Sophia's Web : Understanding the Unity and Diversity of Religion, Science and Ourselves

The universe is akin to a multi-dimensional cube. Each point in this cube mirrors and reveals itself as every other point. In the language of chaos theory, Nature repeats Herself. It is in capturing this mirroring function of Nature that I wrote "Sophia's Web." As the book will show, when we listen to a favorite myth, the story being told tells us something about ourselves. It mirrors our lives. Furthermore, the book shows that the various religions, in all their wonderful diversities, mirror one another.

This repeating, or mirroring, action of Nature is also evident in our metaphors. For example, it is often common for us to say, "I conceived this idea," or "This idea is my baby," in linking the creative process of mind to the feminine function of giving birth. In other words, the power and beauty of metaphor is to capture the repeating functions of Nature. What happens in the mind happens in our bodies and in our love lives. Nature repeats Herself.

In reading "Sophia's Web," it is hoped the reader will begin to link her, or his, self to the cosmos as a whole. Towards this end, the book is aligned with the verb definition of "religion," "to connect again." In other words, the book is designed to help the reader obtain a sense of his or her wholeness.

Burl Hall is a single 45 year old man who currently works within the field of mental health. He has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in Psychology, and a Master's degree from Towson State University in Counseling Psychology. Burl is currently employed as a mental health therapist is Virginia.

Burl's interest in the Goddess has been life-long. Even as a child, he had a deep love and awe for Her. This love is eternally passionate. Burl describes it as a longing for home, much in the fashion of the journeyman, Odysseus, longs for his wife, Penelope, meaning, "She Whose Face is Veiled." This passionate quest for Home for Burl has included visions of the Goddess as a five-year-old child, and a falling in love with Her, as Athena, or Wisdom, at the age of seven. Intuitively, Burl realized Wisdom as a Woman due to Her ability to give birth to thought, to insight.

In the spring of 1992, Burl began having a series of dreams in which his childhood Goddess-friend reappeared. He realized the Woman whom he envisioned in the dreams was the Goddess. Indeed, he realized it was She who created the dreams and Her image. The image became realized as a projected form serving as a metaphor for a power that had no form. Image described function. It was at this point that Burl began to contemplate that the bodies of women and men describe universal processes. This insight was the fathering impulse for the conception of his current book, Sophia's Web.

Burl has never felt any particular religion was right, or THE WAY. The Way for him involves creative process and not dogma. As such, it became a driving force for him to realize the unity of all religions. This unity he knew intuitively in his heart. It was as if God had planted this knowledge in Burl's Soul. In his adulthood, it sprang forth from his depths as a tree sprouts from the Earth's womb.

It was this idea that attracted Burl to the physics of David Bohm and his theory of the Unmanifest Implicate Order. What has yet to unfold in our surface minds awaits birth from within its implied state, existing within us. As an egg exists in a woman's ovaries as a potential child, it appeared to Burl that knowledge of the universe's Wisdom existed as a potential within the Soul awaiting for the correct and fertile time in which it could emerge. It thus appeared to Burl that Bohm's theories mirrored ancient ideas about the Goddess. Physics had married the Divine Wisdom, Sophia. His book is a celebration of this marriage. Want to join the festivities?