I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind – especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called ‘consciousness’ and the other the ‘unconscious’
We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.
People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.
Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students – and even professional biologists – acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory.
A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
There are no monotone “values” in biology.
Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.
Some tools of thought are so blunt that they are almost useless; others are so sharp that they are dangerous. But the wise man will have the use of both kinds.
Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth.
It takes two to know one.
Number is different from quantity.
Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Perhaps the attempt to achieve grace by identification with the animals was the most sensitive thing which was tried in the whole bloody history of religion .
A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.