Reflection

Nobel Prize biologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, refers to syntropy as an “innate drive in living matter to perfect itself”.

Some say that a desire arrives in your heart only because it can be fulfilled. As living beings, we have syntropy working in us in a very deep level. It’s this natural striving for growth, for expansion of life and consciousness. The hunger for getting better, living better, having more from life. This psychological drive, when obstructed, leaves us with a feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction that is hard to explain or to get rid of. We may try to numb it through small pleasures in life, or forget it through being busy at work or with family. But it’s still there.

I won’t tell you to “be brave, follow your passion, chase your dreams!” (words that, although true, can easily become empty clichés). But I will remind you to get in touch with this primal aspect of our human nature, to hear its wisdom, and to honour it - allow it to take any shape it wants in your life.

Giovanni Dienstmann
(more on the Meditative Life page)

Growth

“Deep within every life, no matter how dull or ineffectual it may seem from the outside, there is something eternal happening. This is the secret way that change and possibility conspire with growth.

John Henry Newman summed this up beautifully when he said, “To grow is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Change, therefore, need not be threatening; it can in fact bring our lives to perfection. Perfection is not cold completion. Neither is it avoidance of risk and danger in order to keep the soul pure or the conscience unclouded.

​When you are faithful to the risk and ambivalence of growth, you are engaging your life. The soul loves risk; it is only through the door of risk that growth can enter.”

​– John O’Donohue / Excerpt from ANAM CARA

A Force of Nature

​....Everything is in everything. - physicist Henri Bortoft

When we eventually grasp the wholeness of nature, it can be shocking. In nature, as Bortoft puts it, 'The part is a place for presencing the whole.' This is the awareness that is stolen from us when we accept the machine world-view of wholes assembled from replaceable parts. - page 5

... All learning is about how we interact with the world and the types of capacities that develop from our interactions. What differs is the depth of awareness and the consequent source of action. If awareness never reaches beyond superficial events and current circumstances, actions will be reactions.

If, on the other hand, we penetrate more deeply to see the larger wholes that generate 'what is' and our own connection to this wholeness, the source and effectiveness of our actions can change dramatically. .... We came to realize that both groups are really talking about the same process—the process whereby we learn to 'presence' an emerging whole, to become what George Bernard Shaw called 'a force of nature.' - pages 9-10

... The core capacity needed for accessing the field of the future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond one's preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control and, as Salk said, making choices to serve the evolution of life.... - pages 11-12

— Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworksi and Betty Sue Flowers