Earth's Eye

"A lake is a landscape's most

beautiful and expressive feature.

It is Earth's eye;

looking into which the

beholder measures the

depth of his own nature."

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Embedded Patterns

"No pattern is an isolated entity.

Each pattern can exist in the world

only to the extent that is

supported by other patterns:

the larger patterns in

which it is embedded,

the patterns of the same

size that surround it,

and the smaller patterns

which are embedded in it. "

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - )

'Silent' = 'Listen'

"The word 'listen'

contains the same letters

as the word 'silent'."

- Alfred Brendel (1931 - )

Hush of Silence

"Listen closely... 

the eternal hush of silence

goes on and on throughout all this,

and has been going on,

and will go on and on.

This is because the world

is nothing but a dream

and is just thought of

 and the everlasting eternity

pays no attention to it."

- Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969)

Hardly Noticeable

"If you will stay close to nature,

to its simplicity,

to the small things hardly noticeable,

those things can unexpectedly

become great and immeasurable."

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

Crepuscular Cryptographs

"One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Perception of the Infinite

"Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?"

- René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

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)

Leaps of Imagination

"The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it. 

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail."

- James Gleick (1954 - )

Conceptual Boundaries

"It is extremely interesting, then, to think about the meaning of the word ‘form’ as it applies to constructions of arbitrarily complex shapes. For instance, what is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty? Is if the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina? Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us feel that we are not merely looking at a two-dimensional surface; we are responding to some sort of inner meaning inside the picture, a multidimensional aspect trapped somehow inside those two dimensions. It is the word ‘meaning’ which is important here. Our minds contain interpreters which accept two-dimensional patterns and then ‘pull’ from them high-dimensional notions which are so complex that we cannot consciously describe them. The same can be said about how we respond to music, incidentally.

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality."

- Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Beyond our Ken

"One night after dinner a group of us were talking about the supernatural, and one of our dinner guests said that when the electric light was invented, people began to lose the dimension of the supernatural. In the days before we could touch a switch and flood every section of the room with light, there were always shadows in the corner, shadows which moved with candlelight, with firelight; and these shadows were an outward and visible sign that things are not always what they seem; there are things which are not visible to the mortal human being; there are things beyond our ken."

-  Madeleine L'Engle (1918 - 2007)

Web of Time

"This web of time,

the strands of which approach one another,

bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other

through the centuries,

embraces every possibility. 

We do not exist in most of them.

In some you exist and not I,

while in others I do,

and you do not."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Spark of Radiance

"The spiritual task we

are given is a simple one:

to attend to that inner spark of radiance,

to hold vigil over it until

we realize it to be our self,

and to dig up and cast off

all argument we have with its love."

- Adyashanti (1962 - )

A Mysterious Cocoon

"The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the offshore lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind."

- M. L. Stedman
The Light Between Oceans

The Content of Cognition

"In a sense it has been my way to transcendental experience: to the discovery that matter metaphorically speaking, is the creation of the spirit (the mode of existence of the observer in a domain of discourse), and that the spirit is the creation of the matter it creates. This is not a paradox, but it is the expression of our existence in a domain of cognition in which the content of cognition is cognition itself. Beyond that nothing can be said."

- Humberto R. Maturana (1928 - )

When the Mind is Quiet

"I hope that you will listen, but not with the memory of what you already know; and this is very difficult to do. You listen to something, and your mind immediately reacts with its knowledge, its conclusions, its opinions, its past memories. It listens, inquiring for a future understanding.

Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all.

You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn't react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding.

If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds - in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.

When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain".

-  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)