Continuity in Space

"We go all the way back to the first universal sensation that our spirit can already perceive thanks to the extremely intense synthesis of all the senses in a universal whole which will make us return through and beyond our millennial complexity, to primordial simplicity."

"It is achieved through

the intuitive search

for the one single form

which produces continuity in space."

- Umberto Boccioni

(1882 - 1916)

Pictures of the Soul

"At different moments you 

see with different eyes. 

You see differently in the morning 

than you do in the evening. 

In addition, how you see is also 

dependent on your emotional state. 

Because of this, a motif can be seen 

in many different ways,

 and this is what makes art interesting." 

"Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye —

it also includes the inner pictures of the soul."

- Edvard Munch

(1863 - 1944)

Your Own Self

"Whether you are going or staying

or sitting or lying down, 

the whole world is your own self. 

You must find out

whether the mountains, rivers,

grass, and forests 

exist in your own mind

or exist outside it. 

Analyze the ten thousand things, 

dissect them minutely, 

and when you take this to the limit 

you will come to the limitless, 

when you search into it you come

to the end of search, 

where thinking goes no further

and distinctions vanish. 

When you smash the citadel of doubt, 

then the Buddha is simply yourself." 

- Lanxi Daolong 

(c. 1213-1278)

Nothing is as it Appears

"Know all things to be like this:

A mirage, a cloud castle,

A dream, an apparition,

Without essence, but with

qualities that can be seen.

Know all things to be like this:

As the moon in a bright sky

In some clear lake reflected,

Though to that lake

the moon has never moved.

Know all things to be like this:

As an echo that derives

From music, sounds, and weeping,

Yet in that echo is no melody.

Know all things to be like this:

As a magician makes illusions

Of horses, oxen,

carts and other things,

Nothing is as it appears." 

- Samadhiraja Sutra

(2nd century CE)

Spiritual Wings

 

"... thus music brings into view the form of movement of celestial bodies, the pure form, freed from object and matter, as its very rhythm and harmony. Music is that art which has shed physicalness the most, by presenting pure movement as such, removed from any object, and by being carried by invisible, almost spiritual wings." 

– F. W. J. Schelling (1775 - 1854)

Philosophy of Art

Sometimes the Image is the Thing

“Abstraction is idea

without body.

The object photographed may

have nothing to do with

the subject though the

object may be subject.

The photograph may be an

objective document of pure subjectivity.

There are things in the world

that are unseen to the unaided.

There are seens that are not.

If all language is ultimately metaphor,

then don't talk to me of first principles.

It is wrong to assume that in a

photograph there must always have been

something - some thing.

Sometimes the image is the thing.” 

- Roger Newton (1960 - )

Op Tics

Interbeing

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. 'Interbeing' is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix 'inter-' with the verb 'to be,' we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. 'To be' is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.” 

- Hanh Nhat Thich (1926 - )

Quoted from Sourcebook of the World's Religions

Ring of Brodgar, Stenness

"There, on a little hill near to the lake, in a tomb, was found the bones of a man, which indeed were connected together, in length fourteen feet as the author affirmed, and money was found under the head of the dead man; and indeed I viewed the tomb...There at the lake are stones high and broad, in height equal to a spear, and in an equal circle of half a mile."

- Jo Ben (c.16th Century)

 Descriptio Insularum Orchadiarum

Simplicities of Natural Laws

“The simplicities of natural laws 

arise through the complexities

of the language we use 

for their expression.” 

- Eugene Wigner

(1902-1995)

Matter is But a Shadow

“...the supreme quality of beauty being 

a light from some other world is the idea ... 

... that the matter is but a shadow, 

the reality of which it is but the symbol..” 

- James Joyce

(1882 - 1941)

Becoming Never Ends in Being

“All mortals, being in the process of coming-to-be

and passing away, appear as phantoms 

and uncertain apparitions of themselves.

No one can step twice into the same stream, 

nor touch a living object twice in the same condition.

In swift and repeated change, 

things disperse and gather again; 

not in temporal succession, 

but in substance only they come together 

and flow away, approach and depart.

So it is that becoming never ends in being.” 

- Heraclitus

(c. 540 - c. 480 BCE) 

A Faculty Superior to Reason

“You ask, how can we know the Infinite?

I answer, not by reason.

It is the office of reason 

to distinguish and define. 

The infinite, therefore, cannot be 

ranked among its objects. 

You can only apprehend the

 infinite by a faculty superior to reason,

by entering into a state in which 

you are your finite self no longer,

in which the divine essence 

is communicated to you. 

This is ecstasy. 

It is the liberation of your mind 

from its finite consciousness. 

Like can only apprehend like; 

when you thus cease to be finite,

you become one with the infinite.

In the reduction of your 

soul to its simplest self,

its divine essence, 

you realize this union -  this identity.” 

— P. D. Ouspensky

(1878 - 1947)

Pondering Reality

“Perhaps the world was actually different

from the one I had begun to perceive.

Every man who had ever lived became a

contributor to the evolution of the earth,

since his observations were a part of its growth.

The world was thus a place entirely constructed

from thought, ever changing, constantly

renewing itself through the process of

mankind’s pondering its reality for themselves.”

— James Cowan (1942 - )

A Mapmaker’s Dream

The Photographer's Relationship to the World

“It is the mystery and splendor 

of photography that the

essence of the art has little to do 

with photography itself. 

The making of the picture 

is simple and quick.

The hard part is everything else:

the whole of the photographer's 

relationship to the world.” 

- Peter Galassi

Chief Curator of the Dept. of Photography

Museum of Modern Art, New York

(commenting on Henri Cartier-Bresson in

 The Man, The Image and the World)

What is Order?

“What is order? 

We know that everything in

the world around us is governed

by an immense orderliness. 

We experience order

every time we take a walk.

The grass, the sky,

the leaves on the trees,

the flowing water in the river,

the windows in the houses along the street,

all of it is immensely orderly. 

It is this order which makes

us gasp when we take our walk.

It is the changing

arrangement of the sky,

the clouds, the flowers, leaves,

the faces round about

us, the order, the dazzling

geometrical coherence, together

with its meaning in our minds. 

But this geometry which means

so much, which makes us feel

the presence of order so clearly,

we do not have a language for it.”   

- Christopher Alexander

(1936 - )

Poetry, Prophecy, and Religion

“The greatest thing a human soul 

ever does in this world is

see something and tell what 

he saw in a plain way.

Hundreds of people can talk 

for one who can think.

But thousands can think for

 one who can see.

To see is poetry, prophecy, 

and religion, all in one.” 

- John Ruskin

(1819 – 1900)

Direct Experience

“To the vast majority of people 

a photograph is an

image of something within 

their direct experience:

a more-or-less factual reality.

It is difficult for them 

to realize that the

photograph can be the source 

of experience, as well as the

reflection of spiritual awareness 

of the world and of self.” 

- Ansel Adams

(1902 - 1984)

Complete Consciousness

"Complete consciousness is present

to us at all times, every moment, 

but we reject it in order to 

maintain our prejudices, our ideas. 

But sooner or later we will 

relinquish our ideas in favor of response... 

Life is consciousness of life itself."

- Agnes Martin

(1912 - 2004)

Creating Distinctions

“In the sky, there is

no distinction of east and west;

people create distinctions

out of their own minds

and then believe them to be true.” 

- Gautama Siddharta

(563-483 B.C.)

Music of the Eyes

"Perhaps art is just taking out

what you don't like

and putting in what you do.

There is no such thing 

as Abstraction. 

It is extraction, 

gravitation toward a 

certain direction... 

It is nearer to music, 

not the music of the ears, 

just the music of the eyes."

- Arthur Dove

(1880 - 1946)

Perspectives and Realities

"What prohibits me from treating my perception as an intellectual act is that an intellectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary. But in perception it is 'real'; it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which is it given exhaustively."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

(1908 - 1961)

Edge of the Sea

"The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the senses of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings...

There is a common thread that links these scenes and memories–the spectacle of life in all its varied manifestation as it appeared, evolved and sometimes died out. Underlying the beauty if the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to this riddle is hidden.

It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life, and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear." 

- Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964)

The Edge of the Sea

Feeling of Wonder

"This oceanic feeling of wonder

is the common source of 

religious mysticism,

of pure science and

art for art's sake." 

- Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)

Goethian Wholeness

"In following Goethe's approach to scientific knowledge, one finds that the wholeness of the phenomenon is intensive. The experience is one of entering into a dimension that is the phenomenon, not behind or beyond it, but which is not visible at first. It is perceived through the mind, when the mind functions as an organ of perception instead of the medium of logical thought. Whereas mathematical science begins by transforming the contents of sensory perception into quantitative values and establishing a relationship between them, Goethe looked for a relationship between the perceptual elements that left the contents of perception unchanged. He tried to see these elements themselves holistically instead of replacing them by a relationship analytically. Ernst Cassirer said, 'the mathematical formula strives to make the phenomena calculable, that of Goethe to make them visible."

- Henri Bortoft (1938 - 2012)

The Wholeness of Nature

Deep Infinity

“Deep, deep infinity! 

Quietness. 

O dream away from the 

tensions of daily living; 

to sail over a calm sea at 

the prow of a ship,

toward a horizon that always recedes;

to stare at the passing waves and listen to

their monotonous soft murmur;

to dream away into unconsciousness ..."

- M.C. Escher (1898-1972)

Hidden Meaning

"Everything in the world has

a hidden meaning. . . .

Men, animals, trees, stars,

they are all hieroglyphics.

When you see them you

do not understand them.

You think they are really men,

animals, trees, stars.

It is only years later

that you understand."

- Nikos Kazantzakis

(1883 - 1957)

Mystical Perception

"It is to a practical mysticism that [...you...] are invited: to a training of ... latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of ... languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of ... attention to new levels of the world. Thus ... become aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception—this 'ordinary contemplation,' as the specialists call it—is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural human activity, no more involving the great powers and sublime experiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than the ordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powers of the great musician."

- Evelyn Underhill (1875 - 1941)

Mysticism

Innocence of Vision

"The only provable reality of a photograph is its physical existence — a flat piece of paper with some smudges on one side...Most adults have to regain the ability to experience pictures directly and deeply. Contrary to their convictions that they understand everything, most people have to reestablish the ability to let a photograph speak for itself. And paradoxes abound, one has to earn the innocence of vision — by hard effort, by serious and deliberate search for meanings in photographs."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

Aperture Magazine Anthology:The Minor White Years, 1952-1976

Deciphering the External World

“Art is not what we see;

it is in the spaces between."

"The creative act is not

performed by the artist alone;

the spectator brings

the work in contact with

the external world by

deciphering and interpreting 

its inner qualifications and thus adds 

his contribution to the creative act."

"The spectator makes the picture.” 

- Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968)

The Mind is Simply Aware

“There is no ideal in observation.

When you have an ideal, 

you cease to observe, 

you are then merely

approximating the 

present to the idea, 

and therefore there

is duality, conflict, 

and all the rest of it. 

The mind has to be in the 

state when it can see, observe. 

The experience of the observation 

is really an astonishing state. 

In that there is no duality. 

The mind is simply - aware.”

- Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

Not Things, but Light

“I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, 

nor do I think of my camera as a means of 

recording a mountain or an animal

unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'.

My first thought is always of light.”

- Galen Rowell (1940 - 2002)

Through the Invisible

“The great truth, or the absolute truth,

makes itself visible to our mind

through the invisible.”

- Georges Vantongerloo (1886 - 1965)

Painter/Sculptor

Spiritual Awareness

“To the vast majority of people 

a photograph is an

image of something within 

their direct experience:

a more-or-less factual reality.

It is difficult for them 

to realize that the

photograph can be the source 

of experience, as well as the

reflection of spiritual awareness 

of the world and of self.”  

- Ansel Adams

(1902 - 1984)

Invisible Organization of Energy

“Science shows us that the

visible world is neither 

matter nor spirit;

the visible world is the invisible 

organization of energy.”

- Heinz Pagels

(1939 - 1988)

Forms, Space, and Distinctions

“A universe comes into being when

a space is severed or taken apart… 

by tracing the way we 

[make such distinctions] 

we begin to reconstruct …  

the basic forms underlying linguistic,

mathematical, physical, 

and biological science.”

- G. Spencer Brown (1923 - )

Laws of Form

Between Something and Nothing

“Now, I am going to tell you something.

I don’t know what heading it comes under, 

and whether or not it is relevant here,

but it must be relevant at some point. 

It is not anything new, but I would like to say it. 

There is a beginning. There is no beginning of that beginning. 

There is no beginning of that no beginning of beginning.

 There is something. There is nothing. 

There is something before the beginning of something and nothing, 

and something before that. Suddenly there is something and nothing. 

But between something and nothing, 

I still don’t really know which is something and which is nothing.  

Now, I’ve just said something, 

but I don’t really know whether I’ve said anything or not.” 

- Chuang-Tzu (4th century BC)

Chuang Tzu: Inner Chapters

Expressions of Deep Order

"If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all."

- Stuart Kauffman

(1939 - )

Limited in Time and Space

“A human being is part of the 

whole called by us a universe,

a part limited in time and space. 

He experiences himself, 

his thoughts and his feelings,

as something separate from the rest,

a kind of optical delusion 

of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us;

it restricts us to our personal decisions and our

affections to a few persons nearest to us. 

Our task must be to free 

ourselves from this prison by

widening our circle of 

compassion to embrace

all living creatures and the 

whole of nature of its beauty.” 

- Albert Einstein

(1879 - 1955)

Perception, Structure, Order

"When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. And our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn’t understand at all. Thus in my opinion the world is not raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed.

Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand. Arrangements such as the layout of a city or building, a set of tools, a display of merchandise, the verbal exposition of facts or ideas, or a painting or piece of music are called orderly when an observer or listener can grasp their overall structure and the ramification of the structure in some detail. Order makes it possible to focus on what is alike and what is different, what belongs together and what is segregated. When nothing superfluous is included and nothing indispensable left out, one can understand the interrelation of the whole and its parts, as well as the hierarchic scale of importance and power by which some structural features are dominant, others subordinate."

- Rudolf Arnheim

(1904 - 2007)

What is an Object?

“...Consider an object ...  what is an object? 

Philosophers are always saying, 

'Well, just take a chair for example.' 

The moment they say that, you know they 

do not know what they are talking about any more. 

What is a chair? 

Well, a chair is a certain thing over there ... 

Certain? How certain?

 The atoms are evaporating from it 

from time to time - not many atoms,

 but a few - dirt falls on it and 

gets dissolved in the paint; 

so to define a chair precisely, 

to say exactly which atoms are chair,

 and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, 

or which atoms are paint that

 belongs to the chair is impossible. 

So the mass of a chair can be defined only approximately.

 In the same way, to define the mass of a single object is impossible,

 because there are not any single, left-alone objects in the world.”

- Richard Feynman

(1918 - 1988)

Arbitrary Slices

“They will say: ‘Well, it’s a hexagon,’ but it isn’t a hexagon, and a rectangle which isn’t a rectangle. By describing what it nearly is but isn’t quite, they get a sort of description out. The division into parts is of course purely arbitrary. They could have sliced it anyway they wanted.”

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

An Ecology of Mind

That It Is

"The mystical is not

how the world is,

but that it is."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

(1889 - 1951)

To Dream the World

"We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false."

- Jorge Luis Borges

(1899 - 1986)

Chasing Ideas

“The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. 

At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.”

- Terence McKenna

(1946 - 2000)

A Sea Boundless and Measureless

“The hidden well-spring of your soul

must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;

And the treasure of your infinite depths

would be revealed to your eyes.

But let there be no scales to

weigh your unknown treasure;

And seek not the depths of your

knowledge with staff or sounding line.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, 'I have found the truth,'

but rather, 'I have found a truth.'

Say not, 'I have found the path of the soul.'

Say rather, 'I have met the soul

walking upon my path.'

For the soul walks upon all paths.

The soul walks not upon a line,

neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself,

like a lotus of countless petals.” 

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

The Prophet