Plural Monism

"Monism allows for no such things as 'other occasions' in reality—in real or absolute reality, that is. The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more than the difference between what I formerly called the each−form and the all−form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each−form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all−form or collective−unit form is the only form that is rational. The all−form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co−implicated. In the each−form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. It is thus at all times in many possible connexions which are not necessarily actualized at the moment.

...

Here, then, you have the plain alternative, and the full mystery of the difference between pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can set it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a nutshell:—Is the manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you must postulate that one−enormous−whole indivisibly as the prius of there being any many at all—in other words, start with the rationalistic block−universe, entire, unmitigated, and complete?—or can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in oneness, and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued into one another by intermediary terms—each one of these terms being one with its next neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never getting absolutely complete?

...

Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully co−ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world may, in the last resort, be a block−universe; but on the other hand it may be a universe only strung−along, not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
A Pluralistic Universe

Unfolding Forms

"The essential order of movement is not that of an object translating itself from one place to another, but rather, it is a folding and unfolding, in which the object is continually being created again, in a form generally similar to what it was, though different in detail. The explicate order of movement of the object is thus not independent, substantial, and self-existent. We suggest instead that it is an appearance, abstracted from the implicate order, on which it depends and from which it derives its whole form and set of characteristic relationships.

...

What all this means is that the flux of the holomovement is the implicate source of all forms, both physical and mental. That is to say, the whole of existence, including inanimate matter, living organisms, and ‘mind,’ arises in a single ground, in which these are all enfolded, or contained implicitly. 

...

It is clear that, in this view, living organisms are to be regarded as particular manifestations of what is ultimately enfolded in the inward depths of the holomovement. We are suggesting here that a living organism has a more direct contact with what is thus enfolded in the holomovement than does inanimate matter. [...] One can appropriately call the holomovement the life energy, which is the ground that ultimately creates and sustains all matter and all mind, as two relatively autonomous and independent streams that may move in parallel."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
The Implicate or Enfolded Order
Quoted from Chapter 1 in Mind in Nature: the Interface of Science and Philosophy

Forces Eternal

 "Here doth Nature close the ring of her forces eternal;
Yet doth a new one, at once, cling to the one gone before,
So that the chain be prolonged for ever through all generations,

And that the whole may have life, e'en as enjoyed by each part.
Now, my beloved one, turn thy gaze on the many-hued thousands
Which, confusing no more, gladden the mind as they wave.
Every plant unto thee proclaimeth the laws everlasting.
Every floweret speaks louder and louder to thee."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
 The Metamorphosis of Plants

Unreal Things

 "Unreal things have a reality of
their own, in poetry as elsewhere.
We do not hesitate, in poetry,
to yield ourselves to the unreal,
when it is possible to
yield ourselves."

- Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

Photographer's note. There is an amusing story behind this image, which I took with my iPhone yesterday after my wife, our eldest son, and I finished dinner at a local Nepalese restaurant. As we were waiting for the bill to arrive, I was transfixed by what looked like - to my eye, anyway - a mountainous dune-like vista (such as we had recently seen during our visit to Death Valley, CA). In "reality" this is nothing but a three foot section of wall near the ceiling, with the play of light owing itself to some light fixtures on the ceiling itself (which I cropped out of the image you see above). The "amusing" part is that while I was transfixed by the real-but-unreal dunes (and took a few loooong moments, as I usually do, to get the composition just right), our waiter was politely waiting by our table, equally transfixed by my fascination with what - to him - was nothing but peeling paint on a wall that needed repair! Indeed, when I was finished and approached our table to sit back down, I heard the tail end of a conversation that ensued behind my back between our waiter and my wife. My wife was explaining (as she has done countless times before in similar scenarios) that I "see the world a bit differently," even as our waiter kept apologizing for not having yet "fixed" the wall. Light, shadow, texture, reflection, paint, wall in need of repair, or dunes in the desert, ... which of these are "real" and which imagined? And what of the infinite other Borgesian worlds left unperceived and unexplored? Seeing the world differently, indeed 😊

Thoughtful Imbibing

"Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

...

Aside I turn to the holy,
unspeakable, mysterious Night.

...

In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents."

- Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night 

Luminous Eddy

"The birth and death of the leaves are the
rapid whirls of the eddy whose
wider circles move slowly
among stars."

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Another Vision

"We must close our eyes and
invoke a new manner of seeing, a
wakefulness that is the birthright of us all,
though few put it to use.

...

What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birthright of all, which few turn to use.

...

Never did eye see the sun unless
it had first become sun-like,
and never can the soul have vision of
the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)

Scenery of Spring

 "In the scenery of spring,
nothing is better, nothing worse;
The flowering branches are

of themselves, some short,
some long."

- Ryōkan (1758 - 1831)

Cosmic Soul

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

...

It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. [...] It is even conceivable that every creative advance that any mind has ever made involves unwitting co-operation with the cosmic mind which, perhaps, will awake at some date before the End.

...

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Last and First Men and Star Maker

Shitao's Yihua

"On a windy, rainy, spring day, I am happy I have no visitors; my hand is free, my mind relaxed and cleansed. The ancients called it yihua, the 'single stroke': a thousand hills, ten thousand valleys, people, bamboo, trees, a single brushstroke and all is completed. On one level, yihua constitutes a very practical concept: a complete design begins and finishes with the single brushstroke. On a metaphysical level, it suggests that 'myriad strokes are reunited in oneness' through the mind and hand of the artist and through the artist's spiritual communion with nature."

- Shitao (642–1707)