Definitions

Delve into deeper meanings of some of the terms you'll find on this website.

• Consciousness
  “The condition and suchness of all that is, gross, subtle, or causal. That which witnesses, and that which is witnessed….” Beingness that is “totally beyond and prior to anything that arises, and yet no part of that Being[ness] … other than what arises.”
  ―Ken Wilber
  

• Center of Ourselves 
  That which is central to our experience of what it is to be human, and connects us to all that is.
  “And so, the center of the self was shown to be God…” “But this is not God as an ontological other, set apart from the cosmos, from humans, and from creation at large. Rather it is God as an Archetypal summit of one’s own Consciousness.”
  ―Ken Wilber
  

• Mythology
  The story that explains how or why things happen the way they do.
  Myth as “a story that takes each individual moment of a life and places it in a context, a plot, a cohesive movement.”
  ―D. Stephenson Bond
  
  

• Heroism
  Heroism is the “inner transformation, and the subsequent transformation in our outer lives, when we learn to activate our hidden creative resources and connect with transcendent sources of support. As we become heroic, in this sense, we learn to view our challenges differently, and they subsequently lose their hold over us.”
  ―Lorna Catford & Michael Ray
  
  

• Labyrinth     
  “Labyrinths are usually in the form of a circle with a meandering but purposeful path, from the edge to the center and back out again… Each has only one path, and once we make the choice to enter it, the path becomes a metaphor for our journey through life, sending us to the center of the labyrinth and then back out to the edge on the same path. The labyrinth is a spiritual tool meant to awaken us to the deep rhythm that unites us to ourselves and to the Light that calls from within. In surrendering to the winding path, the soul finds healing and wholeness.”
  ―Lauren Artress
  

• Workplace
  The workplace includes “managing the outer organization—work processes, organizational objectives, managerial structures—and the inner organization of people—emotional attitude, mental processes, cooperative spirit.” Workplace “[o]rganizations—religious, educational, business—are the context in which the and of ‘the individual and the group’ takes place. Organizations are places where what is unique about the individual meets what is unique about social organization.”
  ―Alan Briskin
  
  

• Paradigm
  “A paradigm is a kind of general theory of such scope that it is capable of encompassing or providing a context for most of the known phenomena in its field.”
  ―T.S. Kuhn
  “We see that paradigms are extremely potent arbiters of reality, and that all scientific disciplines are based upon paradigms, that is, upon shared sets of expectations, which, in turn, are accepted by society as the consensual validation of reality. From this state of consensus, shared by scientists and laymen alike, derives the concept of what constitutes an acceptable or proper question, method, and solution to any given inquiry.”
  ―Kenneth Pelletier
  
  

• Symbolic Power
  The “psychological mechanism” within our psyche that uses symbols as a bridge to “transform energies between the visible and invisible” realms of reality.
  ―Angeles Arrien

• Transformation
  A "metamorphosis" that evolves an aspect of our thoughts, behavior or actions that has been out of alignment between our inner and outer worlds. Once we are in alignment, the metamorphosis that we have undergone powers our movement through the stages of our heroic journey.
  ―Marion Moss Hubbard