Quotes:
There’s this surface consciousness, but we have an even deeper level, and that’s really what the contemplative life is: a kind of non-conceptual way of approaching reality with a deeper level of consciousness, It isn’t conceptual or thought out, but it brings you into contact with the earth, with people, and with God in a way you can’t really do with thought. That’s really what the contemplative life is.”
“There has been a sort of evolution in my thinking. All the great religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian Mysticism, Islam, have what we call a ‘perennial philosophy’. This goes back thousands of years, before Christ. The idea’s that it isn’t just matter out there, it’s all filled with some sort of basic consciousness and spirit – that there’s a unity between man and nature and living things. This was a philosophy accepted in the west right up to the Renaissance, about 1500. Then a group of scientists came along who were religious people as well: Sir Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Descartes. They began looking at everything outside of man’s spirit as sort of a mechanical system – that the earth was purely matter. What happened after this new way of thinking was the industrial revolution. Man began to manipulate the earth, to exploit it and its had dire results….What we have to do is regain this sense of the perennial philosophy which we’ve lost.”
“Like Chief Seattle’s prayer, ‘You are one with nature, nature is one with you, we are all part of one another.’