On my retreat this past weekend, it happened. Here is the duo:
From The Universe is a Green Dragon (as Thomas explains how relationships and interactions form new entities):
"This [conversation] reveals our cultural bias for analysis - the dynamic is as real in the life of the seas as it is in the realm of elementary particles. Each realm has its own integrity; the ocean can not be reduced to elementary particles. If you decompose the ocean into elementary particles, the ocean disappears."
From John Polkinghorne:
"Science treats the world as an object, something you could put to the test, pull apart, and find out what it’s made of. And, of course, that’s a very interesting thing to do, and you learn some important things that way. But we know that there are whole realms of human experience where first of all testing has to give way to trusting. That’s true in human relationships. If I’m always setting little traps to see if you’re my friend, I’ll destroy the possibility of friendship between us. And also where we have to treat things in their wholeness, in their totality. I mean…a chemist could take a beautiful painting, could analyze every scrap of paint on the canvas, would incidentally destroy the painting by doing that, but would have missed the point of the painting, because that’s something you can only encounter in its totality. So we need complementary ways of looking at the world."
To try to not pull everything apart...a dynamic duo for this analytical mind, indeed.
Let us walk in the holy presence.
