The Cosmic Vision of Zoltan Torey (Think About This #59)
by Megan CaterFor the past seventeen years, EnlightenNext magazine has been seeking out individuals who are breaking the boundaries of human potential. For Issue 35 (2007), we interviewed Zoltan Torey, an extraordinary man who dedicated his life to understanding the nature of consciousness after a tragic accident at a chemical plant left him blind and barely alive. Torey spoke about his heroic struggle for life and the cosmic vision that came to him late one night in a Sydney hospital bed:
The world was in a ghastly situation, and here I was in this hospital room concerned with my own recovery? As the night wore on, my reflections deepened. I thought, “Instead of asking what God and the universe can do for me, why don’t I ask what I can do for God and the universe?” In my mind I began to review everything I understood about evolution. I knew that the universe began with this big bang, that everything we can see today was condensed in a single mathematical point. So, in a sense, we are the expanded form of this initial condition that appears to have a natural tendency to generate awareness, insight, and complexity from within. I came to the conclusion that there was an unmistakable directionality in all this. I even began to perceive good and evil, not in a religious sense but in the sense of promoting or retarding this grand process.
Zoltan Torey’s book The Crucible of Consciousness has just been published in the U.S. To download an MP3 recording of our interview with Torey, click here.
For our 
What does it mean to be a man? Strong and brave? Sensitive and sweet? Unfortunately, this is a question that gets little attention in the public sphere today, leaving so many of us gentlemen unenlightened. In my experience, growing up in a solidly progressive area of the US (the Pacific Northwest) during the 80s and 90s, I had many clear ideas about what a man shouldn’t be — aggressive, insensitive, brash, and arrogant — but very few explicit examples of what a real, progressive, post-traditional man should look like. It was this particular lack of clarity that led us to explore the current state of masculinity and where it might be going in the future for the Aug-Oct issue of EnlightenNext magazine (formerly What Is Enlightenment?), titled “
That’s why it was so refreshing to read 
I remember very clearly the first issue of 
After years of eager anticipation, we’re pleased to finally welcome 
