Transcending the Subject

"The fact that these highly abstract notions coalesce in such refined harmony is absolutely mind-boggling. It points to something rich and mysterious lurking beneath the surface, as if the curtain had been lifted and we caught glimpses of the reality that had been carefully hidden from us. These are the wonders of modern math, and of the modern world.

...

The interaction between math and physics is a two-way process, with each of the two subjects drawing from and inspiring the other. At different times, one of them may take the lead in developing a particular idea, only to yield to the other subject as focus shifts. But altogether, the two interact in a virtuous circle of mutual influence.

...

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.” Mathematics teaches us to rigorously analyze reality, study the facts, follow them wherever they lead. It liberates us from dogmas and prejudice, nurtures the capacity for innovation. It thus provides tools that transcend the subject itself."

- Edward Frenkel (1968 - )
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality

Rocky Headland

"Be like the rocky headland on
which the waves constantly break.
It stands firm, and round it
the seething waters
are laid to rest."

- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)
Meditations

Great Whaleback of Granite

"On Cadillac you can feel all of mount desert underfoot. You seem to be riding a graceful surfacing of mountains headed, like a pod of whales, out to sea through other, smaller islands equally well wrought, unique expressions of rock foaming at their margins, leaning a little seaward or a little landward, depending on which way the tide is moving. From here, to the south and west, one island leads to another, all the way to Frenchboro and Swans Island and Isle au Haut, as this landscape toys with the idea of islands until the sea says enough and there is only water.

...

What else is there to do here- or anywhere in nature- but to indulge the awareness of your senses, observe, the instructive otherness that lies just beyond- or is it within - the beauty of nature, and improve your understanding of the world around you and of yourself as an observing being?

...

On  clear mornings, standing on this great whaleback of granite, with this wide coastal world in your mind's eye and sense keenly the orderliness of the solar system, the way the sun and the moon pull on the oceans to the advantage of life on earth. To the east beyond Schoodic and Petit Manan, you can see a day coming toward you as a blush of light - the "rosy-fingered dawn' of Homeric poetry."

- Christopher Camuto
Time and Tide in Acadia

Time and Memory

"This is the disconcerting conclusion that emerges from Boltzmann’s work: the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. It’s a conclusion that leaves us flabbergasted: is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world in all of its minute detail? On a kind of distortion that’s produced by myopia? Is it true that, if I could see exactly and take into consideration the actual dance of millions of molecules, then the future would be “just like” the past?

...

Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world. The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance.

...

I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
The Order of Time

Form and Content

"All art is relationships, all art. Design is relationships. Design in a relationship between form and content... Your glasses are round. Your collar is diagonal. These are relationships. Your mouth is an oval. Your nose is a triangle - this is what design is.

...

Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.

...

Visual communication of any kind, whether persuasive or informative, from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and function: the integration of the beautiful and useful. Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea."

- Paul Rand (1914 - 1996)
Paul Rand: A Designer's Art

Ocean of Imagination

"The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas."

- Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - )

Heavenly Lantern

"Before humans beings possessed fire or tools or language, the moon had been their ally. It would calm people's fears now and then by illuminating the dark world like a heavenly lantern. Its waxing and waning gave people an understanding of the concept of time. Even now, when darkness had been banished from most parts of the world, there remained a sense of human gratitude toward the moon and its unconditional compassion. It was imprinted upon human genes like a warm collective memory."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
1Q84

Tennyson's Flower

"Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Patterns of Ones and Zeros

"'Personal density,' Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, 'is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.' 'Temporal bandwidth,' is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar '[delta-] t' considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

...

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hense the success of failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line. But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

...

If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world."

- Thomas Pynchon (1937 - )
V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland

Source of Spirituality

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
The Demon-Haunted World

Perceived Geometries #2

"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.

Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,

And lay them prone upon the earth and cease

To ponder on themselves, the while they stare

At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere

In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese

Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release

From dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,

When first the shaft into his vision shone

Of light anatomized! Euclid alone

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950)

Perceived Geometries #1

"It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have labored upon it."

- Bernhard Riemann (1826 - 1866)

"The division of the perceived universe
into parts and wholes is convenient
and may be necessary,
but no necessity determines
how it shall be done.""

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

Leaves of Forgotten Paths

"On this plank of silent wood, a leaf descends like a stray sentence from a book never written, a fragment of the universe’s lost prose. The droplets cling to it, like memories of rain on the brink of being erased. They are not droplets at all, but miniature worlds, reflecting all that ever was, and all that will never be. Within this moment, time folds itself inward, a palimpsest of lives and stories overlapping in their stillness, as if each droplet were a star trembling on the edge of oblivion.

The leaf, fragile and delicate, is the map to nowhere—a path we will never walk, though it was laid out for us in some forgotten dream. Its veins are threads of infinite labyrinths, spun from the cosmic loom of contingency. Do they lead to Eden or toward the dust? Borges would have marveled at the infinity it holds within the finite, a cipher for the universe itself, decipherable only by those who have forgotten how to read. Its edges fray with the mystery of countless fates untaken.

But look closely—each grain of wood beneath it bears the imprint of time’s invisible steps. Could it be that this scene was destined to be? Or does the leaf choose its resting place, in defiance of all that is written? The universe pauses, just long enough for this image to be both remembered and lost, seen and unseen, a paradox folding in on itself. We are left to wonder if, in the fading moments of the universe, there will be a single leaf left resting on a board, and if we—trapped in Borges’ eternal dream—will finally understand its purpose."

- ChatGPT4o (12 Sep 2024)
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. You have taken a black and white image of a leaf resting gently on some old wooden boards. Write a prose poem in the style of Borges that describes a mystery imbued in and implied by this image. Limit the number of stanzas to three, with 5 lines each. Be creative."

Tangled Infinity

"The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

Niagara Concealed

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Invisible Cities

Forms

"Nature! …

She is ever shaping new forms:

what is, has never yet been;
what has been, comes not again.
Everything is new,
and yet nought but the old."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Forms Without Substance

"He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! "

- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914)
Ghost Stories

The Limitless Aleph

"All language is a set of symbols
whose use among its speakers
assumes a shared past.
How, then, can I translate into
words the limitless Aleph,
which my floundering mind
can scarcely encompass?"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

The Source Of All Light

"We are the eyes of the cosmos.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self.

...

See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating on a skinless drum. No light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything.

...

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.
Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.
We are the witnesses through which the
universe becomes conscious of
its glory, of its magnificence."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Web of Nature

"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. This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it."

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
A Pattern Language

Wakan-Taka

"What is Life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. The True Peace. The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Taka (the Great Spirit), and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men."

- Black Elk (1863 - 1950)

The Function of Consciousness

"The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. In this sense, it functions as a clearinghouse for sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, establishing priorities among all the diverse information. Without consciousness we would still “know” what is going on, but we would have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive way. With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. And we can also invent information that did not exist before: it is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

The Universe is a Single Flower

"The universe is elegant. And there is a harmony in it. We see that the Earth is beautiful, that the beings in it are beautiful. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Buddha described the universe to be like one single flower. The cosmos is like a bank of flowers. We we see the planet as a beautiful flower, and each of us is also a beautiful flower. No matter what age we are we are very beautiful. That is the insight of the Buddha in the Avatamsaka sutra. The cosmos is a kind of treasure. Each being on the planet is a flower."

- Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022)
The Universe is a Single Flower

Garment of Brightness

"Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky,
Your children are we, and with tired backs
We bring you the gifts that you love.
Then weave for us a garment of brightness;
May the warp be the white light of morning,
May the weft be the red light of evening,
May the fringes be the falling rain,
May the border be the standing rainbow.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness
That we may walk fittingly where birds sing,
That we may walk fittingly where grass is green,
Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky!"

- The Tewa People
Song of the Time Loom

Supernational Beings

"The Á-shi-wi, or Zuñis, suppose the sun, moon, and stars, the sky, earth, and sea, in all their phenomena and elements; and all inanimate objects, as well as plants, animals, and men, to belong to one great system of all-conscious and interrelated life, in which the degrees of relationship seem to be determined largely, if not wholly, by the degrees of resemblance. In this system of life the starting point is man, the most finished, yet the lowest organism; at least, the lowest because most dependent and least mysterious. In just so far as an organism, actual or imaginary, resembles his, is it believed to be related to him and correspondingly mortal; in just so far as it is mysterious, is it considered removed from him, further advanced, powerful, and immortal. It thus happens that the animals, because alike mortal and endowed with similar physical functions and organs, are considered more nearly related to man than are the gods; more nearly related to the gods than is man, because more mysterious, and characterized by specific instincts and powers which man does not of himself possess. Again, the elements and phenomena of nature, because more mysterious, powerful and immortal, seem more closely related to the higher gods than are the animals; more closely related to the animals than are the higher gods, because their manifestations often resemble the operations of the former.

...

In like manner, the supernatural beings of man's fancy - the 'master existences' - are supposed to be more nearly related to the personalities with which the elements and phenomena of nature are endowed than to either animals or men; because, like those elements and phenomena, and unlike men and animals, they are connected with remote tradition in a manner identical with their supposed existence to-day, and therefore are considered immortal.

...

Thus was the surface of the earth hardened and scorched and many of all kinds of beings changed to stone. Thus, too, it happens that we find, here and there throughout the world, their forms, sometimes large like the beings themselves, sometimes shriveled and distorted. And we often see among the rocks the forms of many beings that live no longer, which shows us that all was different in the 'days of the new.'"

- Zuñi Fetiches, Second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1880-1881

Pueblo Prayer

"I add my breath to your breath
that our days may be long on the Earth,
that the days of our people may be long,
that we shall be as one person,
that we may finish our road together."

-  "Prayer of the Laguna Pueblo"
World as Lover, World as Self

Bandelier National Monument

"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."

- M. Scheffer, E. H. van Nes, D. Bird, and T. Kohler
Loss of resilience preceded transformations of pre-Hispanic Pueblo societies

Quantum Realities

"To understand this new frontier, I will have to try to master one of the most difficult and counterintuitive theories ever recorded in the annals of science: quantum physics. Listen to those who have spent their lives immersed in this world and you will have a sense of the challenge we face. After making his groundbreaking discoveries in quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg recalled, 'I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?' Einstein declared after one discovery, 'If it is correct it signifies the end of science.' Schrödinger was so shocked by the implications of what he'd cooked up that he admitted, 'I do not like it and I am sorry I had anything to do with it.' Nevertheless, quantum physics is now one of the most powerful and well-tested pieces of science on the books. Nothing has come close to pushing it off its pedestal as one of the great scientific achievements of the last century. So there is nothing to do but to dive headfirst into this uncertain world. Feynman has some good advice for me as I embark on my quest: 'I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.'"

- Marcus du Sautoy (1965 - )
 The Great Unknown

Morphic Fields

"Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it.

...

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

...

What is emerging ... is an evolutionary vision of reality at every level: subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, social, ecological, cultural, mental, economic, astronomical and cosmic."

- Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - )

Fossilization of Time

"To me photography functions as a fossilization of time.

...

My method is different from the one most photographers use. I do not go around and shoot. I usually have a specific vision, just by myself. One night I thought of taking a photographic exposure of a film at a movie theater while the film was being projected. I imagined how it could be possible to shoot an entire movie with my camera. Then I had the clear vision that the movie screen would show up on the picture as a white rectangle. I thought it could look like a very brilliant white rectangle coming out from the screen, shining throughout the whole theater. It might seem very interesting and mysterious, even in some way religious.

...

I’m inviting the spirits into my photography.
It’s an act of God."

- Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - )

Eyes of the Dreamer

"Life is not merely what it seems to be.

Hidden from our eyes by the cloak

of materiality is a wonderful world

which only the eyes of the dreamer can see

and the soul of the mystic comprehend.

...

...silence is the root of sound,
and from it pours forth the fiat
that fashioned the world.
This is the dynamic silence of creation,
the tremendous dramatic silence of
new birth forever taking place-
new worlds forever fashioning.

...

To those capable of seeing the
light of these spiritual orbs,
there is no darkness,
for they dwell in the presence of
limitless light and at midnight see
the sun shining under their feet."

- Manly Hall (1901 - 1990)

Transpersonal Experiences

"The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole."

- Stanislav Grof (1931 - )
The Holotropic Mind

Liquid Vortex

"My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
And thine doth like a convict sit,
With marline-spike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying,
Wherein they fancy intersperses
Long avenues of universes,
While Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one finite, unbounded homoloid,
And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed. "

- James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879)

Hypertelescopic Imagination

"But in truth the eternal spirit was ineffable. Nothing whatever could be truly said about it. Even to name it "spirit" was perhaps to say more than was justified. Yet to deny it that name would be no less mistaken; for whatever it was, it was more, not less, than spirit, more, not less, than any possible human meaning of that word. And from the human level, even from the level of a cosmical mind, this "more," obscurely and agonizingly glimpsed, was a dread mystery, compelling adoration.

...

Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet’s dark side a hill, and on that hill myself.

...

For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself. I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite.

...

For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Star Maker

Folded and Hidden

"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;

That eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all nature; The indefinable hard something that is the old heroic stamina of nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, to proceed with single purpose toward the result necessitated, and for which the time has arrived.

...

What is nature but change, in all its visible, and still more its invisible processes? Nature keeps up her long and harmless throes, her vital, copious, eternal procession, An infinite number of currents and forces, and contributions, and temperatures, and cross-purposes, Whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality

...
I fully believe in a clue and purpose in nature,

Enfolding itself all processes of growth,
effusing life and power, for hidden purposes.

The sun and stars that float in the open air,

The apple-shaped earth and we upon it,

Earth’s soil, trees, winds,

Waters that encompass us, tumultuous waves—

Surely the drift of them is something grand,

The purport of objective nature is doubtless folded, hidden, somewhere here;

I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
Nature, Containing All

Divisible Space

"We are not to consider the world as the body of God, or the several parts thereof as the parts of God. He is a uniform Being, void of organs, members or parts,...being everywhere present to the things themselves. And since space is divisible in infinitum, and matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures, and in several proportions of space, and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of Nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction in this."

- 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 😊 

Hallucinatory Character of the World

"Let us admit what all the idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us look for unrealities that confirm that character. We will find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.

...

We have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Sea of the Unreal

"Reality is, you know,
the tip of an iceberg of
irrationality that we've managed
to drag ourselves up onto for
a few panting moments before
we slip back into the sea
of the unreal."

- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

Metaphors for Life

"A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Self-Conscious Flow

"Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present.

...

Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it, and the easier it is to get distracted.

...

I mean, we’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are—as far as we know—the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(See "Unlocking Creative Flow: How the Brain Enters the Zone")

Zen Drops

"In one drop of water are found
all the secrets of the oceans."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) 

Geometrodynamics

"The universe does not exist “out there,” independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself."

- John Archibald Wheeler (1911 - 2008)

The Woods are Alive

"Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

...

There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.

...

At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing."

- Bill Bryson (1951 - )
A Walk in the Woods

Secret Order

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

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

The Silence Within

"The longest journey is the journey inward.

...

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.

...

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

...

To preserve the silence within - amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens - no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky."

- Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 - 1961)