Organic Unfoldment

"Photography! 

Summation of the life experience

Exquisite focal point of all being

Aromatic distillation

Inmost

And ultimate

Light.

From out of darkness

Ascending, once again

God alone.

Photography?

Realization,

Identity,

My religion of

Organic Infoldment.

Spatiously

In the lap of

Mother alone

Full blown as a rose,

Organic Unfoldment."

- Edmund Teske (1911 - 1996)

Revere What is Unknowable

"Science of nature has one goal:

To find both manyness and whole.

Nothing 'inside' or 'Out There,'

The 'outer' world is all 'In Here.'

This mystery grasp without delay,

This secret always on display.

The true illusion celebrate,

Be joyful in the serious game!

No living thing lives separate:

One and Many are the same."

...

We can never directly see

what is true, that is, identical with

what is divine: we look at it

only in reflection, in example,

in the symbol, in individual

and related phenomena.

We perceive it as a life

beyond our grasp,

yet we cannot deny

our need to grasp it.

...

The highest achievement

of the human being

as a thinking being is to

have probed what is

knowable and quietly to

revere what is unknowable."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Goethe on Science

Confrontation With Mystery

"That everything may be conceived as an illusion does not exclude the concept that all illusion is reality. Any aspect of it can be considered reality or illusion. Illusion is the game we artists play (and sleight of hand as well)... this confrontation with mystery exists all the time. Mystery, power, and the concept of going beyond one's corporeal reality. If you can't expand beyond your own limitations physically then it becomes attractive to expand your own limitations by way of mental process, spirituality, or mysticism. Mysticism is on display everywhere."

- Bruce Conner (1933 - 2008)

The Unaccountable Truth

"...to 'listen' is to be in a position where hearing is impossible--or deceptive. It is the wrong kind of listening: listening for a limited message, an objective sound, a sensible meaning. Actually one decides one's life by responding to a word that is not well defined, easily explicable, safely accounted for. One decides to love in the face of an unaccountable void, and from the void comes an unaccountable truth. By this truth one's existence is sustained in peace--until the truth is too firmly grasped and too clearly accounted for. Then one is relying on words, i.e., on one's own understanding and one's own ingenuity in interpreting existence and its "signs." Then one is lost and has to be found once again in the patient Void."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Existence Itself

"If you awaken from this illusion,

and you understand that

black implies white,

self implies other,

life implies death.

You can feel yourself,

not as a stranger in the world,

not as something here on probation,

not as something that has

arrived here by fluke,

but you can begin to feel

your own existence as

absolutely fundamental.

What you are basically,

deep, deep down,

far, far in,

is simply the fabric

and structure of

existence itself."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

What You See

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Limits of Perception

"Phenomena unfold on their own appropriate scales of space and time and may be invisible in our myopic world of dimensions assessed by comparison with human height and times metered by human lifespans. So much of accumulating importance at earthly scales ... is invisible by the measuring rod of a human life. So much that matters to particles in the microscopic world of molecules ... either averages out to stability at our scale or simply stands below our limits of perception. "

-  Stephen Jay Gould (1941 - 2002)