THE FABRIC OF THE FUTURE
M. J. Ryan, editor
Women visionaries illuminate the path to tomorrow.
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"Goodness is our inherent nature." Cheri Huber, Zen teacher, 'There Is Nothing Wrong with Us'
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"When we are being who we are and honestly living with inspired integrity, we automatically inspire the imaginations of everyone we encounter." Jamie Sams, 'Messages for the Women of the Millennium'
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"Everything in nature is cyclical and opposites are in balance. In the natural world you have opposites, like day and night, but they're not in opposition; they're complements to each other. They're part of one whole, and you have to have both. One isn't 'good' and the other 'evil'. The more that we can start to look at the world in this way again, the more integrated we can be." Starhawk, author and founding minister of the Covenant of the Goddess, 'Envisioning the Future'
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"We inhabit a participatory universe, influencing and being influenced on a cellular level by everything that is around us." Dawna Markova, Ph.D., author and organizational mythologist, 'From Rut to River: Co-creating a Possible Future'
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"Our traditional Native American greeting in the Seneca language is 'Na:weh Skennio' – thank you for being! Whether you know it or not, each of you represents a spark of inspiration within the Great Mystery. You are needed. You touch the lives of many and are responsible for changing the lives of others for the better. For all that you do and for who you are, I thank you for being." Jamie Sams, 'Messages for the Women of the Millennium'
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"Our hearts are the rivers through which God's love flows. They are the eminent domain of divine energy and possess an intelligence greater than any other aspect of our being. Love emanating from our heart-center is a powerful force that unleashes the very creative energy of the universe." Sue Patton, psychotherapist and author, 'A Deep and Holy Hunger: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine in Daily Life',
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"Myth is always about soul-making and about the pathos that accompanies the journey of the soul as it travels from out-moded existence to the amplified life in the kingdom. Thus it has much to teach us about where we are right now and where we are headed." Jean Houston, 'Living in One's and Future Myths'
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"One day while taking a walk I asked the universe a question: What is our story? What is happening on planet Earth? I knew it must be one story, for it was one Earth. With that question, I went into a slight daydreaming type walk. Suddenly, I had an 'out-of-Earth' experience. My mind's eye was lifted into outer space. Floating as the astronauts did, I experienced our planet as a living organism struggling to coordinate itself as a whole. I felt the pollution choking our lungs, the hunger torturing our bodies, the weapons killing ourselves. I felt the pain in the whole system for one frightful instant in time. Then, a miracle seemed to happen. I felt as though I were seeing a few frames ahead in the movie of creation. In this moment of expanded reality, an unbearable pain intensified throughout the whole planetary body, very much like the pain before giving birth to a child. There was a flash of light, an unearthly light, the kind that the mystics see. It came from within us, and from beyond us. We saw the light together. The floodgates of our hearts opened. Love streamed forth. The barriers that separated us dissolved. The air cleared, the waters cleared. Healings abounded. I heard the inner words: 'Our story is a birth. We are one body. What the avatars have come to tell us is true. Go tell the story of our birth, Barbara!'" Barbara Marx Hubbard, 'Awakening to Our Genius, the Heroine's Journey'
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"Part of the information that we need now is an awareness of the indivisibility of our relationship with each other – peoples of all races, nationalities, ethnicities, and classes – and with the Earth and all her creatures." China Galland, 'The Black Madonna and the Limits of Light: Looking Underneath Christianity, A Teaching for Our Time'
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"When White Buffalo Calf Woman came among us bringing the Sacred Pipe which represents wholeness and holiness – the respectful honoring of our unity with all things – she reminded us of its importance for the continuance of Life itself. Ken Carey in 'Return of the Bird Tribes' brings us her words: 'Creation does not take place where there is a scattering and dissipation of energies,' she explained, 'Creation requires a gathering together and focusing of your power within a circle of commitment – like a seed, an egg, a womb or a marriage. If you would create and not destroy, you must remember always the Sacred Hoop. Consider wisely the ways in which you would use your power and then around those ways draw the sacred circle of commitment. In the warm atmosphere of that circle, the power of love builds and builds like a storm above the wet summer prairie until the circle can hold no more and explodes in the conception of the new." Brooke Medicine Eagle, Native American healer, 'Creating a Path of Beauty'
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"Organisms shape themselves in response to their neighbors and their environments. All respond to one another, co-evolving and co-creating the complex systems of organization that we see in nature. Life is systems-seeking. It seeks organization. Organization is a naturally occuring phenomenon. Self-organization is the powerful force by which Gaia created herself through relationships, creating all the living systems we see. She knows how to organize from the inside out, from partnering with neighors rather than from imposition and control." Margaret J. Wheatley, 'Reclaiming Gaia, Reclaiming Life'
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"We are a family. White Buffalo Woman reminds us that we are more than family, we are one with each other. 'Whatever you do to any other thing or being in the circle of life', she exhorts us, 'you do to yourself, for you are One.'" Brooke Medicine Eagle, Native American healer, 'Creating a Path of Beauty'
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"The universe is impersonally invested in evolving toward goodness and uses any available conduit for the purposes of doing so." Marianne Williamson, 'Spiritual Politics'
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"Love is an energy. We don't experience it in the abstract. We experience it through the medium of our relationships. And so it is that the infusion of love that is being asked for above all is an enriching of all our relationships, our relationships with our spouses and lovers, with our parents and children, with the people with whom we work, and even with our enemies and strangers." Daphne Rose Kingma, 'A Profound Infusion of Love', quoted
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"Increasing numbers of us have heard the Gaian voice and seen in our experience ways of being together that celebrate and affirm life. More and more we are in conversations where we speak of the great forces of life – love, purpose, soul, spirit, freedom, courage, integrity, meaning. The new story is being born in these conversations. We are learning to give voice to a different and fuller sense of who we are." Margaret J. Wheatley, 'Reclaiming Gaia, Reclaiming Life'
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"The ancient Sanskrit metaphor of Indra's Net and the modern formulation of quantum physics remind us that we are all woven together. The human challenge is to become fully aware of, full participants in, and fully conscious co-creators of the historic, the mythic, and the unitive realms, especially in times like ours when we are invited by the very depths of being to become co-creators of the future. As Zora Neale Hurston has said, 'There are years that ask questions and years that answer them.' I would add that these are the times. We are the people. And we are living in the answering years." Jean Houston, 'Living in One's and Future Myths'
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"Those like James Hillman and others in the school of archetypal psychology are suggesting something that the ancient neo-Platonists knew – certainly the Gnostics knew – that it is not psyche which exists in us but we who exist in psyche. And that the life of psyche is existent within the realm of God." Jean Houston, 'Living in One's and Future Myths'
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"Serving the global vision through our personal vision may change thousands if not millions of lives, and in turn change our world." Rama Vernon, President of the Center for International Dialogue, 'Manifesting the Vision'
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"What will happen when the storytellers emerge? What will happen when 'the primal mind' sings of our common origin, our stupendous journey, our immense good fortune? We will become Earthlings. We will have evoked out of the depths of the human psyche those qualities enabling our transformation from disease to health. They will sing our epic of being, and stirring up from our roots will be a vast awe, an enduring gratitude, the astonishment of communion experiences, and the realization of cosmic adventure." Brian Swimme, 'Evolution Extended'
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"There is a 'higher' power guiding us even in moments of greatest distress." Rama Vernon, President of the Center for International Dialogue, 'Manifesting the Vision'
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"The (mythic) stories of spiritual principals who are everywhere and all at once recalls the finding in quantum physics concerning the ways in which everything is part of everything else – every electron having knowledge and influence upon every other electron – and each one of us is ubiquitous throughout the great hologram that is our universe." Jean Houston, 'Living in One's and Future Myths'
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"We are opening our senses to the web of relationships, the deep ecology, in which we have our being. Like our primordial ancestors, we begin again to see the world as our body and (whether we say the word or not) as sacred." Joanna Macy, Ph.D., 'The Great Turning'
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"Our inner development as persons comes about as we are able to bear the wholeness of the opposites, to experience them as mutually completing, as interdependent and interpenetrating, in some sense simultaneous. To see them, in other words, as alive, moving, and interweaving, like the distinct and yet interflowing rivers that course through the oceans." Mary Caroline Richards, poet and teacher, 'Separating and Connecting: The Vessel and the Fire'
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"Any step that I take in my life of true healing, of true integration so that I really shift my experience, affects everyone in the world and affects what's happening in the world." Shakti Gawain, speaker/workshop leader, 'Moving Toward the New Millennium'
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"We are all beautifully interwoven into a single consciousness." Daphne Rose Kingma, 'A Profound Infusion of Love'
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We are gathering together the primary insights of spirituality and bringing them together into one place.
This archive contains 11,754 quotes, taken from 635 references,
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