Light of the Moment

"Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal? What is it but death-death without rebirth?

...

There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.

...

You are like a lantern swathed and covered,
hidden away in a dark place.
Yet the light shines;
they could not put out the light.
They could not hide you."

- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

Secret Order

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

"There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense."

- Chuck Palahniuk (1962 - )

""We are not human beings having a spiritual experience;
we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

Musical Dream

"We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands of millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint...a symphony...but we lack the ears to hear it.

...

What am I then? A dream? 

...

A dream will always triumph over reality,

once it is given a chance."

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

Sensations In The Mind

"They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or original qualities do exist without the mind in unthinking substances, do at the same time acknowledge that colors, sounds, heat cold, and suchlike secondary qualities, do not--which they tell us are sensations existing in the mind alone, that depend on and are occasioned by the different size, texture, and motion of the minute particles of matter. This they take for an undoubted truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now, if it be certain that those original qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind. But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moving, but I must withal give it some color or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible qualities are, there must these be also, to wit, in the mind and nowhere else."

- George Berkeley (1685-1753)
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

An Illusive Moment

"All his science (artist) and all his powers of invention must be brought into practice to capture the vision of an illusive moment. It is as though he were in pursuit of something more real which he knows but has not fully realized, which appears, permits a thrilling appreciation, and is gone in an instant."

- Robert Henri (1865 - 1929)
The Art Spirit

Subjective Feels

"Supporters of strong emergent materialism point to the fundamental differences between the subjective psychological reality and the objective physical (or neural) reality. The former includes qualitative experiences that feel like something and exist only from the first-person point of view; the latter consists of physical entities and causal mechanisms that involve nothing subjective or qualitative about them and exist from the third-person point of view or objectively. Nothing we can think about or imagine could make an objective physical process turn into or 'secrete' subjective, qualitative 'feels.' It is like trying to squeeze wine out of pure water: it is just not there, and there can be no natural mechanism (short of magic) that could ever turn the former into the latter."

- Antti Revonsuo, Consciousness

Visible Beauty

"What delights us in visible beauty
is the invisible."

- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830 - 1916)

Mycelial Awareness

"Fungi marched onto land more than a billion years ago. Many fungi partnered with plants, which largely lacked these digestive juices. Mycologists believe that this alliance allowed plants to inhabit land around 700 million years ago. Many millions of years later, one evolutionary branch of fungi led to the development of animals.

...

I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.

...

If you were a tiny organism in a forest’s soil, you would be enmeshed in a carnival of activity, with mycelium constantly moving through subterranean landscapes like cellular waves, through dancing bacteria and swimming protozoa with nematodes racing like whales through a microcosmic sea of life."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Wild Realm

"As the vessel slowly moves on, the scene changes; a fresh vista opens out with every mile; the gazer comes to every bend with undiminished expectation ... No sooner does the sense of confinement between dark and terrific heights become oppressive than some high prospect opens out to the upward gaze, and the sunshine lightens up the wooded shoulders and glittering snow-fields of some distant mount. Then the whole realm is so utterly wild, so unspoiled and unprofaned. Man has done nothing to injure or wreck it."

- William Pember Reeves (1857 - 1932)

Fall, Leaves, Fall

"Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day."

- Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848)