Mind and Matter

"As a physicist who has devoted his whole life to rational science, to the study of matter, I think I can safely claim to be above any suspicion of irrational exuberance. Having said that, I would like to observe that my research on the atom has shown me that there is no such thing as matter in itself. What we perceive as matter is merely the manifestation of a force that causes the subatomic particles to oscillate and holds them together in the tiniest solar system of the universe. Since there is in the whole universe neither an intelligent force nor an eternal force (mankind, for all its yearnings, has yet to succeed in inventing a perpetual motion machine), we must assume that this force that is active within the atom comes from a conscious and intelligent mind. That mind is the ultimate source of matter."

- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

The Visible Invisible

"We are all constantly in the midst of light. We are surrounded, bathed, and nourished by it. This miracle we call light can transform. It can teach, reveal, evoke, and heal. It speaks in many voices. We tend to see light as something that makes form visible, but light reveals much more. It reveals us.

...

Light makes visible the invisible. It can show us love where there seems to be only a rotting log or a solitary rock perched on a ledge. Sometimes the subject is illuminated by light, sometimes the subject is illumination itself. Then the subject itself glows; there are no shadows.

...

Light has the ability to reveal the many layers, the myriad faces contained in each form. Most often, we tend to see just the surface of a subject. We name it, identify it, and forget about it. And we stop seeing. Yet when the light changes, the subject changes, and what the subject has to show us changes.

...

If we are patient, letting go of thoughts and letting the mind settle down, then the hidden faces rise to the surface, and subtlety and richness return. A shift takes place, resonance appears. This allows for real intimacy with the subject.

...

The boulder that was once very soft under diffuse lighting now becomes hard and heavier looking. When the subject reflects the light, the reflections add another dimension; patterns begin to appear. Before sunrise the world is essentially black and white ... Things are almost translucent. Unless we are really 'seeing' and not just looking, it is easy to miss the richness of these subtleties.

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
Light

Mysterious Object

"No object is mysterious.
The mystery is your eye."

- Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)

Patterns of Arrangement

"...thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements – change – in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it – i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself)."

- Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982)
Valis

Nature's Eye

"There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.  This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of us all, "natura naturans."  There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy.  It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being. "

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

"The clear realities of Nature seen

with the inner eye of the spirit reveal

the ultimate echo of God."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Unknown Infinity

"When I stand alone with the earth and sky
a feeling of something in me going off in every direction
into the unknown of infinity means more more to me than
any organized religion gives me."

-  Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

Shores of Vast Expanse

"I read the skies and am rendered silent. This would be a day for walking long on shores of vast expanse. I have been the sort of man I fear would rise again in moments of resolve. When I see him on the street or in the pew or in the mirror, his translucence quivers close to the frequency of fleshliness until I blink him down into the backwash, into the riptide of graces, for he was full of judgment. So I must walk. The tall grass of the dunes is tossing like the ocean’s anemone. Waves are faithful of the sands shaped unseen under the great breathing of the tides. Wind upon grasses. Waves upon sand. Some steady drawing of my surfaces out into the depths and gone, out into the piercing light. Return for more, o mighty patience, o mighty love of the wild and unspeakable, til I am wind and wave."

- James Scott Smith
Water, Rocks and Trees

Feel the Tide

"It was ours, the water at the farm, but it was no different from any other water, every drop of moisture that fell since there were only protozoa, trilobites, orthocones. It was inside every single human being. When I missed the sea, I could lean my face into another person—with worry or dangerous joy or grieving—and feel their tide. The World As It Is is only a furious tide of people, linked by blood and tears and sweat, a push toward each other we can’t stem. Water was over Mother’s grave, beside Father’s, under the boats, in my blood and the blood of everyone I loved. I felt it all. I felt the weight of all the water in the world."

- Eiren Caffall
All the Water in the World

Waves of Consciousness

"Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out,
leave some writing, and just as quickly
new waves roll in and erase it.
I try to quickly read what's
written there, but it's hard,"

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
Kafka on the Shore

"When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world."

- Christophe Galfard (1976 - )
 The Universe in Your Hand

Perfect Balance

"Nature may reach the same result in many ways ... A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Secret Order

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.

...

The grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science… but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically. Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practicable.

...

For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Frozen Homage

"There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Note. A long while back (on Feb 7, 2009 to be exact), I posted a lengthy set of musings on the Unconscious Influence and the Creative Process, wherein I speculated on the impact that seeing one of Fay Godwin's photographs led to one of my own decades later. The image above may be viewed from the opposite perspective, in that it was my conscious memory of one of Ansel Adams' well known Frozen Lakes and Cliffs photograph that drew my eye to the little scene here. While it lacks Ansel's abstract ethereality, I may not have captured the image at all were it not for my knowing (and being able to recall, at an instant's notice) Adams' oeuvre. Far from an "unconscious" influence, my humble image is an intentional homage. It is also a keepsake of a wonderful day my family and I spent on a completely frozen over part of the Potomac river in Maryland side of Great Falls Park that we had never before seen frozen (during our 26+ years of living in the area)! 

Inner Space

"True intelligence operates silently.
Stillness is where creativity and
solutions to problems
are found.

...

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still.
Just look and just listen.
No more is needed.
Being still, looking, and listening
activates the non-conceptual
intelligence within you.
Let stillness direct your
words and actions.

...

When you look and listen in this way,
you may become aware of a subtle and at
first perhaps hardly noticeable sense of calm.
Some people feel it as a
stillness in the background.
Others call it peace.
When consciousness is no longer
totally absorbed by thinking,
some of it remains in its formless,
unconditioned, original state.
This is inner space.

...

Stillness is the only thing in

this world that has no form.
But then, it is not really a thing,
and it is not of this world.

...

Become at ease with the
state of 'not knowing.'"

- Eckhart Tolle (1948 - )
A New Earth

Secrets of the Trees

"If you reveal your secrets to the wind,
you should not blame the wind for
revealing them to the trees."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) 
The Wanderer

Psychic Structure

"We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor should we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.

...

Beyond our genetic coding, we need to go to the earth, as the source from which we came, and ask for its guidance, for earth carries the psychic structure as well as the physical form of every living being on the planet.

...

Ultimately, our guidance on any significant issue must emerge from this comprehensive source. … This source is not distinct from us. The universe is so immediate to us, is such an immediate presence, that it escapes our notice, yet whatever authentically exists in our cultural creations is derived from these spontaneities within us, spontaneities that come from an abyss of energy and a capacity for intelligible order of which we have only the faintest glimmer in our conscious awareness."

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)
The Dream of The Earth

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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↑ top

up

position

down

↓ bottom

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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

Taoist Wisdom (To Get Us Through the Day)

"There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. 'Such bad luck,' they said sympathetically. 'Maybe,' the farmer replied.

 The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. 'How wonderful,' the neighbors exclaimed. 'Maybe,' replied the old man.

 The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. 'Maybe,' answered the farmer.

 The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

 'Maybe,' said the farmer."

The Story of the Chinese Farmer
As interpreted by Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Stones and Trees

"Believe me, for I know,
you will find something far
greater in the woods than in books.
Stones and trees will teach you
that which you cannot learn
from the masters."

- Bernard of Clairvaux (c.1090 - 1153)
The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux

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

Transcending the Subject

"The fact that these highly abstract notions coalesce in such refined harmony is absolutely mind-boggling. It points to something rich and mysterious lurking beneath the surface, as if the curtain had been lifted and we caught glimpses of the reality that had been carefully hidden from us. These are the wonders of modern math, and of the modern world.

...

The interaction between math and physics is a two-way process, with each of the two subjects drawing from and inspiring the other. At different times, one of them may take the lead in developing a particular idea, only to yield to the other subject as focus shifts. But altogether, the two interact in a virtuous circle of mutual influence.

...

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.” Mathematics teaches us to rigorously analyze reality, study the facts, follow them wherever they lead. It liberates us from dogmas and prejudice, nurtures the capacity for innovation. It thus provides tools that transcend the subject itself."

- Edward Frenkel (1968 - )
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality