New Self, New World Quotes

“By letting go of what is known, you are free to encounter the living present, in all its perplexity and revelation. Just as silence is the possibility of sound, self-confessed ignorance is the possibility of encounter.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“When a perspective is integrated, it is accommodated by the intelligence of the body as a whole. The axis of that intelligence rests on the pelvic floor, informed by the world in ways that are utterly beyond the cause-and-effect logic of which our culture is so fond. In its function, the embodied center of being within us has many of the qualities of what physics has dubbed the quantum vacuum. As systems scientist Ervin Laszlo describes the quantum vacuum, it is the locus of a vast energy field that is neither classically electromagnetic nor gravitational, nor yet nuclear in nature. Instead, it is the originating source of the known electromagnetic, gravitational and nuclear forces and fields. It is the originating source of matter itself.197 The integrating genius of the pelvic intelligence is the quantum vacuum of the self: touched by the present, it receives into it all the perspectives of our living, and then rebirths them as the living sensitivities of the felt self, awakening it to the mutual awareness of reality. The”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“the consciousness that joins self and world is analog, and the energetic potential for exchange between them might be named the analog axis. In the way that analog audio technology leans on the vibrating source—the music—and enables its waveform to shape the groove in the LP, the analog axis allows our sensitivities to lean on the One Source—the present—and receive the impression of all the subtle waveforms of Being. Taken together, those waveforms, those currents of exchange, are the one reality. On the subatomic level, even so-called ‘particles’ can be understood in those terms. Physicist Heinz Pagels explains, The electron is not a particle … it is a matter wave as an ocean wave is a water wave. According to this interpretation … all quantum objects, not just electrons, are little waves—and all of nature is a great wave phenomenon.199 We might also say that Being is a great wave phenomenon—and that its every ripple conveys information.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“In general, the values of our culture require that perspectives remain unintegrated—for once it is integrated, a perspective gives us sensitivity rather than leverage; kinship rather than ownership; responsibility rather than power; and an attentiveness to the present rather than to schemata. Our patrifocal culture warns that such sensitivities are hindrances to our willpower—and we learn our lessons early, so that our resistance to the integration we so desperately need is often too subtle to notice.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“What the soul wants, what it hungers for, what it is spending time on this earth to achieve, is a fully conscious, bodily experience of the Present.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“As Father Thomas Berry has pointed out, the trees and grasses are our kin, our relations, our genetic cousins; the rocks of the earth are born of the same star matter that made us. How apt, then, that Thich Nhat Hahn should write of washing a teapot “with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“Arthur Miller noted that the shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars.251”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“The roots of ordinary lead back to a Latin word meaning “to begin a web, lay the warp,” and back farther to a Greek cousin with the same meaning. Ernest Klein suggests that its earliest traceable origins lead to the same base that lies at the root of art and harmony: the Indo-European base ar-, “to join.” What is ordinary belongs to and reveals the web that is joined to all else—it embodies and reveals relationship. When you hold an ordinary object in your hand you are touched by its particular history, which is woven from the fabric of the whole universe.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century