Arbitrary Divisions

"The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Aesthetic Intuition

"Neither religious nor artistic contemplation should be regarded as 'things' which happen or 'objects' which one can 'have.' They belong to the much more mysterious realm of what one 'is' -  rather 'who' one is. Aesthetic intuition is not merely the act of a faculty, it is also a heightening and intensification of our personal identity and being by the perception of our connatural affinity with 'Being' in the beauty contemplated.

In the case of a Zen artist, there is ...no artistic reflection. The work of art springs 'out of emptiness' and is transferred in a flash, by a few brushstrokes, to paper. It is not a 'representation of' anything, but rather it is the subject itself, existing as light, as art, in a drawing which has, so to speak, 'drawn itself.' The work then is a concretized intuition: not however presented as a unique experience of a specially endowed soul, who can then claim it as his own. On the contrary, to make any such claim would instantly destroy the character of 'emptiness' and suchness which the work might be imagined to have. For the Zen man to pretend to share which 'his' experience would be the height of absurdity. Whose experience? Shared with whom? The artist might well be brusquely invited to go home and consider the question: 'Who do you think you are, anyway?' I do not know if this question is recorded among the traditional koans, but it deserves to be.

A disciple once complained to a Zen master that he was unsettled in his mind. The master said: 'All right, give me your mind and I will settle it for you.' The disciple's helplessness to pick up his mind and hand it over to somebody else gave him some idea of the nature of his 'problems.' One cannot begin to be an artist ... until he has become 'empty,' until he has disappeared."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Looking

"The less there was to see,

the harder he looked,

the more he saw.

This was the point.

To see what's here,

finally to look and
to know you're looking,

to feel time passing,

to be alive to
what is happening in the
smallest registers of motion."

- Don Dellilo (1936 - )

Point Omega

Ontological Autometamorphosis

"For some time, there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi,' a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence. The notion was incorrect, for the living ocean was active. Not, it is true, according to human ideas — it did not build cities or bridges, nor did it manufacture flying machines. It did not try to reduce distances, nor was it concerned with the conquest of Space (the ultimate criterion, some people thought, of man's superiority). But it was engaged in a never-ending process of transformation, an 'ontological autometamorphosis.'"

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

Appearances

"We ourselves introduce that

order and regularity in the

appearance which we

entitle 'nature'. 

We could never find them 

in appearances had we

not ourselves,

by the nature of 

our own mind,

originally set them there."

-  Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)

The Critique of Pure Reason

Eternal Unity

"No one was out on the water but me. It was a moonless night, and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. Taking a chance, I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience. After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before… I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time — extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute. After a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I’d been lying there looking up."

- Alan Lightman (1948 - )

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine 

Branches

"A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one."

- Elizabeth Moon (1945 - )