Unbroken Boundaries

"The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

...

There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.

...

In this flow, mind and matter
are not separate substances.
Rather, they are different aspects
of one whole and unbroken movement."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Note. These are all reflections off of cars I took with my iPhone this morning to help break the monotony of sitting in a Nissan dealership waiting for my car to get serviced. As I've repeatedly noted on this blog, images - heck, veritable universes - are everywhere 😊

Intertwined and Intermingling Vibrations

"I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s 'Ninth Symphony.' I do not mean to say that I 'heard' the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibrations, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roll of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voice leaped up trilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices. I felt the chorus grow more exultant, more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorus throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth—an ocean of heavenly vibration—and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes.

Of course, this was not 'hearing' but I do know that the tones and harmonies conveyed to me moods of great beauty and majesty. I also sensed, or thought I did, the tender sounds of nature that sing into my hand—swaying reeds and winds and the murmur of streams. I have never been so enraptured before by a multitude of tone-vibrations.

As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marveled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others—and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine."

-  Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
A letter by Helen Keller to the New York Symphony Orchestra,
 printed in The Auricle, Vol. II, No. 6, March 1924

The Function of Consciousness

"The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. In this sense, it functions as a clearinghouse for sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, establishing priorities among all the diverse information. Without consciousness we would still “know” what is going on, but we would have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive way. With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. And we can also invent information that did not exist before: it is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Self-Conscious Flow

"Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present.

...

Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it, and the easier it is to get distracted.

...

I mean, we’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are—as far as we know—the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(See "Unlocking Creative Flow: How the Brain Enters the Zone")

Orderly Action Within the Whole

"One must then go on to
a consideration of time as a
projection of multidimensional
reality into a sequence of moments.

...

Thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.

...

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

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)

Infinite Storm of Beauty

"One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.

...

...when we contemplate the
whole globe as one great dewdrop,
striped and dotted with continents and islands,
flying through space with other stars
all singing and shining together as one,
the whole universe appears as
an infinite storm of beauty."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)
Nature Writings

A Moment

"'Is this a moment?'
He asks in a very loud voice.

'No, not anymore.'
And this one? Not anymore either.
All you have is the moment to come.
The present is already past.'"

- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)

Enfolded Energy Fields

 "In all ages even among scientific men,
there can be discerned the urge to
apprehend the living form as such,
to grasp the connections of
their external visible parts; to
take them as intimations of inner
activity, and so to master, to some
degree, the whole in an intuition."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Postscript. This image is of the garden peony that adorns the ground beneath our mail-box; more precisely, and paraphrasing Minor White, I should say that the image is what else the garden peony is. What you are "really" looking at is a digital-negative (i.e., wherein the white-to-black tonalities are reversed) of a zoomed-in portion of what started out being 1:1 macro shot of the folds-within-folds of petals inside a single peony flower. The distance from left to right is no more than about two inches. In my physicist's mind's eye, I see an undulating play of interpenetrating enfolded forms of some mysterious energy field; the same impression I get when gazing at Bruce Barnbaum's mesmerizing slit canyon abstracts. Images such as this also remind us that magical otherworldly realms are always near us, just waiting for our eye to discover.

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)

Fragmentation

"Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Thought as a System

Going with the Flow

"A Taoist story tells of an old man who accidentally fell into the river rapids leading to a high and dangerous waterfall. Onlookers feared for his life. Miraculously, he came out alive and unharmed downstream at the bottom of the falls. People asked him how he managed to survive. 'I accommodated myself to the water, not the water to me. Without thinking, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived.'"

- The Daily Zen Journal:
A Creative Companion for a Beginner's Mind 

Whirling Light

"Rotating systems often break axisymmetry; were it not so, there would be no hurricanes. There are steadier examples: the skirts of the 'whirling dervish' carry cusped wave patterns which seem to defy gravity and common sense.

...

We consider a rotating, conically symmetric surface made out of a sheet of material that is constrained not to stretch or compress in two dimensions, but is perfectly flexible with respect to bending in the third. The symmetry of the surface permits an additional material flow to be superimposed on the rotation of the surface, leading to Coriolis forces. The equations describing this system yield a three-parameter family of exact solutions, some of which bear a close resemblance to the patterns on a dervish's skirt. We find that the Coriolis terms that arise from the additional flow are crucial for these types of patterns to exist.

...

The results widen our understanding of the dynamics of flexible objects and of pattern formation in rotating systems. They may also shed some light on previously known instabilities of turbine disks and hard disks. Finally, they bring a bit of science into the otherwise nebulous world of the mystic, and address a phenomenon that has been observed with aesthetic pleasure for hundreds of years."

- J. Guven, J. Hanna and M. Müller,
"Whirling skirts and rotating cones,"
New Journal Of Physics (Nov, 2013)

Postscript. The images in the diptych that I took with my iPhone recently (of light reflecting off of cars parked onto the walls of a local garage) reminded me of Rumi's "Whirling Dervishes," about which you can read here and here (in considerably less technical detail than the one you'll find if you follow the link to the physics journal!)

“You are water, whirling water,
Yet still water trapped within,
Come, submerge yourself within us,
We who are the flowing stream.
...
We came whirling out of nothingness,
scattering stars like dust...
The stars made a circle,
and in the middle,
we dance.”

- Rumi (1207 - 1273

Unobstructed Flow

"The great Tao flows unobstructed in every direction.
All things rely on it to conceive and be born,
and it does not deny even the smallest of creation.
When it has accomplishes great wonders,
it does not claim them for itself.
It nourishes infinite worlds,
yet it doesn't seek to master the smallest creature.
Since it is without wants and desires,
it can be considered humble.
All of creation seeks it for refuge
yet it does not seek to master or control.
Because it does not seek greatness;
it is able to accomplish truly great things. "

- Lao Tzu (6th century – 4th century BCE)
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 34

Non-Action

"That which offers no resistance,
Overcomes the hardest substances.
That which offers no resistance
Can enter where there is no space.
Few in the world can comprehend
The teaching without words, or
Understand the value of non-action."

- Lao Tzu (6th century – 4th century BCE)
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 43

The Watcher Joins the River

 

"Eventually, all things merge into one,
and a river runs through it.
The river was cut by the world's great
flood and runs over rocks
from the basement of time.
On some of the rocks are
timeless raindrops. Under the
rocks are the words, and some
of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
...
I sat there and forgot and forgot,
until what remained was the river
that went by and I who watched...
Eventually the watcher joined the river,
and there was only one of us.
I believe it was the river."

- Norman Maclean (1902 - 1990)

A River Runs Through it and Other Stories

Optimal Experience

 

"The theory of optimal experience is based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

...

When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

...

The key element of an optimal experience

is that it is an end in itself."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Postscript. Sadly, the deeply inspirational Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi passed away on Oct 20, 2021. He joins an (equally sadly) growing number of spiritual/aesthetic mentors of mine that I have never had the pleasure of meeting in person (the last such being John Daido Loori, who passed away in 2009). I have written of applying Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" to photography a number of years ago on this blog (almost exactly 13 years ago, to be precise), but the wisdom and insights he leaves behind are of course timeless. Here is a link to a great TED talk that Csikszentmihalyi gave in 2004. May your soul forever revel in eternal flow, Mihaly! 

Forms and Shapes

 "Although our modern way of thinking has, of course,
changed a great deal relative to the ancient one,
the two have had one key feature in common:
i.e. they are both generally ‘blinkered’ by
the notion that theories give true knowledge
about ‘reality as it is’. Thus, both are led to
confuse the forms and shapes induced in
our perceptions by theoretical insight with
a reality independent of our thought
and our way of looking."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

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.