Limits of Perception

"The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which crisscross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it."

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

Expecting, Hoping, Wishing for - Ice...

"Anyone who keeps the ability to
see beauty never grows old."

- Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)

...and savoring nature's bountiful beauty in its absence. Each year around this time I look forward to going out to one of our local parks in Northern Virginia to do some "ice abstracting," as I like to call it (e.g., see my Jan 2024, Feb 2023, and Dec 2022 posts). Unfortunately, while this year's winter has only barely started, there have thus far been precious few contiguous days of below-freezing weather to yield any "ice" beyond what might be barely visible with a microscope. So, as the Northern VA/Wash-DC region braces for its first major winter storm of the season (along with a sizeable chunk of the entire country), and as temperatures have dropped precipitously due to the polar vortex blanketing our neck of the woods, I looked forward to my first "ice abstracting" photo session of the year this morning. I grabbed a mug of hot coffee, bundled up as if trekking to the Himalayas (it was 17 deg/F when I woke up), threw my camera in the car (gently, but urgently), and raced to Burke Lake. Only to find this: 

Beautiful - indeed, extremely, delightfully, joyously beautiful - but no ice! None, nada. To be sure, I could make out (barely) a few feathery strands of quarter-mm-sized icicles adhering to tiny twigs along the shore, but there was no real ice of any worth to compose with (such as in this Jan 2023 portfolio). I must admit there was a part of me that just wanted to get right back into my car, head home, and dive into a warm bed (17 deg/F temperatures tend to have this effect on me more often now than when I was decades younger). But, it is in the nature of every photographer, young or old, experienced or just starting out (or perhaps just trying to figure out what it takes to become more "experienced"), to clear your head of preconceived wishes and expectations and just revel in the beauty that surrounds us always. (This being said, I still want to do some ice abstracting! 😊)

Distortion of Reality

"Mysticism tends to combine the strictest concept of the Absolute, one that points to transcending any polarity, duality and distinction, and a vision of relativity that both denies the reality of the world of manifestation, when considered independently from its Source, and affirms an essential continuity or unity between the Ultimate and that which is not in an ultimate sense.

The Absolute is literally ab-solutum, which means that it is 'unbound,' 'detached' and 'free.' Although most often understood as 'complete' and 'self sufficient,' and therefore also 'cause of itself,' the Absolute must also and consequently be approached in terms of its perfect freedom, which is itself a dimension of its transcendence vis-à-vis any “relationality.” In this connection “relationality” entails an aspect of 'obligation' or 'reciprocity' by virtue of the 'relationships' and 'relations'  it involves. Therefore, our understanding of “absoluteness” as utter freedom immediately brings the central question of this inquiry to the fore by highlighting the apparent logical impossibility of positing concurrently the ontological reality of both the Absolute and “non-absolute realities” –including ourselves.

...

Metaphysical relativity is, in Advaita Vedānta, primarily identified with Māyā. Now Māyā is most often approached by Shankara as an epistemological phenomenon of superimposition upon Reality.  In other words Māyā is that which makes us mistake 'the rope for the snake.' It is a principle of distortion of Reality that stems from one’s inability to recognize Reality as it is, that is as the non-dual Self or Ātman. On the one hand, Māyā is the 'epistemological' fruit of a false identification of the Self with the body, on the other hand it is Māyā itself, or more specifically tamas - the lowest, most opaque of the three cosmological elements that enter into the composition of Māyā’s world of relativity, that is constitutional of delusion as such: 'The power of tamas is a veiling power.  It makes things appear to be other than what they are.  It is this which is the original cause of an individual’s transmigration and is the cause of the origination of the action of the projecting power.'

It must be noted ... that the ontological status of Māyā is incomprehensible: 'She is most strange. Her nature is inexplicable,' to use Shankara’s words. Māyā is fundamentally the unintelligible, and this lack of intelligibility is a function of  the 'obscurity' or uncertainty of its origin, as well as being bound to the  undecidability of its ontological status. "

- Patrick Laude
Shimmering Reality: The Metaphysics of Relativity in Mystical Traditions

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

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)

Mitote Maya

"He realized that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are. They couldn’t see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the mirrors. And that wall of fog was made by the interpretation of images of light — the Dream of humans.

...

Your whole mind is a fog which the Toltec called a mitote (pronounced MIH-TOE´-TAY). Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other. This is the condition of the human mind — a big mitote, and with that big mitote you cannot see what you really are. In India they call the mitote maya, which means illusion. It is the personality’s notion of 'I am.' Everything you believe about yourself and the world, all the concepts and programming you have in your mind, are all the mitote. We cannot see who we truly are; we cannot see that we are not free."

- Miguel Ruiz (1952 - )
The Four Agreements

Collective Field

"Intelligence ... is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes. The task is to figure out how to become aware of it, to associate with it, to make it manifest. This process is itself one of entanglement, of opening ourselves to forms of communication and interaction with the totality of the more-than-human world, much deeper and more extensive than those which can be performed in the artificial constraints of the laboratory. It involves changing ourselves, and our own attitudes and behaviors, rather than altering the conditions of our non-human communicants.

...

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons.

...

The 'real world' in which we find ourselves, then—the very world our sciences strive to fathom—is not a sheer 'object,' not a fixed and finished 'datum' from which all subjects and subjective qualities could be pared away, but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or 'reality.'"

- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous

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

Mossy Path

"Whence are we born into this world? Wither lies the way by which we may return thither? So deign you to ask in your quest for that knowledge now lost to you. Yet I implore you, seek not that which lies within your good self in some place far removed from yourself. The several teachings that the Buddha has bequeathed us, different one from another though they may seem, have, as he himself has taught us, but a single source. People’s desires and aspirations are as different as their faces, and thus the Buddha teaches through a variety of Expedient Means. Yet the Way by which one endeavors to attain enlightenment, whether one be of high station or low, can be no other than to penetrate to the very source of consciousness. The rain falls alike on all plants and trees; and though the season of their bloom may be early or late, all blossom forth in colorful splendor. Likewise is it with the many different teachings of the Buddha; they are like the dewdrops, having but a single hue of their own, [but appearing to differ] because the cast of people’s minds is not constant. The body, be it that of one either deep in sin or one exalted in virtue, ends ultimately in the same form, as dew upon the mossy path. That which knows no limits, from the distant past into the future, which has neither beginning nor end, lies within your own honored mind. If it be tied by earthly cares and attachments, then never will it escape from the Three Worlds but must wander aimlessly through the Six Realms. In the dark of night, the three thousand greater worlds are far removed and invisible to the Corporeal Eye. Yet open the Mind’s Eye and that far-off world of enlightenment may be seen unobstructed. So you see, there is no need for you to become a monk and relinquish your reign. Even in your present exalted position, if you just set your mind upon it, you can attain enlightenment."

- Reading The Tale of Genji:
Sources from the First Millennium

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.

...

↑ 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

Myo

D.T. Suzuki describes the Japanese word myo (for which there is no single-word equivalent in English) as a "certain artistic quality perceivable not only in works of art but in anything in Nature or life. The sword in the hands of the swordsman attains this quality when it is not a mere display of technical skill patiently learned under the tutorship of a good master...The hands may move according to the technique given out to every student, but there is a certain spontaneity and personal creativity when the technique, conceptualized, and universalized, is handled by the master hand. Myo may also be applied to the intelligence and the instinctive activities of various animals, for example the beaver building its nest, the spider spinning its web, the wasp or ant constructing its castles under the eaves or beneath the ground. They are the wonders of Nature. In fact, the whole universe is a miraculous exhibition of a master mind, and we humans who are one of its wonderful achievements have been straining our intellectual efforts ever since the awakening of consciousness and are daily being overwhelmed by Nature's demonstrations of its unfathomable and inexhaustible myo. The awakening of consciousness has been the greatest cosmological event in the course of evolution. We have been able by its practical application to probe into the secrets of nature and make use of them to serve our way of living, but at the same time we seem to be losing the many things we have otherwise been enjoying which Nature has been liberal enough to grant us. The function of human consciousness, as I see it, is to dive deeper and deeper into its source, the unconscious."

- D.T. Suzuki (1870 - 1966) 
Zen and Japanese Culture

Curious Stillness of Autumn

"The wind swept down the rows, next morning,
swaying the branches of the trees,
and the windfalls dropped to
the ground with soft thuds.
Frost was in the wind,
and between gusts the curious
stillness of autumn."

- John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

"Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man’s beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.'"

- Richard Adams (1920 - 2016)
Watership Down

Myconeurological Networks

"I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers. I see the mycelium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. A new bioneering science could be born, dedicated to programming myconeurological networks to monitor and respond to threats to environments. Mycelial webs could be used as information platforms for mycoengineered ecosystems."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Unfelt Motion

"Suddenly the wind ceased. The air seemed motionless around us. We were off, going at the speed of the air-current in which we now lived and moved. Indeed, for us there was no more wind; and this is the first great fact of spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is this unfelt motion forward and upward. The illusion is complete: it seems not to be the balloon that moves, but the earth that sinks down and away.

…

Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings. "

- Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873 - 1932)
My Air-Ships

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

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

A Vast and Mysterious Organism

"I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. The more I look at a thing, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I want to see. It is like peeling an onion. There is always another layer, and another, and another. And each layer is more beautiful than the last.

This is the way I look at the world. I don't see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.

I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn't stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere."

- Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
Black Spring

Time and Memory

"This is the disconcerting conclusion that emerges from Boltzmann’s work: the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. It’s a conclusion that leaves us flabbergasted: is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world in all of its minute detail? On a kind of distortion that’s produced by myopia? Is it true that, if I could see exactly and take into consideration the actual dance of millions of molecules, then the future would be “just like” the past?

...

Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world. The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance.

...

I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
The Order of Time

Tangled Infinity

"The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

Forms Without Substance

"He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! "

- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914)
Ghost Stories