The Rev. Dr. Harry L. Serio is a minister in the United Church of Christ. His fourth book, Gray Matter, Dark Matter, and Doesn’t Matter was recently published by Wipf and Stock Publishers and is now available.
Serio is a frequent lecturer and workshop leader in the areas of archaeology, spirituality, and the arts and meditation. He is the director of the Spiritual Exploration Project in Reading, Pennsylvania. Serio is past-president of the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies and is the author of The Dwelling Place of Wonder, The Mysticism of Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience, and The Other Side of Memory.
This is a brief description of his latest book from the Preface:
What are the limits of human cognition? How do we know anything? Who we are, what we do, who we interact with, where we live, what we read, what we watch on television, indeed our exposure to the world around us affects how we think and how we make sense of our environment. The world is inside of our brains. Our gray matter contains all of our memories and enables the past to affect our future. What we remember shapes who we are.
Scientists are investigating the dark matter of the universe which supposedly comprises 85% of all that is. When Carl Jung posed the idea of a collective unconscious, I am not so sure that it is limited to the aggregation of human minds. When we speak of God, how do we define what or who God is? God may very well be a universal consciousness that pervades all that is. Our individual experiences may be part of a universal whole affecting the entirety of creation.
The title of this book includes the words “Doesn’t Matter,” but in a sense, everything matters. Everything that appears insignificant, irrelevant, and doesn’t matter has an effect upon the universe, and we may not know what it is until the eschaton, the final conclusion of all that is, if indeed there will be an end. Or just another beginning.
This book contains a series of essays that have some relevance to my own life and to my relationship with others. Some may not matter to the reader, but all relate to some aspect of our mutual existence.
There will be opportunities for program presentations, discussions, and book signings.
