Pearce, Hughes, and Walsh

Again, I was fascinated with Pearce's "Cosmic Egg". He states that, "Each of the many people involved could have hardly been aware that they were laying the groundwork for Oak Ridge or Hiroshima" (68). He is talking about how the atomic hypothesis started out as a "hunch" and is now commonly accepted as truth. The funny thing is, I just had a philosophy class where the professor was talking about Decartes and how he lived in the 1600's when the telescope and microscope were both invented. Before these inventions, people couldn't see certain things that were there all along. Not being able to see them (or believe in them), however, doesn't mean that they aren't there. After these inventions, people could see tiny objects or distant places and so they became accepted as true. Futhermore, they couldn't have had any idea as to what would come about from these inventions---I'm sure they would be shocked to see certain things today. Another quote that got my attention was, "The Divine Imagination moves the mind as it pleases, the wind bloweth where it listeth, but only when the way has been prepared by a discipline of mind" (70). This reminds me of "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear"---I'm not sure where this quote came from or who said it. The idea is that you have to be ready and willing to learn/accept/internalize ideas before you understand them. You might read something today (such as a good quote) but not "get" it until later on down the road. You'll think to yourself, "That makes so much sense now." Also, the teacher isn't neccesarily a person (the typical teacher)---it could be a book, a song, a random thought, etc.

I learned a new word thanks to Walsh: panpsychism-that all objects have a mind or soul (126). This is the Western take on hylozoism and animism. I've been trying to understand this concept for some time. I can believe that all living things have a soul and that is why you should be good to everyone and everything---people, animals, the environment, etc. What I am having trouble with is the idea that this computer I'm typing on has a soul. I can't wrap my mind around an inanimate object having a soul. Maybe I'm being too literal here, I don't know. I've heard before that since everything comes from the same place of origin, then it has a soul. I suppose that so long as I take away from this that I should be good to all things and treat them (people, plants, etc.) with care, then I've got the point. Page 135 points out, "...for the yogi, the deity is considered a mental creation, a projection of one's own as yet unrecognized potentials, which the visualiztion will allow the yogi to recognize and claim". I'm telling you---I have to get into this yoga stuff. I realize that this takes a considerable amount of time and effort but I can't help but wonder if "visualization", as he states, can be manifested without the use of yoga. I hear all the time how athletes visualize scoring/winning/success in whatever sport it happens to be in. Perhaps I should start visualizing myself typing this blog at an earlier time than right before class. One last note about this reading is that it mentions "A Course in Miracles". I haven't read it yet, but I do want to. I heard of it before and thought it sounded interesting---now, I want to read it even more. Walsh writes, "Its insights are genuinely transcendental...It is psychologically sound, philosophically penetrating, and eminently practical" (140). I can't wait...

The Hughes reading was kind of interesting. I had a friend that used a book to decipher her dreams and I used it a few times myself. I don't remember gaining any useful insight from it though. Hughes discusses lucid dreaming about a perfect landscape. I can't say this has ever happened to me before (the landscape part, that is)---my lucid dreams are rare and usually of a sexual nature. I'm not quite sure I should've shared that but I want to know if anyone else has this problem (if you want to call it a problem). The sections on out-of-body-experiences and near-death-experiences are foreign to me. I've never had such an experience and that's just fine with me. I'll end this with a quote I like from this section that I think is related to people being in sensory deprivation where they start creating their "reality" from past experiences because of the lack of stimuli---"It seems that, just as the physical body creates its own reality through its sensory system, so the nonphysical body creates a reality through internally generatetd stimuli, and under certain circumstances these two realities interpenetrate" (59).