The book describes the healing now offered to us as individuals and as an earth community when the recent transformative discoveries made by scientists are explored together with the experiences and insights of some of the great mystics. The discoveries of our unfathomably long origin story and the discovery by quantum physicists of the unseen, energetic interiority of the very matter of our bodies and the natural world are explored within the context of the mystical traditions. Important commonalities of insight are offered. These discoveries can be profoundly healing as the author describes based on her personal experience. We can embrace the depth of our belonging within our emerging understanding of ourselves and the natural world. The book includes several paintings by the author.

Excerpt from the September 2024 essay

At the memorial service of a friend the family gave us a small booklet that had some photographs and stories about her life. It was a pleasure to learn more about her as I had known her only in her later years. Remembering this, I decided to write a few stories about my life in New York City, Buenos Aires and now in Cambridge, MA. However, I have recently understood something more compelling that needs to be written. The story I want to tell is about the consequences of the family tragedy that profoundly affected my life. It is also a story of the spiritual awakening that changed me forever but about which I had no understanding. I write to share my exploration of the long-hidden consequences of that tragedy and the search which was provoked by spiritual experience… Read full essay

“Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood goes a long way toward healing the duality our culture has perceived between science and religion. This story helps us reconcile our will to know with our belief that there is a larger whole of which we are an essential, intrinsic part. Mary’s book can help us find our voice in a challenging time through claiming our larger identity. I have feelings of deep gratitude for the work that Mary Coelho has done. As I have read it I am sometimes moved to tears as it confirms what my heart has known all along. Mary’s gift is that she is at home in the scientific venture but she is patient and careful as she demystifies the language and learning of its quantum pioneers.”

—Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis, OP, co-founder of Genesis Farm, Earth Literacy Center, New Jersey

Many times as I was reading, I thought of the unnameable people in the future who will be served, touched, guided, inspired by her insights, scholarship, intuition and vision. Mary Coelho has created a guidebook for every serious contemplation of the cultural and spiritual significance of contemporary science. A distinguished and vibrant work integrating science and spirituality in ways directly relevant to contemporary society’s deepest challenges. Your book is awesome and, I believe, unique to the epic of evolution movement.

—Brian Swimme, California Institute Integral Studies, Director of the Center for the Story of the Universe

When the Presence breaks through into our lives, how do we understand it, when in the West we are caught between often seemingly contradictory ways of understanding the world offered by science and by religious tradition?

—Mary Conrow Coelho