Seed Unfolding

"The One, perfect in seeking nothing, possessing nothing and needing nothing, overflows and creates a new reality by its superabundance. [...] The process is like the unfolding of a seed, moving from simple origin to termination in the world of sense, the prior always remaining in its place, while begetting its successor from a store of indescribable power - power that must not halt within the higher realm [...] but continue to expand until the universe of things reaches the limit of its possibility, lavishing its vast resources on all its creatures, intolerant that any one should have no share in it. Nothing is debarred from participation in the Good, to the extent of its receptivity. "

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)
The Enneads

Possible Worlds

 "As there are an infinity of possible worlds,
there are also an infinity of laws,
certain ones appropriate to one; others,
to another, and each possible individual
of any world involves in its concept
the laws of its world."

- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)

Fleeting Vortices

"[Physicists and naturalists cannot] look down from a great height upon a world which their consciousness could penetrate without being submitted to it or changing it. [...] a more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us ... to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

...

Hence we find our minds instinctively tending to represent energy as a kind of homogeneous, primordial flux in which all that has shape in the world is but a series of fleeting 'vortices'. [...] each new being has and must have a cosmic embryogenesis ...

...

Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge ...
but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end,
to assail the real from different angles
and on different planes."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
The Phenomenon of Man

More is Diferent

"At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y. But this does not at all imply that science X is 'just' science Y. At each stage entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one."

- Philip W. Anderson (1923 - 2020)
More is Different

Unfolding Forms

"The essential order of movement is not that of an object translating itself from one place to another, but rather, it is a folding and unfolding, in which the object is continually being created again, in a form generally similar to what it was, though different in detail. The explicate order of movement of the object is thus not independent, substantial, and self-existent. We suggest instead that it is an appearance, abstracted from the implicate order, on which it depends and from which it derives its whole form and set of characteristic relationships.

...

What all this means is that the flux of the holomovement is the implicate source of all forms, both physical and mental. That is to say, the whole of existence, including inanimate matter, living organisms, and ‘mind,’ arises in a single ground, in which these are all enfolded, or contained implicitly. 

...

It is clear that, in this view, living organisms are to be regarded as particular manifestations of what is ultimately enfolded in the inward depths of the holomovement. We are suggesting here that a living organism has a more direct contact with what is thus enfolded in the holomovement than does inanimate matter. [...] One can appropriately call the holomovement the life energy, which is the ground that ultimately creates and sustains all matter and all mind, as two relatively autonomous and independent streams that may move in parallel."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
The Implicate or Enfolded Order
Quoted from Chapter 1 in Mind in Nature: the Interface of Science and Philosophy

Forces Eternal

 "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."

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

Cosmic Soul

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

...

It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. [...] It is even conceivable that every creative advance that any mind has ever made involves unwitting co-operation with the cosmic mind which, perhaps, will awake at some date before the End.

...

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Last and First Men and Star Maker

Shitao's Yihua

"On a windy, rainy, spring day, I am happy I have no visitors; my hand is free, my mind relaxed and cleansed. The ancients called it yihua, the 'single stroke': a thousand hills, ten thousand valleys, people, bamboo, trees, a single brushstroke and all is completed. On one level, yihua constitutes a very practical concept: a complete design begins and finishes with the single brushstroke. On a metaphysical level, it suggests that 'myriad strokes are reunited in oneness' through the mind and hand of the artist and through the artist's spiritual communion with nature."

- Shitao (642–1707)

Movements of Mind

"The life of forms is not the result of chance. Nor is it a great cyclorama neatly fitted into the theater of history and called into being by historical necessities. No. Forms obey their own rules - rules that are inherent in the forms themselves, or better, in the regions of the mind where they are located and centered - and there is no reason why we should not undertake an investigation of how these great ensembles, united by close reasoning and by coherent experiment, behave throughout the phases that we call their life. The successive states through which they pass are more or less lengthy, more or less intense, according to the style itself. [...] We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above man. They mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind. [...] We must, in the truest sense of the word, follow closely at its heels; we must take careful note of how it lives its life."

- Henri Focillon (1881 - 1943)
The Life of Forms in Art

Unknown Worlds

"Without a living subject,
there can be neither space nor time.

...

[This is] "...what one might call the description of a walk into unknown worlds. These worlds are not only unknown; they are also invisible. Furthermore, the justification for their existence is denied by many zoologists and physiologists. [...] While this assertion will sound odd to anyone familiar with those worlds, it can be explained by the fact that not everyone has access to those worlds. Certain convictions are able to bar the entrance to those worlds so securely that not even one ray of all the splendor that spreads over them can penetrate it. Whoever wants to hold on to the conviction that all living things are only machines should abandon all hope of glimpsing their environments. [...] Every subject spins out, like the spider's threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence.

...

Each subject lives in a world where there is
only of subjective realities and where the
same environments represent
only subjective realities."

- Jakob von Uexküll (1864 - 1944)
 A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans:
With a Theory of Meaning

Infinite Garden

"The Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. [...] 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 although the earth and the air interspersed between the plants in the garden, or the water interspersed between the fish in the pond, are not themselves plant or fish, yet they still contain them, though more often than not of a subtlety imperceptible to us. [...] Therefore there is nothing uncultivated, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion, except in appearance."

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

Mycomagicians

"Mushrooms hold the secrets to the universe,

to life on our planet, and
 the core of our being.

...

There are more species of fungi, bacteria, and protozoa in a single scoop of soil than there are species of plants and vertebrate animals in all of North America. And of these, fungi are the grand recyclers of our planet, the mycomagicians disassembling large organic molecules into simpler forms, which in turn nourish other members of the ecological community. Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death. [...] Biological systems are influenced by the laws of physics, and it may be that mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter, just like salmon take advantage of the tides.

...

Mushrooms are the key to unlocking the
mysteries of the natural world."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

There is a Cause

"To return to the difficulty which has been stated with respect both to definitions and to numbers, what is the cause of their unity? In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause."

 - Aristotle (384–322 BC)

One Seen as Many

"Being the one, the universal Soul is present in all beings. Though one, It is seen as many, like the moon in the water ... Just as it is the jar which being removed (from one place to another) changes places and not the Akasha ['fifth element' or ether] enclosed in the jar – so is the Jiva [individual, embodied soul] which resembles the Akasha ...When various forms like the jar are broken again and again the Akasha does not know them to be broken, but He knows perfectly. Being covered by Maya [cosmic illusion that veils the true nature of reality], which is a mere sound, It does not, through darkness, know the Akasha (the Blissful one). When ignorance is rent asunder, It being then Itself only sees the unity."

- Amritabindu Upanishad (100 BCE to 300 CE)

Self-Organized Criticality

"Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule?
How do we know that the creations of worlds are
not determined by falling grains of sand?"

- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Miserables 

"How can the universe start with a few types of elementary particles at the big bang, and end up with life, history, economics, and literature? The question is screaming out to be answered bur it is seldom even asked. Why did the big bang not form a simple gas of particles, or condense into one big crystal? We see complex phenomena around us so often that we rake them for granted without looking for further explanation. In fact, until recently very little scientific effort was devoted to understanding why nature is complex.

I will argue that complex behavior in nature reflects the tendency of large systems with many components to evolve into a poised, "critical" state, way out of balance, where minor disturbances may lead to events, called avalanches, of all sizes. Most of the changes take place through catastrophic events rather than by following a smooth gradual path. The evolution to this very delicate state occurs without design from any outside agent. The state is established solely because of the dynamical interactions among individual elements of the system: the critical state is self-organized. Self-organized criticality is so far the only known general mechanism to generate complexity. 

To make this less abstract, consider the scenario of a child at the beach letting sand trickle down to form a pile. In the beginning, the pile is flat, and the individual grains remain close to where they land. Their motion can be understood in terms of their physical properties. As the process continues, the pile becomes steeper, and there will be little sand slides. As time goes on, the sand slides become bigger and bigger. Eventually, some of the sand slides may even span all or most of the pile. At that point, the system is far out of balance, and its behavior can no longer be understood in terms of the behavior of the individual grains. The avalanches form a dynamic of their own, which can be understood only from a holistic description of the properties of the entire pile rather than from a reductionist description of individual grains: the sandpile is a complex system.

The complex phenomena observed everywhere indicate that nature operates at the self-organized critical state. The behavior of the critical sandpile mimics several phenomena observed across many sciences, which are associated with complexity."

- Per Bak (1948 - 2002)
How Nature Works

A State of Information

"There are objects: cinnamon, microwaves, interstellar particles and scarecrows. There is nothing underneath objects. Or, better, there is not even nothing underneath them. There is no such thing as space independent of objects (happily contemporary physics agrees). What is called Universe is a large object that contains objects such as black holes and racing pigeons. Likewise there is no such thing as an environment: wherever we look for it, we find all kinds of objects—biomes, ecosystems, hedges, gutters and human flesh. In a similar sense, there is no such thing as Nature. I’ve seen penguins, plutonium, pollution and pollen. But I’ve never seen Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality).

...

Likewise, there is no such thing as matter. I’ve seen plenty of entities (this book shall call them objects): photographs of diffusion cloud chamber scatterings, drawings of wave packets, iron filings spreading out around a magnet. But I’ve never seen matter. So when Mr. Spock claims to have found 'Matter without form,' he is sadly mistaken... You can now buy a backpack that is made of recycled plastic bottles. But an object doesn’t consist of some gooey substrate of becoming that shifts like Proteus from plastic bottle to backpack. First there is the plastic bottle, then the production of the bag ends the bottle, its being is now only an appearance, a memory of the backpack, a thought: “This bag is made of plastic bottles... Nature [...] is 'discovered in the use of useful things.'

...

Matter, in current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself... Instead of using matter as my basic substrate, I shall paint a picture of the Universe that is realist but not materialist. In my view, real objects exist inside other real objects. 'Space' and 'environment' are ways in which objects sensually relate to the other objects in their vicinity, including the larger objects in which they find themselves... There is no space or environment as such, only objects... The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained 'in' other objects... What are these objects, then, that claustrophobically fill every nook and cranny of reality, that are reality, like the leering faces in an Expressionist painting, crammed into the picture plane? On what basis can we decide that there is no top, middle, or bottom object, that objects are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, that they generate time and space, and so on?"

Timothy Morton (1968 - )
Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Cosmic Trickster

"To explode or to implode - said Qwfwq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself; perchance to awaken elsewhere, unchanged."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Cosmic Rhythms

"Yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world."

- Huston Smith (1919 - 2016)

Synaptic Plasticity

"We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware."

- Richard Powers (1957 - )
The Overstory

Mind Over matter

"The very act of thinking involves the redistribution of atoms, specifically the transference of mental information via mRNA (messenger RNA) in the neurons to protein chains at the ends of the dendrites where the new memories are held. Thus, the more a person uses his mind, the more protein in his dendrites and the more complex his brain. According to this view, 'all thought is psychokinetic' because the very act of thinking, by definition, involves a mental event being changed into a physical one: a thought becomes a memory, that is, mind over matter."

- Marc Seifer (1948 - )