Category: HyC Adventures

Hyatt Carter During our 21-year stay in Southern California, my wife Linda and I enjoyed many adventures. Two of those adventures were of special importance. First, our finding of Founder’s Center for Positive Spirituality and becoming part of that community under the inspiring leadership of Senior Minister Rev. Dr. Arthur Chang whom I sometimes refer… Continue reading Adventures with Rev. Arthur at Founder’s

This is an introduction to one of Ken Wilber’s most versatile ideas: his model of what he calls the Four Quadrants. As a formal structure, the four quadrants display a striking resemblance to a mandala. Wilber also speaks of his philosophy as “weaving a mandala of the many faces of Spirit.” My approach, therefore, will… Continue reading Ken Wilber’s Mandalic Model of Reality

A foundational teaching of the New Testament is that God has declared that Jesus is the Son of God, thus affirming, on the highest authority, his divine nature. At what point in time, or during which event in the life of Jesus, is the declaration made? It turns out that there are four answers to… Continue reading Evolution of the Word in Paul and the Four Gospels

Speaking of accomplishments that transform the universe— The musical genius of Mozart is legendary . . . astonishing . . . breathtaking. When creating his music, Mozart never wrote rough drafts that he later polished to perfection. All who observed him at work agree that he could sit down and dash off a musical composition,… Continue reading Mozartian Moments

The French writer Jacques Derrida coined the word “hauntology” for his variation on the philosophical term “ontology.” Since the initial “h” is silent in French, the two words are the same in sound. For my purposes, the general sense of “hauntology” is about revealing the absences that haunt, or are present in, all presences.1 Whereas… Continue reading Hauntology or Ontology: That Is the Question

As a freshman many years ago, I went off to Park College, idyllically situated on hills overlooking the Missouri River just north of Kansas City. It was there I had my first opportunity to visit a world-class museum: The Nelson Gallery of Art. On that auspicious day I found myself pausing many times before the… Continue reading Slender Gold: Emperor Huizong’s Brush with Beauty

Socrates is deservedly famous for the art of questioning he discovered and put to good use. Many who came to Socrates with confident beliefs soon came to see, under the light of his incisive questioning, that these beliefs were built upon the sands of confusion, self-contradiction, and superficial misunderstandings. This way of questioning has become… Continue reading Awaken Your Inner Socrates

In 1911, the French physicist Paul Langevin proposed the following thought experiment: Imagine two people: a chronologer, or timekeeper on earth, and a space traveler who departs from earth on a space craft that zips away at just under the speed of light. The space craft travels for one year and then reverses direction and… Continue reading An Odyssey in Space and Time

“And it was Euler1 who discovered the most beautiful formula in all mathematics: eiπ + 1 = 0 a mysterious and ineffable expression connecting the five most important numbers in the universe.”2 This formula is a special case of Euler’s famous equation: eix = cos x + i sin x To derive the special case,… Continue reading The Most Beautiful Formula in Mathematics

Norwood Russell Hanson, a philosopher of science, offers for our consideration this tantalizing thought: “There is more to seeing than meets the eye.” The truth of this was vividly brought home to me when I discovered that Goethe, the great German writer, developed a way of seeing that can be a powerful addition to everyone’s… Continue reading Goethe’s Way of Seeing: The Poetics of Perception