“The right kind of education means the awakening of intelligence, the fostering of an integrated life, and only such education can create a new culture and a peaceful world; but to bring about this new kind of education, we must make a fresh start on an entirely different basis.“
“New technology has invited us to become globally connected — to increase our sense of space from local communities, to nations across the world and to the cosmos.”
“To live means to look backward as well as forward, and to decide, in every moment between continuity and change.” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, from Speech and Reality, 1970
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. …
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me”- Einstein
Ralph Waldo Emerson
TRANSCENDENTALISM
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.[5] – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philosophy … is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence. — Solitude and Society
The inconsistencies and contradictions which are to be found in my thought are expressions of spiritual conflict, of contradictions which lie at the very heart of existence itself, and are not to be disguised by a facade of logical unity. ‘True integrality of thought, which is bound up with the integrality of personality, is an existential unity, not a logical.’ Existentiality indeed is a controversial conception. Personality is changelessness in change. That is one of the essential definitions of personality.
– Nikolai Berdyaev from Slavery and Freedom, pg 8.
There is a ‘Grand Integrator’ within everyone that is capable of integrating all the linked yet differentiated components that make us human.
Myers
Wellness is the result of a human being becoming integrated
Siegel
We/Inside
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If the content of this site is dear to your heart, we are around the camp fire together. If you are a stranger to this topic, it may be more like you are visiting a museum. The guided tour of this museum of integrative thinkers changes every week and is available on the “Meet” page.
Seasoned professionals can tell you that before this era of the Internet, out of each decade or so there emerged a group of intellectual stars in the social sciences whose prominence and fame rose and fell like the popularity of a movie-star. Driven by the publishing trends in academia and the CME seminar training fads luring practicing professionals, one group of stars followed another. Each new packaging of the information tended to neglect to reference the earlier contributors. The Internet has changed the information landscape. Now the internet provides easy access to brilliant minds across many decades and even across centuries and it is as easy as the click on a link. The Internet connects across space and time.
Young scholars need not be limited by the biases of their self-promoting, careerist, academic advisors. The young scholar need not let their schooling blind them to the range of opportunities for learning and their own capacity to integrate the available knowledge.
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“We are ourselves a mystical quality of the Earth, a unifying principle, an integration of the various polarities of the material and the spiritual, the physical and the psychic, the natural and the artistic, the intuitive and the scientific. We are the unity in which all these inhere and achieve a special mode of functioning. In this way the human acts as a pervading logos.”- Thomas Berry
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Meet the following contributers to our knowldege about “us” and how we connect:
Quotes from The Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell on his life and work
“Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names,” he often quotd the Vedas. To synthesize the constant truths of history became the burning point of his life, to bridge the abyss between science and religion, mind and body, East and West, with the timeless linkageof myths became his taks of tasks.”
“So as Albert Einstein pursued a unified field theory for the energies of the outer realm, Joseph Campbell dedicated himself to forging a kind of unified field theory of the equally prodigious energies of the inner realm, the personifications of which we call “the gods.” Andwhat physicists call the “fabric of reality” Campbell called “the net of gems,” a sparkling metaphor from Hindu cosmology that is also a keen image for his own unique weaving together of myths, religion, science, and art. His teachers in those disciplines, he concluded, were all saying essenially the same thing; that there is a system of archetypcal impulses that have stirred the human spirit throughout history. It is, as he synthisized it, “one grandiose song.” – Phil Cousineau from “Introduction” of The Hero’s Journey
