Making Fun of Gravity

"...we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Escher on Escher: exploring the infinite

Expressions of Deep Order

"If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all."

- Stuart Kauffman

(1939 - )

Interpenetrating Fragments and Divisions

"[There is an...] almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

...the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘holds’ all the others enfolded within it.

...both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Interpenetrating Worlds

"Instead of negating the conflicting aspects of a paradox, you advance your understanding when you can hold both sides of a dichotomy in your mind at the same time, reconciling rather than negating. One could embrace paradox as an operating, operative principle, rather than seeking to deny or dissolve or dilute it. Rather than seeking to resolve dualisms and institute some grand ‘theory of everything’, the science of the imagination would embrace and explore paradox, going deeper into conundrums, relinquishing delusory attempts to achieve certainty. We may find that thought and language are creative aspects of being, tools for transforming reality. If the universe is actually a projection of subtler levels of the psyche- a loom of maya- then we may discover that the vibratory lattices of interpenetrating worlds elaborated by current physics are descriptions of the psyche itself, in its fully ensouled unfolding."

- Daniel Pinchbeck (1966 - )

Breaking Open the Head:

A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

Process, Emergence, and Autopoiesis

"I guess I've had only one question all my life. Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question."

- Francisco Varela

(1946 - 2001)

Forms, Shapes, and the Implicate Order

"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 our whole and unbroken movement."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992) 

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Patterns and Transformations

"All fixed set patterns

are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns." 

- Bruce Lee (1940 - 1973) 

 "Our bodily food is changed into us, but our spiritual food changes us into itself." 

- Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1327)

Reflections and Illusions

"You have heard much of this world
yet what you seen of this world?
What is its form and substance?...
You are asleep and your vision is a dream;
all you are seeing is a mirage.
When you awake up on the morn of the last day
you will know all this to be fancy and illusion;
When you have ceased to see double,
Heaven and Earth will become transformed;
when the real sun unveils his face to ou,
the moon, the stars,and Venus will disappear;
if a ray shines on the hard rock
like wool of many colors, it drops to pieces."
-Mahmud Shabistari
Sufi Poet
(1288 - 1340)

"Reflect: is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens dissimilar things, who puts the copy in the place of the real object?

I should certainly say that such a one was dreaming.

But take the case of the other, who recognizes the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects-- is he a dreamer, or is he awake?"

-Plato, The Republic