Transpersonal Experiences

"The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole."

- Stanislav Grof (1931 - )
The Holotropic Mind

Liquid Vortex

"My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
And thine doth like a convict sit,
With marline-spike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying,
Wherein they fancy intersperses
Long avenues of universes,
While Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one finite, unbounded homoloid,
And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed. "

- James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879)

Hypertelescopic Imagination

"But in truth the eternal spirit was ineffable. Nothing whatever could be truly said about it. Even to name it "spirit" was perhaps to say more than was justified. Yet to deny it that name would be no less mistaken; for whatever it was, it was more, not less, than spirit, more, not less, than any possible human meaning of that word. And from the human level, even from the level of a cosmical mind, this "more," obscurely and agonizingly glimpsed, was a dread mystery, compelling adoration.

...

Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet’s dark side a hill, and on that hill myself.

...

For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself. I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite.

...

For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Star Maker

Folded and Hidden

"The greatest lessons of nature are the lessons of the fresh, eternal qualities of being: The variety and freedom, the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality—each toward all and nothing supersedes the rest;

That eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all nature; The indefinable hard something that is the old heroic stamina of nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, to proceed with single purpose toward the result necessitated, and for which the time has arrived.

...

What is nature but change, in all its visible, and still more its invisible processes? Nature keeps up her long and harmless throes, her vital, copious, eternal procession, An infinite number of currents and forces, and contributions, and temperatures, and cross-purposes, Whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality

...
I fully believe in a clue and purpose in nature,

Enfolding itself all processes of growth,
effusing life and power, for hidden purposes.

The sun and stars that float in the open air,

The apple-shaped earth and we upon it,

Earth’s soil, trees, winds,

Waters that encompass us, tumultuous waves—

Surely the drift of them is something grand,

The purport of objective nature is doubtless folded, hidden, somewhere here;

I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
Nature, Containing All

Divisible Space

"We are not to consider the world as the body of God, or the several parts thereof as the parts of God. He is a uniform Being, void of organs, members or parts,...being everywhere present to the things themselves. And since space is divisible in infinitum, and matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures, and in several proportions of space, and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of Nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction in this."

- Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)

Note. The triptych contains "quick grabs" (using my iPhone) of the skylights near Gate 4 of the Bangor, Maine airport while waiting for our plane to return back home (to Northern VA) after viewing the total eclipse on April 8. While I did not take any images of the eclipse (I just wanted to just "be in the moment"), the little black spheres in the skylight reminded me a little of that experience and caught my eye 😊 

Hallucinatory Character of the World

"Let us admit what all the idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us look for unrealities that confirm that character. We will find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.

...

We have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)