Eerie Order

"It turns out that

an eerie type of chaos

can lurk just behind

a facade of order;

and yet, deep inside the chaos

lurks an even eerier type of order."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Metamagical Themas:Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Wonder

"When the first encounter with some object surprises us... this makes us wonder and be astonished... And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion."

- Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

The Passions of the Soul

Unbroken Movement

"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 our whole and unbroken movement."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Quietude

"Allow the heart to

empty itself of all turmoil!

Retrieve the utter tranquility

of the mind from which you issued.

Although all forms are dynamic,

and we all grow and transform,

each of us is compelled

to return to our root.

Our root is quietude."

- Lao Tzu (6th century – 4th century BCE)

The Sentinel

"Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts."

- Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

The Sentinel

Unapproachable Silence

"My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Simplicity

"When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. "

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Balance

"In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world."

- Thomas Moore (1940 - )

Care of the Soul

Creating Divisions

"The general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that it’s not doing anything – that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Suggested Reality

"You must suggest to me reality; you can never show me reality.

...all thinkers are apt to become dogmatic, and every dogma fails because it does not give you the other side. The same is true of all things, art, religion and everything else. You must find a third, as your standpoint of reason. This is how I came to work in the science of geometry, which is the only abstract truth."

- George Inness (1825 - 1894)