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)

Qualitative Forms

"We have written the equations of water flow. From experiment, we find a set of concepts and approximations to use to discuss the solution - vortex streets, turbulent wakes, boundary layers. When we have similar equations in a less familiar situation, and one for which we cannot yet experiment, we try to solve the equations in a primitive, halting, and confused way to try to determine what new qualitative features may come out, or what new qualitative forms are a consequence of the equations. Our equations for the sun, for example, as a ball of hydrogen gas, describe a sun without sunspots, without the rice-grain structure of the surface, without prominences, without coronas. Yet, all of these are really in the equations; we just haven't found the way to get them out.

...

The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality - or whether it does not.

...

If water - which is nothing but these little blobs, mile upon mile of the same thing over the earth - can form waves and foam, and make rushing noises and strange patterns as it runs over cement; if all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?"

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Earth's Dreaming

"In the beginning was the dream...

In the eternal night where no dawn broke,
the dream deepened.
Before anything ever was,
it had to be dreamed.

...

If we take Nature as the great artist, then all presences in the world have emerged from her mind and imagination. We are children of the earth's dreaming. It's almost as if Nature is in dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unable ever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Each day we live in what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble a dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious - we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.

...

There is no definitive dividing line
between reality and dream.
What we consider real is often
precariously dream-like.
Our grip on reality is tenuous..."

- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

Place of Purification

"Solitude is the place of purification."

- Martin Buber (1878 - 1965)

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Cosmic Process

"Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.

...

I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposefulness, infinitude.

...

From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as a man."

- Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
Henry Miller on Writing

Randomness, Creativity, Mystery, Understanding

"Randomness does not mean everything is meaningless. Randomness is, sort of… You’re looking at creativity in its primordial state. You see one of the characteristics of randomness is unpredictability. Now, something is unpredictable if you couldn’t predict it in advance: that’s creativity. So, in other words, randomness and creativity are practically different names for the same thing. Something that isn’t random is something you can predict, which means that it’s not creative. You’re sticking within your current system of concepts.

...

The problem of creativity is, can you have a mathematical theory of creativity? Well it can’t be a theory that will give you a mechanical procedure for being creative because then it’s not creative. So a mathematical theory of creativity has to be indirect. Creativity is by definition uncomputable. If we knew how to do it, it wouldn’t be creative. When you have maximum creativity, it looks random because it’s totally unpredictable from what you knew before.

...

If you can calculate something, then it’s not creative because you’re working within your existing system. So there’s this paradoxical aspect. A mathematical theory of creativity is a more abstract kind of mathematics where you can prove theorems about creativity – you can describe it – maybe you can show it’s highly probable, but it won’t give you a way to mechanically produce creativity, which is the kind of thing that instrumental mathematics normally does.

...

I’m trying to get to the concentrated essence of the mystery: the mystery is creativity, and I think that’s deeply meaningful. I mean, ... the universe wants to create us. The universe wants to create mind. The universe maybe wants to get closer to God, or maybe the universe is God and it’s trying to increase its level of perception, its level of understanding."

- Gregory Chaitin (1947 - )
The Joy of Mathematical Discovery

Trees are Poems

"Trees are poems that the earth
writes upon the sky."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

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)

Nature's Elegance #2

"What is especially striking and remarkable
is that in fundamental physics a
beautiful or elegant theory is
more likely to be right
than a theory that
is inelegant."

- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)

Mystagogic Objects

"If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.

...

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

...

The universe is mystagogic."

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)
Fragments

Uncalculable Boundaries

"Einstein once wrote, 'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.'

...

By the 'mysterious,' I do not think Einstein was referring to something fearful or supernatural. I believe he was speaking about the boundary between the known and the unknown. Standing at that boundary is an exhilarating experience. And it is a deeply human experience—concerning what the human mind understands and what that mind does not yet understand.

...

Evidently, the fundamental laws

of nature do not pin down a

single and unique universe.

According to the current thinking

of many physicists, we are

living in one of a vast number of universes.

We are living in an accidental universe.

We are living in a universe uncalculable by science."

- Alan Lightman (1948 - )
The Accidental Universe

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

Soft Stillness and the Night

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

- William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
The Merchant of Venice

Worlds Born

"Each friend represents a world in us, a
world possibly not born until they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting
that a new world is born."

- Anais Nin (1903 - 1977)
The Diary of Anaïs Nin

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

Ancient Rhythms

"The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigor and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here."

- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace