Receiving the World

"Paradoxical as it may seem,

the purposeful life has no content,

no point. It hurries on and on,

and misses everything. Not hurrying,

the purposeless life misses nothing,

for it is only when there is

no goal and no rush that

the human senses are

fully open to receive the world."

- Alan Watts

(1915 - 1973)

Mind and Matter

"Whole and unity; thing or entity or being. Every whole is a unity and every unity that is divisible is a whole. For example, the primitive concepts, the monads, the empty set, and the unit sets are unities but not wholes. Every unity is something and not nothing. Any unity is a thing or an entity or a being. Objects and concepts are unities and beings... In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind. 'Matter' refers to one way of perceiving things, and elementary particles are a lower form of mind. Mind is separate from matter... Classes and concepts may, however, also be conceived as real objects, namely classes as 'pluralities of things' or as structures consisting of a plurality of things and concepts as the properties and relations of things existing independently of our definitions and constructions. It seems to me that the assumption of such objects is quite as legitimate as the assumption of physical bodies and there is quite as much reason to believe in their existence. They are in the same sense necessary to obtain a satisfactory system of mathematics as physical bodies are necessary for a satisfactory theory of our sense perceptions."

- Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978)

Nothing Normal About Nature

"The truth is, however,

that there is nothing very

“normal” about nature.

Once upon a time

there were no flowers at all"

- Loren Eiseley (1907 - 1977)

The Immense Journey

Immanent Dialectic

"Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally different relation to it. At first, to be sure, the question of truth seems to apply only to particular parts and not to the whole of reality. Within this whole different strata of validity begin to be marked off, reality seems to separate sharply from appearance. But it lies in the very nature of the problem of truth that once it arises it never comes to rest. The concept of truth conceals an immanent dialectic that drives it inexorably forward, forever extending its limits."

- Ernst Cassirer (1874 - 1945)

Metaphysical Angst

"There are people ... who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos."

- José Saramago (1922 - 2010)

Essential Unity of the World

"We try to realize the

essential unity of the world

with the conscious soul of man;

we learn to perceive

the unity held together

by the one Eternal Spirit,

whose power creates the earth,

the sky, and the stars,

and at the same time

irradiates our mind."

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Science and Art

"Science and art sometimes

can touch one another,

like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle

which is our human life,

and that contact may be

made across the borderline

between the two

respective domains."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)