Intuition and the Creation of a Better World

Creativity, Imagination & Vision


Agni Yoga

Creativeness is the basis of evolution. With what then is it possible to strengthen the acts of creative power? Only with cheerfulness. Joy is a special wisdom. Cheerfulness is a special technique. This enhancement of vigor arises out of a conscious realization of the creativeness of elements. Truly, creative patience and cheerfulness are the two wings of the worker.

Community, sl. 163

Aurobindo, Sri

Vision is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist. The Kavi was in the idea of the ancients the seer and revealer of truth, and though we have wandered far enough from that ideal to demand from him only the pleasure of the ear and the amusement of the aesthetic faculty, still all great poetry preserves something of that higher truth of its own aim and significance. Poetry, in fact, being Art, must attempt to make us see, and since it is to the inner senses that it has to address itself, ÷ for the ear is its only physical gate of entry and even there its real appeal is to an inner hearing, ÷ and since its object is to make us live within ourselves what the poet has embodied in his verse, it is an inner sight which he opens in us, and this inner sight must have been intense in him before he can awaken it in us.

Therefore the greatest poets have been always those who have had a large and powerful interpretative and intuitive vision of Nature and life and man and whose poetry has arisen out of that in a supreme revelatory utterance of it. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa, however much they may differ in everything else, are at one in having this as the fundamental character of their greatness. Their supremacy does not lie essentially in a greater thought-power or a more lavish imagery or a more penetrating force of passion and emotion; these things they may have had, one being more gifted in one direction, another in others, but these other powers were aids to their poetic expression rather than the essence or the source of it. Sight is the essential poetic gift The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and world-images which become the expressive body of the vision; and the great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation, kavayah satyasrutah, seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word.

Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, pp. 29-30

Bachofen, J.J.

Language deals in successive particulars; it expresses bit by bit what must be brought home to the soul at a single glance if it is to affect us profoundly. Words make the infinite finite. Symbols carry the spirit beyond the finite world of becoming into the realm of infinite being.

J.J. Bachofen

Bailey, Alice

The vision is a symbolic way of experiencing revelation. The gradual unfoldment of each of the five senses brought a steady emerging revelation of God's world and a constantly extending vision. The development of sight brought a synthetic aptitude to focus the results of all lesser visions brought to the point of revelation by the other four senses. Then comes a vision, revealed by the "common sense" of the mind. This demonstrates in its most developed stage as world perception where human affairs are concerned, and frequently works out in the vast personality plans of the world leaders in the various fields of human living. But the vision with which you should be concerned is to become aware of what the soul knows and what the soul sees, through the use of the key to soul vision ÷ the intuition.

Alice Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age, Vol. I, pp. 687-8

Baring, Anne

A culture grounded on extraversion alone will not survive because its values are too shallow to sustain it through the kind of crisis we now face. But there is a new consciousness coming into being ÷ I will call it quantum consciousness ÷ prepared and mediated by many thousands of individuals. With it, all things are possible. With its help, we can change our image of reality and the crystallized habits in which we are imprisoned because we don't know how to trust the heart and the imagination. The answers to our questions cannot come from the incomplete consciousness of the intellect but from a deeper revelation that may be born from our instincts, a new mythology of the whole of life as a divine unity. There is, in this new myth, no essential distinction between transcendent and immanent life; as the mystics have always told us, the distinction and the dualism are in our distorted perception of reality. The divine is what we are. We are eternally in the divine. This revelation above all others may heal our heart.

Anne Baring, in David Lorimer (ed),The Spirit of Science, p. 356

Coelho, Paulo

I am now convinced that it's not the great ideologies that will change the world. Many of them have failed and the birth of new and even more dangerous ones remains a threat, such as the new fundamentalisms. I still feel myself to be a political animal, but the politics contained in my books concern breaking down the walls of cultural conventions that lead to fanaticism. I believe the most important thing,as the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater affirms, is a strong ethical commitment from each one of us, without which future society will be ever more fratricidal and ever less fraternal.

Paulo Coelho, Confessions of a Pilgrim, p. 69

Collins, Cecil

... What do you come up against when you have a vision? - you come up against the problem of incarnating it in a denser way, in a material. The very fluid and open way of the world of imagination is infinite. The problem is how this infinity is to be condensed in the material object.

Cecil Collins, The Vision of the Fool & Other Writings [ed. Brian Keeble], p. 115

de Chardin, Teilhard

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Einstein, Albert

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

Fox, Matthew

Creativity is precisely the ground where humanity and divinity share common space, the very core of human and divine union. The Creation tradition, therefore, puts art (with a small "a"] in the center of the development of the human person and of the satisfaction of human culture. As Eckhart would put it, there is no work that is satisfying to the human being that is not essentially a work of creativity, and each of us has this potential for self-expression - living out images - which is what art is all about.

Matthew Fox

Hall, Sir Ernest

Genius results from the miraculous fusion of the human race and the creative universe. What emerges from such a union nourishes our souls, expands our minds and senses and brings to life our own genius.

Sir Ernest Hall, 'In Defence of Genius', Annual Lecture, Arts Council of England. RSA Journal, 1996

Havel, Vaclav

I believe that with the loss of God, man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates, to which he could always relate anything, chiefly himself. His world and his personality gradually began to break up into separate, incoherent fragments corresponding to different relative coordinates. And when this happened, man began to lose his inner identity, that is, his identity with himself. Along with it, of course, he lost a lot of other things, too, including a sense of his own continuity, a hierarchy of experience and values, and so on. It's as if we were playing for a number of different teams at once, each with different uniforms, and as though - and this is the main thing - we didn't know which one we ultimately belonged to, which of those teams was really ours.

Vaclav Havel, from an interview with Jiri Lederer

Jung, Carl Gustav

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

The reaction which is now beginning in the West against the intellect in favour of feeling, or in favour of intuition, seems to me a mark of cultural advance, a widening of consciousness beyond the too narrow limits of a tyrannical intellect.

C.G. Jung, Commentary, The Secret of the Golden Flower (Translated by Richard Wilhelm), p. 85

Kokoschka, Oscar

The state of awareness of visions is not one in which we are either remembering or perceiving. It is rather a level of consciousness at which we experience visions within ourselves.

This experience cannot be fixed; for the vision is moving, an impression growing and becoming visual, imparting a power to the mind. It can be evoked but never defined.

Yet the awareness of such imagery is a part of living. It is life selecting from the forms which flow towards it or refraining, at will.

A life which derives its power from within itself will focus the perception of such images. And yet this free visualising in itself ÷ whether it is complete or hardly yet perceptible or undefined in either space or time ÷ this has its own power running through. The effect is such that the visions seem actually to modify one's consciousness, at least in respect of everything which their own form proposes as their pattern and significance. This change in oneself, which follows on the visions' penetration of one's very soul, produces this state of awareness, of expectancy. At the same time there is an outpouring of feeling into the image which becomes, as it were, the soul's plastic embodiment. This state of alertness of the mind or consciousness, has, then, a waiting, a receptive quality. It is like an unborn child, as yet unfelt even by the mother, to whom nothing of the outside world slips through …

The life of the consciousness is boundless. It inter-penetrates the world and is woven through all its imagery. Thus it shares those characteristics of living which our human existence can show. One tree left living in an arid land would carry in its seed the potency from whose roots all the forests of the earth might spring. So with ourselves; when we no longer inhabit our perceptions they do not go out of existence; they continue as though with a power of their own, awaiting the focus of another consciousness. There is no more room for death, vision disintegrates and scatters, it does so only to reform in another mode.

Therefore we must hearken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within. "The Word became Flesh and dwelt among us." And then the inner core breaks free ÷ now feebly and now violently ÷ from the words within which it dwells like a charm. "It happened to me according to the Word."

If we will surrender our closed personalities, so full of tension, we are in a position to accept this magical quality principle of living, whether in thought, intuition or relationships. For in fact we see every day human beings who are absorbed in one another, whether in living or in teaching, aimless or without direction. So it is with every created thing, everything we can communicate, every constant in the flux of living; each one has its own principle which shapes it, keeps life in it, and maintains it in our consciousness. Thus it is preserved, like a rare species, from extinction. We may identify it with 'me' or 'you' according to our estimate of its scale or its infinity. For we set aside the self and personal existence as being fused into a larger experience. All that is required of us is to release control. Some part of ourselves will bring us into the unison. The enquiring spirit rises from stage to stage until it encompasses the whole of Nature. All laws are left behind. One's soul is a reverberation of the universe. Then too, as I believe, one's perception reaches out towards the Word, towards awareness of the vision.

As I said at first, this awareness of visions can never fully be described, its history can never be delimited, for it is a part of life itself. Its essence is a flowing and a taking form. It is love, delighting to lodge itself in the mind. This adding of something to ourselves - we may accept it or let it pass; but as soon as we are ready it will come to us by impulse, from the very breathing of our life. An image will take for us suddenly, at the first look, as the first cry of a newborn child emerging from its mother's womb.

Whatever the orientation of a life, its significance will depend on this ability to conceive the vision. Whether the image has a material or an immaterial character depends simply on the angle from which the flow of psychic energy is viewed, whether at ebb or flood.

It is true that the consciousness is not exhaustively defined by these images moving, these impressions which grow and become visual, imparting a power to the mind which we can evoke at will. For the forms which come into the consciousness some are chosen while others are excluded arbitrarily.

But this awareness of visions which I endeavor to describe is the viewpoint of all life as though it were seen from some high place; it is like a ship which was plunged into the seas and flashes again as a winged thing in the air.

Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions…

I search, inquire and guess. And with that sudden eagerness must the lamp wick seek its nourishment, for the flame leaps before my eyes as the oil feeds it. It is all my imagination, certainly, what I see there in the blaze. But if I have drawn something from the fire and you have missed it, well, I should like to hear from those whose eyes are still untouched. For is this not my vision? Without intent I draw from the outside world the semblance of things, but in this way I myself become part of the worlds' imaginings. Thus in everything imagination is simply that which is natural, it is nature, vision, life.

Oscar Kokoschka, On the Nature of Visions

Macy, Joanna

Recognizing the creative powers of imagery, many call us today to come up with visions of a benign future ÷ visions which can beckon and inspire. Images of hope are potent, necessary: they shape our goals and give us impetus for reaching them. Often they are invoked too soon, however. Like the demand for instant solutions, such expectations can stultify ÷ providing us with an escape from the despair we may feel, while burdening us with the task of aridly designing a new Eden. Genuine visioning happens from the roots up, and these roots for many are shrivelled by unacknowledged despair. Many of us are in an in-between time, groping in the dark with shattered beliefs and faltering hopes, and we need images for that in-between time if we are to work through it.

Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, p. 25

Okri, Ben

There is no rest for the soul. God is hungry for us to grow. When you look around and you see empty spaces, beware. In those spaces are cities, invisible civilisations, future histories, everything is HERE. We must look at the world with new eyes. We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven't begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. Our hunger can change the world, make it better, sweeter. The world that we see and the world that is there are two different things. Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle. We need a new language to talk to one another.

Ben Okri, The Famished Road, p. 498

Raine, Kathleen

It is the poets whose proper task it is to bear witness to the qualities and values of the world; and I would remind you of one of the two or three supreme poets of this century: Rainer Maria Rilke. Near the end of his life, in a brief period of continuous and prophetic inspiration, he completed his two greatest poetic works, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. In our secular world it is customary to look to scientists for the truth, to the arts for entertainment: I suggest that this attitude is deeply mistaken. Perhaps it should be reversed, for it is the part of the poet to present to us that total view and experience of reality which includes all aspects of our humanity in the context of every age. Or that situates every age, rather, in the context of the everlasting. Such poets have, even so, written in this century; I think of Valery and St John Perse, of Rilke and of Yeats, indeed of T.S. Eliot and of Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins, of Robert Frost; and there are others less complete or less illustrious. I know no poetry that goes beyond that of Rilke in stating - suggesting rather - who we are, what our place in the universe. Rejecting institutionalized religion he was the more free to experience those 'angels', intelligences of the universe, from 'behind the stars'. What are we, he asks, beside these great transhuman orders? And he replies:

Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable; you can't impress him with the splendour you've felt; in the cosmos where he more feelingly feels you're only a novice. So show him some simple thing, refashioned by age after age till it lives in our hands and eyes as part of ourselves. Tell him things.

To the things of this earth it is mankind who gives their reality. It is these only we can tell the Angel:

Above all, the hardness of life, The long experience of love; in fact purely untellable things. But later, under the stars, what use? the more deeply untellable stars? For the wanderer does not bring from mountain to valley a handful of earth, for all untellable earth, but only a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue gentian. Are we, perhaps here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit-tree, Window, ÷ possibly: Pillar, Tower ·

It is we who give meaning to these things by our words, by performing Adam's appointed task of 'naming' the creation. Thus we bestow on the creatures not a merely natural, but a human, an imaginative and invisible reality. And Rilke continues his thought that we are here 'just for saying' the names:

but for saying, remember, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose of this sly earth, in urging a pair of lovers, just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them?

The world finds in us an intenser, a totally new mode of being; as if we are here to perform an alchemical transmutation of crude base 'nature' into the gold of Imagination. And to the Angel we can show 'how happy a thing can be, how guileless and ours'; even in their transience:

These things that live on departure understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all. Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible hearts into ÷ oh, endlessly ÷ into ourselves. Whosoever we are.*

Whosoever we are. That is a mystery which we cannot in our very nature hope to resolve. It has been the hubris of science to hope to know everything, to play Sherlock Holmes with the mystery of being itself. The poet, more humble, seeks to discern who and what we are within a totality greater than ourselves, a finally unknowable order. We are nevertheless the custodians and creators of that order of values and realities that are properly human, that human kingdom of the Imagination 'ever expanding in the bosom of God'. That 'divine body', the human Imagination, is the underlying order which bounds, embraces and contains the human universe.

Kathleen Raine, in David Lorimer (ed), The Spirit of Science, pp. 232-234 * Translated by Lieshman and Spender.

Robinson, Edward

It is the good fortune of our species, to put it no higher, to be equipped with a faculty that can outflank the apparently un-avoidable conclusions with which the calculations of reason confront us. There is a parallel here in the structure of the human eye. The lateral cells of the retina are more sensitive to movement than those in the centre. (Test this by watching a television screen out of the corner of your eye.) This feature has survival value for us. The hunter needs to be specially alert to what is happening on the fringes of his vision. So with the human mind. The area of our conscious awareness as it moves like a spotlight over the landscape is at any one time limited; but at its fringes and beyond there are infinite possibilities of vision, possibilities which would be quite cripplingly distracting if they all crowded in on us at once. Yet to have no access to them would be no less inhibiting. What is going on at the extreme limits of our consciousness may be of vital importance to us if our growth into full humanity is not to be arrested or to remain stunted. What we need, and what we have, is the ability to see more in the present, in any particular present, than meets the eye. What enables us to do this is the faculty of imagination.

Edward Robinson, Icons of the Present: Some Reflections on Art, the Sacred and the Holy, pp. 19-20

Salinger, J.D.

... I say (and everything that follows in these pages all too possibly stands or falls on my being at least nearly right) - I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction, p. 69

Shelley, Percy.Bysshe.

A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Smith, Huston

Short of a historical breakdown which would render routine ineffectual and force us to attend again to things that matter most, we wait for art; for metaphysicians who, imbued with that species of truth that is beauty in its mental mode, are (like Plato) concomitantly poets. By irradiating the human imagination that has atrophied in this kali yuga, this age of iron, such men might restore to it the supple, winged condition it requires if it is to come within light-years of Truth. They might return to our inner eye–almost, one might say, to our sense of touch–ontological spaces we have forgotten exist, landscapes crowded with presences the knowing of which can turn men into saints.

Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, The Common Vision of the World's Religions, p. 36

Tagore, Rabindranath

In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their individual separateness. But the day reveals the greater unity which embraces them. The man whose inner vision is bathed in an illumination of his consciousness at once realizes the spiritual unity reigning supreme over all differences. His mind no longer awkwardly stumbles over individual facts of separateness in the human world, accepting them as final. He realizes that peace is in the inner harmony which dwells in truth and not in any outer adjustments. He knows that beauty carries an eternal assurance of our spiritual relationship to reality, which waits for its perfection in the response of our love.

Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, p. 67

Tarnas, Richard

We need to move beyond the very narrow empiricism and rationalism that were characteristic of the Enlightenment and still dominate mainstream science today. We need to draw on - to use a single encompassing term - the wider epistemologies of the heart. We need ways of knowing that integrate the imagination, the intuition, the aesthetic sensibility, the revelatory or epiphanic capacity, the capacity for kinesthetic knowing, the capacity for loving. We need a deeply developed sense of empathy if we are to overcome the subject-object barrier. We need to be able to enter into that which we seek to know, and not keep it ultimately distanced as an object. We need, to use Barbara McClintock's phrase, a feeling for the organism ...

Richard Tarnas, 'The Great Initiation', in Noetic Sciences Review, Vol. 47, Winter 1998

Tarnas, Richard

The remarkable modern capacity for differentiation and discernment that has been so painstakingly forged must be preserved, but our challenge now is to develop and subsume that discipline in a more encompassing, more magnani­mous intellectual and spiritual engagement with the mystery of the universe. Such an engagement can happen only if we open ourselves to a range of epistemologies that together provide a more multidimensionally perceptive scope of knowledge. To encounter the depths and rich complexity of the cosmos, we require ways of knowing that fully integrate the imagination, the aesthetic sensibility, moral and spiritual intuition, revelatory experience, symbolic perception, somatic and sensuous modes of understanding, empathic knowing. Above all, we must awaken to and overcome the great hidden anthropocentric projection that has virtually defined the modern mind: the pervasive projection of soullessness onto the cosmos by the modern self's own will to power.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and psyche, intimations of a new world view, p. 41. NY, Viking, 2006

Vaughan, Frances

As any creative person knows, when one gives the imagination free rein, it is likely to produce a lot of worthless material along with that which is highly prized by the individual and/or society. What is characteristically intuitive in this process is the factor of inspiration. Artists know that the muse must be wooed. Creative inspiration cannot be commanded, yet when it comes it carries with it the tremendous power and energy which may enable the artist to achieve a truly great work. It also carries the conviction and certainty characteristic of intuitive insight. The artist may not be able to explain why he or she feels compelled to carry out a particular piece of work, but he or she knows it must be done. The intuitive faculty leads the artist into new ways of expression and, whatever the medium, serves as the link between the individual and the universal experience given expression in a work of art. Thus, the source of true art is always an intuitive cognition of reality.

Frances E. Vaughan, Awakening Intuition, p. 48

Vinoba Bhave

Have the courage to say, "I shall surely lift myself up". Do not kill the power of your mind, thinking, "I am a worthless worldly creature". Do not clip the wings of imagination; spread them out. Take the chandul as your model. When it sees the rising sun, it thinks it can reach the sun, and flies towards it. We too should be like that. However high the poor chandul flies, can it ever reach the sun? But through the imagination, it can certainly attain the sun. But our behaviour is just the opposite. We do not rise even as high as we can, but instead, we cramp our imagination, weaken our power of growth, and so flutter down to earth. Even the power that is ours, we lose by undervaluing it. When imagination is crippled one cannot but fall down. Let the imagination, therefore, be upward-looking. Since man progresses with the help of the imagination, do not throttle it. Don't whine ÷ "Brother, do not leave the beaten track; Stay where you are in the world, don't wander here and there in vain." Don't dishonour your soul. The seeker can be steady only when he has wide imagination and self-confidence. Only by these can he sustain himself and grow.

Vinoba Bhave, Talks on the Gita, pp. 57-8

Whyte, David

There is a good practical reason for encouraging our artistic powers within organizations that up to now might have been unwelcoming or afraid of those qualities. The artist must paint or sculpt or write, not only for the present generation but for those who have yet to be born. A good artist, it is often said, is fifty to a hundred years ahead of their time, they describe what lies over the horizon in our future world. We still have not reached the generation for which Shakespeare ultimately wrote. The artist, of whatever epoch, must also depict this new world before all of the evidence is in. They must rely on the embracing abilities of their imagination to intuit and describe what is yet a germinating seed in their present time, something that will only flower after they have written the line or painted the canvas. The present manager must learn the same artistic discipline, they must learn to respond or conceive of something that will move in the same direction in which the world is moving, without waiting for all the evidence to appear on their desks. To wait for all the evidence is to finally recognize it through a competitor's product.

David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea : Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity. New York, Riverhead Books, 2002, pp. 241- 242

Batchelor, Stephen

At a time when the all-embracing certainties of closed societies and belief systems no longer convince or reassure us, more and more do we find ourselves in that perplexing middle ground between communities and ideas. Having embraced this homelessness, we are at liberty to weave our way between buddhism and monotheism, the religious and the secular, science and art, literature and myth. In exploring the fertile spaces between traditions, we open up a path that may be rooted in a specific tradition but has branched out into the no-man's-land between them all.

In an open society saturated with information, the gaps between traditions serve as a refreshing but unsettling wilderness. By dwelling in their emptiness, we are able to return to those questions for which each tradition claims to have the answers. The anarchy of the gaps makes it impossible for any ideology or religion to take hold. For the very act of laying claim to that inbetween space would enclose it in boundaries and compromise its openness, thereby turning it into a closed space separated from other closed spaces, thus creating more gaps that are beyond one's reach.

... Yet a culture of awakening does not rest on the universalist assumption that all "spiritual" paths ultimately lead to the same destination: some may be vicious circles that go nowhere, while others may be in thrall to longings for eternity. As a middle way, such a culture would be rooted in a vigilant care that is constantly on guard against the lures of both the demonic and divine.

Stephen Batchelor, Living With the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil, pp. 180 - 187

Hyde, Lewis

We … rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him. An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that “I,” the artist, did not make the work. “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” says D. H. Lawrence. Not all artists emphasize the “gift” phase of their creations to the degree that Lawrence does, but all artists feel it.

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property , p. xii. NY, Vintage, 1983

Burns, James MacGregor

I mean by leadership not only the transactional leaders who thrive on bargaining, accommodating, and manipulating within a given system, but the transforming leaders who respond to fundamental human needs and wants, hopes and expectations, and who may transcend and even seek to reconstruct the political system rather than simply to operate within it.

James MacGregor Burns, The Power to Lead. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1984, p.16

Klein, Joe

"During Clinton's transition, you had all these people writing ad hoc papers about what to do at this agency or how to deal with that policy, but that was an extension of how Clinton's mind works," says one of the many Obama aides who is a veteran of the Clinton Administration. "Clinton had this great horizontal intelligence. He could pull an idea from a meeting he had in northern Italy and apply it to spreading broadband service through Iowa. It was amazing but not exactly efficient. Obama is more vertical. He pushes the process along, streamlines it. We had one 25-to-5o-page policy paper for every agency."

Joe Klein, 'A New Destiny: Barak Obama's Inauguration Showed the World a more Sober, Civil and Exuberant America', in Time Magazine, Vol. 173, No. 4, 2009 (Feb. 2 2009), p.37

Maira, Shakti

Beauty is the 'key' principle, the master key in reordering our values and systems - in economics, in governance, in education. We should start to seek beauty in every activity - questioning, for instance, whether a business plan is beautiful, and whether a new product design is beautiful in its micro and macro interrelationships.

Shakti Maira. 'A Master Key', in Resurgence, March/April 2009, No. 253, p. 42

Baker, Ian

In the Buddhist sense, imagination does not so much transform as reveal what is already present, the mind's inherent creativity realizing its essential unity with all situations.

Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place. New York, Penguin, 2004, p. 126

Trungpa, Chogyam

A work of art is created because there is basic sacredness, independent of the artist's particular religious faith or trust. That sacredness is the heaven aspect, which creates an umbrella, so to speak, that becomes very powerful and very real. At that point, human dignity is more important than the particular religion or discipline a person came from. … Sacredness from that point of view is the discovery of goodness, which is independent of personal, social, or physical restrictions.

Chogyam Trungpa, True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art, Boston & London, Shambhala, 2008, p. 130

Berry, Thomas

In science, thought is organized around separateness and differences, parts are dissected, analysis and judgement prevail; with intuition, thought leads to synthesis and vision. We need both kinds of awareness, the inspiration of the intuitive and the critical faculty of the scientific intelligence, but science has been overdone in reference to the intuitive consciousness. Only through intuition can we experience a sense of the sacred.

Thomas Berry, in Recovering A Sense of the Sacred : Conversations with Thomas Berry. by Carolyn W. Toben. Whitsett, NC, Timberlake Earth sanctuary Press, 2012, p. 88.

Kindred, Glennie

Most of us have not been encouraged to develop our intuitive sides and our minds are often so full of our own internal chatter that we are unaware of our intuitive responses when they do happen. They come and they go, and we often barely register them. When we do, we quickly forget them or ignore them in favour of the rational view. Our conditioned belief is that the intuition is not real, it is of no importance (therefore give it no time or energy), and it is not to be trusted or acted upon ... When in fact the opposite is true.

Learning to receive and to trust these hidden and previously underestimated parts of ourselves requires that we look at our old beliefs about this, reframe them and tell ourselves a new story. Once we decide to engage with our receptive selves as well as our active selves, and learn to trust our own experiences and senses, the doors will open to this delightfully rich and natural part of who we also are.

Glennie Kindred, Letting in the Wild Edges, East Meon, Hants, Permanent Publications, 2013. p. 10

Holdrege, Craig

Long-term sustainability will not be achieved ... through technological fixes or environmental laws, as important as these may be. It demands an evolving state of mind - it would be better to say an evolving flux of mind - in which we experience ourselves as conscious participants in the planetary process and become increasingly able to model our ways of thinking and acting after the dynamic and interconnected nature of life itself. This is a tall order, because it means transcending object thinking, which has held its glorious and unglorious grip on the human mind for too long. But as with all large tasks, you seek a place to begin and get to work.

Craig Holdrege, Thinking Like a Plant: A Living Science for Life. Great Barrington MA, Lindisfarne Books, 2013. pp 2 - 3

Longfellow, Henry Wordsworth

Let us, then, labor for an inward stillness,
An inward stillness and an inward healing;
That perfect silence where the lips and heart
Are still, and we no longer entertain
Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions,
But God alone speaks in us, and we wait
In singleness of heart, that we may know
His will, and in the silence of our spirits,
That we may do His will, and do that only!

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Christus: A Mystery - Part III: The New England Tragedies, Act I, Scene 3.

Peer, Kevin

Buddhism has helped me to develop a more intimate relationship with the nature of my own mind. I have learnt through meditation practice that thoughts come and go of their own accord, endlessly. That’s just the nature of mind. Between and underlying those thoughts, however, is a great stillness. Access to this stillness has been a great ally to me in making films.

When I’m practicing cinematography from this open, alert stillness, the most remarkable things arise. I’ll suddenly have an impulse to turn around and look in another direction, and there’s the very thing I was looking for: there’s the moment just before the sun peeks through the branches and illuminates the side of the elk, or there’s the expression on the face of the Tuareg as, seated on his camel, he turns. I’m able to engage these wonderful gifts that arise, because in that moment I’m living from a place that is infinitely more expansive and inclusive than the thought-box of my head.

Kevin Peer. ‘Sacred Cinema: Molly Hollenbach interviews Kevin Peer’ in Resurgence, November/December 2004, No. 227, p. 53

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