Spirit in Action
Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood
Mary Conrow Coelho's book, Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood. The Power of Contemplation in a Evolving Universe, draws on her teaching & research in biology, Masters of Divinity, and PhD in Historical Theology to explore and flesh in "The New Story" of our place in an evolving universe.
- Broadcast on:
- 01 Aug 2010
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[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world that we may hear as one with every voice, with every song we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world that we may dream as one with every voice, with every song we will move this world along. Let's start out Spirit in Action today, listening to a passage from Mary Conroe Quaylo's book, Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood. The person is a living form of something incomparably old, and thus is, in this sense, also most ancient. The human being is both ancient and new. It is important not to let a misconception of springing from the short span of our individual lives result any longer in a faulty valuation of ancient matter, the ancient earth, the ancient soil, the ancient water, and the ancient body. The finite world of matter is actually not passing, although it has continually changed its form. Individual lives are brief, but a person, one of the present forms of the ancient earth, is not finite because the person is a form of this ancient earth. It is no longer appropriate to think of matter in the body as a passing container of Spirit. Matter and its forms are ancient, and part of the continuous unfolding of the ever-changing, ongoing present now. That was a passage from Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood, subtitle The Power of Contemplation in an Evolving Universe, and it's by Mary Conroe Quelo, my spirit and action guest today. As you likely glimpse from that excerpt, the scope of the book, its immense, its global, and its transformative. Mary has gone through transformations herself, constantly enlarging her understanding and perception, starting from her first career in biology, teaching and research, moving on to seminary for a master's in divinity, followed by a PhD in historical theology. Valuing the contributions of science and also the alternate knowings of spirituality, Mary Conroe Quelo does rigorous work in moving forward the exploration of the new story, an alternate way of understanding the universe. To put you in the right frame of mind before we talk to Mary, let's listen to a song that mixes science and spirituality. It recapitulates evolution, but in a powerful and emotional spiritual frame of reference. It's the gentle arms of Eden. On a sleepy endless ocean, when the world lay in a dream, there was rhythm in the splashing roll, but not a voice to sing. So the moon fell on the breakers in the morning, warm the waves, till a single cell did jump and hum. The joy is though to say this is my home, this is my only home, this is the only sacred ground that I've ever known. And should I stray, in the dark night alone, Rock me goddess in the gentle arms of Eden. Then the day shone bright and round her till the one turned into two, and the two and two ten thousand things, old things in the news. And on some virgin beachhead, one lonesome critter crawled, and he looked about and shouted out in his most astonished draw, this is my home, this is my only home, this is the only sacred ground I've ever known. And should I stray, in the dark night alone, Rock me goddess in the gentle arms of Eden. [Music] Then all the sky was buzzered and the ground was carved green, and the weary children of the woods went dancing in between, and the people sang rejoicing when the fields were clad with grain, this song a celebration from their cities on the plain, this is my home, this is my only home, this is the only sacred ground I've ever known. Should I stray, in the dark night alone, Rock me goddess in the gentle arms of Eden. [Music] Now there's smoke across the harbor and there's factories on the shore, and the world is ill with greed and will, an enterprise of war. But I will light my burdens in the cradle of your grace, and the shining beaches of your love and the sea of your embrace, this is my home, this is my only home, this is the only sacred ground I've ever known. Should I stray, in the dark night alone, Rock me goddess in the gentle arms of Eden. Rock me goddess in the gentle arms of Eden. That was "Gentle Arms of Eden" by Tracy Grammer and Dave Carter. Blending scientific evolution with the spiritual gift that creation is to everyone and everything. Seems like an appropriate way to introduce Mary Conroe Quello, author of Awakening Universe Emerging Personhood to Spirit and Action. Mary joins us today from her home in Massachusetts. Mary, I'm so pleased you can join me for Spirit in Action. Thank you, Mark. I look forward to talking with you about this work of integrating the story of the universe and personal spirituality. That's quite a powerful reading that you shared with us from the second chapter of your book, The Evolving Universe. One thing that I'm sure everybody has in their mind is, why is this so important? Why is it important now? What's the urgency? Is there an urgency to it? Yes, as a culture, we have devalued into the material world. Science has discovered important things, but it has objectified matter and the resulting technology and expansion of populations has meant a use of the Earth and relationship to the Earth that has become destructive and we need to see freshly what we're part of, which includes Spirit and Matter and this evolutionary story offers a way of seeing what we're part of, how ancient it is, the great call, the creativity involved and what's become the Earth as we know it now so that we can value it, both as matter and the embedded spirit within it. My recollection is that a number of years ago, and I'm not really sure how many, my wife met you at a national Quaker gathering and that you were leading some kind of activity for the Friends and Unity with Nature or the Quaker Earth Care Witness Center, where you were re-experiencing evolution. Was this the seeds of this book? Is this part of the work that you were doing? It is part of the work I was doing. I don't remember, that might have been the universe walk where when walks through what and since is actually our history, the history of how we came into being. It might have been that also I taught workshops there on the spiritual significance of this new story for everyone and including Friends. Describe a little bit more, if you would, this walk, this experience that she had. Is this something you still do? I don't personally do it. I think Sister Miriam Joyce McGillis of Genesis Farm is a person who helped develop it. I don't think it's called a mandala, but it's a way of actually for a person to physically walk in a spiral, in a larger pathway and along a pathway are markers or labels of what development happened at that particular point, like when say, unicellular organisms started on the Earth, the idea being that the cells in our body are descendants of the early cells. Then you may walk further and come to multicellularity. So it's just a way of embedding ourselves in the history of the Earth and seeing how it is also. It's our story. It's our history. Our history goes way, way, way back even before the formation of the Earth. I guess I should say to start in the beginning of the spiral was the earliest atoms, hydrogen and helium were the first atoms. They weren't all the other atoms and then the formation of more complex atoms in the stars and in supernova. So coming to know that the very atoms of our body come out of the early history of the universe and appreciating and celebrating actually the enormous ancient long, long history that's behind us. It's quite a remarkable story. And it's new. We haven't known, as I said, some of the very, all the great thinkers of the past did not know this. It's a phenomenal insight. Could you share another passage or two from your book? How about something from your first chapter? You say it's a new story and that's what you were just talking about. Could you share a passage from there? Yes. We seek a union of theology, personal spirituality and a new cosmology, which in Christian terms is a radically incarnational worldview. It is a vision of a whole that values differentiation without destroying unity. It values matter without becoming materialistic, it values unity, without demanding uniformity, it values spirit, without degrading matter, it values the present without disregarding the past, it values the future without failing to look honestly at the present out of which the future will unfold. We seek a unit division of the richness and depth and intrinsic worth of the whole and of the parts within the whole. That sounds like a tall order. Not a simple thing to do. You know, you're talking about a new story and I'm sure that there are some people who react as we've already got the story we need. It's the Bible or it's the Torah or it's the Quran. We've got the story we need. Is this a anti-traditional, anti-traditional Christian Jewish? Is it a new age thing? Where does it fit in this ecclesiastical universe that exists on Earth already? Well, it's understood. Some people think of it as not competing with Christianity or Islam or something. It's a context in which all the ancient traditions have to kind of re-imagine themselves, re-situate themselves because this previously, well, the most ancient, of course, is the three-level universe got above Earth below that kind of conception which is reflected in some of the teachings of these ancient traditions. It's not an adequate conception. It's not an image. So it's the traditional spirituality. There are insights in great teachings that are not lost, but in fact, I think it greatly enhanced in this somewhat shifted worldview. Brian Swim says that in the context of this new story, some of the great religious insights will find far faster appreciation and depth of the possibility in this context. So it's considered, as I say, I think a meta-story sometimes and within which the great insights and traditions find fuller realization. I think you're saying that this new story does not undercut these other religions, traditional ways of understanding things, but I'm sure that there are some of them that must understand this as a challenge to their authority in the same way that the church says, "No, I'm not going to look through the telescope to see that it really does move. In Galileo, you better shut up." Is that what's happening or is that something that's likely to happen? Yeah, we'll see. That's the importance of this work, for example. Some people fear evolution as a somehow, apparently undermining maybe the authority of God or undermining tradition. So yes, it is sometimes felt to be threatened. And that's why this, I don't know, this kind of works crucial because I think the evolutionary universe, evolution of the earth is completely established and it's what our children will learn and what we all hear about on TV all the time. So inevitably, questions come up to understand what does the word God mean and who is Jesus in this context. These questions will be inevitable. So I think it's a great occasion for depths of insight, exploring what is the nature of things such these people like? Who were these people like Jesus Jesus and Mohammed and how do they fit into this larger picture? It's a very exciting hope and I think greatly enhances the revelations. The traditional revelations are enhanced in this context, I think. It's a non-statics. It's not a static universe. It's an evolving, creative universe and it's a context of great importance for the traditional figures and for all of us personally. You were speaking, Mary, about how the role of the scientist has to change and emerge in this. Sometimes when you talk, you sound like a theologian and sometimes you sound like a scientist and as we all know, you can't be both. You have to be four against. There is no grave matter in this entire universe, which are you? And of course, I realize that there is a mixture. So where do you fall on this continuum? Talk a little bit more about your roots, in other words. On science and religion, two ways of knowing, they inquire into similar territories, but they are distinct ways of knowing and so you can be both. Clearly, you can be both. Some of the great scientists are deeply spiritual people and they credit their scientific discoveries to kind of steep insights, non-racial insights. So clearly, I think there remains a two traditions of knowing. You'd be a scientist or you could be a theologian or something, but an individual certainly can draw on both modes of knowing. I can draw on the mode of knowing of science, which has discovered remarkable things. Many of the congruent with spiritual insight. And then as an individual, I can be a spiritual seeker. I would not allow or I would be very opposed to that to a false dichotomy. In fact, we've got our culture out in trouble. We've lost that integration, which was present before the scientific revolution. You just said, Mary, I think that you're not a scientist. And yet, I think that's part of your entire development, your entire path. At one point, I know you were a high school biology teacher that you worked as a research assistant about kidney function, renal function. Were you a scientist then? And you said you're not a scientist. Now does that mean you're just not making your money that way? What do you mean by that? I'm not actively engaged in scientific work, either teaching or research. I'm not in that sense. I'm not, but I do draw with great interest on discoveries of science. Part of my pathway has been that I was thought to be a scientist. I study scientific methods and modes of inquiry. But I learned a very reductive science that claimed through the scientific materialism that all of the natural world would be explained by mechanistic laws. The matter was made of finite little particles. When you knew how they interacted, you would be able to predict everything. Everything would eventually be explained by measurement. I learned that, and I found that that's a piece that's important, but it's not adequate for the total nature of things. And as I understand it, I value a great deal. Some of the discoveries modes of knowing of science. That's a great deal behind this remarkable new story. We do have other modes of knowing, which is what mystics or Quakers value in meeting. We have other modes of knowing that science is not valued. Science works with measurement, but some of these insights cannot be measured in the scientific modes. What was it that led you to leave your work as this research scientist working in this area of biology, teaching biology? Was there a turning point? Was there something that you got the aha moment that said, "Wait a minute. This answer is not here. I need to go looking elsewhere." Yes, that's a good question. Clearly, there was a big turn for me, which was hard for me because I thought I should continue to work in science, having had quite a bit of training. But it was an important mystical experience that was very compelling, very, I guess, personally meant a very great deal to me, changed my way of understanding, and I just had to pursue that was so important. What sounds like there was a really significant occurrence for you. Now, I know what my own experience is, where there were a couple experiences along the way that turned my head, and I also was in science. I guess I still am. I was a physicist. I mean, I taught physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, so I'm definitely a scientist from one point of view, but I've also had experiences, knowledge, that turned things from me. And I've mentioned them briefly, at least on my show before. Could you say anything about your experience? Sometimes these things are so personal. It's hard to put them into words for other people, but what can you share? Through the years, I, for many years, did not say anything because it is so personal. And I think at least I figured it would be challenged or discredited or something when I knew it was so important. But in a way, I wish in the culture we need to share these more because they happen. Well, I went into the bedroom of our apartment. I was in New York City, and I felt compelled to kneel. And kneeling is not something I had been taught to do at all, you know, is raised to Quaker. Quakers do not kneel. And I can't, it was not, of course, it was not something I could say rationally very well, but I did understand what it means to have the courage to be, some sort of fundamental being identity as part of what we are. And just one important piece was that when it was over, I was somewhat changed. I was healed somewhat psychologically for a period. It lasted for quite a while. This, what I think was a psychological healing, some sort of re-fundamental reordering a healing. Unfortunately, it didn't last. So part of my task has been to try to know that I was that person for a period, this somewhat healed person, and that I could find that person again eventually. I guess the actual experience is what I think I can't believe it is not appropriate to seek that again. And then that's what my work and some of the book is about learning that indeed there are these awakening experiences. And then indeed there is a pathway to having it finding one's way into a relationship with what that which experience or entering into that mood of a being. And there's a long tradition about it, and that's what I thought the study. It took me a while to find my way to it. And I guess that's what led you to go from your work teaching biology, work as research assistant to your attendance, your master's in divinity from Union Theological Seminary, and must have also led you then to your PhD in historical theology from Fordham University. In chapter five of your book, you talk about contemplation as being necessary integral, I think, to our human existence. I have a feeling that would have not been something that you would have said before. When you were a research assistant before you had this opening, would you care to share something from that chapter? Okay. Underline what you just said when that experience happened, which I think would be labeled a mystical experience. I really did not know that such things happened. I may have vaguely heard the phrase, but I didn't know what they meant or what that involved. And that whole contemplative life is about people who've come into a condition of being such they have, some sort of ongoing, unit of relationship with the ground of being or source or God or whatever. So I've studied a lot about the contemplative tradition, and one paragraph is that it is critical to realize that the search for the contemplative life springs from the desire at the core of all religion to live within the experienced presence of God in whatever degree. And in fact, there is a great deal of evidence that the desire to still live can be satisfied to a remarkable extent, though we often do not have confidence that this is a type of life available to us. However, when Evelyn Underhill defines mysticism as an organic process, she gives us reason to suspect these doubts. She defines the contemplative mystical journey as follows. And this is quoting Evelyn Underhill. It is a name of that organic process, which is the art of establishing conscious relation with the absolute. The movement of the mystic consciousness towards this consummation is not merely the sudden admission to an overwhelming vision of truth, those such dazzling glimpses, may from time to time be about safe to the soul. It is rather an ordered movement toward ever higher levels of reality, ever closer identification with the infinite. The fact that Underhill describes the mystical contemplative pathway as an organic process, and as an ordered movement, means it's a native human capacity, and therefore that the mystical contemplative life is not an extraordinary talent of a select few. Gregory of Nissa wrote, "The participation in the blessed life we hope for is not properly speaking a retribution for virtue, but the natural and proper life of the soul. The organic process is not dependent on intelligence and education, but is intrinsic to the capacities of all persons. In fact, there is often a baffling and confusing to the rational mind, because it's John of across-stated. Neither the lower soul nor the higher soul has the capacity for that which is pure spirit. Often the ego is passive before the organic process. However, even though contemplation follows from a dynamic process that is part of the very fabric of the individual, it must be carefully nurtured. This involves cooperation with the transformative process by means of conscious effort and commitment, and the pursuit of a moral life. Yet the contemplative life is not earned, for it is based on the organic transformation of the personality." Well, I like the word organic. I like to eat organic, and so I guess this is a positive concept. I think, though, that organic, in this sense, is reaching towards an understanding of the universe that I'm not sure either the liberal end, the conservative end, the traditional end, the progressive end, whatever you want to call those poles, that they understand very well. I like the phrase, by the way, "intelligent design." That makes sense to me in the universe. Although I have to say that some of the people who use the phrase "intelligent design" then go into a description which doesn't sound like it's intelligent design as I conceive of those words. So you want to talk a little bit about evolution? Is this just random? Some people say, you know, we couldn't have evolved from monkeys into people by random events. And I kind of agree. It's not just random events, I guess. This intelligent design thing is part of what the process is. What are your thoughts on that? Organic is important because it avoids the idea that something from totally outside ourselves will come and give us the contemplative life, whereas the integration that the new story offers is that this depth of being, the God, the ground of being, is present, always present, and that through this organic process it may be realized in consciousness. Organic meaning belonging deeply to the earth and part of who we are as human beings is this capacity for contemplative life. Intelligent design? Yes, I think you're right that the processes of complexification and complexity is not just random. Brian Swim says that if it had only been a random process, the universe would not have gotten beyond complex molecules, maybe complex proteins. What we have here on earth would not have come into being. So there is inner ordering. My only qualification about intelligence is designed. It's sometimes described as something imposed on matter from outside, like something that orders molecules imposed on them and orders them intelligently, whereas this perspective is closed. But it's that the matter spirit psyche itself has within it and it's depth, intelligent ordering, and that would be a way of talking about intelligent design. Is that distinction clear? Well, I think maybe it is to me. One of the ways that I've said it for myself is that we have within us the light, which is the universal light, that just the same way that the cells inside our body contain the DNA, which fell out the whole of who we are. So it's in that same kind of exact relation. I'm not speaking of a metaphor. I'm speaking of an exact parallel. This relates to this as this relates to this, that we live out that same parallel. And this is part of, I think, still unfolding scientific understanding that that's one of the ways that the universe exists, that there is a self-similarity over orders of magnitude, part of outgrowth of chaos theory. Yes. Okay. Yes. It's kind of patterning or something that's evident at different levels of complexity. Yes. Yeah. Although I would, my understanding is that the DNA is crucial to the formation of the person, but also there may be formative powers that are also at work in the development of a person. And what I was saying there really was just that the universal exists within the individual. And I suppose that art, in this case music, is a very good way to draw that image. I am an acorn, the pack in the seed. God is within me and God is the tree. I am unfolding the way I should be carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand. I am an acorn, the pack in the seed. God is within me and God is the tree. I am unfolding the way I should be carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand. I am an acorn, it's that I should be. God is within me and God is the tree. I am unfolding the way I should be carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand. I am an acorn, the way I should be carved in the palm of his hand, carved in the palm of his hand. That was Carol Johnson singing her song "I Am An acorn." She's been my guest on Song of the Soul, so you can listen to my other visits with her on northernspiritradio.org. I think she makes the point oh so well. The complete universal truth carried in the numerous tiny seeds contained within the universal. So Mary, does that resonate for you that the creative force evolution happens from within in complete harmony with the big picture, sweeping view of the universe? Yes, yes exactly, and that would be a way of talking about intelligent design. These being in hold, like the chaos theory or some of the idea that there's formative powers within matter, that's an example, isn't of matter taking form in a complex way, which would be a way of describing a parent design emerging from within. And the crucial thing is that apparently there's a possibility of active conscious participation in this fundamental intelligence. If you just tuned in we're speaking with Mary Conroe Quello. She is the author of a book called Awakening Universe Emerging Personhood. It's about the new story. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. I'm your host for Spirit in Action, which is a northern spirit radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. Go to our site, you'll find links to my guests, amongst other things you can hear all the programs from the past five years. And you can also leave comments and we especially appreciate those that help guide us in our work. We're speaking today, as I said, with Mary Conroe Quello. Mary is not only an author, she worked in the area of biology, taught it, and worked as a research assistant, went to school at Union Theological Seminary, got her master's in divinity there. Fordham University, she got PhD in historical theology. And so she thinks on both the scientific and the theological side and the in-between, something that is not just one of those two sides, but it's a synthesis. And that's what I think this book is about. It's a synthesis of a new story that we need. And Mary, you know, there's something that I wanted to ask you about the new story. When, you know, I talk about Christianity, we talk about the story of the Passion of Christ. You can get kind of specific. You can say, this happened. He was whipped. He was hung up here. He said these words. When you talk about other religions, you can talk about the Buddha. You can talk about whatever and you can get specific stories. And specific stories are very compelling when you can put a face on them. You're struggling, I think, to convey a new story that doesn't have faces in the way we usually do. Is there a succinct story? Is there a parable that you have been able to put together that somehow captures this in a way that people can carry? Because, frankly speaking, long sentences are a challenge, especially for the American society, when we've been taught to have a, you know, attention span of three seconds. Well, one of the great stories is that you take hydrogen and helium and you leave it alone, and it becomes people, rose buds, and trees. Or take the substance of the early earth, the molten rock in the early compounds with the early earth, 4.6 billion years ago, you leave it alone, and it becomes people, trees, and rose buds. That's a big story. The question of leaving it alone might seem to be materialistic or something, but see, in this integration, the early earth intrinsic to it and to the ongoing creativity has the sacred dimension already within it. So when you say leave it alone, that means not human beings or somebody imposing from the outside into the creative process, but it means that the creativity, the emergence of complexity, all the processes which we can see that have resulted in what we have now, that happens intrinsic to the nature of the part we're part of, the nature of the earth. It doesn't need something from outside the galaxy to come and help it happen. It's in its very intrinsic nature, and that's the whole thing of integrating the contemplative life into that nature of what we're part of. Where I was going when I was saying that is there's no such thing as being truly alone because we have that divine embedded in and with us. I think you later in the book get to the point where you talk about how when you're prepared within, when the moment is there, the astonishing thing happens. Now those are my words. Why don't you share some of your words about that? Following Evelyn Underhill's idea of organic process, Teresa of Abilah and others have thought when this process has unfolded, there does come an occasion within the person when the contemplative life is given. Some Meinster Eckhart says, "Where and when God finds you ready, he must act and pour himself out into you. Just as the sun must pour itself into the air if it is clear and pure and cannot help doing so." I just found that most encouraging in my search to find God or find the ground of being. And then Teresa of Abilah says something different, she wrote, "If the soul does not fail God, he will never fail, in my opinion, to make his presence known to it." Contemporary psychological language, Eric Neumann wrote, "The Epiphany," that's the showing forth. "The Epiphany of the Newman," that's the spiritual energetic reality, "is dependent on the personality stage of development. This same idea can be found in mythic material. In archetypal lore, there is the idea that if one prepares a specific psychic place, the being, the creative force, the soul, the source will hear and sense its way to it and inhabit it. These ideas are most compelling in the context of the new story, for they entail the possibility of engaging in the full creative depths of the unfolded adventure of the earth and its communities. Because the teaching of the contemplative tradition offers great promise of a transformative identity, and the new story offers great promise of the possibility of creating a viable future given that the universe isn't ever transforming reality, we must now consider how this active preparation is accomplished." So how do we get there? What do we do? I mean, the new story says something about preparing us for that. Well, there's been centuries of work with this contemplative pathway in many traditions, of course, and so perhaps integrated with this new story, with this additional insight into what we're part of and the rising of human consciousness that perhaps this kind of change in consciousness that the contemplative tradition has spoken about can be understood as part of the ongoing evolution of the whole, and particularly the nature of the human within this whole situation. So that the contemplative life is part of being part of the earth and part of this unfolding evolutionary story, and there can be an evolution of consciousness, which we so desperately need, which is clear how desperately we need it as human beings, a change in consciousness to have a viable future. So maybe this contemplative tradition in this context is a source of hope about possibility of a change to gradually changing human consciousness. So let's ask you a simple question. What is consciousness? Well, it's often said that, you know, consciousness can't name itself or describe it as a very difficult, but the people of life particularly appreciate and listen to say that it's probably a characteristic of matter, very, very simple matter, which has to do with some sort of capacity to relate or know that which is outside itself or something of some sort of relational capacity, knowing capacity. I don't know if I can say what, but it's a very primary quality of matter that becomes complexified. So the simplest self, you know, enormous awareness, you might call it awareness, which is kind of a consciousness of its environment. And I think it's important that people see it as a quality of matter. Are you saying it's not only people and maybe animals, whatever that are conscious? Are you saying that rocks and trees, everything's perhaps conscious? And by the way, at the Quaker meeting here in Eau Claire, we have on our wall a large print that you made that has life in many of its vibrant forms, its artwork that you did with the subtext, all that lives is holy. Are you also saying that things that don't live are holy? Well, yeah, I think that the whole, the whole thing, all the manifest physical world does arise out of a creative formative depth out of the source out of, Brian's going to call it seamlessness out of a ground of being. Everything arises out of that and falls back into it. So everything's connected to that source and not connected, but it has within it that's source. So in some simpler forms, I guess we might say not in human eyes, not strongly expressed, but people have experienced the holy in mountains, practically anywhere. I think people have experienced see, they see quote, unquote, see the spiritual depths of then practically anything, don't they? I mean, the people, and they don't see it as a projection of their own, you know, their own personal spiritual depth, but they understand in unitive experiences that everything is grounded in this source and have these unitive experiences where they see the physical world comes continually out of this source and sustained by the source, source reality. So I guess I would say yes, in that sense, people see the whole thing is holy. Well, I'm actually in that place. I see it all as holy. A comment you made way earlier was, you mentioned being raised Quaker and then later on, you mentioned when you had your mystical experience where you knelt that you didn't know that there were such thing as mystical experiences. And so I have to ask you the question, does that mean that we Quakers are not doing our job in terms of sharing that? Is this a blindness you had, had maybe you diverged from it? What did you mean by that? I often ask that myself, why did that seem to be so new or foreign to me? I think I'd listen maybe and also I was taken over or so educated in a rationalistic materialistic science, which has been superseded. But when I studied it 40 years ago, that's the worldview that kind of took over for me. I mean, it became a dominant assumption for me, which precluded or disregarded some of the teachings of Quakerism and the mystical traditions. So I guess I lost sight of it, although I must say the actual experience of something so important and so strong and so valuable. Maybe my first day school teachers had, if I did listen, I didn't themselves know or something. And the idea of a gathered meeting, which is part of that world, I guess I didn't connect the two perhaps. But it is in the Quaker tradition, there's no question. And I think Quakerism is a mystical stream of experience. Well, we've got just a little bit of time left, Mary. I thought maybe you could pick out one more tidbit from your book to share that. Again, the book is Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood, and it's by Mary Conroe Quello. We've had a few tidbits throughout here. If people want to find it, they can just search for Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood. Of course, they can buy the book via Amazon or any of the other bookstores. You want to read a little bit about it. Website for it is newuniversestory.com. You'll find more connection to Mary Quello's writings via QuakerEarthCare.org. On QuakerEarthCare.org, go to the Publications tab and you'll find things about Quakers in the New Story there, something that she's written for Quaker EarthCare Witness. So is there a passage that you'd care to share before we sign off, Mary? Yes. I would like to add that the universe story website contains art that I've painted, watercolors trying to express something of this worldview that's emerging for us. So they shouldn't go there expecting to read the book and reading all kind of intellectual commentary? Yeah. It's more on the Amazon that there is some couple of reviews that give them more an idea of what the book is about. You asked for a possible reading about this. This does speak to the integration the book is working on. Brian Swinn expresses the radical integration we are describing when he says the consciousness that learns it is that the origin point of the universe is itself an origin point of the universe. The very creativity of the whole thing is within us. The contemplative has developed this consciousness. Lawrence Kushner writes in the river of light of the role of consciousness. Quote, it is as if the primary act of creation is simply becoming conscious and that through becoming conscious we, like God, create ourselves. The first and most important creation that human beings and through them the one of being, through the one of being human beings can give birth is to consciousness. Awareness, eyes open, remade for wonder, eyes that see, eyes that hear, hands that feel. That's the end of the quote from Lawrence Kushner. The creation of consciousness was central to Carl Jung's personal myth. Edward Ellinger points out that Jung recognized that the divine service which man can render to God is to make it possible for light to emerge from the darkness where the creator may become conscious of his creation and man conscious of himself. Further, Edinger writes, "When enough individuals are carriers of the consciousness of wholeness, the world itself will become whole." Jung thought that what both Christ and Buddha have in common is the idea of being a carrier of consciousness. Eric Neumann wrote of the renewal of the world by the change in consciousness brought by encounter with the Numinous. The world and history are the places in which the Numinous manifest itself. That Numinous which transforms its elect by revelation and mystical encounters and through them renews the world and quote from Eric Neumann. And the emergence of consciousness, which is part of the new story, is the story of the emergence of complex consciousness. That's what happens on the earth and the integrating that emergence with the contemplative tradition. You know, you quote from so many diverse sources, religious, mystical, different religious groups, science. You have all of these coming in. I think sometimes if you put all of those people in a room, there would be just one terrible fight. People gouging out each other's eyes because they're so diametrically opposed, at least as they conceive. Do you get arrows, spears thrown at you because you've challenged someone's concept? I do turn to people, several times quoted Brian Swammer, is a person who is a physicist, mathematical cosmologist. But he said it as a physicist and as a cosmologist teaching at the college level, he could not say what the great significance of what he's teaching was at the personal level. He's just not allowed to. I mean, that's not what scientists can do. So under the influence of Thomas Berry and his own leading, he left teaching in the academic situation, teaching physics in the strictly physics. In order to teach that what physics and other scientific sources have discovered, what's the significance for the human being, for the self-understanding of who we are. So I guess that to me is an example of the personal integration that's possible. And of course, he's very carefully avoids language that will insult religious people or not be heard by religion, also avoids some scientific language that turn off scientists. So I guess I personally have only run about people who don't catch on as I would see it, don't see this integration, which probably just dismiss it, but I haven't been personally confronted. Although I do, there are a lot of people who do recognize that this kind of integration is crucial, crucial to our future. We have to value what we're part of and know what we're part of and that is that a person can find spiritual fulfillment in the context of the earth being, somehow not leaving in here. So it's a crucial story which some people do, do recognize this great significance. So there are the people I appreciate and there's many of us, I feel myself part of a community that's working on this. If I would add to this, something referred to earlier, this is another way of saying the great Christian insight. The Christian insight is the incarnational insight that this person, Jesus, was sacred. That's what this human physical human being was in some sense, sacred was in some sense, God. And that's the same thing that this is about. It's about an incarnational worldview which perhaps is becoming available to us in a way that was not available in the past couple of centuries because of the mechanistic science, but now it's available that in fact a person that this incarnational worldview is in fact available to us. We can participate fully in the earth and in the sacred depths, simultaneously. That's a great thought to leave us with great powerful thought. Thank you so much for joining me. Stepping out on the forefront of putting our mysticism with our science, having them go together and moving the human race forward, I hope. Thanks so much for joining me for Spirit and Action, Mary. Well, thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I appreciate your questions. My Spirit and Action guest today was Mary Conroe Cuello, author of Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood. We'll send you out with another song by Carol Johnson, weaving together science, the divine, the commonplace, and transcendent joy. Creation is laughing, it's laughing, it's helping no one in every time. Creation is singing, thinking of new things that it's never tried. Each little atom, each cell doing well with the life of its own. There is no chaos, creation has made us, and life is a thing along. Life with a reason, life with a song, lifting each choice in, the deep sing along. Life with a reason, life with a song, lifting each choice in, the deep sing along. Volcanoes and geysers, hot springs and icebergs, and marble and sand. There's fur in their skin, and there's scales in their skin, and there's paws in their heads. Mothers and others, sisters and brothers, there's you and there's me. There's odds and there's evens, moon tides and seasons, and onions and puffins and peas. Life with a reason, life with a song, lifting each choice in, the deep sing along, the cycle of the life of its own. Life with a song, lifting each choice in, the deep sing along. New trends and protons are young, electrons this time mistakes. Morning in the evening, lays out and plays out and burles out and plays. God must be laughing, his hands must be clapping to see what he's done. I am a part of this work of art, and life is a thing along. Life with a reason, life with a song, lifting each choice in, the deep sing along, the cycle of the life of its own. Life with a song, lifting each choice in, the deep sing along, the cycle of life with a song, lifting each choice in, the deep sing along. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, with every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.