The Usayable

"...trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work."

-  Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Letters to a Young Poet

Our Quixotic Purpose

"We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe."

-  James Gleick (1954 - )
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

The Flow of the Process

"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... 

Understanding must move with the flow of the process." 

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1920 - 1986)

Become a River

"Become a river and then nothing is needed.

That’s what The Secret of the Golden Flower says:

Achieve inaction through action,

achieve effortlessness through effort.

But first comes the effort, 

the action—it will melt you—and then

the river starts flowing.

In that very flow it has

reached the ocean."

- Osho (1931 - 1990)

Outside World

"As far as I know,

there is no proof whatever

of the existence of an

objective reality apart 

from our senses,

and I do not see why

we should accept the

 outside world as such

solely by virtue

of our senses."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Process

"There is no gap

between us and

the process."

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)

Perpetual Stream of Energy

"Living forms are not in being,

they are happening,

they are the expression of

a perpetual stream of

matter and energy which

passes through the organism

and at the same time

constitutes it."

- Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901 - 1972)

Magical Illusion

"You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Mysterious Universe

"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Merely Vibration

"Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us."

- Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893)