Reconnecting to The Source Quotes

“When we are in spontaneous contact with birds, trees, and clouds, with brooks and rivers, with hills and mountains, and with the recurring alternation of the seasons, we think and feel whole. We know that we are part of the world; that we are in everything, and everything is in us. Feelings of belonging, connection, and communion surface and reinforce the ancient and now-revived realization that everything is connected with everything.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to The Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“We live in a finely tuned and delicately constituted universe, where everything that emerges is a whole, and all wholes are embedded in larger wholes and themselves embed smaller wholes. The largest whole in which humanity is embedded is the web of life on the planet. The coherence of this whole is subtly but effectively impacting and influencing us, and all things around us. Bringing this connection to our waking consciousness enables us to reconnect to other wholes around us. Doing so will change us, and will change others around us.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to The Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“According to the traditions, the seat of identity is in the region of the abdomen or bowels. The heart is usually regarded as the vessel through which intimate connection with others, with a larger wholeness, is achieved. Hence, the deepest knowledge of one’s self, and of the oneness of reality, can best be realized through the body.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to The Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“According to the traditions”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“Differentiated multiatomic structures become templates for the evolution of organic macromolecules. The latter build into still more complex and coherent systems: living cells. Groups of cells in turn build into multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms build into societies and ecologies of organisms. Even anthills are coherent complex systems on the socio-ecological level, and so are tribes of chimpanzees and pods of dolphins. As it unfolds on Earth, evolution generates differentiated systems on higher and higher levels of complexity and coherence. We humans are differentiated systems on the highest—or perhaps just one of the highest—level of complexity and coherence so far attained on this planet.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to The Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The tendency toward coherent complex systems is manifested on all levels of size and complexity. Gravitation brings the particles and ensembles of particles that emerge in space and time into contact, and this contact, as we have seen, occurs in a highly structured field. Thus it does not create undifferentiated heaps of particles, but differentiated systems built of coherent relations among their parts.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to The Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“Adopting a term originally proposed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof for developmental processes in psychology, we call the attractor behind the system-building process “holotropic.” (Holos means “whole” in classical Greek, and tropic means “tendency or orientation toward”—e.g., toward a particular state or condition.) The hypothesis is that the disposition or drive behind the evolution philosophers have called transcendental intelligence, élan vital, prana, or etheric force, is in fact a holotropic attractor.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to The Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“That evolution would be a universal process has been recognized, but the impetus that drives it remained mysterious. Bergson speculated that it is an élan vital that counters the trend toward the degradation of energy in natural systems; biologist Hans Driesch suggested that it is a counterentropic drive he termed entelechy. Philosophers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Erich Jantsch postulated a dynamic tendency they called syntony, while others called the universal evolutionary driver syntropy. Eastern thinkers called the energy that drives the evolutionary process prana, a Sanskrit term, while in the West Wilhelm Reich suggested that the driving force is the energy he called orgone. Rudolf Steiner regarded the driver of evolution an etheric force, and Newton himself recognized the presence of this force or factor and sought to incorporate it in his theory. The mechanistic laws, he said, are not a full description of reality; they need to be completed with the recognition of an “enlivening and ensouling” spirit in all things—a “spirit of vegetation.”1”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to The Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“Differentiated multiatomic structures become templates for the evolution of organic macromolecules. The latter build into still more complex and coherent systems: living cells. Groups of cells in turn build into multicellular organisms”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The tendency toward coherent complex systems is manifested on all levels of size and complexity. Gravitation brings the particles and ensembles of particles that emerge in space and time into contact”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“Adopting a term originally proposed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof for developmental processes in psychology”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“That evolution would be a universal process has been recognized”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“To use a simile suggested by mathematical physicist Fred Hoyle, the probability that a complex system such as a living organism would come about by a random mixing of its components is similar to the probability that a hurricane blowing through a scrapyard would produce a working airplane.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The evolution of complex systems is not merely a happy coincidence of elements and conditions in particular regions of the universe: the complex systems we call living are found in more and more places, under more and more diverse conditions. The universe is a universal template for the evolution of systems that range from atoms and molecules to cells and organisms, and societies and ecologies of organisms. It is astronomically improbable that these systems would have come about through a random mixing of their components: they are staggeringly coherent. The statistical analysis of even relatively simple systems reveals that to produce them by a random mixing of their elements would have taken longer than the age of the universe.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The coherence of the basic parameters of the universe is necessary for the evolution of stars and galaxies, living organisms, and entire biospheres in space and time. Complex systems can only arise in a universe of which the physical constants are precisely and enduringly correlated. Variation of the order of one-billionth of the value of some of these constants (such as the mass of elementary particles, the speed of light, the rate of the expansion of galaxies, and two dozen others) would have resulted in a sterile, lifeless universe. Even a minute variation would prevent the creation of stable atoms and stable relations among them, and would thus have precluded the evolution of systems that manifest the phenomena of life.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The clusters of in-formed energy that constitute the universe are not random: they display remarkable coherence. This is not explained by the received theory that the things that emerge in the universe are the result of random interactions.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The world “runs” on information, in the active form quantum physicist David Bohm called “in-formation.” In-formation accounts for the coherent, nonrandom behavior of the particles that make up the basic entities of space and time. It accounts for the myriad ensembles of atoms and molecules that constitute the observable furnishings of the universe. The world is an in-formed quantum system.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The world is an in-formed quantum system constituted of clusters of in-formed energy. The clusters and configurations are coherent—coherent enough so we could define and classify their characteristics. In the most basic and general sense, the in-formed energies that make up the observable world are in-phase patterns of vibration: relatively stable and enduring standing and propagating waves.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“Our universe is a remarkably coherent domain. This calls for explanation, and now we have an explanation. The explanation is that our universe is “in-formed” by the wider and deeper dimension: the Kosmos. That the Kosmos would be an “in-forming” domain beyond space and time is a long-standing insight; it is present in Plato’s philosophy. According to Plato, the world of forms and ideas is the higher (or deeper) reality, the reality of the Kosmos; the physical/material furnishings of the world are but its reflections.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The current understanding is that the world did not come into being when our universe did: there was a pre-space in the world before this universe was born. The universe we inhabit was born in the cosmic explosion known as the big bang 13.8 billion years ago, and it will vanish when the processes that make up its matter-like elements have run their course.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“Max Planck said it clearly: in the final count, there is no such thing as matter in the universe.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World

“The Vedas tell us, “From Joy is all this created, by Joy is all this sustained, through Joy does all this move and into Joy does all this merge!” For”
― Ervin Laszlo, Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World