“We are dealing with two fundamental human and cosmic forces in man and in the universal world: the movement of the descent of the Spirit into the manifest material world (creation, incarnation), and the movement of ascent and return (spiritualization) to the Source that is Spirit, Being itself. And it is man who is destined to stand in the middle as a bridge between these two intrinsically opposing forces—in Christian language, on the Cross...”
from What Is God?
"Look through our great telescopes: Do you see Man? No, of course not. You see chemical reactions, physical laws, explosions, mergings, seemingly violent births and deaths. You, we, do not see Man because it is not Man who is looking through the telescope. It is only part of man: the isolated rational mind, with all its undeniable brilliance, is only a small part of man, of the human psyche.
But if the whole man, if a whole man with all his faculties of perception looks through that same telescope, he will see himself, what he truly is. He will see what the ancient sages and tellers of myth saw in nature, in the Earth, above the Earth, in the sky. He, we, will see passion and truth and love and yearning and the needs of God and the Earth themselves.
We do not see Man in the universe because it is not Man who is looking."
from An Unknown World
Who or what made a universe like this?-- with chance and choice, randomness and design, coiled around each other like the two serpents of the caduceus. Two opposing yet intertwined movements. Contradiction at the heart of reality.
from An Unknown World
“The universe?” From where did it come? How? When? By what energies did what we see only in tiny glimpses come into being?—the universe containing infinities of organized, living worlds, earths, suns, galaxies—cells, organic life, atmosphere— purpose, directions, and lawful order, fundamental forces at work everywhere and in everything—all of which emerged out of what? By what greater mind? By what intelligence did it all appear, an intelligence that embraces even the automatisms of Darwinian evolution on the ground of which everything from a mosquito to a Buddha appears on this earth? In such a case, self-knowledge and experience would not be a passive recording for manipulation of impressions from without, but a seminal generation of realities within realities—just as in any organism the telos or purpose of the whole generates the elements and organs and instrumentalities that maintain the inner world of the organism. And man? Of all creatures we know of on Earth, the intelligent self-regulating and self-creating force would have the added attribute that completes the structure of the universe we know—and that added attribute is conscious intelligence, consciousness as a force of nature, a universal energy. Who, looking at the “starry sky above and the moral law within” can really maintain that it all “just happened”?”
from What is God
“Had I become a “believer”? No. Was I still what I called an “atheist”? No to that also. Then what was I?—some kind of “agnostic”? No, not that either. Because I knew that God was something real in the life of man and in the life of the mind. Only fools denied the intrinsic importance of religion and the idea of God. But—yes, this too—only fools (in my judgment) swallowed it all whole and took it all literally as objectively true.”
from What is God
"Who or what made a universe like this?-- with chance and choice, randomness and design, coiled around each other like the two serpents of the caduceus. Two opposing yet intertwined movements. Contradiction at the heart of reality"
from An Unknown World