KATHERINE NEVILLE’S
“The Art of Life” Newsletter
December 29, 2023
Setting Off into the Miraculous
This year of “The Eight” (2+0+2+4=8) marks the conclusion of a cycle that began in 2015, and it is the dawn of a new cycle. We are stepping across the threshold of a world we think we know, and into a great adventure.
The book I have been immersed in writing, over these past eight years, is all about artists, living 400 years ago. They themselves were immersed in a sea of change, much like the one we are experiencing now, all across our planet. For the first time, through telescopes and through microscopes, they could see the macrocosm and the microcosm that Pythagoras and the later alchemists had described. They could see poikilia, variegation–and observe that the very air we breathe is swimming with life at many levels.
Three Wise Men
Eight years ago, on January 19, 2015, at 8:00 PM, the wonderful brain scientist, Dr Karl Pribram, died. Dr Pribram received his medical degree at age 21, and was nearly 96 years old when he died. He had spent those 75 years in dissecting, analyzing, and making major breakthroughs in our understanding of how the brain works.
Along with Pribram’s two friends and colleagues, astrophysicist David Bohm and chemist Ilya Prigogine, (the “Three Wise Men”) Pribram came to understand, at many levels, that what appeared to be chaos in our universe and in our lives, was actually a manifestation of a kind of magical, miraculous order. (The Greek word Cosmos, itself, signifies both “Order” and “Ornament.” )
I spent nearly 30 years living with Karl Pribram, listening to his colleagues, trying to understand what they understood! That we are indeed at the Dawn of a new reality, a new way of perceiving the deep meaning of an order that already exists around us.
Order from Chaos
As we step off the edge of the Old Reality, into this new view of the universe, I’d like to quote one of my favorite philosophers:
“Chaos is a very real part of our lives. Our attempt to keep it out of our lives is one of the very greatest mistakes we’ve made as a civilization…Life is fantastic. It never ends. It only changes…”
-David Bowie
