what has been, comes not again.
Everything is new,
and yet nought but the old."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914)
Ghost Stories
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
A Pattern Language
- Black Elk (1863 - 1950)
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022)
The Universe is a Single Flower
- Zuñi Fetiches, Second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1880-1881
- "Prayer of the Laguna Pueblo"
World as Lover, World as Self
"Climate extremes are thought to have triggered large-scale transformations of various ancient societies, but they rarely seem to be the sole cause. It has been hypothesized that slow internal developments often made societies less resilient over time, setting them up for collapse. Here, we provide quantitative evidence for this idea. We use annual-resolution time series of building activity to demonstrate that repeated dramatic transformations of Pueblo cultures in the pre-Hispanic US Southwest were preceded by signals of critical slowing down, a dynamic hallmark of fragility. Declining stability of the status quo is consistent with archaeological evidence for increasing violence and in some cases, increasing wealth inequality toward the end of these periods. Our work thus supports the view that the cumulative impact of gradual processes may make societies more vulnerable through time, elevating the likelihood that a perturbation will trigger a large-scale transformation that includes radically rejecting the status quo and seeking alternative pathways."
- Marcus du Sautoy (1965 - )
The Great Unknown
- Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - )
- Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - )
- Manly Hall (1901 - 1990)
- Stanislav Grof (1931 - )
The Holotropic Mind
- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Star Maker
"The greatest lessons of nature are the lessons of the fresh, eternal qualities of being: The variety and freedom, the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality—each toward all and nothing supersedes the rest;
- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
Nature, Containing All
- Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)
Note. The triptych contains "quick grabs" (using my iPhone) of the skylights near Gate 4 of the Bangor, Maine airport while waiting for our plane to return back home (to Northern VA) after viewing the total eclipse on April 8. While I did not take any images of the eclipse (I just wanted to just "be in the moment"), the little black spheres in the skylight reminded me a little of that experience and caught my eye 😊
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(See "Unlocking Creative Flow: How the Brain Enters the Zone")
- John Archibald Wheeler (1911 - 2008)
- Bill Bryson (1951 - )
A Walk in the Woods
- Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 - 1961)
Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how to read music. For instance, the scientific article may say, “The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks.” Now what does that mean?
It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.
So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday."
- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
- William Blake (1757 - 1827)
Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body."
- Vitaly Vanchurin
The World as a Neural Network