The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [87]
21. Robert Bly (trans.), op. cit., p. 24.
Chapter 6
1. Scientists are now expanding their description of “life” in recognition there may be life forms thriving on another planet but living in a sea of liquid methane instead of water or living on hydrochloric acid instead of energy from the sun. See, for example, Douglas Fox, “Life in the Deep Freeze,” New Scientist, August 12, 2006, p. 35. Bacteria have been found buried kilometers deep in the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, with temperatures as low as—40 degrees centigrade, living for hundreds of thousands of years in a film of water at little as three molecules thick.
2. There are complex, self-organizing processes going on even at the scale of entire galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy, with its several hundred billion stars, had been assumed to be no more than a simple, whirling disk of matter. Now, our galaxy is being described by scientists as a “dynamic, living object” that is “breathing—pushing out gas and then pulling it back in, as if exhaling and inhaling.” (See: Bart P. Wakker and Philipp Richte, “Our Growing, Breathing Galaxy,” Scientific American, January 2004.) Our enormous galaxy is a complex ecological system that is nurturing star systems that are in turn producing planets that grow our forms of life. Galaxies are cosmic gardens comprised of billions of stars in a complex, ongoing partnership with streaming gases and energy, all necessary to create the conditions for growing a rich diversity of life within a galaxy.
3. See: Note 20 in Chapter 2, page 208.
4. Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Erik Pema Kunsang, trans., The Mirror of Mindfulness: The Cycle of the Four Bardos, Boston: Shambhala, 1989, pps. 10-11.
Chapter 7
1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, New York: Meridian Book Edition, 1956, p. 30.
2. See Chapter 2 of Elgin, Awakening Earth, New York: William Morrow, 1993.
3. See: http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~GEL134/ambrose.pdf.
4. For a more extensive exploration of driving trends, see Elgin, Promise Ahead, op. cit., Chapter 2: “Adversity Trends: Hitting an Evolutionary Wall.”
5. Robert Bly (trans.), op. cit., p. 11.
6. See: Karen Thompson, The Great Transformation, New York: Knopf, 2006.
7. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 1931.
8. These three stages are explored in depth in Elgin, Awakening Earth, op. cit., Chapters 5, 6, 7.
9. See, for example, Chang, The Buddhist Teaching of Totality, op. cit., p. 39.
10. It is important to differentiate the flow consciousness described here from the far more restricted definition of flow experience described by Mihaly Csikszenthmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Chapter 8
1. Mihail Nimay, Book of Mirdad, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971.
2. Quoted in: Stephen Oates, Let the Trumpets Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., New York: New American Library, 1982, p. 226.
3. Pitirim Sorokin, The Ways and Power of Love, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967 (orig. 1954), p. 71.
4. This description is drawn primarily from: Sorokin, op. cit., p. 67, and Eknath Easwaran, The Compassionate Universe, Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1989.
5. Gitanjali Kolanad, Culture Shock!India, Portland, OR: Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1994, p. 23.
6. Ibid., p. 69.
7. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (abridgement of Vol’s I-VI, by D. C. Somerville), New York: Oxford University Press, 1947, p. 198.
Chapter 9
1. Another useful resource for appreciating a sense of the human scale: Go online and look for “powers of ten” videos; they provide a fascinating look into the realms of the very large and the very small relative to the human scale.
2. See Chapter 1 of Elgin, Promise Ahead, op. cit., “Is Humanity Growing Up?”
Index
Note: Page references in italics denote illustrations
Abil-Kheir, Abu-said, poetry of, 106–107
Aborigines (Australian), view of the universe, 77
agape, teachings of Jesus, 106
ages, the axial, 144–147