Amber Apparition

"White in prismatic order is the union or compound light, while the [...] mixture of our material colors becomes the opposite; that is, the destruction of all, or in other words - darkness. Light is therefore color and shadow the privation of it by the removal of those rays of color, or subductions of power; and there are to be found throughout nature [...] the ruling principles of diurnal variations, the grey dawn, the yellow morning sun rise and red departing ray, in ever changing combination; these are the pure combinations of Aerial colors.

...

The ark stood firm on Ararat: th’ returning sun
Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles, and, emulous of light,
Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise,
Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly,
Which rises, flits, expands, and dies."

- J.M.W. Turner (1775 - 1851)

Underlying Manifestations

"Mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither state exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical (and physical) beauty."

- Ian Stewart (1945 - )

Crumpled Manifolds

"The whole process of applying this complex geometric transformation to the input data can be visualized in 3D by imagining a person trying to uncrumple a paper ball: the crumpled paper ball is the manifold of the input data that the model starts with. Each movement operated by the person on the paper ball is similar to a simple geometric transformation operated by one layer. The full uncrumpling gesture sequence is the complex transformation of the entire model. Deep learning models are mathematical machines for uncrumpling complicated manifolds of high-dimensional data. [...] Our own understanding of images, sounds, and language, is grounded in our sensorimotor experience as humans -as embodied earthly creatures. Machine learning models have no access to such experiences and thus cannot 'understand' their inputs in any human-relatable way [...] this mapping is just a simplistic sketch of the original model in our minds, the one developed from our experience as embodied agents—it is like a dim image in a mirror."

- François Chollet (1989 - )

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

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

Secret Order

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

"There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense."

- Chuck Palahniuk (1962 - )

""We are not human beings having a spiritual experience;
we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

Self-Creation

"As the spider creates and absorbs...
so this universe proceeds from the immortal."

Commentary: "It was said the immortal is the source of all created things. How it is the source is explained by well-known analogies; as is well-known in the world, the spider without requiring any other cause itself creates, i.e., sends out threads not distinct from its own body and again absorbs them itself, i.e., draws them into itself or makes them part of itself; as medicinal plants, i.e., from the corn plant to the immovable, not distinct from the earth, proceed from the earth, and as from the living person the hairs proceed different in nature from him; as in these illustrations, so here, i.e., in the circle of samsara, all the universe of the same and different nature proceeds from the akshara above described, without requiring any other cause; the statement of many analogies is to facilitate easy understanding of the meaning; universe which proceeds from the Brahman proceeds in this order and not all at once, like the throwing of a handful of apples."

- S. Sitarama Sastri

Upanishads and Sri Sankara's commentary

Postscript. This is a cropped iPhone image of a stylized advertisement for a wedding dress that appears in the window of a local dry-cleaning company appropriately called "Cosmo Cleaners" 😊

Patterns of Organic Energy

"'Wu Li' was more than poetic. It was the best definition of physics that the conference would produce. It caught that certain something, that living quality that we were seeking to express in a book, that thing without which physics becomes sterile. 'Wu' can mean either 'matter' or 'energy.' 'Li' is a richly poetic word. It means 'universal order' or 'universal law.' It also means 'organic patterns.' The grain in a panel of wood is Li. The organic pattern on the surface of a leaf is also Li, and so is the texture of a rose petal. In short, Wu Li, the Chinese word for physics, means 'patterns of organic energy' ('matter/ energy' [Wu] + 'universal order/organic patterns' [Li]). This is remarkable since it reflects a world view which the founders of western science (Galileo and Newton) simply did not comprehend, but toward which virtually every physical theory of import in the twentieth century is pointing!"

-  Gary Zukav (1942 - )
The Dancing Wu Li Masters

Process of Perceiving

"Perceiving how things are is a mode of exploring how things appear. How they appear is, however, an aspect of how they are. To explore appearance is thus to explore the environment, the world. To discover how things are, from how they appear, is to discover an order or pattern in their appearance. The process of perceiving, of finding out how things are, is a process of meeting the world; it is an activity of skillful exploration."

- Alva Noë (1964 - )

Cohered Confusion

"[It] is the peculiar gift of the truly great
detective that he can apply to the inexorable
rules of logic three catalyzers:
an abnormal observation of events, 
 knowledge of the human mind and
an insight into the human heart.
...
It is your task to cohere confusion,
to bring order out of chaos.
...
...the pattern must exist.
It’s the same story in detection:
recognize the pattern and you’re within
shooting distance of the ultimate truth."

- Ellery Queen
a.k.a., Frederic Dannay (1905–1982)
and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971)

Note. I have written before about the meta-pattern that describes the pattern of how I search-for/discover photographic compositions while on travel (e.g., see my short essay, Fox-like Hedgehogian Photography, that describes my experience in Iceland). The first few days in any new place (or old place, newly revisited) are inevitably filled with excitement, awe, and an Ansel-Adams-esque drive to capture Wagnerian-epic landscapes in all their glory. My wife's and my recent trip to New Zealand certainly matched this pattern; and how could it not with truly otherworldly vistas such as Milford Sound! But, predictably, after a relatively few days of rapid-fire "Ooooh" and "Aaahhh!" shots, my eye/I reverted back to its typically quieter less dramatically Wagnerian reflective state to find the sorts of images I love best - i.e., those that are obviously grounded in places I visit, but which may have been taken anywhere - intimate patterns that catch my attention not because they scream "Capture me to show others before the light goes bad!", but because they mirror something looking through the lens, a thought, a memory, a feeling, whatever. My favorite images (however humble and possibly "uninteresting" they may be to others) are those that lift the veil between inner and outer realities. The very best are fragments of mystical experiences. To be sure, the image above is certainly not in that last category. But it is a typically Andy-esque post-first-travel-week intimate composition grounded on "seeing" an inner pattern depicted externally. In this case, a self-organized "Q" that remined me of Ellery Queen's signature letter that adorned the covers of his early mystery books. I wonder, would I have even "seen" this intimate landscape (captured in New Zealand, but not an image of New Zealand, per se) had I not spent the better part of my teen years devouring early Ellery Queen mystery novels?

Withered Leaves

"If in our withered leaves you see

Hint of your own mortality:—

Think how, when they have turned to earth,

New loveliness from their rich worth

Shall spring to greet the light; then see

Death as the keeper of eternity,

And dying Life’s perpetual re-birth !"

- Poem attributed to the initials W.L. (Epigraph, Chapter 6)
Arthur E. Shipley, Life: A Book for Elementary Students

Order and Disorder

"Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.

It’s possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms."

- Georges Perec (1936 - 1982)
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Acausal Order

"If you marry the ordered to the
chaos you produce the divine child,
the supreme meaning beyond
meaning and meaninglessness."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

"In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such "meaningful coincidences," which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914."

- Sonu Shamdasani (1962 - )
The Red Book: Liber Novus

Secret Order

"In all chaos there is a cosmos,
in all disorder a secret order."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Borgesian Batesonian Patterns

"It turns out that

an eerie type of chaos

can lurk just behind

a facade of order;

and yet, deep inside the chaos

lurks an even eerier type of order."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Metamagical Themas:Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new "Ice Forms" portfolio I've posted on my web gallery. On the other hand, the image below - which shows an amalgam of the 16 photographs in this gallery - has a curious aesthetic all its own.

 

Apart from my lifelong attraction to "order within chaos within order within..." (both as photographer and physicist), the Borgesian Batesonian in me is drawn to the all-but-invisible emergent patterns that connect the patterns we (only partly consciously) weave. While the individual images hold no more relation to one another than the fact that they were all captured along the same 10-foot-long shoreline of a local lake during a single happy hour of searching for "ice forms" a few days ago when the temperature dipped into the single digits, the "amalgam" is at once both strangely familiar (as though I had "seen" it lurking somewhere within the frozen water) and alluringly alien (since, though it is undeniably something my camera "captured," it is also something I could not have possibly observed). It's random-yet-not-random frozen forms and eddies hint at some mysterious (creative - living?) froth that periodically dispenses with aesthetically pleasing patterns that photographers "catch" glimpses of and then call their own.

Skeleton of Truth

"So there it is in words, Precise
And if you read between the lines
You will find nothing there
For that is the discipline I ask
Not more, not less
Not the world as it is
Not ought to be –
Only the precision
The skeleton of truth
I do not dabble in emotions
Hint at implications
Evoke the ghosts of old forgotten creeds.
All that is for the preacher
The hypnotist, therapist and missionary
They will come after me
And use the little that I said
To bait more traps
For those who cannot bear
The lonely
Skeleton
of Truth"

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980) and Mary Catherine Bateson (1939 - 2021)

Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred

Different Perspectives

"Question: You mean it's a matter of different perspectives?
Each person has a different reason for being here;
if a person looked at it from the outside, he'd see
us all sitting here and maybe wouldn't know why.
And then...?

Trungpa Rinpoche: I mean we are trying to unify ourselves through confusion.

Question: The more confusion, the more unity?

Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s what tantric people say.

Question: You mean the more confusion there is,
the more difficult it is to stamp a system on reality?

Trungpa Rinpoche: You see, chaos has an order by virtue
of which it isn’t really chaos. But when there’s no chaos,
no confusion, there is luxury, comfort.
Comfort and luxury lead you more into
samsara, creating more luxurious situations
adds further to your collection of chaos.
All these luxurious conclusions come back on
you and you begin to question them,
which leads you to the further understanding
that, after all, this discomfort has order in it."

- The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 4

Knowing Nothing of Space

 "We do not know 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)

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

Creative Consciousness

"I believe that we need to learn from natural process about how to be appropriately creative ourselves, meaning that our activities should be appropriate to whatever is the context within which we are acting. This of course applies to everything we do, not just to art or architecture. The process of bringing something into being is what we and the rest of nature are engaged in all the time, but we have a tendency to assume that what emerges from our looking or feeling or doing was there to begin with and we just became aware of it. However just as quarks and mesons, organisms and galaxies are dynamically generated continuously, from we know not what, to become the natural kinds that we call in the generic language of dynamics, attractors, so we and the world we inhabit are generated continuously. The individual properties of these natural kinds reflect the context in which they arise by their particularities. It is this type of process that I believe we need to understand by participating in it, not just by looking at it.

...

The latest problem to appear clearly on the scientific agenda is how consciousness (and feeling) could emerge in a cosmos that is made up of totally inert, insentient components. Complexity theory always requires that there be some precursor of whatever property is observed to emerge in a system, such as superconductivity or the properties of water or the cooperative behavior of bees in a hive. The dilemma now is to account for the evolutionary emergence of feeling from a system that has no qualitative precursor of such a property. This would be a scientific miracle, and scientists don’t like miracles. So some other solution needs to be found. My own preference, to save the unity of scientific understanding, is to adopt some position like that of Whitehead or Bergson, so that consciousness and feelings are grounded in reality and not some ghostly epiphenomena that are not quite real. However, this will be very firmly resisted by the majority of scientists, and for perfectly good reasons. You do not lightly abandon a position that has been so phenomenally successful at explaining so much of nature. I don’t intend to abandon it either, but I believe that science has to be extended in some way to accommodate the reality of qualities."

- Brian Goodwin (1931 - 2009)