Fathomless Becoming

"As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,

Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,

Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me
I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,

But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me
stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,

Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,

With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,

Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing,
not a single object, and that no man ever can,

Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me
to dart upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.
...

Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,

Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,

From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,

Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,

Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,

A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random,

Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,

Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,

We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,

You up there walking or sitting,

Whoever you are, we
too be in drifts
at your feet."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
"As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life" in Leaves of Grass

Elemental Exchange

"The mountain range
the stones in the water
all are strange and rare
The beautiful landscape
as we know
belongs to those who are like it
The upper worlds
the lower worlds
originally are one thing
There is not a bit of dust
there is only this still and full
perfect enlightenment.
...
Without a speck of dust being raised,
the mountains tower up;
without a single drop falling,
the streams plunge into the valley."

- Muso Soseki (1275 – 1351)

Indra’s Pool

"In one single mote of dust
Are completely seen all worlds.
If living beings should hear about them,
Their minds would be confused and go insane.

As within a single mote of dust,

So, too, it is in every mote of dust.

All world-systems enter within them.

It is in that way inconceivable.

In every particle of dust

Are Dharmas of the ten directions and three times.

The destinies and kshetras are all limitless,

Yet can be known with all their differences.

In every particle of dust

Are limitless kinds of Buddha kshetras.

Of their various kinds, all limitless,

Not a single one remains unknown.

Everything within the Dharma realm,

With all the varying characteristics

And types of destinies, each having differences,
Can all be discerned and known."

- Indra's Net / Avatamsaka Sutra
(late third or the fourth century CE)

Shared Essence

"The spiritual source shines clear in the light;

the branching streams flow on in the dark.

Grasping at things is surely delusion;

according with sameness is still not enlightenment.

All the objects of the senses

interact and yet do not.

Interacting brings involvement.

Otherwise, each keeps its place.

Sights vary in quality and form,

sounds differ as pleasing or harsh.

Refined and common speech come together in the dark,

clear and murky phrases are distinguished in the light.

The four elements return to their natures

just as a child turns to its mother.

Fire heats, wind moves,

water wets, earth is solid.

Thus with each and every thing,

depending on these roots, the leaves spread forth.

Trunk and branches share the essence;

revered and common, each has its speech.

...

In the light there is darkness,

but don’t take it as darkness;

in the dark there is light,

but don’t see it as light.

Light and dark oppose one another

like front and back foot in walking.

Each of the myriad things has its merit,

expressed according to function and place.

Phenomena exist, like box and lid joining;

principle accords, like arrow points meeting."

- Shitou Xiqian (700–790)

Inward Form

"The whole outward visible World with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward Spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, likewise it has its Character externally; like as Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.

...

The Being of Beings is a wrestling Power; for the Kingdom of God consists in Power, and also the outward World, and it stands especially in seven Properties or Forms, where the one causes and makes the other, and none of them is the first or last, but it is the eternal Band.

...

This Formed world has manifested itself with the motion of all forms with this visible world, as with a visible likeness, so that the Spiritual being might be manifest in a corporeal comprehensive essence; as the desire of the inward forms has made itself external, and the internal being is in the external; the internal holds the external before it as a glass, wherein it beholds itself in the property of the generation of all forms; the external is its signature."

- Jakob Böhme (1575–1624)
The Signature of All Things

Living Pattern

"Thou art confused, my beloved, at seeing the thousandfold union

Shown in this flowery troop over the garden dispersed;

Many a name dost thou hear assigned; one after another

Falls on thy listening ear, with a barbarian sound.

None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness;

Therefore a mystical law is by the chorus proclaimed;

Yes, a sacred enigma! Oh, dearest friend, could I only

Happily teach thee the word, which may the mystery solve!

Closely observe how the plant, by little and little progressing,

Step by step guided on, changeth to blossom and fruit!

...

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;

But if thou here canst decipher the mystic words of the goddess,

Everywhere will they be seen, e’en though the features are changed."

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

Woven Becoming

"When we seek definitely to express the relations of events which arise from their spatio-temporal structure, we approximate to simplicity by progressively diminishing the extent (both temporal and spatial) of the events considered. For example, the event which is the life of the chunk of nature which is the Needle during one minute has to the life of nature within a passing barge during the same minute a very complex spatio-temporal relation. But suppose we progressively diminish the time considered to a second, to a hundredth of a second, to a thousandth of a second, and so on. As we pass along such a series we approximate to an ideal simplicity of structural relations of the pairs of events successively considered, which ideal we call the spatial relations of the Needle to the barge at some instant. Even these relations are too complicated for us, and we consider smaller and smaller bits of the Needle and of the barge. Thus we finally reach the ideal of an event so restricted in its extension as to be without extension in space or extension in time. Such an event is a mere spatial point-flash of instantaneous duration. I call such an ideal event an ‘event-particle.’ You must not think of the world as ultimately built up of event-particles. That is to put the cart before the horse. The world we know is a continuous stream of occurrence which we can discriminate into finite events forming by their overlappings and containings of each other and  separations a spatio-temporal structure. We can express the properties of this structure in terms of the ideal limits to routes of approximation, which I have termed event-particles. Accordingly event-particles are abstractions in their relations to the more concrete events. But then by this time you will have comprehended that you cannot analyze concrete nature without abstracting. Also I repeat, the abstractions of science are entities which are truly in nature, though they have no meaning in isolation from nature."

- Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947)
The Concept of Nature

First Distinction

"‘In the beginning,’ my dear, ‘there was that only which is, one only, without a second. Others say, in the beginning there was that only which is not, one only, without a second; and from that which is not, that which is was born.

‘But how could it be thus, my dear?’ the father continued. ‘How could that which is, be born of that which is not? No, my dear, only that which is, was in the beginning, one only, without a second.

‘It thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth fire.

‘That fire thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth water.

‘Water thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth earth.’"

- Chāndogya Upaniṣad (8th to 6th century BCE)
Translated by trans. F. Max Müller, The Upanishads

Nested Worlds

"Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. [...] Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond. [...] And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us. [...] Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves. [...] Thus, although each created Monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it, and of which it is the entelechy; and as this body expresses the whole universe through the connection of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe in representing this body, which belongs to it in a special way. "

- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Monadology

Boundless Within

"The person in the hut lives here calmly,
not stuck to inside, outside, or in between.
Places worldly people live, he does not live.
Realms worldly people love, he does not love.
Though the hut is small, it
includes the entire world."

- Shitou Xiqian (700–790)

Pathless Way

"The Way is perfect like vast space
where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.
Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject
that we do not see the true nature of things.
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,
nor in inner feelings of emptiness.
Be serene in the oneness of things
and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity

your very effort fills you with activity.

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other,

you will never know Oneness.

Those who do not live in the single Way

fail in both activity and passivity,

assertion and denial.

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality;

to assert the emptiness of things
is to miss their reality."

- Sengcan (496? - 606)
Xinxin Ming

Ephemeral Vastness

"Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot become firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood and has its own before and after. Although before and after exist, past and future are cut off. Ash stays in the position of ash, with its own before and after. As firewood never becomes firewood again after it has burned to ash, there is no return to living after a person dies. However, in Buddha Dharma it is an unchanged tradition not to say that life becomes death. Therefore we call it no-arising. It is the established way of buddhas’ turning the Dharma wheel not to say that death becomes life. Therefore, we call it no-perishing. Life is a position in time; death is also a position in time. This is like winter and spring. We don’t think that winter becomes spring, and we don’t say that spring becomes summer.

...

When a person attains realization, it is like the moon’s reflection in water. The moon never becomes wet; the water is never disturbed. Although the moon is a vast and great light, it is reflected in a drop of water. The whole moon and even the whole sky are reflected in a drop of dew on a blade of grass. Realization does not destroy the person, as the moon does not make a hole in the water. The person does not obstruct realization, as a drop of dew does not obstruct the moon in the sky. The depth is the same as the height. [To investigate the significance of] the length and brevity of time, we should consider whether the water is great or small, and understand the size of the moon in the sky."

- Dogen (1200 - 1253)
Genjōkōan

Stillness Without Seeing

"...Stillness without seeing,
Not moving in a dark room.

Wakeful without wandering,

The mind is tranquil yet bright.

All phenomena are real and eternal,

Profuse, yet of a single form.

Going, coming, sitting, standing,

Don’t attach to anything.

Affirming no direction,

Can there be leaving and entering?

There is neither unifying nor dispersing,

Neither slow nor quick.

Brightness and tranquility are just as they are.
They cannot be explained in words."

- Niutou Farong (594-657)

Sacred Threshold

"Here, we are no longer in the well-known valleys of human and psychic life. We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure: that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold. And even when the threshold is crossed, where shall certainty be found? Where shall we discover those marvelous laws that we are perhaps constantly disobeying: laws of whose existence our conscience is ignorant, though our soul has been warned? Whence comes the shadow of a mysterious transgression that at times creeps over our life and makes it so hard to bear? What are the great spiritual sins of which we can be guilty? Will it be our shame to have striven against our soul, or is there an invisible struggle between our soul and God? And is this struggle so strangely silent that not even a whisper floats on the air? [...] Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves of night and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded."

- Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 - 1949)
The Treasure of the Humble

Fluid Becoming

“The body pre-eminently—that which we are most justified in isolating within the continuity of matter, because it constitutes a relatively closed system—is the living body; it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others within the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real."

- Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)
Creative Evolution

Liquid Mirror

"How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink—But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—” She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist."

- Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Psychedelic Visions

"The moment that I closed my eyes a vision of celestial glory burst upon me. I stood on the silver strand of a translucent, boundless lake, across whose bosom I seemed to have been just transported. A short way up the beach, a temple, modelled like the Parthenon, lifted its spotless and gleaming columns of alabaster sublimely into a rosy air--like the Parthenon, yet as much excelling it as the godlike ideal of architecture must transcend the ideal realized by man. Unblemished in its purity of whiteness, faultless in the unbroken symmetry of every line and angle, its pediment was draped in odorous clouds, whose tints outshone the rainbow. It was the work of an unearthly builder, and my soul stood before it in a trance of ecstasy. Its folded doors were resplendent with the glory of a multitude of eyes of glass, which were inlaid throughout the marble surfaces at the corners of diamond figures from the floor of the porch to the topmost moulding. One of these eyes was golden, like the midday sun, another emerald, another sapphire, and thus onward through the whole gamut of hues, all of them set in such collocations as to form most exquisite harmonies, and whirling upon their axes with the rapidity of thought. At the mere vestibule of the temple I could have sat and drunk in ecstasy forever; but lo! I am yet more blessed. On silent hinges the doors swing open, and I pass in.

...

It is this process of symbolization which, in certain hasheesh states, gives every tree and house, every pebble and leaf, every footprint, feature, and gesture, a significance beyond mere matter or form, which possesses an inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness.

...

Perhaps one of the most difficult things to convey to a mind not in the hashish delirium, by the symbols which there teach the manner of its process, or by any others, is the interchange of senses. The soul is sometimes plainly perceived to be but one in its own sensorium, while the body is understood to be all that so variously modifies impressions as to make them in the one instance smell, in another taste, another sight, and thus on, ad finem. Thus the hashish-eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colours, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings."

- Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836 - 1870)
The Hasheesh Eater

Cosmic Reverence

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Postscript. This image was captured in Galicia, Spain last week during the slightly-over-one-minute in duration total solar eclipse. While my family and I witnessed a much longer (>3.5 min) eclipse in Baxter State Park (in Maine) in 2024, this one was special since it took place during a pilgrimage of sorts to where my wife's father's side of the family has been living for centuries. For those of you not lucky enough to experience a total eclipse in person, the image above hardly does justice to feeling the magic of the sun suddenly disappearing to nothingness while still suspended in the sky. The physicist in me was as slack-jawed at the spectacle as my spiritual side was awed by the living cosmos.

Amber Apparition

"White in prismatic order is the union or compound light, while the [...] mixture of our material colors becomes the opposite; that is, the destruction of all, or in other words - darkness. Light is therefore color and shadow the privation of it by the removal of those rays of color, or subductions of power; and there are to be found throughout nature [...] the ruling principles of diurnal variations, the grey dawn, the yellow morning sun rise and red departing ray, in ever changing combination; these are the pure combinations of Aerial colors.

...

The ark stood firm on Ararat: th’ returning sun
Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles, and, emulous of light,
Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise,
Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly,
Which rises, flits, expands, and dies."

- J.M.W. Turner (1775 - 1851)

Overtones and Vibrations

"String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string. One of the basic things about a string is that it can vibrate in many different shapes or forms, which gives music its beauty. If we listen to a tuning fork, it sounds harsh to the human ear. And that’s because you hear a pure tone rather than the higher overtones that you get from a piano or violin that give music its richness and beauty.

So in the case of one of these strings it can oscillate in many different forms - analogously to the overtones of a piano string. And those different forms of vibration are interpreted as different elementary particles: quarks, electrons, photons. All are different forms of vibration of the same basic string. Unity of the different forces and particles is achieved because they all come from different kinds of vibrations of the same basic string."

- Edward Whitten (1951 - )

Universal Consciousness

"A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the keynote, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense material Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of Matter hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the works of a vast occult Intelligence.
...
They are the seven colours of the light of the divine consciousness, the seven rays of the Infinite, and by them the Spirit has filled in on the canvas of his self-existence conceptually extended, woven of the objective warp of Space and the subjective woof of Time, the myriad wonders of his selfcreation great, simple, symmetrical in its primal laws and vast framings, infinitely curious and intricate in its variety of forms and actions and the complexities of relation and mutual effect of all upon each and each upon all. These are the seven Words of the ancient sages; by them have been created and in the light of their meaning are worked out and have to be interpreted the developed and developing harmonies of the world we know and the worlds behind of which we have only an indirect knowledge. The Light, the Sound is one; their action is sevenfold."

- Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950)
The Life Divine

Mystery of the Infinite

"When the King conceived ordaining

He engraved engravings in the luster on high.
A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed
within the Concealed of the Concealed
from the mystery of the Infinite,
a cluster of vapor in formlessness
set in a ring, not white,
not black, not red, not green, no color at all.
As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors.
Deep within the spark gushed a flow
imbuing colors below,
concealed within the concealed of the mystery of the Infinite.
The flow broke through and did not break through its aura.
It was not known at all until,
under the impact of breaking through,
one high and hidden point shone.
Beyond that point, nothing is known."

- "Creation of Elohim," Zohar

Cosmogenic Vision

"If you analyze cave art ... there are so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness, of visions. And plants like the amanita muscaria mushroom and psilocybin mushrooms appear to have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change. So to investigate this possibility when I got interested in this mystery, I went down to the Amazon where there are still surviving shamanistic cultures today, and where they drink the powerful visionary brew: ayahuasca, of which the active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine (DMT) which is actually closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin. [...] And one of those effects has to do with creativity, and we can see the creative cosmogenic impulse of ayahuasca in the paintings of Ayahuasca Shamans from Peru, like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo ... those richly saturated colors, they’re amazing visions that they reproduce. [...] And as these paintings show, another universal experience of ayahuasca is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically."

- Graham Hancock (1950 - )
The War on Consciousness

Supernatural Visions

"In the last few decades, a new kind of art has been striking natives and tourists of Peruvian Amazonia with great wonder and enchantment: ayahuasca‑inspired visionary art. This very original iconography emerges directly from the artists’ visionary experience under the effect of the ayahuasca brew. [...] With the use of figurative techniques, sometimes learned in art schools or developed autonomously, mestizo visionary artists manage to translate and share their colorful supernatural visions with a much wider public than that directly involved with ayahuasca shamanism. One of the most important effects of this translation, in my view, is to render visible the invisible dynamics of shamanic worlds, even to untrained eyes. [...] This art functions as a shining window to the spiritual worlds of ayahuasca shamanism, translating the multidimensional and extraordinary visions to our more familiar realm of everyday iconic images."

- Vinícius Dino, Visionary Art in Peruvian Amazonia:
The Power of Images and Translation Effects

Other Minds

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. [...] We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question - for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Spirit-Matter

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

...

In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit. All that exists is matter becoming spirit. There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. [...] Life represents the goal of a transformation of great breadth, in the course of which what we call ‘matter’ turns about, furls in on itself, interiorizes the operation covering, so far as we are concerned, the whole history of the earth. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self‑conscious. It is a cosmic change of state."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

Underlying Manifestations

"Mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither state exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical (and physical) beauty."

- Ian Stewart (1945 - )

Dancing Dream

"All great truths are only myths that exist momentarily 
in the evolving greater consciousness.
Like individuals, they die, to be
reborn fresh and glorious in
the minds of each new age.
They may bear a resemblance to their forebears,
but each brings with it new features of its own
and seeks to find its place and meaning in
the dancing dream that is the cosmos. "

- David Chethlahe Paladin (1926-1984)
Painting the Dream

Broken Symmetry

"The state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry. [...] In my own field of many-body physics, we are, perhaps, closer to our fundamental, intensive underpinnings than in any other science in which non-trivial complexities occur, and as a result we have begun to formulate a general theory of just how this shift from quantitative to qualitative differentiation takes place. This formulation called the theory of 'broken symmetry' may be of help in making more generally clear the breakdown of the constructive converse of reductionism."

- Philip W. Anderson (1923 - 2020)

Principial Unity

"All that exists, in whatever mode this may be, necessarily participates in universal principles, and nothing exists except by participation in these principles, which are the eternal and immutable essences contained in the permanent actuality of the Divine Intellect. Consequently, it can be said that all things, however contingent they may be in themselves, express or represent these principles in their own way and according to their order of existence, for otherwise they would be purely and simply nothingness. Thus, from one order to another, all things are linked together and correspond, to come together in total and universal harmony, for harmony is nothing other than the reflection of principial unity in the manifested world."

- René Guénon (1886 - 1951)

Meditative Quiescence

"Knowledge is not an object that you acquire. It’s not a mechanism that somehow you provide to the human mind. It’s actually an epiphanal moment. And I think this is true of the arts, poetry, painting, music, and I would say also to spiritual understanding. [...] Is it possible to be alive, active in the world, and yet have such calm, such kind of inner openness and presence that one can lead a life, at least in part, that is an expression of that quality of meditative quiescence that's on the one hand quite alert and on the other hand, completely at ease, completely at rest. So it’s a little bit like bringing the sleeping life into the day life."

- Arthur Zajonc (1949 - )

Enchanted Spirits

"Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
Seven Nights

In the Heart of the Spirit

 "In our hearts there burns a fire...
That burns all veils to their root and foundation
When those veils have been burned away
Then the heart will understand completely.
Ancient love will unfold ever-fresh forms
In the heart of the Spirit,
In the core of the heart."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Illusory Categories

"The further we penetrate into the submicroscopic world, the more we shall realize how the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting and ever‑moving components with man being an integral part of this system.

...

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks,’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way.

...

Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. [...] all things and events perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected, and are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality."

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
The Tao of Physics

Temples of the Sun

"The loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they built pyramidal Temples of the Sun. [...]

...

The Great Pyramid! Both, built in Atlantean times, stand as distinctive marks of the mysterious continent, and remain as mute legacies from a race of people who have departed as mysteriously as their own land. Both remind the successors of the Atlanteans of the glories of that lost civilization.

...

Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kinds of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp."

- Paul Brunton (1898 - 1981)
A Search in Secret Egypt

Paul's Reflections

"At the core of it all, there's something more.
Something luminous, something shimmering."

- Paul Cotter

Long-time readers of my blog will have seen book reviews appear every now and then, but I haven't posted as many as one might expect (given my general penchant for books). By my count, I have about 20 (depending on the minimal length and depth that defines a "review" and excluding a post in which I summarize the book my mom and I wrote about my dad's life and art); just click on "Book Reviews" in the Themes and Places section in the left sidebar to see the full list. That's 20 reviews out of a total of 1660 total posts since 2004, or less than 1 per year! The main reason is that I only post reviews of books that have made a strong - a strong positive - impression on me. I can further distill this already select group to a set of exactly four books that made me blurt out "Wow!" and which altered my perceptions of the creative potential of photography as an art form: (1) Bruce Barnbaum's Visual Symphony (in the 1970s), (2) Fay Godwin's Land  (middle 1980s), and (3) John Sexton's Recollections (in 2006), and (4) Wynn Bullock's Color Light Abstractions (in 2010). To this short list I must now add a fifth - Paul Cotter's Paul's Reflections: Photography and thoughts about life and living - mostly because of how brilliantly it combines "verbal and visual" aesthetic - even spiritual - spaces, an observation made also by Barbara Bullock-Wilson in the foreword she wrote for Paul's book.

Full disclosure: (1) Despite never having met in person (though we both look forward to the day this is no longer true), Paul and I have "known" each other for about 10 years, and connected over an essay Paul had published on Wynn Bullock in 2016 (which I found by following a link I'd seen on Barbara Bullock Wilson's Facebook page). And, as dedicated readers of my own blog know, Barbara serendipitously become a treasured friend of mine soon after we first corresponded in 2012 via email about my "discovery" of her father's color abstractions; (2) I purchased Paul's book online as soon as I learned of its existence. Does my knowing Paul make the "review" you are about to read biased? Objectively, perhaps. But you'll have to take my word (on faith, of course) that I never recommend a book (about photography or any other subject) unless I believe it is special. Which brings us to my review.

The softcover book (this is the only version available) consists of 53 of Paul's favorite essays and accompanying photographs that have appeared on his blog between March 2023 and early 2026 (you can read more about the book and place your order here). Apart from the foreword and introduction, it follows an elegantly simple two-page format: a title introduces a short essay and a quote/callout (that highlights salient text) on the right, and an accompanying photograph appears on the left (a few sample pages are here and here). 

While the photographs reveal Paul's gift for simplicity and reflect an inner calm honed from years of studying Buddhism (Paul has been featured in National Geographic magazine, gallery exhibitions, and international photography annuals), the essays - each a perfect companion to the image it is paired with (as explained below) - are a world unto-themselves. Each essay is anchored on a single idea or observation (or, as you'll find on page 29, "thoughts about thoughts"). What sets these essays apart from those by most other photographer-authors is the Zen-like spark of illumination they ignite in the reader; Paul is as gifted an author as he is a photographer! Indeed, as I've emailed him privately several times after reading his blog posts, I am in awe at how few words - often no more than a few spare, poetic-like paragraphs - Paul needs to convey ideas that will take root and linger in your memory long after you've closed his book. I tend to think of them as sacred clippings drawn from the life of a wise and gentle sage. Though they are all short and can be finished in a minute or two, I recommend that you savor these essays by reading them slowly, thoughtfully, letting your mind wander and muse on whatever related themes and ideas you will no doubt find percolating inside you. 

You will find - and grow to appreciate after spending quality time with Paul's book - that each image-essay pair is subtly interlocked and self-reinforcing. When you turn to a page, your eye will first be drawn to the photograph on the left (since we are fundamentally visual creatures). After you've absorbed the first layer of meaning (there are other, typically many other layers you'll discover as you revisit the image), you'll shift your gaze to the accompanying essay on the right. This will also quickly draw you in, and you will momentarily "ignore" the image because you will have become consumed with the story that's taken you along for a ride. At some point, as you are reading the essay, your eyes will suddenly dance back to the image to pick out a detail you somehow missed before but which some words you've just read reminded you (or your mind's eye) was there to be discovered all along. You smile ("Of course, I should have seen that!") and turn your attention back to the essay. You smile again ("Paul's describing a world the photograph is showing me just a small part of!"). The essay seems somehow even richer than before; and you see textures and rhythms only hinted at by the words themselves. You glance back at the image and suddenly see that it doesn't just mirror some explicit part of the essay (what probably originally caught your eye), but includes deeper latent layers of meaning; the image is somehow transformed into something more ("I want to just keep looking at it, I don't want to leave."). Then back to the essay ("I wish it would go on. I'm not ready to leave this world. I never saw the world this way!). Back and forth you'll go, until distinctions between image and essay start blurring, and eventually disappear altogether. You'll "see" a world that the Zen-master's boat (i.e., which I'll colloquially refer to as "Paul's image-essay pair") has gently guided you across the stream to see. You smile again, relishing the anticipation of revisiting this stream before turning the page to step into another boat. 

While Paul's book is not meant to make you a better photographer or writer (though there are lessons galore for those who aspire to refine their skills at either), it will undoubtedly enhance your appreciation of - and ability to see, to really see - the "everyday miracles that are all around us." As for me, I look forward to dipping into its pages for inspiration for years to come. Highly recommended!

Simple Light

"Know that before the emanations were emanated and the created was created, a supreme simple light filled all reality, so that there was no free place at all in the sense of an empty, hollow space, but everything was filled with that simple light of the En Sof. [...] And when it ascended in its simple will to create the worlds and emanate the emanations, thereby making the perfection of its works, its names and its attributes knowable, which was the reason for the creation of the worlds [...], the En Sof contracted at the middle point, truly in the middle of its light. It contracted the light and moved away on all sides around the center point. This left a free space around the center point, an empty, hollow space..."

- Isaac Luria (1534 - 1572)
Etz Chaim (Tree of Life)

Sorcery's Mirror

"Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance - representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation. [...] It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues—ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double. [...] Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true."

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)

Crumpled Manifolds

"The whole process of applying this complex geometric transformation to the input data can be visualized in 3D by imagining a person trying to uncrumple a paper ball: the crumpled paper ball is the manifold of the input data that the model starts with. Each movement operated by the person on the paper ball is similar to a simple geometric transformation operated by one layer. The full uncrumpling gesture sequence is the complex transformation of the entire model. Deep learning models are mathematical machines for uncrumpling complicated manifolds of high-dimensional data. [...] Our own understanding of images, sounds, and language, is grounded in our sensorimotor experience as humans -as embodied earthly creatures. Machine learning models have no access to such experiences and thus cannot 'understand' their inputs in any human-relatable way [...] this mapping is just a simplistic sketch of the original model in our minds, the one developed from our experience as embodied agents—it is like a dim image in a mirror."

- François Chollet (1989 - )

Quetzal Serpent

 " And then the earth arose because of them, it was simply their word that brought it forth. For the forming of the earth they said "Earth." It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding.

...

This is the account of when all is still silent and placid. All is silent and calm. Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky. These, then, are the first words, the first speech. There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, or forest. All alone the sky exists. The face of the earth has not yet appeared. Alone lies the expanse of the sea, along with the womb of all the sky. There is not yet anything gathered together. All is at rest. Nothing stirs. All is languid, at rest in the sky. There is not yet anything standing erect. Only the expanse of the water, only the tranquil sea lies alone. There is not yet anything that might exist. All lies placid and silent in the darkness, in the night. All alone are the Framer and the Shaper, Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, They Who Have Borne Children and They Who Have Begotten Sons. Luminous they are in the water, wrapped in quetzal feathers and cotinga feathers. Thus they are called Quetzal Serpent. In their essence, they are great sages, great possessors of knowledge."

- Popol Vuh

Plato's Cave

"Plato's Cave" Portfolio

"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? [...] Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world - sunk in a deep grave - waste and lonely is its place. [...] More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts - needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul - that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. [...] No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence - they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations - into it the gods went back - and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. "

- Novalis (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new Plato's Cave portfolio in my web gallery. For those of you who have not already guessed at how these images have been created (I posted the first in the series a few weeks ago with the heading, Platonic Forms), the title (and reference) will be obvious from the process: I shine thin beams of light (using one, two, or three flexible gooseneck LEDs with magnetic bases secured to a metal plate for stability) through a wide assortment of glass and acrylic geometric forms (squares, prisms, pyramids, circles, spheres, etc.) ranging in size from a quarter of an inch to about three or four inches and of varying translucency and color (the color of most forms depends on the direction of light that hits their surface), and photograph the most "pleasing combinations" of the resulting clusters of lights and shadows that appear on a black matte board pitched vertically some distance beyond where the LEDs are stationed. Note that while the images look noisy, it is not actual "noise" you are seeing, but rather the impression of noise due to the collective specular and diffuse reflections of light off the matte board's imperfectly speckled surface. 

Apart from my delight in being able to use this technique to explore a part of the abstract aesthetic latent space pioneered by László Moholy-Nagy, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Robert & Sonia Delaunay, and explored by my dad in his later years (albeit, in my case, on a woefully amateurish level compared to these extraordinary artists), I am intrigued conceptually, philosophically even, by how blatantly it blurs the distinction between traditional art and photography. I say this because for this series photography plays only a minor (and least important) role! Arranging and discovering a "pleasing configuration" of lights and forms requires a lot of time and patience. It typically takes me about 20-30 min to find a single geometry worth taking an image of. Indeed, the process of choosing the type and number of shapes, adjusting the light's intensity, direction, and the beam size, and making the myriad small changes (during which I often have to start from scratch because an arrangement is simply "not working") needed to gradually sculpt (reveal?) a "pleasing geometry" - for which the final "shot" is almost an afterthought - is arguably more akin to making art than doing photography!

My lifelong fascination with the blurred distinction between art and photography has directly fueled my experiments in abstraction, wherein I deliberately try to tease apart (disentangle?) the creative tension between finding abstract patterns vs. creating them. Individual projects all follow their own style and rhythm. For example, for my Synesthscapes series, I search for patterns in what are essentially "fixed" environments (e.g., natural light refracting/reflecting through a rum bottle); for my Swirls, Whorls, and Tendrils series, I create singular "worlds" made up of ink and water, which I then photograph whatever time-slice of it proves to be sufficiently interesting; my perpetual winter passion to find ice abstracts consists of exactly that, finding patterns that nature herself has already produced; my light abstracts emerge from fixed geometries of light filaments and intentional random camera movements, wherein I decide whether an image is "good enough" to keep only after taking the photograph; and Cymatiscapes require little more of me than to choose a vessel type and size (e.g., a small soy sauce dish) and a vibration frequency before clicking the shutter in my camera's burst mode; I tend to think of this series (which I love!) as neither art nor photography (at least in the traditionally creative sense) and merely as an archive of my having observed something interesting. But, compared to all of these earlier experiments, the process of creating - literally, creating - images for Plato's Cave is obviously on an entirely different level! Of course, in the most fundamental sense, distinctions between art and photography (and, as someone has commented below) between art and life, are not just blurred, they are entirely illusory.