- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(See "Unlocking Creative Flow: How the Brain Enters the Zone")
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Self-Conscious Flow
Sunday, December 17, 2023
Lily Math
- Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
Il Saggiatore
Monday, December 11, 2023
Illimitable Spirit
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."
- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."
- Richard Bach (1936 - )
Friday, December 08, 2023
Disorder to Order
- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
Patterns of Connection
Monday, March 06, 2023
Cartesian Fallacy
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
"Logic does not lead us from the fact that we are an integral part of the web of life to certain norms of how we should live. However, if we have the deep ecological experience of being part of the web of life, then we will (as opposed to should) be inclined to care for all of living nature. Indeed, we can scarcely refrain from responding in this way.
By calling the emerging new vision of reality 'ecological' in the sense of deep ecology, we emphasize that life is at its very center. This is an important issue for science, because in the mechanistic paradigm physics has been the model and source of metaphors for all other sciences. 'All philosophy is like a tree,' wrote Descartes. 'The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences.'
The systems view of life has overcome this Cartesian metaphor. Physics, together with chemistry, is essential to understand the behavior of the molecules in living cells, but it is not sufficient to describe their self-organizing patterns and processes. At the level of living systems, physics has thus lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality. This is still not generally recognized today. Scientists as well as nonscientists frequently retain the popular belief that 'if you really want to know the ultimate explanation, you have to ask a physicist,' which is clearly a Cartesian fallacy. The paradigm shift in science, at its deepest level, involves a perceptual shift from physics to the life sciences."
- Fritjof Capra (1939 - ) and Pier Luigi Luisi (1938 - )
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision
"Nature is an infinite sphere
whose center is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere."
- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)
Friday, December 16, 2022
Illimitable Universe
- Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919)
The Riddle of the Universe
Thursday, August 11, 2022
Graceful Curves
- G. Hanmer Croughton (1843 - 1920)
Abel's Photographic Weekly, Volume 20
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
Form of Forms
Tranquil brightness.
The soul is in a manner all that is:
the soul is the form of forms.
Tranquility sudden, vast,
candescent: form of forms."
- James Joyce (1882 - 1941)
Saturday, July 09, 2022
Knowing Nothing of Space
- M.C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
Wednesday, December 01, 2021
Slow Growth
- Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922)
Saturday, November 27, 2021
Constructions in Space
- Bernhard Riemann (1826 - 1866)
Friday, November 26, 2021
Vuja de
Sunday, October 31, 2021
Mind-Stuff
- Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)
Postscript. I have long been intrigued by the propensity of some of history's great physicists to wax mystical when engaged about the "meaning" of it all (e.g., Stephen Hawking's "fire" that breathes life into our equations, and the "bit" behind John Archibald Wheeler's It-from-Bit:
"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom, at a very deep bottom, in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." (John Archibald Wheeler, 1911- 2008)
For those of you interested in taking a slightly deeper dive into the possible relationship among the ontology of quantum physics, Jungian psychology, and Eddington's thoughts on a "conscious universe," there is also this open access paper that was published a few years ago in the Behavioral Sciences journal, and from which I borrowed the quote that appears above. While the paper makes only an indirect mention of art (and refers to photography even more obliquely), spiritually inclined readers are likely to resonate with its illuminating discussion of how consciousness is entangled with the "mystical mind"; and of how we - as conscious creative beings - both instantiate ourselves within and "see" the universe at large.
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Beyond Language
- Inger Christensen (1935 - 2009)
The Condition of Secrecy
Friday, September 17, 2021
Wholeness
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1842)
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Transparent as a Dragonfly
- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)
Monday, March 15, 2021
Lines of Meaning
everything has not been written;
we are not turning into phantoms.
We walk the corridors,
searching the shelves
and rearranging them,
looking for lines of meaning
amid leagues of cacophony
and incoherence,
reading the history of
the past and our future,
collecting our thoughts
and collecting the
thoughts of others,
and every so often
glimpsing mirrors,
in which we may recognize
creatures of the information."
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Library of Babel
Monday, February 15, 2021
Space
We do not see it,
we do not hear it,
we do not feel it.
We are standing in
the middle of it,
we ourselves are
part of it,
but we know
nothing about it."
- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
Sunday, February 07, 2021
Beyond One's Reach
in many so-called symbols
is exactly their vagueness,
their openness,
their fruitful ineffectiveness
to express a 'final' meaning,
so that with symbols
and by symbols one
indicates what is always
beyond one's reach."
- Umberto Eco (1932 - 2016)
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language