Why I'm Not a Rational Materialist

"The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand."

From Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything

Needing a Return to the Feminine

From the Tao Te Ching:

Know the male,
yet keep to the female:
receive the world in your arms.
If you receive the world,
the Tao will never leave you
and you will be like a little child.


"Our one-sided fixation on mechanized progress is the result of our civilization's ingrained habit of prioritizing the "rightness" of masculine rationality, seeking to dominate nature, over the "leftness" of feminine intuition, preferring to surrender to it. Edinger writes: "Everything 'feminine' (earth, nature, body, matter) underwent a profound depreciation with the onset of our aeon.... The fact is that the 'depreciation of the feminine' is one of the ways by which the Western psyche has evolved; and we can only assume that it was necessary for the required sequence of events." The "depreciation of the feminine" includes, not only women, but the intuitive and shamanic forms of thought denigrated by our rigidly masculine rationality, as well as nature itself, which is treated as the soulless object of the scientist's alienated gaze. This domineering attitude continues to underlie--and belie-- our mechanistic progress." -- Daniel Pinchbeck, p114 of 2012