Edited by Ernest Lester Smith (1904 – 1992) with revisions by Patrick Milburn.

221 Pages | Published in 1975, second edition 1990 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 083560627.

‘This is a remarkable book‘, said the Chicago Daily News. ‘It indicates that a new synthesis is in the works, which is understood by many people might restore the confidence of our whole civilization’.

This new edition, with revisions by biologist Patrick Milburn, incorporates the latest ideas in biology, physics and theology. It takes a fresh look at a world, whose secrets are essential to understanding the nature of our own reality and cites recent scientific surprises about our world. Starting from the premise that consciousness is a fact of nature, since it is a universal experience, the book hypothesizes that intelligence is primal and that the cosmos is grounded in, and pervaded by Intelligence.

This hypothesis comes from experience as true as the beauty of the sunrise over the sea and is supported by science. The book offers a reinterpretation of science from a transformed standpoint. It refutes traditional scientific theory, that preaches the role of ‘blind’ matter and blind chance in the universe. The further our science penetrates into the order of reality, the more intricate the mathematical harmonies that are revealed. In living forms, we find an unfoldment of intelligence, a type of creative design that is functional and expressive in variety. The origin and evolution of life on Earth are part of a cosmological process, one that flows from the sun into the depths of space.

Chapter 14 – Toward a Synthesis (p. 209):

” Thus we see, though still from afar, that the world of which we are so intimately a part is ultimately a reality woven of shared experience – a field of consciousness in which, as T.S. Eliot expressed it, all truths have their time and place. In such a sense, we are coming home to our own true place in nature.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Through the unknown remembered gate
Where the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the Children in the apple-tree
Not known because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the silence
Between two waves of the sea. “

By Ernest Lester Smith (1904 – 1992).

233 Pages | A Quest Original, First Edition 1988 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 0835606279.

‘Adventures in Higher Thought! Probes Mind and Beyond’!

This book explores Mystical Consciousness, Intuition, Holism, Dreaming, Memory, Bio-Feedback, Brain Rhythms, Information Processing, Mind-Brain Interface. Smith shows how ancient seers and Eastern mystics already have reached greater Wisdom through higher states of consciousness. Whole truth, he reasons, generally available only to a person, who has made considerable progress in spiritual living and reached the higher self inside each one of us.

From the Epilogue:

” If a worldly person were to ask me if I believe in reincarnation, I should be tempted to answer, ‘No, what you regard as yourself will not reincarnate.’ It is the inner being, barely recognized through a worldly life, that returns. Thus, we may say that the personality is immortal, though not everlasting, since it persists for a while after death. The individuality, the transpersonal spiritual nature, is everlasting though not eternal, since it persists through a long series of incarnations. Only the Spirit, the divine nature, of which we are as yet only dimly aware, is eternal. It abides quiescent in its timeless realm, until we are ready to return to the Source whence we came, following in the footsteps of men like the Buddha and the Christ. “