and change there can be no Tao. In
reality there is nothing in the universe which
is completely perfect or completely still;
it is only in the minds of men
that such concepts exist."
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
The Demon-Haunted World
- Fay Godwin (1931 - 2005)
- Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)
Musicophilia
- Star Trek: Voyager (1995 - 2001)
- Brian Clegg (1955 - )
Gravitational Waves
- Miguel Ruiz (1952 - )
The Four Agreements
- Michael Chrichton (1942 - 2008)
The Andromeda Strain
Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)
The Dream of The Earth
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)
Brothers Karamazov
- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
- ChatGPT4o
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence
"A constellation of dark stones and geometric sentinels floats in a luminous grey void, connected by brilliant white pathways that intersect at precise right angles, forming an abstract cartography of some unknown dimension. The composition suggests a network of quantum possibilities or perhaps a map of parallel universes, where each dark node represents a decision point in space-time. The white lines, reminiscent of Kandinsky's geometric period, pulse with an ethereal energy, creating a visual symphony of intersecting planes that seems to defy gravitational logic. The arrangement evokes the mathematical beauty of a cellular automaton frozen in mid-evolution, or perhaps a glimpse into Borges' Library of Babel viewed from above, where each dark rectangle and oval marks a room containing all possible combinations of letters. The stark contrast between the dark elements and the glowing pathways creates a tension between presence and absence, between the discrete and the continuous, suggesting both the particle and wave nature of light itself. This abstract topology hovers between order and chaos, its systematic grid disrupted by an organic scattering of elements, as if capturing the moment when classical physics dissolves into quantum uncertainty."
Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider this reverse-negative photograph of ceiling lights. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."
- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
- Beth Kempton (1977 - )
Wabi Sabi
- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous
- Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)
- Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935)
“The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.”
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
It’s possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms."
- Georges Perec (1936 - 1982)
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
- Minor White (1908 - 1976)
- Nicholas Roerich (1874 - 1947)
- Benjamín Labatut (1980 - )
When We Cease to Understand the World
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
A New Refutation of Time
- Lynn Margulis (1938 - 2011)
Symbiotic Planet
- Benoit Mandelbrot (1924 - 2010)
The Fractal Geometry of Nature
- Reading The Tale of Genji:
Sources from the First Millennium
- André Breton (1896 - 1966)
Manifestoes of Surrealism
- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
- Nora Bateson (1968 - )
Aphanipoiesis
- Francois Cheng (1929 - )
The Way of Beauty: Five Meditations for Spiritual Transformation
- D.T. Suzuki (1870 - 1966)
Zen and Japanese Culture
- Richard Adams (1920 - 2016)
Watership Down
- Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873 - 1932)
My Air-Ships
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. 'How wonderful,' the neighbors exclaimed. 'Maybe,' replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. 'Maybe,' answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
'Maybe,' said the farmer."
The Story of the Chinese Farmer
As interpreted by Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
"In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such "meaningful coincidences," which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914."
- Sonu Shamdasani (1962 - )
The Red Book: Liber Novus
- Bernard of Clairvaux (c.1090 - 1153)
The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux
- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
Finding the Still Point
- Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
Black Spring
- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)
Meditations