Glittering Universe

"There may be no such thing as the
'glittering central mechanism of the universe'
but magic may be better description
of the treasure that is waiting."

- John Archibald Wheeler (1911 - 2008)

Beyond Form

"Thought defines the universe in geometric figures.

...

Those granted the gift of seeing more deeply
can see beyond form, and concentrate
on the wondrous aspect hiding
behind every form, which is
called life.

...

Only for those prepared to leave
their familiar life behind, will life
emerge in a new gown of continually
expanding beauty and perfection.
But in order to attain such a state,
it is necessary to achieve stillness
in both thought and feeling."

- Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944)

Cloud of Unknowing

 "The universes which are amenable
to the intellect can never satisfy
the instincts of the heart."

- The Cloud of Unknowing

Absence/Presence

 "In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in
perennial Presence you see appearance.
Though the two are one and the same,
once they arise, they differ in name."

- David Hinton
The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

Spirits Clad in Veils

"We are spirits clad in veils."

- Christopher P. Cranch (1813 - 1892)

"Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don’t want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It’s something relative to the past and the future.
It’s a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don’t want to include time in my scheme.
I don’t want to think about things as present;
I don’t want to separate them from themselves,
treating them as present.

I shouldn’t even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can’t think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn’t a science."

- Alberto Caeiro (1889 - 1915)
The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

"There are many faiths, but the spirit is one
— in me, and in you, and in him. So that
 if everyone believes himself, all will be united;
everyone be himself and all will be as one."

- Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)
Resurrection

Myriad Worlds of the Universe

"I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasure of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of, magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated one as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons."

- Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 563 or 480 BCE)

Geometry Made Visible

"Architecture is geometry made visible
in the same sense that music
is number made audible."

- Claude F. Bragdon (1866 - 1946)

More Than the Mind Knows

"'Standing in the presence of' must be different than 'spirit taking over.' In the former I photograph my own blocks, veils, abstractions, etc. I know nothing of the latter. ... Be still with yourself. To establish condition - concentration heightened awareness with a still body and active mind ... To stand in the presence of... projection - empathy - to awareness of object and self ... Previsualization. (Become a camera. Let subject generate its own composition or impose, knowingly, yourself. when the subject presents itself as its own photograph.) Subject for what it is. Subject for what else it is ... [Written in upper margin: 'while holding firm to object and self-previsualizing its transformation as a photograph.] ... During a moment of rapport let recognition trigger exposure. Recognition of what? The thing for what it is (surface appearance and let the viewer go on if he wishes). Things for what else they are: A) inner truth or essence B) mirror of self. This means to do this at seeing prior [to] exposure and again at the instant of exposure ... The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows. Photo not understood fully at exposure. Sense of desiring of self and/or of world (by including heart and soul). Beyond verbal and visual, beyond this recognizable image rapport with spirit or depth [of] mind ... (Above delete this because it may become another Canon. Make each photograph a prayer.) ... Once a photo is a mirror of the man and man a mirror of the world, spirit may take over. Make each photo a prayer."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)
Minor White, Memorable Fancies

Joyfully Reaching the Stream

 "Follow the way of virtue.
Follow the way joyfully
Through this world and on beyond!
...
The fool laughs at generosity.
The miser cannot enter heaven.
But the master finds joy in giving

And happiness is his reward.
...

And more -
For greater than all the joys
Of heaven and of earth,

Greater still than dominion

Over all the worlds,

Is the joy of reaching the stream."

- The Dhammapada

Self-Creation

"As the spider creates and absorbs...
so this universe proceeds from the immortal."

Commentary: "It was said the immortal is the source of all created things. How it is the source is explained by well-known analogies; as is well-known in the world, the spider without requiring any other cause itself creates, i.e., sends out threads not distinct from its own body and again absorbs them itself, i.e., draws them into itself or makes them part of itself; as medicinal plants, i.e., from the corn plant to the immovable, not distinct from the earth, proceed from the earth, and as from the living person the hairs proceed different in nature from him; as in these illustrations, so here, i.e., in the circle of samsara, all the universe of the same and different nature proceeds from the akshara above described, without requiring any other cause; the statement of many analogies is to facilitate easy understanding of the meaning; universe which proceeds from the Brahman proceeds in this order and not all at once, like the throwing of a handful of apples."

- S. Sitarama Sastri

Upanishads and Sri Sankara's commentary

Postscript. This is a cropped iPhone image of a stylized advertisement for a wedding dress that appears in the window of a local dry-cleaning company appropriately called "Cosmo Cleaners" 😊

Shamanic Dance

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed."

-  Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

Postscript. This is an "old" (almost two year old) image that I had inexplicably not processed from its raw state until having recently "discovered" it on my hard drive while looking for another (completely unrelated) picture. It's not that I did not think of it as a “keeper" worth processing soon after I captured it; rather, I simply overlooked it before I moved on to other things. It's existence is a reminder that our hard drives are likely full of "old and forgotten" (perhaps never properly "seen" and/or processed) photographs, behooving us to set aside time every once in a while to retrace old steps. The image depicts a tiny waterfall my wife and I passed while walking from the parking lot we left our car in on the Canadian side of Niagara falls in October 2023 (specifically, at Dufferin Islands Nature Area) to the falls themselves. Intriguingly, it is this shot (or something very close to it) - and, saliently, not an image of Niagara Falls themselves - that my brain conjures as a mental image whenever I hear "Niagara Falls" mentioned; and that (for me) depicts the "soul" of Niagara so much more directly (certainly, more poetically) than the iPhone panorama that appears below. 

Little did I realize that my mental image is a memory of an experience I had forgotten I'd photographed. Perhaps, with a nod to shamanic truths, I do not realize that my life is a but memory of an experience I had forgotten I'm always living!

Everything Dreams

"He was aware that in thus relegating to irreality  a major portion of the only reality, the only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane mind runs: the loss of the sense of free will.

...
Everything dreams.
The play of form, of being,
is the dreaming of substance.
Rocks have their dreams,
and the earth changes...
...

Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life – evolution – the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy – existence itself – is essentially change."

- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

The Lathe of Heaven

String Theory

"For me, the most beautiful aspects of physics are not the complicated math equations or even the ability of predicting how things will happen. What attracts me to physics is what it teaches us about the bigger picture. The general philosophical lessons that are embedded in physical laws are what excite me. For example, the fact that all particles and forces get unified within string theory teaches us about the unity underlying our universe. The amazingly vast collection of solutions to equations of string theory suggests that there may be many universes besides ours. What happened before the big bang, or was there a time before big bang? The 'duality symmetry' in string theory, which exchanges small spaces with large spaces, suggests that perhaps as we go back in time the universe was effectively getting bigger instead of smaller. This suggests we came from other universes. Physics teaches us deep facts about our universe and our place in it. I hope I can add a little to this beautiful story. That is my goal."

- Cumrun Vafa (1960 - )

Process of Perceiving

"Perceiving how things are is a mode of exploring how things appear. How they appear is, however, an aspect of how they are. To explore appearance is thus to explore the environment, the world. To discover how things are, from how they appear, is to discover an order or pattern in their appearance. The process of perceiving, of finding out how things are, is a process of meeting the world; it is an activity of skillful exploration."

- Alva Noë (1964 - )

Psycho-Physical Events

"Reality, according to Heisenberg, is built not out of matter, as matter was conceived of in classical physics, but out of psycho-physical events – events with certain aspects that are described in the language of psychology and with other aspects that are described in the mathematical language of physics – and out of objective tendencies for such events to occur. ‘The probability function…represents a tendency for events and our knowledge of events’  ... The deepest human intuition is not the immediate grasping of the classical-physics-type character of the external world. It is rather that one's own conscious subjective efforts can influence the experiences that follow. Any conception of nature that makes this deep intuition an illusion is counterintuitive. Any conception of reality that cannot explain how our conscious efforts influence our bodily actions is problematic. What is actually deeply intuitive is the continually reconfirmed fact that our conscious efforts can influence certain kinds of experiential feedback. A putatively rational scientific theory needs at the very least to explain this connection in a rational way to be in line with intuition."

- Paul Davies (1946 - )
Information and the Nature of Reality

Language of Mathematics

"Something becomes objective (as opposed to 'subjective') as soon as we are convinced that it exists in the minds of others in the same form as it does in ours and that we can think about it and discuss it together. Because the language of mathematics is so precise, it is ideally suited to defining concepts for which such a consensus exists. In my opinion, that is sufficient to provide us with a feeling of an objective existence, of a reality of mathematics."

- Armand Borel (1923 - 2003)

Boundless Ambiguity

Paradox Museum, Miami, Florida

"The writing lies before you and always says the same, if you believe in words. But if you believe in things in whose places only words stand, you never come to the end. And yet you must go an endless road, since life flows not only down a finite path but also an infinite one. But the unbounded makes you anxious since the unbounded is fearful and your humanity rebels against it. Consequently you seek limits and restraints so that you do not lose yourself tumbling into infinity Restraint becomes imperative for you. You cry out for the word which has one meaning and no other, so that you escape boundless ambiguity. The word becomes your God, since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic against the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. You are saved if you can say at last: that is that and only that. You speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek and make words."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
The Red Book: A Reader's Edition

Photographs-Otherwise-Not-Taken, Taken

Inside of Library, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

"Nows within this now, rather like snapshots in an album. Each Now is separate and a world unto itself, but the richly structured Nows 'know' about one another because they literally contain one another in certain essential respects. As consciousness surveys many things at once in one Now, it is simultaneously present, at least in part, in other Nows. This awareness of many things in one could well exist in a much more pronounced form in other places in Platonia."

- Julian  Barbour (1937 - )
 The End of Time

Note. The admittedly busy title of this blog post obviously begs an explanation. I'll start by saying that it is inspired by a short email exchange I recently had with a photo buddy of mine (the Zen-master, Paul Cotter). In reply to Paul's kind comments about my recent "travelogue images," I countered with the suggestion that my favorite images from the trip are/may-be those I took with my iPhone and not my 21L-sling-bag's-worth of "pro" gear (the details of which hardly matter)! While I am not (entirely) convinced of the veracity of my claim (and others may differ), I have zero doubt that my iPhone gifted me many images that I will cherish in the years to come precisely because these are photographs I would otherwise have not taken! Some examples - click to see full-size:

View of a wall while waiting to be seated at a restaurant

Footprints on a beach in front of another restaurant

A view from inside the Novotel Auckland Airport
while my wife was busy getting us checked in

Frosted window inside restroom at the
Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park Visitor Centre

View inside a restaurant while being led to our table

Upside down view of one of the ceilings at the
Nadi International Airport in Fiji

Another (upside down) view from inside the library at
the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

 

A snapshot view of urban geometry while waiting
for my wife to pay the parking meter

A 5 sec exposure of a part of our boat ride to Milford Sound,
stabilized by my iPhone's computational photography algorithms

I have dozens more of these "Photographs-Otherwise-Not-Taken, Taken" images, all of which share this one salient pattern: had I not used my iPhone to capture them (embarrassingly easily by, literally, framing and tapping, and without any of what my wife describes as "glacier-paced compositional machinations"), they would all have been but fleeting moments doomed to be lost in the mists of memory and time.

Unbroken Boundaries

"The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

...

There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.

...

In this flow, mind and matter
are not separate substances.
Rather, they are different aspects
of one whole and unbroken movement."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Note. These are all reflections off of cars I took with my iPhone this morning to help break the monotony of sitting in a Nissan dealership waiting for my car to get serviced. As I've repeatedly noted on this blog, images - heck, veritable universes - are everywhere 😊

Madness is a Special Form of the Spirit

"Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
The Red Book: A Reader's Edition