Perspectives
A changing collection of books & quotes
Touch
Fully Flesh First.
Touching: The Human Significance of Skin
“Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.”
- “The skin is the most important [sensory] organ system of the body. A human being can spend his life blind and deaf and completely lacking the senses of smell and taste, but he cannot survive at all without the functions performed by the skin.”
Birth Without Violence
- “Touching is the primary language. ‘Understanding’ comes long after ‘feeling.'”
- “Our language hides variety from us, protects us from its overpowering totality. But this in no way is the case with the newborn infant. Sensation is total: not filtered, not organized.”
“Touching is the primary language. ‘Understanding’ comes long after ‘feeling’ .”
From Birth Without Violence
Breath
Bridge Through Body-Mind.
Breath: New Science of a Lost Art
“Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation.”
“The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume.”
“Take a deep breath is not a helpful instruction [for emotional regulation] …. hold your breath is much better.”
Dr. Breath
“Nothing exceeds in importance how and what one breathes.”
- “The respiratory mechanism always responds more efficiently in a state of relaxed effort than in a state of tension.”
“Not long after the introduction of sound as an exercise device … improvement became dramatic.”
Restoring Prana
“The breath affects everything and everything the breath.”
“Next to thinking, breathing constitutes our most consistently performed habitual pattern, unconsciously repeated 20,000 times a day.”
- “In the truest sense, pranayama is akin to going on an ‘air diet.'”
“The key to optimum breathing ... is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume.”
From Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
Imagery
Fullness of Life.
Healing Visualizations
“The ability to understand and communicate in the language of image … precedes the ability to communicate with words.”
- “In the Western world … imagery was an essential technique for physical ailments, until approximately 1650.”
“Change does not take place in people who alter merely their outward circumstances.”
“Imaginal healing gives us the opportunity to achieve more independence and freedom.”
Guided Imagery for Self-Healing
- “Imagery is … the dominant language of the right brain and the human unconscious.”
- “Using all your senses in imagery involves more of your brain … and makes the imaginary experience more real.”
“At first, the client tends to watch the images with some fascination, as if at the theater, but sooner or later it dawns on them that they are being addressed by something intelligent.”
“Imaginal healing gives us the opportunity to achieve more independence and freedom.”
From Healing Visualizations
Meditation
Know ThySelf.
Open-Focus Brain
“Attention biases and attentional rigidity are the principal causes of human misery and suffering.”
“In narrow focus, we resist our experience but stay riveted to an exaggerated version of it. In open focus, by contrast, we allow our experience while inviting our underused senses, including that of space, to surround and diffuse it.”
“Once we learn to shift into open focus, any situation can be the occasion for attentional release into unself-consciousness.”
The Science of Enlightenment
- “Nature is constantly pulling us toward the enlightened state.”
- “Meditation makes it possible to transcend your limited identity, so that the mind and body become a home that you can go in and out of, rather than a prison you are stuck in.”
“Regardless of how ordinary a sensory event may be, when it is experienced with radical completeness, it becomes utterly extraordinary—indeed, paradoxical.”
“You can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.”
“Attention biases and attentional rigidity are the principal causes of human misery and suffering.”
From The Open-Focus Brain
All of Life
Beyond Sapian.
The One-Straw Revolution
- “The fertility of nature, as it is, is beyond reach of the imagination.”
“The reason that man’s improved techniques seem to be necessary is that the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent on them.”
- “An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.”
Kinship With All Life
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“All life is innately equipped to speak with all life whenever minds and hearts are properly attuned.”
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“What I was privileged to watch was not a dog expressing great qualities, but rather, great qualities expressing a dog.”
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“It was clear that if I wanted to get along with him or any other living thing, I must live from a pure heart and from pure motives.”
“All life is innately equipped to speak with all life whenever minds and hearts are properly attuned.”
From Kinship with All Life
Science & Subjectivity
Margins of Reality.
Irreducible Mind
- “Psychology must take account of the full range of human experience or be reduced to a caricature.”
- “The brain as an organ limits, shapes, or ‘filters,’ not creates, consciousness.”
- “The only way we can get consciousness out of a theory is to build it into the theory somewhere at the beginning.”
Quantum Questions
- “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And Lo! it is our own.” (Heisenberg)
“Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” (Schrodinger)
“We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown ... we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint ... And Lo! it is our own.”
From Quantum Questions