ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks, firstly, to all those who helped get this book into shape. Of the quotations, “Rabbit’s clever …” is from A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner and “All the world’s a stage” was already a common saying when Shakespeare used it to start a famous soliloquy in As You Like It.
“I think, therefore I am” was Descartes. “Nature is the living …” was Goethe. “The probability that random chance …” is one of a number of variants of a quip credited to the astronomer, Fred Hoyle.
“Closer is He than breathing …” was Alfred Lord Tennyson. “Welcome the divine eternity in the passing shadows of time …” was Jean Pierre de Caussade. “Off and on, in some rare moments …” is from the Indian scholar, philosopher, and president (1962–67), S. Radhakrishnan.
The “wind beneath our wings” takes mild poetic licence with the song title, “Wind Beneath My Wings” by Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar. “Music for a While (shall all our cares beguile)” is a song by the seventeenth-century composer, Henry Purcell. Two great songs!
“When He decrees a matter …”, “Not a leaf falls …”, “all the worlds”, “the best of forms”, “Be!” and “Return!” are all from the Qur’an. “Die before you die” is a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in the Muslim tradition. “I was a hidden treasure …” is also from the Muslim tradition. “Live in such a way …” is a Sufi saying.
The “image of God” appears in both the Bible and the Qur’an. “In the beginning was the Word …”, “Word made flesh”, “Be ye therefore perfect”, “My yoke is easy …”, “many mansions”, “legion, for we are many”, and “possessed with demons” are all from the Christian gospels.
“Cool as sandalwood …” is from the poetry of the Indian mystic, Paltu Sahib, and the “divine human body” is also from the Indian mystics. The creation hymn that forms the epilogue is the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda, written around 500 BCE.
“The name that can be named …” is how Lao Tzu opens the Tao Te Ching.
“Know thyself” is a Greek aphorism of the classical period, attributed to a number of the ancient sages, and appearing as an inscription in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The single general in command of two opposing armies and the playwright whose characters abuse him are images from Plotinus – a third-century, Neo-Platonist mystic.
The team working on the extraction of energy from the vacuum of space, who have developed a new form of space-energy theory unifying all known physical laws and processes, is led by Doug Torr. Part of the background theoretical work, in association with José Vargas, has already been published, and the rest is scheduled to follow. Of course, their work still requires the scrutiny of their fellow scientists, but both are respected, published physicists, who have been working in this area for several decades.
“We pronounce it ‘I’, as if it were the whole of us …”, “He worships Himself through us”, and “If we take one step …” are from Maharaj Charan Singh, my spiritual master, and primary source of inspiration.
“The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything” is the Ultimate Question put to the computer ‘Deep Thought’ in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Deep Thought took 7 ½ million years to figure out the answer, which, as everyone knows, is 42.