Rainbow Book Quotes

“The profound meanings of the colors is something that was an integral part of all the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, China and Tibet, as well as the traditional cultures of the Native American Indians, and even the medieval Europeans. For all those thousands of years, symbolic colors functioned as basic building blocks in the world view of most of the religions on Earth. For all those thousands of years. the colors of the cardinal directions (North, East, South, West), and the colors of the primary elements (Fire, Air, Earth, Water) were filled with cosmic significance. When these people chose a color to wear around their finger or their neck, they were not trying to look attractive; they were trying to enter into closer communication with the divine spirits of the universe. During the 16th and 17th centuries, an enormous change took place in European civilization. The consciousness of modern times began to be born. Art, science, philosophy, religion had been intimately interrelated aspects of each other. Now they began to go their separate ways. All walks of life shifted away from an unquestioning belief in the transcendent promise offered to the entire community of the faith-promise offered to the entire community of the faithful in 'Heaven Above', and began to concentrate on the more certain, the more immediate reality that each person could experience right here on earth. This new sociology may be characterized as 'Institutionalized Industrialism.' It is a cultural system that integrates the psychologically consonant principles of religious protestantism, economic capitalism, political democracy, and aesthetic single-point perspective. his new psycho-social system - this new consciousness - is the one that continues to describe most of the Western world.”
― The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

“Physicists and meta-physicists have communicated with one another very little in the history of Western civilization. The 'reason' of Aristotle and the 'revelation; of Plato have been polarities towards which human understanding has gravitated for the last 2,500 years. 'The result is,' as Jung observed, 'that in their extremism, both lose one half of the universe'. Only during unusual periods in history have the physical aspects of the world and the metaphysical aspects of the world been recognized as equally 'real' halves of a well-balanced cosmos. Western civilization has only known a few such periods, such as the Golden Age of Greece in the 6th and 5th centuries, B.C., the great cultural synthesis of the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Since the beginning of 'modern times' in the 16th and 17th centuries there has been little dialogue between those who are devoted to the physical, and those who are devoted to the metaphysical. The people who tend to wear white, and the people who tend to wear black, have done about their separate ways. One group is particularly concerned with an intuitive understanding. of what causes the universe to make those motions in the first place.

In the last several decades, there has been a small but significant reduction in the distance between those two polarities. The closer scientists have come to the edges of the finite universe, the more they have found themselves employing concepts and vocabularies that traditionally have been reserved for theologians.

A century ago, few scientists believed we would ever know what stars were made of. Now we do. We also know that our physical bodies are made up of the same substance as those stars. A decade ago, few would have believed that the brain emits waves that we can learn to 'hear' (through a process called biofeedback), and use to modify not only our psychological behavior, but also physiological processes long though to be beyond human potential, for example: the rate at which our hear is beating, or the rate and which an illness is spreading.

In other words, the more closely modern science has been able to examine physical reality, the more metaphysical it appears to be. Many of the greatest scientists of our time have come to conclusions that have been the basic assumptions of world religions since the 'beginning of time.' After a few decades of skepticism, the Behavioral Sciences have concluded that one cannot completely separate the objective aspects of an experience from the perceptions of the person who is undergoing that experience. the two things are mutually influential. They are aspects of each other.”
― The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco