Curiosity & Consciousness.
"The great paradox of consciousness is that it constitutes both our entire experience of reality and our blindfold to reality as it really is. Forever trapped within it, we mistake our concepts of things for the things themselves, our theories for the universe, continually seeing the world not as it is but as we are. The supreme frontier of human freedom may be the ability to accept that something exists beyond understanding, that understanding is a machination of the mind and not a mirror of the world — that the world simply is, and our consciousness is a participant in its being but not a creator of it."
~ Maria Popova
The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to the unity that is in them: and you achieve the “Simple Vision” of the poet and the mystic — that synthetic and undistorted apprehension of things which is the antithesis of the single vision of practical men.
The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfiguring results of hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new light, are poured from the outward world.
The conscious love which achieves this vision may, indeed must, fluctuate… But the will which that love has enkindled can hold attention in the right direction. It can refuse to relapse to unreal and egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in darkness, and in the suffering which such darkness brings to the awakened spirit, its appointed task, cutting a way into new levels of Reality."
Complement Evelyn Underhill’s wholly revelatory Practical Mysticism with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on transcendence for the science-spirited, then revisit Emerson on nature, transcendence, and how we become our most authentic selves.
The Atom and the Doctrine of Identity:
Quantum Pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness
“The over-all number of minds is just one.”
👇 More Brilliant Universal Reading 👇
For more highlights from The Universe in Verse,
Savor NASA astrophysicist Natalie Batalha reading Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell reading Walt Whitman,
Actor and activist America Ferrera reading Denise Levertov,
Poet Tracy K. Smith reading her ode to the Hubble Space Telescope,
Astrophysicist Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou,
Poet Marie Howe reading her stirring tribute to Stephen Hawking,
Elizabeth Bishop on why everyone should experience at least one long period of solitude in life.
Practical Mysticism
A Little Book for Normal People
(Aziloth Books)
By: Evelyn Underhill
