Dancing Rhythms

"Everything in the universe
has a rhythm,
everything
dances."

- Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014)

Cosmic Journey

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey — stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. But the expressions of life are ephemeral, momentary, transient. Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, once said, This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, Rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment, but it is transient. It is a little parenthesis in eternity. If we share with caring, lightheartedness, and love, we will create abundance and joy for each other. And then this moment will have been worthwhile."

- Deepak Chopra (1946 - )

Organs of Perception

"The time has come to realize
that supersensible knowledge has
now to arise from the
materialistic grave.

...

Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.

...

Whoever seeks higher knowledge
must create it for himself.
He must instill it
into his soul. "

- Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925)

Altered State of Consciousness

"Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an [altered state of consciousness] ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. 

The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. 

Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. 

As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the 'principle of parsimony,' Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like 'Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily' or 'Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.' The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the 'primitives' who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious."

- Rick Strassman (1952 - )
 Inner Paths to Outer Space

Silent Knowledge

"Silent knowledge is the deep, innate wisdom that is in all things. It comes from the interconnectedness of all beings and creatures. It is the wisdom of the universe. For instance, if you've ever simply known the answer to a question without any logical way that your brain could have discovered it—like when a mother can feel that her child is in danger or when you know the moment a relative transitions into death—this is all silent knowledge. It is the universal wisdom that has always been at our fingertips, but that we often neglect to tap into, either because we don't know or have forgotten how."

- Don Jose Ruiz
Wisdom of the Shamans

Pattern of Information

"Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many unique, recursively constructed parts.

...

If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to—and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.

...

We are each just one temporary instance of life on this planet—a pattern of information structuring matter across billions of years."

- Sara Imari Walker
Life as No One Knows It

Celestial Hues

"I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's 'Dream') at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume."

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Swann’s Way

Nature's Elegance #2

"What is especially striking and remarkable
is that in fundamental physics a
beautiful or elegant theory is
more likely to be right
than a theory that
is inelegant."

- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)

Experimental Writing

"Some arts move in time, like music; others are presented in space, like painting. In both cases the organizing principle is recurrence, which is called rhythm when it is temporal and pattern when it is spatial. Thus we speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern of painting; but later, to show off our sophistication, we may begin to speak of the rhythm of painting and the pattern of music. In other words, all arts may be conceived both temporally and spatially. The score of a musical composition may be studied all at once; a picture may be seen as the track of an intricate dance of the eye. Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting: its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds at one of its boundaries and form patterns which approach the hieroglyphic or pictorial image at the other. The attempts to get as near to these boundaries as possible form the main body of what is called experimental writing. We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative, and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we 'see' what he means."

- Northrop Frye (1912 - 1991)

Enfolded Mysteries

"That we do not construct the external world to suit our own ends in the pursuit of science, but that vice versa the external world forces itself upon our recognition with its own elemental power, is a point which ought to be categorically asserted again and again.

...

From the fact that in studying the happenings of nature we strive to eliminate the contingent and accidental and to come fully to what is essential and necessary, it is clear that we always look for the basic thing behind the dependent thing, for what is absolute behind what is relative, for the reality behind the appearance and for what abides behind what is transitory.

...

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. Music and art are, to an extent, also attempts to solve or at least to express the mystery. But to my mind, the more we progress with either, the more we are brought into harmony with all nature itself.

...

If you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change."

- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Mystagogic Objects

"If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.

...

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

...

The universe is mystagogic."

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)
Fragments

Non-Mechanical Reality

"Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter."

- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe

Limits of Perception

"The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which crisscross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it."

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

Expecting, Hoping, Wishing for - Ice...

"Anyone who keeps the ability to
see beauty never grows old."

- Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)

...and savoring nature's bountiful beauty in its absence. Each year around this time I look forward to going out to one of our local parks in Northern Virginia to do some "ice abstracting," as I like to call it (e.g., see my Jan 2024, Feb 2023, and Dec 2022 posts). Unfortunately, while this year's winter has only barely started, there have thus far been precious few contiguous days of below-freezing weather to yield any "ice" beyond what might be barely visible with a microscope. So, as the Northern VA/Wash-DC region braces for its first major winter storm of the season (along with a sizeable chunk of the entire country), and as temperatures have dropped precipitously due to the polar vortex blanketing our neck of the woods, I looked forward to my first "ice abstracting" photo session of the year this morning. I grabbed a mug of hot coffee, bundled up as if trekking to the Himalayas (it was 17 deg/F when I woke up), threw my camera in the car (gently, but urgently), and raced to Burke Lake. Only to find this: 

Beautiful - indeed, extremely, delightfully, joyously beautiful - but no ice! None, nada. To be sure, I could make out (barely) a few feathery strands of quarter-mm-sized icicles adhering to tiny twigs along the shore, but there was no real ice of any worth to compose with (such as in this Jan 2023 portfolio). I must admit there was a part of me that just wanted to get right back into my car, head home, and dive into a warm bed (17 deg/F temperatures tend to have this effect on me more often now than when I was decades younger). But, it is in the nature of every photographer, young or old, experienced or just starting out (or perhaps just trying to figure out what it takes to become more "experienced"), to clear your head of preconceived wishes and expectations and just revel in the beauty that surrounds us always. (This being said, I still want to do some ice abstracting! 😊)

Uncalculable Boundaries

"Einstein once wrote, 'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.'

...

By the 'mysterious,' I do not think Einstein was referring to something fearful or supernatural. I believe he was speaking about the boundary between the known and the unknown. Standing at that boundary is an exhilarating experience. And it is a deeply human experience—concerning what the human mind understands and what that mind does not yet understand.

...

Evidently, the fundamental laws

of nature do not pin down a

single and unique universe.

According to the current thinking

of many physicists, we are

living in one of a vast number of universes.

We are living in an accidental universe.

We are living in a universe uncalculable by science."

- Alan Lightman (1948 - )
The Accidental Universe