Thinking Is the Best Way to Travel

About the Book

The American philosopher Charles Hartshorne once remarked, “The great adventures of my life have been books.” The adventures of ideas last for a lifetime, even for someone who enjoys exceptional longevity, as did Hartshorne, who lived to the age of 103. These essays express some of the adventures I’ve enjoyed with books, ideas, and the thinkers behind them.

The division into four sections, symbolized by the four elements—Air, Earth, Water, and Fire—is perhaps more intuitive than cerebral, but there is method nonetheless.

In Part One, the clear air of reason provides room, and ground, for adventurous flights of imagination and, especially in the Goethe piece, a cleansing, or better, a transformation of the windows of perception.

Part Two is more down-to-earth and invites participation in several practical adventures or techniques for cultivating mental and spiritual faculties and growing in consciousness.

Water is one of our richest metaphors that finds protean expression in the path of spirituality, explored in Part Three, as well as in all great literature and in the other arts.

Part Four concerns the liberating and refining fire of philosophy, namely the adventurous frontier of process philosophy, as first conceived and clearly formulated by Alfred North Whitehead, further developed by Charles Hartshorne, and now carried robustly forward by the worldwide community of process thinkers and scholars.

About the Author

Hyatt Carter is a licensed counselor, a writer/editor, and a lifelong scholar with a wide spectrum of interests. He is a longtime member of Founder’s Center for Positive Spirituality and served for four years on the Board of Trustees there. He is assistant editor of The Word, a publication now in its 54th year, and co-editor, along with philosopher Randall Auxier, of Charles Hartshorne’s The Unity of Being, a new book that will be published soon by Open Court.

His fields of expertise include process philosophy, Zen Buddhism, positive psychology, and contemplative spirituality. Three of the essays in this volume are longer versions of papers he presented at national conventions. In the spirit of serious play, or maybe four-play, he continues to add to his ever-growing collection of what he calls Meta-Fours—significant and sometimes amusing ways in which the archetypal number four seems to turn up all over the place, such as in his personal slogan: May the fours be with you!

For the last twenty years he and his wife Linda have lived in the seaside community of Marina del Rey, California.