I remember being hit by Euclid’s proof that there is no largest prime number. I was eleven. Some years later it was girls with their sweet eyes, the cadences of Keats and Johnson, nearly being struck by lightning on Mount Olympus, skidding out of control on a wet road and having nowhere to go.

This talk will explore aspects of the emerging 21st century paradigm of a dynamic self-creating universe. Viewing the cosmos as a living organism with inter-related parts gives new meaning to the Hermetic axiom ‘as above so below’. Phoebe proposes that the cosmology of the physicists be extended to include the inner level of reality – the cosmic mind and psyche – arguing that the systems science model of nested hierarchies , when applied to mind, suggests that purpose and meaning in the cosmos could flow top-down from the mind of the whole, which puts subjects like astrology on a new footing.

No religious scripture contains as many accounts of gross paranormal or miraculous phenomena than the four testaments of the New Testament. Changing water into wine, feeding the multitude , healings, resurrections, walking on water, and the transfiguration where great blinding light shone from Jesus. And there are many more. These miracles had great impact on a developing and expanding religion. Controlling and influencing the laws of nature was interpreted as an act of divinity, a divine intervention.