[Abstracted from Catherine Ingram’s universally acclaimed book-

’Passionate Presence’. Published with glad consent of the author. - Editor]

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new

landscapes, but in having new eyes. "
- Marcel Proust

Awakened awareness is sometimes likened to being swept into a wave of universal intelligence. You are standing on the riverbank of conditioned mind and belief, clutching a branch of dogma, hoping to stay put, and suddenly a torrent of white water rushes by and sweeps you off your feet. Nothing to do but surrender and enjoy the rapids. Like this, one’s conditioned mind is out of the way and what roars through is the intelligence of the creative force of existence. Suddenly, one is interested in the process. Moving from dogma to the unknown is also a movement from dullness to aliveness, and life becomes an exploration, a celebration.

According to the modern astronomy, our solar system was formed some four and a half billion years ago when a cloud of interstellar gas and dust condensed into itself, forming a broad and rather flat disk. At its dense center there formed the sun, a blazing ball of thermonuclear fire around which swirled millions of rocky chunks, some of which merged together to form planets. This process apparently repeats itself throughout the universe. In 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back dazzling images of new stars similarly forming in the constellation Orion. In the observable universe alone it is estimated that about one hundred such solar systems are forming every second.

Today the planets along with other large space matter swirl around the fiery center in our solar system on the same flat plane as they did at the time of their formation. What has dramatically changed, however, is the phenomenal variety of life that has sprung up on the third planet from the sun, our Earth. Apparently abundant in conditions for life, Earth sits strategically not too far from or too close to the sun. It is protected for the most part from devastating collisions with intergalactic space debris by our massive neighbour planet Jupiter, which has so far taken the largest hits for us.