Friday, January 07, 2022

Wiggly Order


"When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess...They are wiggly but in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order. Now, take a look at yourselves. You are all wiggly...We are just like clouds, rocks and stars. Look at the way the stars are arranged. Do you criticize the way the stars are arranged?"

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
The Tao of Philosophy 

Wednesday, January 05, 2022

Being, Meaning, and Another Order

"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

...
The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.
...
"Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning."

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Postscript. My apologies for the poor quality of this image, but it was captured with a shivering cold hand tapping on an even colder iPhone while out on my morning walk with my wife (these now routine walks have been a very generous "gift" of our pandemic-ridden times). I had a thought to run back into the house to get one of my "real" cameras, but my brain and legs were colder still and simply refused to budge. Searching for otherworldly vistas in ice forms is one of my favorite pastimes in the winter, but I've had precious few days in which to do so (as yet, in northern VA). While work week constraints prevent me from truly indulging myself, the promise of some continued cold weather has me eagerly looking forward to continuing my search for "otherworldly vistas" this weekend!

Tuesday, January 04, 2022

Embodied Network


"We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no 'nature' or 'environment,' separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory."

- David George Haskell (1969 - )
The Songs of Trees 

Friday, December 31, 2021

A Vast Pattern


"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Thursday, December 30, 2021

Universal Spark


"Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark."

- David Deutsch (1953 - )
The Beginning of Infinity 

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Limits of Comprehension


"Man is not born to solve
the problem of the universe,
but to find out what he has to do;
and to restrain himself within
the limits of his comprehension."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Saturday, December 25, 2021

Perceive the Inconceivable


"What dreaming does is
give us the fluidity to
enter into other worlds by
destroying our sense of
knowing this world.
He called dreaming a journey
of unthinkable dimensions,
a journey that, after making us
perceive everything we
can humanly perceive,
makes the assemblage point
jump out side the
human domain and
perceive the inconceivable. "

- Carlos Castaneda (1925 - 1998)
The Art of Dreaming