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)

Topologically Speaking

"It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies. And we don’t know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity.

...

The bedrock basic stratum of reality is irreality;
the universe is irrational because
it is built not on mere shifting sand –
but on that which is not.

...

Pascal said, 'All history is one immortal
man who continually learns.'"

- Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982)

Flux of Life

"Held tight as it seems to you in the finite, committed to the perpetual rhythmic changes, the unceasing flux of 'natural' life— compelled to pass on from state to state, to grow, to age, to die— there is yet, as you discovered in the first exercise of recollection, something in you which endures through and therefore transcends this world of change. This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread and merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one intense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of - an instinct for - another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, as yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for the Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning mind of the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it can, is the source of all your unrest. More, it is the true origin of all your best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause of your heroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentative efforts to still that strange hunger for some final object of devotion, some completing and elucidating vision, some total self-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your little activity can be merged."

- Evelyn Underhill (1875 - 1941)

Becoming Bamboo

"The sensuous person is liquid, flowing, fluid. Each experience, and he becomes it. Seeing a sunset, he is the sunset. Seeing the night, dark night, beautiful silent darkness, he becomes the darkness. In the morning he becomes the light. He is all that life is. He tastes life from every nook and corner, hence he becomes rich. This is real richness. Listening to music he is music, listening to the sound of water he becomes that sound. And when the wind passes through a bamboo grove, and the cracking bamboos, and he is not far away from them: he is amidst them, one of them—he is a bamboo."

- Osho (1931 - 1990)

Voice of the Sea

"The voice of the sea speaks to the soul."

- Kate Chopin (1850 - 1904)

The Language of Trees

"But we shouldn't be concerned about trees purely for material reasons, we should also care about them because of the little puzzles and wonders they present us with. Under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination-in many cases, what you imagine is not so far removed from reality, after all!"

- Peter Wohlleben (1964 - )
The Hidden Life of Trees

Duet Between Dreamer and World

"'As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space,' Milosz writes, 'I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end!' And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
The Poetics of Space

Restless Stillness

"The universe was born restless
and has never since been still"

- Henri Rousseau (1844 - 1910)

Wonder Beyond Words

"To be alive in this beautiful,
self-organizing universe --
to participate in the dance of life
with senses to perceive it,
lungs that breathe it, organs
that draw nourishment from it --
is a wonder beyond words."

- Joanna Macy (1929 - 2025)

Note. Sadly, another "light of an enlightened eye" and an "incandescent light" has been extinguished. Eco-philosopher, systems thinker, and Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy passed away on 19 July 2025. Her 1991 monograph, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory, had a profound and lasting influence on me as physicist and photographer. Here is a wonderful interview that Macy had with Emergence magazine in 2018.