Cliffs of Mystery

"The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple-universe."

- Annie Dillard (1945 - )

Cosmological Cycling

"'Tlingit language reflects subtle differences between ordinary and extraordinary, commonplace and mysterious, safe and dangerous ... the language is rich in verbs and emphasizes activity and motion, making no sharp distinction between animate and inanimate [as defined in Western thought]. Hence, mountains, glaciers, bodies of water, rocks and manufactured objects all have qualities of sentience.' 

...

A system of cosmological understandings about the nature of existence, its entities, forces, processes, and the nature of time and space is found in virtually all human cultures. Tlingit cosmology was grounded in the principle that all living entities had 'spirits' and those entities cycle between domains of life in the world of direct experience followed after death by residence in another domain waiting for rebirth or reincarnation into this world. This process has been referred to as cosmological cycling.

...

'...people understood that all entities of nature – plants, animals, stones, trees, mountains, rivers, lakes, and a host of other living entities – embodies relationships that must be honored. Through the seeking, making, sharing, and celebrating of those natural relationships, they came to perceive themselves in a sea of interdependent relationships.'"

- Steve J. Langdon (1948 - )
"Spiritual Relations, Moral Obligations and Existential Continuity,"
in Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom

Dialogue with Nature

"I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature.

...

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him."

- Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840)

Mystery of Mysteries

"Should one wish to learn the methods of a conjurer, he might vainly watch the latter's customary repertoire, and, so long as everything went smoothly, might never obtain a clue to the mysterious performance, baffled by the precision of the manipulations and the complexity of the apparatus; if, however, a single error were made in any part or if a single deviation from the customary method should force the manipulator along an unaccustomed path, it would give the investigator an opportunity to obtain a part or the whole of the secret. Thus. ... it seems likely that through the study of the abnormal or unusual, some insight may be obtained into that mystery of mysteries, the development of an organism."

- Harris H. Wilder (1864 - 1928)

Cosmic Strings

"A cosmic string is, put simply, a flaw. A crack. A defect. A fold in the very fabric of spacetime itself. If they exist, they were made in the earliest moments of the big bang, when the insane energies were capable of twisting and distorting spacetime so much that it left permanent wrinkles.

These wrinkles, known as cosmic strings, would be almost impossibly thin, no wider than a single proton. But that would pack a potent punch. At those densities, a stretch of cosmic string only a mile long would weigh more than the entire planet Earth. Based on our theories of how they would form, they could stretch from one of the observable universes to the other.

But ... we don’t know if they exist."

- Paul M. Sutter
The Sheer Awesomeness and Weirdness of Cosmic Strings

Dancing Rhythms

"Everything in the universe
has a rhythm,
everything
dances."

- Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014)

Cosmic Journey

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey — stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. But the expressions of life are ephemeral, momentary, transient. Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, once said, This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, Rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment, but it is transient. It is a little parenthesis in eternity. If we share with caring, lightheartedness, and love, we will create abundance and joy for each other. And then this moment will have been worthwhile."

- Deepak Chopra (1946 - )

Organs of Perception

"The time has come to realize
that supersensible knowledge has
now to arise from the
materialistic grave.

...

Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.

...

Whoever seeks higher knowledge
must create it for himself.
He must instill it
into his soul. "

- Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925)

Altered State of Consciousness

"Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an [altered state of consciousness] ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. 

The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. 

Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. 

As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the 'principle of parsimony,' Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like 'Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily' or 'Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.' The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the 'primitives' who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious."

- Rick Strassman (1952 - )
 Inner Paths to Outer Space

Silent Knowledge

"Silent knowledge is the deep, innate wisdom that is in all things. It comes from the interconnectedness of all beings and creatures. It is the wisdom of the universe. For instance, if you've ever simply known the answer to a question without any logical way that your brain could have discovered it—like when a mother can feel that her child is in danger or when you know the moment a relative transitions into death—this is all silent knowledge. It is the universal wisdom that has always been at our fingertips, but that we often neglect to tap into, either because we don't know or have forgotten how."

- Don Jose Ruiz
Wisdom of the Shamans