Structure of Reality

"The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

 

There Are No Boundaries

"That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that 'ultimate reality is a unity of opposites' is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere."

- Ken Wilber (1949 - )

No Boundary: Eastern and Western
Approaches to Personal Growth

Delight of the Senses

"Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses. By thy might, there return into us treasures that we had abandoned. By thy grace, there are released in us all the dried-up runnels of our heart. Of the riches that exist in the world, thou art the rarest and also the most delicate - thou so pure within the bowels of the earth! A man may die of thirst lying beside a magnesian spring. He may die within reach of a salt lake. He may die though he hold in his hand a jug of dew, if it be inhabited by evil salts. For thou, water, art a proud divinity, allowing no alteration, no foreignness in thy being. And the joy that thou spreadest is an infinitely simple joy."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 - 1944)

Wind, Sand and Stars

Experiencing Eternity

"When you realize that eternity

is right here now,

that it is within your possibility

to experience the eternity of

your own truth and being,

then you grasp the following:

That which you are

was never born

and will never die."

- Joseph Campbell (1904 - 1987)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Striving Toward the Infinite

"The sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. Here we easily see that nothing can be given in nature, however great it is judged by us to be, which could not, if considered in another relation, be reduced to the infinitely small; and conversely there is nothing so small which does not admit of extension by our imagination to the greatness of a world if compared with still smaller standards... Nothing, therefore, which can be an object of the senses is, considered on this basis, to be called sublime. But because there is in our imagination a striving toward infinite progress and in our reason a claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real idea, therefore this very inadequateness for that idea in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things of sense excites in us the feeling of a supersensible faculty... Consequently it is the state of mind produced by a certain representation with which the reflective judgment is occupied, and not the object, that is to be called sublime... the sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense."

- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Only Seeing My Thoughts

"What does this think about that?
Nothing thinks about anything.
Does the earth have consciousness

of its stones and plants?
If it did, it would be people. . .
Why am I worrying about this?
If I think about these things,
I’ll stop seeing trees and plants
And stop seeing the Earth
For only seeing my thoughts...
I’ll get unhappy and stay in the dark.
And so, without thinking,

I have the Earth and the Sky."

- Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935)

Skye: Not even a Thousand Pictures

"Use a picture.

It's worth a thousand words."

- Arthur Brisbane (1864 - 1936)

(This aphorism is usually ascribed to an old Chinese proverb,
although it has been traced to an instructional talk given by Brisbane
to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club in 1911)

I have no deeper words of wisdom to impart in regard to this photo than to simply echo Brisbane's admonition. I could say that it was a photo taken at Trumpan (Skye, Scotland at some precise lat/long coordinate), on July 4, 2016 at 10:13 local time (as one might guess, the sun sets very late on Skye in the summer), looking to the north west toward the isle of Harris, and that the ambient temperature was hovering near a comfortably cool 54 deg F. I could write some words to convey a sense of the mysteriously "dynamic stillness" that the slowly dwindling light infused the "air" with. I could wax poetic, and conjure some lines to describe the forms and colors of the evanescent clouds that so transfixed my wife's and my attention with their phantasmagorical - mystical - undulations. I could even evoke the faint, but soft accompanying symphony of mooohs and baaaas of Skye's - and Trumpan's - omnipresent cows and sheep, now cloaked by darkness, to provide a (dare I say it: synesthetic) dimension to the experience of seeing a sunset from this particular spot in space and time on our planet.

But none of these incantations come close to matching the power of a simple "picture." And yet, even the picture is inept (as would be any other I could insert in its place), and woefully inadequate to express the feeling of what it was like to be actually like being there in that moment, a short walk away from our little rented cottage, a warm meal in our bellies, kids safely by our side (though more engrossed in their flashlight-lit books than the aesthetic wonders surrounding them), knowing there are two full weeks still awaiting us on our vacation, looking out into the distance, just meditating on, and enjoying, the simple beauty spread before us.

"Use a picture; it's worth a thousand words" - yes, all true - but even a thousand pictures will fall far short of conveying what it is really like to experience the preternatural riches of Skye.