© all-around-us.com
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Photo Courtesy of NASA
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Photo Courtesy of NASA
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Our goal is to contribute to an understanding of the deep connections between the outer material world and the inner world of human experience. We feel these deep connections aren't widely understood and that the concepts needed to work with them are only now being discovered. The primary connection we’re talking about can be simply expressed as:
The world as we perceive it is not a done deal separate from us.
Normally we feel the world is completely independent of us and that we basically react and interact with it. But our activity in the world is intimately connected with what the world is for us. Once we discover our own perceptions actually alter what we take the world to be, we’re faced with a challenge – how do we work with our perceptions after we realize we are part of what we perceive?
It’s not a trivial challenge, and nothing less than a new world opens up for us once we've seen the deep ways our inner being is revealed through our experiences of the external world. Once this recognition is reached we feel we have to find new ways to talk about our involvement with the world's unfolding and not only our passive observations of it.
One of the significant results of this new deeper approach is that how we go about doing things turns out to be as important as meeting our goals. Or put another way, the path we follow to our discoveries is as important as what we discover.
We feel there are tremendous benefits to emphasizing this approach. Once we realize we are creatively changing the world, even in the process of actively discovering it, we gain a deeper interest for living in it. By contrast, views that assume everything has already been done, that nothing makes a difference, etc., are seen as having a deadening effect on us.
The question of how a person consciously chooses to understand and interact with the world becomes an immensely important one. Not only for the individual person, but eventually for everyone else around them. There are also definite limits to how much we can affect each other. Each human being is both a mirror of the greater world and at the same time an individual doer in that world. The real trick is in uncovering exactly how to work with these facets of our being.
Freedom is also an integral part of these deeper inner connections. We can see it operating at any number of levels. For example, even a person who wants to live a completely uneventful life demands the freedom to choose such a life for themselves. Uniqueness is also a necessary part of the mix, because whatever experiences a person may desire for themselves, they want to experience them from the standpoint of their own sense of personal experience and history.
Each of us contains (both in fact and in potential) the problems, the actions, and goals of so many other human beings. Yet how we solve these challenges arises through individual acts of freedom. Solutions to new problems can’t always be solved with old methods. If we can both open and deepen experience with understanding we will be able to go as someone once said, “from a point of view to a view of points.”
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