filled with transcendent meaning. We do not see things only as they are, but also as we are."

"And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known."

"Autonomous primordial forms in the psyche that structure and impel human behavior and experience and that are expressions of a collective unconscious shared by all human beings [Archetypes]."

"In the moment of writing, go with where the energy is. Your delight in saying something, what unfolds most readily in you is a good place to begin. It primes the pump, it gets the waters flowing. If you leave what you actually feel like doing as a writer, but then some super-ego inside you says no, you should be doing this other thing or a harder part of the task, then that could leave you stymied for hours. You may lose the magic moment of when something wanted to be said to you. This is a writer"

"Ours is an age between worldviews, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. Yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like."

"Having appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ...Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ...and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view"

"The Cosmology of a civilization both reflects and influences all human activity, motivation, and self-understanding that takes place within its parameters. It is the container for everything else."

"Enter now the theory of quantum mechanics to upend our ideas about the physical nature of the world. Physicists were discovering in their laboratories that the basic properties of atomic particles were being altered just by the simple act of measuring them. Soon after it was discovered that, in certain experimental arrangements, particles at the atomic level do not fully exist prior to being observed. The activity of conscious observation and measurement was actually bringing particles into full existence! This suggests that reality may not be pre-given and "objective," but rather that it is being..."

"The very nature of the objective universe turns any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation."

"The Wari people of the western Amazon see the cosmos (and particularly the natural world) as imbued with endlessly flowing energy, spiritual intelligence, and power. Time, space, and matter appear fluid to them, alterable through language, music, and ritual. Contemporary Western scientists view the universe as the interplay and exchange of matter and energy, combining, changing, and evolving through predictable and comprehensible physical laws. And Vajrayana Buddhism of Tibet discerns multitudes of universes and worlds within worlds, all interpenetrating and appearing as forms of awareness in"

"The hardest part of the day for the writer is that point near the beginning where you know you need to say something. The page is blank. The screen is blank. There is tremendous resistance to putting anything down; you are like Sisyphus only you can"

"Humanity's progress of knowledge and the evolution of consciousness have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, if profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties?intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational?enter the process of knowing.How we approach the other, and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate."

"I hope my book opens thoughtful readers to a new dimension of the extraordinary universe we live in, a universe that seems to be informed at all levels by a profound creative intelligence. I believe that we can participate in the evolutionary unfolding of this universe more consciously and fully if we are aware of the correspondences between the planetary movements and our lives. And we can move into a more trusting relationship to life and the cosmos when we recognize the larger patterns of meaning and purpose in which we are embedded."

"I think each individual is on a journey of her own or his own. Individuals need to be listening closely to their own hearts, their own calling to new horizons. They need to pay attention to where they feel "not right"?perhaps unplug the television, go out into nature more often, look at the heavens and the night sky outside of the city. We all need to orient our lives more towards beauty, towards art, towards relationships, and towards interior self-exploration, whether it's meditation or more powerful forms of experience. For example, the ayahuasca rituals coming from South America are extraordinary, powerful initiatory rituals that help people become aware that they are in a larger universe than they thought. So on the one hand, there are individual paths on which each of us has to find our own way. But then there's the question of how we are to deal with the major problems of modern consciousness on the collective level--for example, the vast collective entrancement that's happening right now through the mass media."

"Given current assumptions about the cosmos, it is a scandal for a professor of philosophy to come out with a book that is in any way supportive of astrology. I think it's safe to say that of all perspectives, astrology is the one most subject to automatic rejection and scorn in the modern intellectual world. I myself was skeptical until I conducted my own research. But the evidence is very compelling: There is an astonishingly consistent correlation between planetary alignments and the patterns of human experience. "Cosmos and Psyche" sets out that evidence in a way that readers new to this perspective can examine and assess for themselves. It's a little like Galileo's telescope: Anyone could look through it to see the new universe it revealed, but it was a scandal at the time."

"The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection."

"Most cultures, including our own prior to the modern era, had some kind of astrology as part of their world view, for they understood the cycles of the moon, sun, and planets as deeply meaningful. The astrological perspective sees the universe as both meaningful and unified. Instead of the modern division between the purposeful, meaning-seeking human consciousness and a random, meaningless universe, astrology points to a universe that is integrated at all levels: outer and inner, macrocosm and microcosm, celestial and terrestrial. As was said by the ancients, "As above, so below.""

"Our civilization desperately needs to develop more awareness about the consequences of our activities. We need to be paying attention not just to the bottom line of the next quarterly profit report, but to what seven generations from now will experience as a result of our actions. The only way that such a fundamental change will occur would be if enough individuals become more deeply aware of our profound embeddedness within the larger Earth community and the universe itself. Our civilization basically seems to be caught in an immature period in its development, like a self-enclosed adolescent who has not yet been initiated into the deeper realities of life and who therefore continues to act from a short-sighted and often self-destructive state of consciousness. It's as if our entire civilization is undergoing an initiation in our time, into a new world view and a new way of living."

"The existence of correlations between the planetary cycles and human life makes it possible for both individuals and societies to understand better what archetypal energies are at work and at what time. This can help us be more skillful and aware as we engage in the activities of life. It's like knowing the weather report before going out into the ocean to sail or surf. It helps to know where the winds and waves will be coming from. But there is also a deeper advantage: Modern civilization pays a high price for living in a universe that it believes is random and spiritually meaningless. Nature is not honored but is instead exploited for short-term benefit. And a purposeless universe creates a sense of deep spiritual emptiness inside, which people try to fill with endless consumer products, so that the industrial technology producing those products is cannibalizing the planet. But as we know, you can never get enough of what you don't really need. A new vision of nature and the universe as ensouled, as spiritually significant, would give a better ground for both moral responsibility and a sense of spiritual belonging."