Park Teter

   Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1934, Daniel Park Teter was awarded “Honors with Exceptional Distinction” when he graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1956. As a child shocked by Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, he had planned a career working against war. Yale was to be followed by study abroad… then five or six years in the Foreign Service… then politics. But in 1958, when a Swedish beauty broke his heart, he “threw my career to the winds.” He dropped out the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research and hitch-hiked to Lebanon.

Wars, he reassured his conscience, do not begin in Congress or the Kremlin; they begin in the human heart. Perhaps in a different civilization, he told himself, he could find “an education of my ignorant heart.” Then he could reach the warring hearts of others by writing poetry and fiction.

His education began sooner than expected. While crossing Greece he learned from a bakery-truck driver that Lebanon had erupted in war.

Because Lebanon’s frontier was closed, he had to fly the last sixty miles from Damascus to Beirut. There he taught Western Civilization at the American University of Beirut.

      And he married an Iranian student. She was to give birth to two sons… and further “education of my heart.”

      Because of immigration problems, they were married in Canada. There Teter began a career in journalism as an editorial writer for the Toronto Globe and Mail. When they moved to Washington, he became news editor at Congressional Quarterly.

      From 1965 to 1967 Teter was the University of Pennsylvania's Adviser in Humanities at a university in Shiraz, Iran, a city famous for its roses, its nightingales, and the poets Hafez and Saadi. The next year he evaluated U.S. Peace Corps programs in Iran, Morocco, and Afghanistan.

      From 1968 to 1973, at the University of Chicago and at Princeton, he studied psychological changes in Europe during The Scientific Revolution of the 16th-17th centuries. In the age of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton he sought the origins of two Western attitudes he felt were needed in non-Western cultures caught in an earthquake of change: 1) a passion for objectivity; 2) a willingness to abandon sacred beliefs.

       Teter was then forced to abandon his own sacred belief, his Western belief in an objective physical universe, by a coincidence. He violated his own passionate commitment to rationality by “superstitious” concentration on producing a chance meeting with a troubled woman he loved. When that chance meeting took place he knew, inwardly, that it was not chance. That knowledge opened his life to floods of amazing coincidences that no rational person would attribute to chance.

      Teter discovered that coincidences can be rationally explained by a new scientific paradigm that recognizes that we create physical facts in the same way that we create dream images. Since 1973, Teter has been exploring that paradigm’s revolutionary consequences for science, religion, society, and personal life.

While writing books he supported himself by part-time work for the Los Angeles Times – Washington Post News Service and by free-lance writing on topics like “Iran Between East and West” (Congressional Quarterly/Editorial Research Reports, Jan. 26, 1979), “Future Shock in Iran” (Washington Post Outlook, Dec. 10, 1978), “Princeton-Pennsylvania Accelerator: End of an Era in Particle Physics,” Science, July 2, 1971)

He combined a journalist's immersion in public affairs with years of reading, reflection, writing, and rewriting in the solitudes of a Lake Superior lighthouse, a Virginia farmhouse, a Rocky Mountain cabin, a cottage by a Danish fjord, and a ranch near the Pacific.

      Teter’s discoveries are summarized in The Revolution of the Species, and analyzed in greater depth in The Adventure. The story of the discoveries, and their application to private and public life, is recounted in The Personal Universe: A True Story of Passionate Love and Revolutionary Science.

      Teter has also written a novel, (The Trial of God), two plays (The Winter War, Satan II), a book of poetry (Paper Wings) and a collection of bumper stickers (Bumper Thinkers). The novel and stage plays will be rewritten as screenplays for popular feature movies.

      All of these works, Teter explains, express “a revolution of consciousness that will replace the insanity of war with awakening, at last, to the adventure for which we exist.”