Showing posts with label Stairs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stairs. Show all posts

Saturday, November 16, 2024

(Missing) Inhabitants of Impossible Worlds


"It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the same floor, because they have differing conceptions of what is horizontal and what is vertical. Yet they may well share the use of the same staircase. On the top staircase illustrated here, two people are moving side by side and in the same direction, and yet one of them is going downstairs and the other upstairs. Contact between them is out of the question because they live in different worlds and therefore can have no knowledge of each other's existence.
...
Only those who attempt the absurd...
will achieve the impossible.
I think ...
I think it's in my basement...
Let me go upstairs and check."

M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Tuesday, August 02, 2022

New Eyes


"A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
...
The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new sights,
but in looking with new eyes

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Remembrance of Things Past

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Mind As Passage


"The utmost mission of Mind
is to train our obscure consciousness
which has emerged out of the
dark prison of Matter,
to enlighten its blind instincts,
random intuitions,
vague perceptions till it shall
become capable of this greater light
and this higher ascension.
Mind is a passage,
not a culmination."

- Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950)

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Mind, Path, Stillness

"When the mind is very quiet,
completely still,
when there is not a movement
of thought and therefore no experience,
no observer, then that very stillness
has its own creative understanding.

In that stillness the mind is
transformed into something else."

J. Krishnamurti
Spiritual Philosopher (1895-1986)