Making Visible the Invisible

"The world is filled with these
invisible islands of energy,
where certain things can happen
and certain emotions and
dreams can be transported.
And as a photographer,
my task is to find those places.

...

Photography for me is not looking,
it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what
you’re looking at, then
you’re never going to get
others to feel anything when
they look at your pictures.

...

The camera is a tool for
making visible the invisible."

- Fay Godwin (1931 - 2005)

Vibrating Universe

"Gravitational waves are fundamentally different. Not only is a gravitational wave a side-to-side, lateral wave like light, not a longitudinal wave like sound, but it isn’t a ripple through objects in spacetime; it passes through spacetime itself. When a gravitational wave passes by, spacetime squeezes and contracts. This oscillation influences matter, which exists in spacetime – but doesn’t require matter to be able to travel. It’s quite demeaning to gravitational waves to call their detection ‘hearing the sound of black holes in space’ as some have done. By comparison, sound is a trivial local effect. Gravitational waves make the universe itself vibrate."

- Brian Clegg (1955 - )
Gravitational Waves

Imaginary Places

"Professor Summerlee gave a snort of impatience. 'We have spent two long days in exploration,' said he, 'and we are no wiser as to the actual geography of the place than when we started. It is clear that it is all thickly wooded, and it would take months to penetrate it and to learn the relations of one part to another. If there were some central peak it would be different, but it all slopes downwards, so far as we can see. The farther we go the less likely it is that we will get any general view ... You are all turning your brains towards getting into this country. I say that we should be scheming how to get out of it.' 'I am surprised, sir,' boomed Challenger, stroking his majestic beard, 'that any man of science should commit himself to so ignoble a sentiment ... I absolutely refuse to leave, however, until we have made at least a superficial examination of this country, and are able to take back with us something in the nature of a chart.'"

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930), The Lost World
As quoted by Alberto Manguel (1948 - )
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

Life Implicit

"Buddhist philosophy, notion of mutually dependent origination, everything originates together, mutually dependent. it is close to implicate order, which says that everything comes out of a good and everything is interrelated, and that underlying it there is no substance that can be defined. that also give rise to karma, but karma too becomes changeable since even our own state of mind is part of the whole, and when it changes, the whole changes, so the karma changes.

...

The holomovement which is 'life implicit' is the ground both of 'life explicit' and of 'inanimate matter', and this ground is what is primary, self-existent and universal. Thus we do not fragment life and inanimate matter, nor do we try to reduce the former completely to nothing but an outcome of the latter.

...

Thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly. And, as we'll discuss further on, it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person. Yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that is not doing anything—that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you don't decide what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives the false information that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought, whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Until thought is understood—better yet, more than understood, perceived—it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do. That's the difficulty. Thought is participating and then saying it's not participating. But it is taking part in everything. Fragmentation is a particular case of that. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Innocence of Eye

"Innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child — with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder.

...

A very receptive state of mind...
not unlike a sheet of film itself -
seemingly inert, yet so sensitive
that a fraction of a second's
exposure conceives a life in it.

...

Insight, vision, moments of revelation. During those rare moments something overtakes the man and he becomes the tool of a greater Force; the servant of, willing or unwilling depending on his degree of awakeness. The photograph, then, is a message more than a mirror, and the man is a messenger who happens to be a photographer."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

Dissolved Into The Picture

"I have for many years searched for the possibility of letting the viewer 'stroll' in the picture, forcing him to forget himself and dissolve into the picture.

...

A frightening depth of questions, weighted with responsibility, confronted me. And the most important: what should replace the missing object? The danger of ornamentation was clear, the dead make-believe existence of stylized forms could only frighten me away.

...

It took a very long time before this question (What should replace the object?) received a proper answer from within me. Often I look back into my past and am desolate to think how much time I took for the solution. I have only one consolation: I could never bring myself to use a form which developed out of the application of logic—not purely from feeling within me. I could not think up forms, and it repels me when I see such forms. All the forms which I ever used came “from themselves,” they presented themselves complete before my eyes, and it only remained for me to copy them, or they created themselves while I was working, often surprising me. "

- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

Esse Est Percipi

"...neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And to me it is no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) , cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them … The table I write on I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed-meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it ... or as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. [Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, quoted by JLB]

...
With the continuities of matter and spirit denied,
with space denied, I do not know by what
right we retain that continuity which is time.
Outside each perception (real or conjectural),
matter does not exist;
outside each mental state,
spirit does not exist;
neither then must time exist
outside each present moment.
...

[We] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity ... The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations ... The comparison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. [Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, quoted by JLB]"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
A New Refutation of Time

Reflecting Surrealities

"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream, and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, surreality, so to speak.

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Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory."

- André Breton (1896 - 1966)
Manifestoes of Surrealism

Aphanipoiesis

"Aphanipoiesis (n.) combines two words from ancient Greek to describe this way in which life coalesces toward vitality in unseen ways. Aphanis comes from a Greek root meaning “obscured, unseen, unnoticed;” poiesis is from one meaning “to bring forth, to make.” Other words which also carry the root aphanis include “phantom,” “diaphanous,” and “phenomenon,” while the root poiesis is familiar from the word “poetry,” along with Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis.

According to Peirce, abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis and is the only logical operation that introduces any new idea. Central to the abductive process is the notion of hypothesis. But what does a hypothesis say about the anticipatory systems of perception of any given observer? In noticing aphanipoiesis, exploring the realm of unseen contributors coalescing to produce the foundations of the hypothesis itself becomes relevant. The hypothesis is limited by pre-existing anticipatory patterns. If one listens only for what one knows to listen for, that is what will be heard. In the study of aphanipoiesis, the hypothesis is an indicator of those pre-habituated perceptions through which new information will be filtered. Familiarity with something in one context enables a kind of description of another context to become a basis for experiencing any kind of newness. A new flavor is explored through the experience of known flavors; a new form of music is explored by understanding other forms. Ultimately, the abductive process becomes a zone of untamed, unnamed, unseen, and essential contributors to what may later be called emergence. "

- Nora Bateson (1968 - )
Aphanipoiesis

Constructs of Imagination

 

"Perception is not a
window on objective reality.
It is an interface that hides objective
reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
...

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents. To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

...

...
What we call ‘reality,’ consists of
an elaborate papier-mâché construction of
imagination and theory filled in between
a few iron posts of observation."

- Donald Hoffman (1955 - )

The Case Against Reality

Awareness

"Most of us spend our time preoccupied. We are constantly carrying on an internal dialogue. While we are involved in talking to ourselves, we miss the moment-to-moment awareness of our life. We look, but we don’t see. We listen, but we don’t hear. We eat, but we don’t taste. We love, but we don’t feel. The senses are receiving all the information, but because of our preoccupations, cognition is not taking place. Zazen brings us back to each moment. The moment is where our life takes place. If we miss the moment, we miss our life."

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
Finding the Still Point

Ocean of Imagination

"The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas."

- Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - )

Heavenly Lantern

"Before humans beings possessed fire or tools or language, the moon had been their ally. It would calm people's fears now and then by illuminating the dark world like a heavenly lantern. Its waxing and waning gave people an understanding of the concept of time. Even now, when darkness had been banished from most parts of the world, there remained a sense of human gratitude toward the moon and its unconditional compassion. It was imprinted upon human genes like a warm collective memory."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
1Q84

Time and Space

"Because of the hazy, nondefinite character of quantum physics (called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), at the dimensions of the Planck length, space and time churn and seethe, with the distance between any two points wildly fluctuating from moment to moment, and time randomly speeding and slowing, perhaps even going backward and forward. In such a situation, time and space no longer exist in a way that has meaning to us."

- Alan Lightman (1948 - )
Probable Impossibilities

 

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)

Disorder to Order

"And here the fundamental dilemma appeared. The grim picture of cosmic evolution painted by the physicists—an engine that is slowly running down and grinding to a halt—was in sharp contrast to the evolutionary thinking of the biologists, who observed that the living universe evolves from disorder to order, toward states of ever increasing complexity. At the end of the 19th century, then, Newtonian mechanics, the science of eternal, reversible trajectories, had been supplemented by two diametrically opposed views of evolutionary change—that of a living world unfolding toward increasing order and complexity, and that of an engine running down, a world of ever increasing disorder. Who was right, the physicists or the biologists?"

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
Patterns of Connection

Observer-Centric Virtualities

"Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns...The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite.

...

Self-causation of reality becomes apparent when a phenomenal mind, which is a web of patterns, conceives a novel pattern and perceives it. All mass-energy, space-time itself emerge from consciousness. Those are epiphenomena of consciousness.

...

Mind instantiates oneself into matter. In a mathematical sense, matter is an “in-formed” pattern of mind. Time is emergent, and so is space. If space-time is emergent, so is mass-energy. All interactions in our physical world is computed by the larger consciousness system. In short, mind is more fundamental than matter. All realities are observer-centric virtualities."

- Alex M. Vikoulov, Theology of Digital Physics

The Total Perspective Vortex

"The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

...

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable."

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Photographing Reality

"The line between the reality
that is photographed because it
seems beautiful to us and the reality
that seems beautiful because it
has been photographed is very narrow.

...

You only have to start saying of something 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

"The Adventure of a Photographer"

Flying Leaves of Autumn

"Autumn leaves don't fall, they fly.
They take their time and wander
on this their only chance to soar."

- Delia Owens (1949 - )
Where the Crawdads Sing