Sunday, February 09, 2025

Shamanic Ecstasy


"This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed."

-  Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
Food of the Gods

Saturday, February 08, 2025

The Sensation of the Mystical


"The most beautiful and most profound emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illuminable superior who reveals himself in the slightest details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction for the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Friday, February 07, 2025

Habitual Gestures


Making art … means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.
...
Your desire to make art,
beautiful or meaningful or emotive art,
is integral to your sense of who you are.
...
Viewed closely, however, style is not a virtue, it is an inevitability, the inescapable result of doing anything more than a few times. The habitual gestures of the artist appear throughout any body of work developed enough to be called a body of work. Style is not an aspect of good work, it is an aspect of all work. Style is the natural consequence of habit."

David Bayles (1952 - ) and Ted Orland (1941 - )
Art & Fear

Thursday, February 06, 2025

Spiritual Nature


"Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history. The use of the outer creation is to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right originally means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eye-brow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature.
...
But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import – so conspicuous a fact in the history of language – is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.
...
As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or, all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Nature

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

Denying Temporal Succession


"And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
"A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Nothing Exists in Itself


"To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."

Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)

Monday, February 03, 2025

Crystalline Multiverse


"Again we were too parochial, and were led to the false conclusion that knowledge-bearing entities can be physically identical to non-knowledge-bearing ones; and this in turn cast doubt on the fundamental status of knowledge. But now we have come almost full circle. We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special physical properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse."

David Deutsch (1953 - )
The Fabric of Reality

Thursday, January 30, 2025

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 - )

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

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


Tuesday, January 28, 2025

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)

Sunday, January 26, 2025

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)

Saturday, January 25, 2025

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

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Dancing Rhythms

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

- Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014)

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

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 - )

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

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)

Saturday, January 18, 2025

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

Friday, January 17, 2025

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

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Pattern of Information


"Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many unique, recursively constructed parts.
...
If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to—and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.
...
We are each just one temporary instance of life on this planet—a pattern of information structuring matter across billions of years."

- Sara Imari Walker
Life as No One Knows It

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Celestial Hues

"I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's 'Dream') at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume."

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Swann’s Way