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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

2. Perennial Wisdome: An AnthropoCosmic Code

Clarke, W. Norris, S.J. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. At a time when there is “no integrating vision of reality and human life as a whole,” Clarke attempts to frame a systematic philosophy founded upon the corpus of Thomas Aquinas. The crucial insight is a recovery of Aquinas’ “analogy of proper proportionality” by which to relate persons to a stratified nature and its Divine Creator. But the effort seems to have difficulties trying to accommodate with a perceived Darwinian, “non-living” universe. As a result, a “great circle of being” proceeds outwardly as a cosmic and personal journey from one to many, but only to return to its original source, rather than gaining its own created value.

Conger, George. Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967. A rare study first published in 1922 of correspondences in every Western culture from Greece and Arabia to 19th century Europe.

Cook, Francis. Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. In contrast to the western classification and analysis of objects, which leads to mechanism and control, eastern wisdom views existence as a “cosmic ecology,” and “a vast web of interdependencies.” The Buddhist image of the cosmos as a jeweled net whence each gemstone reflects and contains every other exemplified this animate unity. A mutual identity and intercausality connects and defines a self-creating cosmic organism. Whereas western civilization moves linearly from past to future, Cook argues, this Asian realm abides in a dynamic yet timeless, non-teleological holism.

Cousins, Ewert. Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978. A masterful treatise focusing on the high Middle Ages of Bonaventure, Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa but tracing back to Augustine and forward to Whitehead and Teilhard. Cousins shows how the sense of a reciprocal, creative polarity likewise infused Christian scholasticism. The human person was seen as an exemplary recapitulation of the sacred universe whose essence is complementary and trinitarian in kind.

Coward, Harold. Taoism and Jung: Synchronicity and Self. Philosophy East & West. 46/4, 1996. How Carl Jung drew upon Chinese correlative teachings to conceive an active resonance between ones inner psychic realm and the organically sensitive external cosmos.

In summary, then, Jung’s “synchronicity” is the idea that a person is a participant in and meaningfully related to the acausal patterning of events in nature. (482)

Crouch, Carly. Genesis 1:26-27 as a Statement of Humanity’s Divine Parentage. Journal of Theological Studies. 61/1, 2010. A Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, post-doctoral theologian returns once more to this venerable, pristine analogy, the only one that makes any sense. If humanity is truly “made on the image of God,” so often availed as truth’s core and crux, then this must construe “parent to child.” In these latter days, might we realize in both the temporal fullness of our gendered lives, and a universal evolutionary gestation from cosmos to ourselves as “God’s own children?”

Damiani, Giuseppe. The Fractal Revolution: To See a World in a Grain of Sand. Rivista di Biologia. 103/203, 2010. An Istituto di Genetica Molecolare, CNR, Pavia, scientist commends this latter 20th century fractional, dynamic geometry that recurs in kind everywhere from atom to atmosphere. This grand advance is seen to fulfill historical inklings from Greece to Galileo’s mathematical book of nature of a cosmic creation that reveals itself through such a universal principle. But sadly, such an epic, salutary vision is not yet appreciated, and this respected, 80 year, journal of Italian and European holistic biology is now discontinuing publication.

Danielou, Alain. While the Gods Play. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1987. A vibrant account of the extensive hierarchy of microcosm and macrocosm, in its female and male phases, that forms the Hindu theophany.

The universe develops in accordance with a code contained in its seed, as a plant develops from its seed. These laws are based on archetypes, formulae which are the same whether they concern the whole universe or its individual elements or parts.

Darling, David. Deep Time. New York: Delacorte, 1989. A scientist and author poetically imagines the future expanses of a cosmic gestation and personalization.

How much like a human being the cosmos as a whole had developed. And by the same token how true had proved the suspicion of the mystics, with their primal right-brain awareness, that man was a microcosm of nature. Both infant human and infant cosmos began apparently from states simple and symmetric, from a featureless genesis egg offering no clue as to what it might become. From early oblivion both progressed steadily, in accord with some hidden, inner code, to consciousness and thence to self-consciousness, waking up gradually to the tremendous fact of their own existence. (181)

Dobbs, Betty. The Janus Face of Genius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Conceptual pioneers such as Issac Newton stand astride two ages as they refer back to metaphysical, alchemical lineaments and ahead to the nascent scientific method of physics.

Drob, Sanford. Kabbalistic Visions: C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2010. In this sage work, the Fielding Graduate University philosopher and author finds this traditional corpus of wisdom to have a deep affinity with the insights of archetypal psychology. For both endeavors, while separated by centuries, are engaged with the same exegesis of self-individuation from parent to child, whereof cosmogenesis and psychogenesis repeat as macrocosm and microcosm. Kabbalist divine personas are Abba the Father, Imma the Mother, Zeir Anpin the Impatient One or Ben the Son, and Nukvak, the Female or Bot the Daughter. And as Carl Jung similarly evoked, our life course indeed involves, as its essence, the feminine and masculine principles, anima and animus, which originate, separate and long struggle in their quest of an equitable marriage in personal wholeness.

El-Aswad, el-Sayed. Religion and Folk Cosmology. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Egyptian village life is founded upon an intertwined blend of indigenous and Muslim beliefs whence the microcosmic human exemplifies and participates in the hierarchically spiritual macrocosm. A gender role and individual/community complementarity situates a person within a divinized cosmos.

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