Category: Quotes

  • Bill Plotkin on Purpose

    The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as a human being. Bill Plotkin has the following perspective to share on purpose (my emphasis in italics): Our Soul purpose is categorically different…

  • Bill Plotkin on Soul, Felt-sense, and Metaphor

    The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as human beings. Bill Plotkin uses common words in uncommon ways. Soul is, for example, an ecological concept. Soul Bill Plotkin writes (my emphasis…

  • Eugene Gendlin on Logic

    Logic, math, and graph paper are quintessentially human creations—nothing natural comes in equal units that can be substituted in logical slots. Every leaf and cell is a little different. —Eugene Gendlin The actual order is supralogical. It is more than a given logic can represent, although a given logic can fit some given aspect or…

  • Iain McGilchrist on Logic

    The following quotes are from Iain McGilchrist’s books The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter with Things. McGilchrist points out the limits of sequential analytic logic, the building up of knowledge from parts, and the prioritising of detail over the bigger picture. An uncritical following of…

  • F. David Peat on Logic

    …any approach that is based upon a set of fixed rules, strategies or fixed rational forms can never fully come to terms with nature’s unlimited richness. —F. David Peat, New Science, New Vision Any level of introspection indicates to us the degree to which our thoughts and responses are conditioned and how the self orders…

  • How to make living structure?

    Christopher Alexander on how to make living structure: …success in making living structure…comes from the ability of the maker, at each step in the unfolding process, to do the thing which is required—at each instant to do the thing which is most consistent with wholeness. …and that, of course, depends on the extent to which…

  • Are People Machines?

    This is an imagined conversation between Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), George I. Gurdjieff (1866 to 1877–1949), and Norm Hirst (1932-2012). The conversation is based on quotes from Peter D. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, and the Autognomics website. PO: Once I was talking with Gurdjieff… I was speaking…about…

  • Notes on Goethe’s Aphorisms

    Daniel Christian Wahl has translated Goethe’s collected aphorisms in ‘The Tip of the Iceberg’ Goethe’s Aphorisms on the theory of Nature and Science. I appreciate that Wahl has attempted to stay as close as possible to the literal meaning of Goethe’s writings in order to avoid unnecessary interpretations. Here are my own brief notes, which…

  • Charles Chapin on Airborne Infection

    The unwillingness to acknowledge the likelihood that aerosols are a major means of COVID-19 transmission can be traced to Charles Chapin (1856-1941), an American public health researcher. Charles Chapin writes in The Sources and Modes of Infection that: In reviewing the subject of air infection it becomes evident that our knowledge is still far too…

  • Henri Bortoft on seeing life itself

    Seeing is the thing! Simon Robinson shares Henri Bortoft’s 2009 Schumacher College lectures on his blog Transition Consciousness: Making the transition to a better world. The following is a transcript of Henri Bortoft’s Lecture Four, Part Three, from 12:20 to 16:05, where Bortoft talks about seeing life itself, comparing Darwin with Goethe. I have edited…