London, England (PRWEB) March 19, 2014

Everybody makes mistakes in life. The question is where one goes from these mistakes in order to make a positive change in life.

In Michael Angelo Le Houxs new book, Far More Than We Think: Making Sense of Spirituality, the reader is given a fusion of contemporary and ancient wisdom, scientific fact and personal experience to help prove that all of us are capable of far more than we think.

Le Houx delicately yet honestly talks about the challenges of his former life, through seven compelling sections that build to a conclusion that there is more to our existence than we may have previously thought possible.

Far More Than We Think is an intimate and informative book that helps readers from a variety of backgrounds to better understand the spiritual science behind the troubles that many face in life. Le Houx has given his audience a guide to quiet the mind so that the spirit, love and true understanding can begin to shine through.

If anybody ever thought that there must be more to life than their current experience so far, then this book could mark an important turning point, Le Houx said.

Far More Than We Think explains why spirituality makes sense and how it impacts all aspects of ones life.

Far More Than We Think: Making Sense of Spirituality By: Michael Angelo Le Houx ISBN: 978-1452584881

Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and BalboaPress online bookstores

About the author

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Former Addict Turned Author, Michael Angelo Le Houx, Fuses Spiritual Principles, Ancient Wisdom and Contemporary ...

The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth, by Thomas Berry (Orbis Books. 2009).

I read this book as the UK faced severe weather events. Media coverage of flooded homes, storm-lashed coasts, and crippled transport infrastructure were a vivid illustration of the growing challenge of climate change, and the urgent need for us to work with nature, rather than fight a losing battle against it. So it seems increasingly important that the message contained in Thomas Berrys book is understood and embraced.

Thomas Berry died in 2009 and this book was published posthumously. A collection of ten essays, written between 1987 and 2000, it is a good introduction to the work of a great thinker and a great spirit.

As a Catholic priest of the Passionist, order Berry had a deep Christian faith, but this supremely gifted man was much more than a priest, and his faith was much bigger than an adherence to one narrowly defined creed. As a scholar and a teacher, to describe his approach as holistic would be true, but also an enormous understatement. He rejoices in diversity, and his inclusive philosophy and spirituality embraces not only other religions, scriptures, and cultures, but science and the entirety of Creation.

Berry, who studied both Chinese and Sanskrit languages, took inspiration from an enormous range of sources, but had a particular affinity for St Thomas Aquinas, from whom he took his clerical name, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest who trained as a palaeontologist and geologist.

A quote from Aquinas illustrates how startlingly relevant ancient writings can be in our modern age. The "perfection of the universe" lies in its diversity, says Aquinas,

"For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any single creature whatsoever."

Taking this as his starting point, Berry infers that consequently there is no area of human knowledge or experience which should remain outside the remit of a Christian. He is saddened when his own Church claims to have a monopoly on truth, and asserts, "When the religious traditions are seen in their relations to each other, the full tapestry of the revelatory experience can be observed."

With the advancement of scientific understanding of how the earth and humanity came into being he says, "For the first time the entire human community has, in this story, a single creation or origin myth. Although it is known by scientific observation, this story also functions as myth." So he believes that for the first time in human history humanity can unite in a truth which is relevant to all and includes all.

For Thomas Berry, the natural world and the human community are seen as "a unified single community with an overarching purpose: the exaltation and joy of existence, praise of the divine, and participation in the great liturgy of the universe." So the degradation of the earth and mans alienation from nature is seen as a tragedy, and spells certain death for the planet if we do not change our ways. For the Church, which Berry feels has in the past been part of the problem, it is an urgent necessity to become part of the solution. In fact he says it is "the fundamental task of the Church in the twenty-first Century."

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Research associate Dr. Gilliss Dyer and laser technician Ted Borger discuss the experimental configuration of Target Chamber 2 at the Texas Petawatt lab. Photo: Robert Shults

Research associate Dr. Gilliss Dyer and laser technician Ted Borger discuss the experimental configuration of Target Chamber 2 at the Texas Petawatt lab.

Dr. Gilliss Dyer surveys the target bay of the Texas Petawatt Laser in preparation for an experiment. Photo: Robert Shults

Dr. Gilliss Dyer surveys the target bay of the Texas Petawatt Laser in preparation for an experiment.

A view inside one of the Petawatt's main amplifiers. The Texas Petawatt's main amplifiers are repurposed components from the world's first petawatt class laser, the decommissioned Nova facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Photo: Robert Shults

A view inside one of the Petawatt's main amplifiers. The Texas Petawatt's main amplifiers are repurposed components from the world's first petawatt class laser, the decommissioned Nova facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Foil and foam insulate inlets for liquid nitrogen in the Texas Petawatt target area. The Petawatt can fire at both gaseous and solid targets. Photo: Robert Shults

Foil and foam insulate inlets for liquid nitrogen in the Texas Petawatt target area. The Petawatt can fire at both gaseous and solid targets.

Researchers from universities around the world utilize the unique timescale of the Petawatt for experiments exploring rare states of matter, such as those found within stars or in the aftermath of supernovae. Photo: Robert Shults

Researchers from universities around the world utilize the unique timescale of the Petawatt for experiments exploring rare states of matter, such as those found within stars or in the aftermath of supernovae.

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Feature Article of Tuesday, 18 March 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

When men are intellectually greater than others, we learn from their utterances; when they are morally better than others, we learn from their lives (See Sylvan M. Jacobs James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey: An African Intellectual in the United States, published in the 1996 edition of The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 81, No. 1-4, p. 47-61).

That sets the tone for todays deliberation. That having been said, although Paulo Freires radical methodological approach to education is essentially Marxist, an ideological strain antithetical to Afrocentric theory, yet, like other progressive ideas with immense transformative social and political value, there exist important theoretical overlaps with Afrocentric pedagogy. That is, Freires critique of the so-called banking model of education, a foundational philosophy of Eurocentric pedagogy, frees studentship from the hegemonic endometrium of cranial emptiness as well as from the intimidating guillotine of teacherhood, an idea, which, in theory, is considered superior to studentship. This poses a serious problem for us because a teacher, like the student, learns along as he or she impacts knowledge. This also implies functional simultaneity between teacher and student. Therefore, technically, Freire believed, very strongly, that interpreting learner as a mere symbol of empty vessel, a theoretical borehole demanding that the teacher, supposedly the more knowledgeable of the two, fills it up, made the learner a necessary object in a relationship of unequal dichotomy with the teacher.

Admittedly, this ideological confluence accommodates Afrocentric pedagogy and Freirean critical pedagogy. As well, lets stress here that no unlettered individual walks around bearing the zero-weight of cranial emptiness, because, sensory perception involving taste, smell, sight, touch, hearing, and umami, alone, could potentially fill parts of the human brain to the brim with useful information without instructional benefit of teacher-learner relationship. Still, the tabula rasa of Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and Sigmund Freud has come under serious scientific revision (See Fiona Macraes article Babies Remember Music They Heard in the Wound up To Four Months after They Are Born, published on MailOnline, Jan 30, 2014). In addition, this Eurocentric theory on empty vessel, is, essentially, antithetical to Afrocentricity, this, in another creative context, which is that it also potentially distorts the ideological fulcrum of Allan Blooms controversially influential work, The Closing Of The American Mind, a book, which, among other things, sees relativism, or multiculturalism, as a concept detrimental to intellectual openness, community, and psychological development. Pointedly, we have belabored these points before but still needed an informational reprise to explore additional didactic questions.

That is, Bloom makes no room for critical thinking! This is exactly what our newly-proposed educational system in Africa should strive to avoid, as stifling critical thinking spells disaster for developmental retrogression, among others. Nonetheless, not everyone agrees with him. Caruthers Intellectual Warfare; Williams Destruction of Black Civilization; Asantes The Painful Demise Of Eurocentrism; Sefa Deis Teaching Africa: Towards A Transgressive Pedagogy, Indigenous Knowledges In Global Contexts, and Schooling And Education In Africa; Bikos I Write What I like; Thiongos Moving The Center and Decolonizing The Mind; Woodsons The Mis-education Of The Negro; Lomoteys essay Independent Black Institutions: African-Centered Education Models and book Alternative Educational Institutions; Shujaas Too Much Schooling: Too Little Education; Shockleys The Mis-education Of Black Children, all, one way or the other, make a strong moral and political case for African intellectual and cultural independence, national development, scientific and technological advancement. In fact, Shujaas analytic dichotomy between education and schooling is equally provocative yet ideologically apt!

Further, another essay, Culture, Power, And Education: The Philosophies And Pedagogy Of African-Centered Educators, Vol 3 (3), 2011, p. 54-75, authored by Darrell Cleveland and Kmt Shockley and published in the International Journal Of Critical Pedagogy, mounts one of the strongest and most comprehensive arguments yet in favor of Afrocentric pedagogy. But then again, going back to Allan Bloom, we may want to add contrary to Blooms negative assertions about relativism, that, however one looks at it, the idea, undoubtedly, is tied inseparably to political and moral questions of multiculturalism. Then, it is also the case that relativism does not inhere in such religions as Christianity and Islam, arguably two foreign forces challenging the moral authority of African culture. Ironically, both religious systems obtain in the body politic. In fact, both claim to be vessels replete with cultural universalism as far as morality and truth go, yet are militantly, hypocritically intolerant to a fault. That notwithstanding, the brutal history of slavery and racism, of political Islam and Christian fundamentalism, in particular, and their accompanying religious terrorism belittle any hallowed claims to tolerance.

Arguably, to a certain extent, religiosity, particularly of Islam and Christianity, may be said to constitute the bane of many a society. Ethnocentrism, corruption, racism, political elitism, and classism are the other epidemiological ills of todays society, of modernity. In addition, religious dogma and apeirophobia, a kind of phobia including fear of the afterlife, and asceticism, among other godly sanctioned dogmata, have replaced critical thinking, in any case, assuming the dwarfed stature of unquestioning mediocrity and mental repose. In other words, the spasmodic, sibilating voice of the shadowy pastor, prophet, or evangelist has now usurped the authoritative tenor of critical thinking. After all, as far as physiological and anatomic functionality goes, what exactly did the Christian God or Islam Allah intend for the brain when he encased it in cranial confinement? Was the brain to think, luxuriate, or idle about in the cerebrospinal fluid? Critical thinking, therefore, requires intellectual balance between theory and praxis, between healthy superstition and religiosity, between spirituality and materialism, between gnosis and empiricism.

What do we have to say about critical thinking beyond its narrow Eurocentric definition? Well, critical thinking means adding value to our raw natural wealth (mineral and flora); critical thinking means patronizing African-made goods and services; critical thinking means loving ourselves as a people, first and foremost, and then loving the rest of humanity; critical thinking means GDP does not tell us everything (See Fioramontis Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the Worlds Most Powerful Number and The Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics; see also Boyles The Tyranny of Numbers and Kumi Naidoo and others on Youtube (I Cant GDP) courtesy of Starchild, one of our persistent and loyal readers). Critical thinking means using our natural resources to benefit the people of Africa; critical thinking means using our God-given talents and psychological resources to prevent others from manipulating us to their sole benefit; and critical thinking means we avoid uncritical imitation of foreign unhealthy cultural habits, etc.

Also, critical thinking means celebrating ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political, religious, regional, ra
cial, and ideological differences, for differences, we firmly believe, constitute the creative hallmarks of nature. Thus, we should learn to institute diversity in the body politic as iradal cultural stamp of harmony, of unity. Namely, its a paradoxical statement of fact that differences ought to be seen as a unifier of contradictions. After all, was it not Kwegyir Aggrey, the Father of African Education, who said: You can play a tune of sorts on the white keys, and you can play a tune of sorts on the black keys, but for real harmony you must use both the black and the white? We emphasize that the white keys and the black keys should be analytically construed beyond the narrow definitional strictures of biological racialism. Therefore, as the parable goes Aggrey did not see harmony as an acoustic temperamental response to notational separatism.

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The Power of Critical Thinking (lV)

Sooner or later, if youre making a TV show about science, youre going to have to deal with the dreaded E-word.

More than 150 years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," evolution remains a cornerstone of modern science as well as a lightning rod for controversy, particularly among the religiously devout. The pilot episode of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey," which aired last week, only briefly alluded to evolution (although even that was sufficient to spark rumors of censorship when a local Fox affiliate in Oklahoma cut into that segment to run a station promo, purportedly because of an operator error).

The opening for this weeks "Cosmos" episode ("Some of the Things That Molecules Do") wades right into those treacherous waters to explore the common ancestry of every living thing on Earth. Or rather, it dips its toe gingerly into those treacherous waters. You know, just to test things out a bit before plunging in.

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This is the story about you and me and your dog, our host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, purrs reassuringly from his perch by a cozy campfire in the woods. What could be less intellectually threatening than mans best friend? The conceit is a little hokey, especially when Tyson makes a show of waving a flaming torch at encroaching wolves to hold them at bay.

But it provides a neat segue into the domestication of canines: dogs evolved from wolves that self-selected for tameness over many generations Survival of the Friendliest. And eventually human beings began breeding only those dogs with the most desirable qualities: artificial selection instead of natural selection. We took evolution into our own hands, Tyson says.

Oh yes, he uses the E word, like it aint no thing because it isnt. The scientific evidence for evolutionary theory is overwhelming, after all, and Tyson is ready to show us just how this process works at the molecular level, via some nifty animations of DNA. We see twin strands being split and replicated as cells divide, a process that usually runs smoothly, although occasionally there are errors tiny mutations, often inconsequential. But sometimes they can, say, alter the color of a bears fur, and you get a bear with white instead of brown fur. In an icy environment, that confers a survival advantage in the form of better camouflage; its easier for a bear with white fur to sneak up on prey. So nature selects for white fur and that mutation gets passed down through subsequent generations. And voila! You have polar bears.

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The episode deftly covers the basics of the Tree of Life, in which each twig represents a different species, with those most closely related on the same or nearby branches, and the trunk represents the common ancestry of all life on Earth. We grapple with the evolution of the eye, the marvelously complex result of random mutations over millions of years. No need to invoke an intelligent designer, Tyson assures us. Natural selection has got this covered too.

But evolution doesnt easily adapt to sudden, catastrophic events, evidenced by the five mass extinctions that wiped out so many earlier species on Earth. Tyson focuses on the end of the Permian Era, when massive volcanic eruptions wiped out the trilobites.

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'Cosmos' recap: Wading into the tide pools of evolution

By Willa Paskin

Slate

How big is the cosmos? This is both a central question of "Cosmos," the Seth MacFarlane-produced, Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted reboot of Carl Sagan's widely watched and beloved 1980 miniseries investigating and elucidating our knowledge about the universe, and a question of Fox's, which is premiering the new version on all 10 of its channels tonight, in hopes that an educational program about stars, history, evolution and the universe can once again become a zeitgeist-capturing, hugely rated television event. Will Americans still be delighted to eat our science vegetables if they are sprinkled with enough stardust? Fox is hoping yes.

The new Cosmos starts slowly and reverently enough: deGrasse Tyson, a warm, avuncular presence, standing on the same cliffs Sagan did, talking about the universe, our place in it and preaching the gospel of the scientific method in a glossy episode, which, scientifically speaking, doesn't advance much beyond middle school. But though "Cosmos" hews to many of the conceits deployed in the original -- the "Ship of the Imagination" is back, as is the calendar compressing the 13.8-billion-year lifespan of the universe into just one year -- things have changed, and not just because Pluto is no longer a planet.

In 34 years, scientists have made significant advances, as have special effects departments (the "Ship of Imagination" is newly sleek), but the most notable change is how politicized science and scientific thought have become. The first episode of "Cosmos" devotes a good chunk of itself to an animated sequence about a Franciscan monk living in 16th-century Italy who was burned at the stake for his scientifically correct beliefs. It is a segment aimed squarely at anti-science advocates, implicitly arguing that science and the scientific method are not necessarily inimical to god.

DeGrasse Tyson, walking the streets of Rome, relays the story of that monk, whose name was Giordano Bruno. (Though he lived between Copernicus and Galileo, these more famous men each barely get name-checked.) Bruno had a dream not just that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, per Copernicus, but that neither was the sun: Instead, the universe was limitless. Bruno was not a scientist. He did not test his hypothesis. His insight came to him as a revelation, one he kept preaching even as he was excommunicated and banished from every church -- Catholic, Protestant, and Calvinist -- in the land (as well as being laughed out of Cambridge). In "Cosmos' " version of Bruno's story, organized religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, are presented as rigid and corrupt -- the church is described as the "thought police" and the priest who sentences Bruno to death looks like a nefarious Disney villain -- but faith itself is not. Bruno's argument is that his god is limitless and unbounded, so why shouldn't the universe be? "Your god is too small!" he cries to those who brand him a heretic.

Writing in New York magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz interpreted this segment of "Cosmos" as "painting organized religion as an irrelevant and intellectually discredited means of understanding factual reality" and as part of the show's larger "pushback against faith's encroachments on the intellectual terrain of science." (This is particularly in contrast to the sort of echt-spirituality and new-ageism that hovered around the original "Cosmos." Sagan himself was agnostic.) Organized religion certainly comes in for it, but I think this segment is up to something more gentle than declaring war on blinkered anti-science evangelists. "Cosmos" is offering viewers a way to reconcile science and faith: Don't let your god be too small.

I doubt very much that the mini-bio of Giordano Bruno will prove effective at convincing creationists that "Cosmos" is for them. "Cosmos" is unapologetic about its faith in science: "Science gives us the power to see what vision cannot," deGrasse Tyson says. In one segment, he points out that if you compress the history of the universe to one year, then Jesus and the religion he inspired have existed for all of five seconds. But just the simple fact that nearly a quarter of "Cosmos' " first episode is devoted to an allegory about a relatively marginal Franciscan monk, rather than science itself, shows how extensively anti-science activists have hijacked the conversation, and just how seriously "Cosmos" takes that hijacking."Cosmos" is trying to encourage all remotely reasonable people, god-fearing or otherwise, to look up at the stars.

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'Cosmos' aims to raise our gaze heavenward

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Doctor/Tibetan monk returns to Ventura County to speak on mind, body

Amit Goswami, Ph.D., is no stranger to thinking on another level. Melding quantum physics with philosophy and spirituality, he has gained a following of those who believe that the key to enlightenment can be found in theories often relegated to the laboratory. Made famous by his appearance in the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?, Goswami has taken his theories around the world.

Goswamis talk this weekend is titled "Quantum Creativity in the Time of Crisis and Paradigm Shifts.

VCREPORTER: What does it mean to be "quantum conscious"?

DR. AMIT GOSWAMI: It is the ability to live in two domains of reality, a domain of potentiality which is unconscious and a manifest domain where we have subject-object awareness.

What does it mean to go from the "primacy of matter to the primacy of consciousness"? Does this reflect a need to move from materialism?

Scientific materialism is based on the idea that all are matter and material interaction in space and time. Instead, quantum physics says there is the domain of potentiality outside of space and time where we now have experimental evidence that communication is instantaneous. This interconnectedness, details show, is our capacity of knowing consciousness. When consciousness chooses from the material possibilities, actuality collapses and we have subject-object awareness. So we say consciousness is primary, manifest matter is created from it.

In your book Quantum Creativity you discuss the aha! insight. What is the "aha!" insight?

A discontinuous transition in thought comes with a surprise, hence the aha. Quantum physics explains this as a quantum leap of thought. It is similar to the quantum leap that electrons make when they go from one atomic orbit to another.

How do you meld science with philosophy?

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Blending science and spirituality

I wonder if Dane, the 20-something snowboarder who had his picture taken with Shawn White in Vail, will finish his nursing degree after his return to Upper Peninsula Michigan? And what can one learn from a quantum spirituality author?

These are just a couple of the questions Gretchen and I are left with after our recent trip to Colorado on Amtrak.

The source of these questions is the community seating policy in the Amtrak dining car, one of our favorite features of an Amtrak journey because each meal offers an opportunity to meet someone you might never encounter otherwise.

We boarded the train at Mount Pleasant, Iowa, on a snowy, very cold February evening and moments later we were seated with a handsome, dark-haired Iowa farmer who was commuting to Omaha to spend the weekend with his wife and daughter.

His daughter has cancer and his wife stays with her in Omaha. He rides Amtrak every weekend to be with them. As we lingered over a delicious chocolate cream puff dessert, he told us that he was finishing a new home to replace one that been rendered uninhabitable when a neighboring dairy operation burned a pile of moldy hay on a day when the smoke lingered for hours, saturating his house.

He farms more than 1,000 acres, much of it rented land, with the help of a hired man. As we left the table, we expressed our wishes for his daughters recovery. And we lingered a few more minutes to see photos of her on his smart phone.

At breakfast the next morning, we were seated with a bespectacled couple who welcomed us with smiles and introduced themselves as Pam and Jim. We learned in the course of our conversation that Pam is a life coach and they were traveling to San Francisco to buy a house for her daughter, who is growing vegetables somewhere in northern California and plans to start a community-supported agriculture business.

Jim said after we gave some background on our families that he shared our sons interest in sculpture. His grandfather, Gutzon Borglum, was the sculptor of the presidents on the Mount Rushmore Memorial. Pam and Jim live in the Black Hills of South Dakota, but he also manages a large ranch in Texas inherited from the other side of his family.

Jim asked for the address where he could view our sons artwork. And Pam was curious about our journalism background, so Im to send a sample of columns, perhaps this one.

On the way home, we were seated at breakfast with Dane, whose shy grin was framed by a gray hoodie, and the spirituality author, an articulate man with graying hair, a stubble beard and engaging smile. Dane told us over our grits, eggs, bacon and toast, that he had been in Vail for six months, but his job tuning skis and boards was not fulfilling and he was headed home to return to college.

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SKOL: Riding the rails is never dull

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A physician who is a Tibetan monk returns to Ventura County roots to give workshops on mind, body