Quotes about Physiology

The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. The invisible shapes of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, and the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. Our own reflections, we might say, are a part of the play of light and its reflections.

By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths. And indeed each terrain, each bioregion, seems to have its own particular intelligence, its unique vernacular of soil and leaf and sky.

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams – all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

the remembered image of a thing can have as much impact on the senses as the thing itself.  It can also have a powerful effect on the body's physiology, a state of affairs that has been experienced firsthand by anyone who has ever felt their heart race after imagining hugging a loved one.  Or anyone who has ever felt their palms grow sweaty after conjuring up the memory of some unusually frightening experience.  At first glance the fact that the body cannot always distinguish between an imagined event and a real one seems strange, but when one takes the holographic model into account-a model that asserts that all experiences, whether real or imagined, are reduced to the same common language of holographically organized wave forms-the situation becomes less puzzling.  Or as Achterberg puts it, "When images are regarded in the holographic manner, their omnipotent influence on physical function logically follows.  The image, the behavior, and the physiological concomitants are a unified aspect of the same phenomenon".

If God is indeed in the body—and consciousness and physiology are, from an evolutionary perspective, inextricably linked—we must acknowledge that divine consciousness is available in and through physicality.