Psychic Structure

"We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor should we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.

...

Beyond our genetic coding, we need to go to the earth, as the source from which we came, and ask for its guidance, for earth carries the psychic structure as well as the physical form of every living being on the planet.

...

Ultimately, our guidance on any significant issue must emerge from this comprehensive source. … This source is not distinct from us. The universe is so immediate to us, is such an immediate presence, that it escapes our notice, yet whatever authentically exists in our cultural creations is derived from these spontaneities within us, spontaneities that come from an abyss of energy and a capacity for intelligible order of which we have only the faintest glimmer in our conscious awareness."

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)
The Dream of The Earth

Cosmogenesis

"We live in a universe where the mathematical equations of the beginning are alive in us. If you altered them in any way, we wouldn’t even be here. We would never have come forth. Those conditions at the beginning of time are exactly what they had to be for us to allow the mathematics of the universe’s beginning to think inside us."

...

"Our universe had been creating itself for billions of years and suddenly, through the work of a handful of human beings, the universe found a way to reflect on itself, on how it had developed over billions of years."

...

"The greatest discovery of the last four hundred years is the time-developmental nature of our universe. Scientists have come to realize we live not in a cosmos but in a cosmogenesis, a universe developing from a primordial simple state into ever more complex states."

- Brian Thomas Swimme (1950 - )
Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

Cosmic Serpent

"All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saying as much for millennia. He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time. It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary. It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision."

- Jeremy Narby (1959 - )
The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

Impressions of Niagara Falls

"Dream delivers us to dream,
and there is no end to illusion.
Life is like a train of moods
like a string of beads, and, as
we pass through them, they prove 
to be many-colored lenses which
paint the world their own hue..."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

I mentioned in my last post that my wife and I took a short trip to Niagara Falls, Canada last weekend. I also mentioned that I was a bit underwhelmed by the falls themselves; as a photographer "seeing" the falls for the first time (the "tourist" in me was enthralled, and my iPhone has about a half dozen snaps to prove it). Rather than taking photographs of the "falls as they appear in their full splendor," I instead took a series of more intimate "impressions" of the falls. 

Apart from their sheer size - the height varies between 70 and 100 ft, the Canadian portion is close to 2,600 ft wide, while the U.S. side is a bit over 1,000 ft) - Niagara falls are cacophonous and effervescent; indeed, they are best described as a thunderously loud living liquid chaos! While the images that accompany this post may fall (small pun intended) far short of conveying just how thunderously loud and chaotic the falls are, they do provide a sense of what the falls offer photographers apart from their (otherwise grand) splendor. 

The Eternal Energy of the Universe

"A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.

...

Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to 'feel it in your bones.'

...

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about,
because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Limits of the Possible

"A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.

...

"It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact' - however well attested - until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

...
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist
states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the
limits of the possible is to venture a
little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic."

- Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

Note. This is another one of a series of images I took with my iPhone during a trip my wife and I recently took to Monterey, CA. I had to resort to my iPhone because of an unfortunate "error" in judgement I made in packing my "minimal travel" photo gear for the trip. Thinking (correctly) that since my trip was ostensibly work-related and I had "only" a few days for our mini vacation, I (incorrectly) reasoned that I should only take an old camera and an even older (much older) lens. Well, the camera and lens both worked, separately, but - because of the age-mismatch - not together. So, for the first day, my photography consisted mostly of spraying iPhone shots at whatever my eye/I could find; things got a bit better the next day after B&H came through with an overnight delivery of a newer lens (I have no affiliation with B&H beyond simply being a long-time happy customer). While I soon put down my iPhone, I must confess that many of my favorite shots from this short trip - such as the one above of our younger son, Josh, musing on the marine life as it swam by in a large tank at the Monterey Bay aquarium - were taken with the iPhone.

I Am

"Silent friend of many distances, feel

how your breath enlarges all of space.

Let your presence ring out like a bell

into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.

Move through transformation, out and in.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?

If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power

that rounds your senses in their magic ring,

the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.

To the flashing water say: I am.""

- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Translation by Stephen Mitchell (The Enlightened Heart)

Eternal Energy

"You, yourself, are the
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.

...

We are the eyes of the cosmos.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
 and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Temporality #3

 "No permanence is ours;
we are a wave
That flows to fit
whatever form it finds"

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
The Glass Bead Game

Postscript. One last "improvisation" on finding ways to render the ephemeral beauty that lives and dwells in flame (as described in Temporality #1) before I move on to other images and musings. The base images in this example are selected from the same set I used for my earlier examples (i.e., roughly 100 or so macros of flame, exposed between 1/2000th and 1/5000th sec). Also, just as in the last example (Temporality #2), each panel of the triptych is effectively an average (in terms of luminance) of three separate images. But this time, I loosened the constraint that individual photographs must retain their original orientation. I've written a short Mathematica program that automates the process of assembling triptychs of luminance-averaged layers, wherein each image either remains "as is" (i.e., in its original upright position), is reflected horizontally or vertically (as in a mirror), or is reflected both horizontally and vertically. Of course, this vastly increases the set of randomly assembled images. Assuming 100 "base" images - i.e., original flame macros - a 3 panel assembly consisting of 3 layered base images, each of which can assume any of four orientations, leads to over 50 million! combinations! But, while this makes it difficult, if not impossible, to sample even a small fraction of the "abstract triptych space," it can also yield striking images that would otherwise likely remain unknown. Of course, there are myriad associated aesthetic, conceptual, and philosophical depths that can be mined here (e.g., "What does the space of all possible 'creative' excursions from a starting set of images even look like?" - echoes of Stuart Kauffman's space of the "Adjacent Possible"), but I best end the discussion here, and let the lone exemplar above speak of what lives in that unimaginably larger universe of latent realities.

Temporality #2

"But what about "time"? After all it is not a bundle in which past, future and present are wrapped up together. Time is not a cage in which the "no longer now," the "not yet now," and the "now" are cooped up together. How do matters stand with "time"? They stand thus: time goes. And it goes in that it passes away. The passing of time is, of course, a coming, but a coming which goes, in passing away. What comes in time never comes to stay, but to go. What comes in time always bears beforehand the mark of going past and passing away. This is why everything temporal is regarded simply as what is transitory."

- Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)
What is Called Thinking?

Postscript. A lesson my dad (an artist, who passed away a much too long 19 years ago) implicitly drilled in to me - oh, ever so gently, as it was simply a way of life with him; something he did as instinctually as most people breathe - was the importance of constant play and experimentation (something I've underscored before in another context). As I wrote a few days ago, I am "revisiting" - and rediscovering - the ephemeral beauty that lives and dwells in flame. And so, in the spirit of my dad's freewheeling jazz-like improvisation, I've been toying with alternative ways of "seeing" - after the fact - more deeply into what only my lens can see when the flame I am pointing my camera at is alive. My first stab (as shown in an earlier post) was to use triptychs to emphasize the "dance" within the flame; the preliminary fruits of which have already spawned a small portfolio (with more to follow). An example of an "improvised" second take on this idea is shown above. It is still a triptych, but here each frame merges three separate images, captured in rapid succession during a given sequence (individual images are still exposed between 1/2000th and 1/5000th sec). The implied enfolding makes the flame look even more organic and alive! Perhaps - with a nod to Goethe, who famously described architecture as "frozen music" - I ought to call these ethereal moments frozen fire.

Imagining the World

"Sometimes he seemed to be

saying that nothing existed

unless people thought it did,

and the world was really

only there at all because

people kept on imagining it.

But then he seemed to be

saying that there were

lots of worlds, 

all nearly the same and 

all sort of occupying

the same place 

but all separated by the 

thickness of a shadow, 

so that everything that 

ever could happen 

would have somewhere

to happen in."

- Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015)
Equal Rites

The Behavior of Things

"Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both.

This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before.

There is one simplification at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way….

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it. There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

The Character of Physical Law

Holy Fire

"For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you."

- Annie Dillard (1945 - )

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Creative Energy

"The thoughts, words, and emotions that human beings emit from moment to moment are constantly streaming forth from their bodies, forming creative fields that are visible in various colors, forms, and shapes. Some of these creative fields are hazy and cloudy in appearance, and they hover around the person in indeterminate patterns. Others are extremely tenacious, and they twine tightly around the person like a resilient string.

Each thought or emotion holds its own unique form of creative energy, and thoughts having a similar frequency band together to form a homogeneous creative field around the person who emitted them.

Where does our creative energy come from in the first place? Pure energy is always emitting from the source of the universe, brimming with infinite potential. This energy supports all forms of life, big or small. Each human being receives a steady supply of this same universal energy, and each of us assigns a shape to that energy by means of our words, thoughts, and emotions. This is the process of creation. The energy of any thought, whatever it might be, holds the potential for generating a creative field."

- Ervin Laszlo (1932 - )

Complicated Little Curlicues

"It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Field of the Finite, Quality of the Infinite

“The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is “wind or breath.” This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is the energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies.”

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Our Quixotic Purpose

"We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe."

-  James Gleick (1954 - )
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Perpetual Stream of Energy

"Living forms are not in being,

they are happening,

they are the expression of

a perpetual stream of

matter and energy which

passes through the organism

and at the same time

constitutes it."

- Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901 - 1972)

Process

“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually - if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning - you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as - Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so - I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.” 

― Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Organization of Energy

"Science shows us that the

visible world is neither 

matter nor spirit;

the visible world is the invisible 

organization of energy."

- Heinz Pagels (1939-1988)