Tag: Wordsworth
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A Juxtaposition
The Wordsworth poem reminds me that we are all made of ‘star dust’. We’re made of exactly the same atoms as everything else in the universe. These atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, sodium, chlorine and magnesium were created millions and billions of years ago in the nuclear furnaces of massive,…
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Myth, Bible, Religion (ii)
In thinking about myth, I wrote last time about the sometimes limited ability of words to fully describe. This, of course, doesn’t hinder words from evoking the indescribable. A favourite example comes from William Wordsworth – That’s an eight line, non-description of what is intangible, but it’s also a matchless evocation of what Paul Tillich…
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Consciousness, Mind and Whirlpools
My previous post was about Panpsychism, a long held, newly resurgent view of mind, consciousness or awareness. Consciousness, I suggested, should neither be regarded as an illusion, nor as miraculously ’emerging’ from unconscious matter. Rather, it should be viewed as ‘built in’ with the bricks of the universe – a ‘given’, like photons, electrons and…
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William Wordsworth’s God
It seems to me that Wordsworth, in these “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, is describing a kind of experience that lies, for more than a few people, at the root of what could be called ‘a religious sensibility’. Once upon a time, human beings thought the universe was very small – a…
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Consciousness, Mind and God
What precisely is ‘consciousness’? On the one hand, we know exactly what it is. It is ‘what it feels like to be us’ in our every moment of wakefulness. It’s the contents of what we call our ‘minds’. But on the other hand, we haven’t the slightest clue what it is. It’s a complete mystery. …
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Where am I?
I’m sometimes asked, as an ex ‘minister of the word’, how I presently see things. So I’m writing this, but not to persuade anyone that I’ve now arrived at a ‘right’ destination. I haven’t arrived at any destination, but I keep journeying on, with mind and heart as open as possible to any and all…
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