The Other Point of View

"Science is a second-order expression [of the world]. Science has not and never will have by its nature the same significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of the world.... Scientific points of view according to which my existence is a moment of the world's are always both naive and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted without explicitly mentioning it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round me and exists for me. To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as in geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie and a river is."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961)

A Tiny Little Database

"The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data."

- Freeman Dyson (1923 - )

Eerie Order

"It turns out that

an eerie type of chaos

can lurk just behind

a facade of order;

and yet, deep inside the chaos

lurks an even eerier type of order."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Metamagical Themas:Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Wonder

"When the first encounter with some object surprises us... this makes us wonder and be astonished... And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion."

- Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

The Passions of the Soul

Unbroken Movement

"There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Quietude

"Allow the heart to

empty itself of all turmoil!

Retrieve the utter tranquility

of the mind from which you issued.

Although all forms are dynamic,

and we all grow and transform,

each of us is compelled

to return to our root.

Our root is quietude."

- Lao Tzu

The Sentinel

"Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts."

- Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

The Sentinel

Unapproachable Silence

"My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Simplicity

"When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. "

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Balance

"In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world."

- Thomas Moore (1940 - )

Care of the Soul

Creating Divisions

"The general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that it’s not doing anything – that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Suggested Reality

"You must suggest to me reality; you can never show me reality.

...all thinkers are apt to become dogmatic, and every dogma fails because it does not give you the other side. The same is true of all things, art, religion and everything else. You must find a third, as your standpoint of reason. This is how I came to work in the science of geometry, which is the only abstract truth."

- George Inness (1825 - 1894)

A Great Dream

"Coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of causally unconnected events...If we visualize each causal chain progressing in time as a meridian on the globe, then we may represent simultaneous events by the parallel circles of latitude...Thus progressions of causal events proceed in one direction, while coincidences link these events from a completely different direction, in a completely different progression. One might say the "motives" of coincidence are of a different "character" or even from a different 'dimension' from causal events.

All the events in a man's life accordingly stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: firstly, in the objective, causal connection of the natural process; secondly, in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and which is thus as subjective as his own dreams, whose unfolding content is necessarily determined, but in the manner in which the scenes in a play are determined by the poet's plot. That both kinds of connection exist simultaneously, and the self-same event, although a link in two totally different chains, nevertheless falls into place in both, so that the fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of the other, and each is the hero of his own drama while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him--this is something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony...It is a great dream dreamt by the single entity, the Will to Life: but in such a way that all his personae must participate in it. Thus, everything is interrelated and mutually attuned."

- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

Nearer and Farther

"All architecture is what you do to it
when you look upon it,

(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone?
or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

All music is what awakes from you
when you are reminded by the instruments,

It is not the violins and the cornets,
it is not the oboe nor the beating drums,
nor the score of the baritone singer singing 

his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus,
nor that of the women's chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Leaves of Grass

Looking at Yourself

"How many of us now realize that space is the same thing as mind, or consciousness? That when you look out into infinity you are looking at yourself? That your inside goes with your entire outside as your front with your back? That this galaxy, and all other galaxies, are just as much you as your heart or your brain? That your coming and going, your waking and sleeping, your birth and your death, are exactly the same kind of rhythmic phenomena as the stars and their surrounding darkness? To be afraid of life is to be afraid of yourself."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown:A Mountain Journal

Restructuring Consciousness

"The holistic mode of consciousness is complementary to [analysis]... this mode is nonlinear, simultaneous, intuitive instead of verbal-intellectual, and concerned more with relationships than with the discrete elements that are related. It is important to realize that this mode of consciousness is a way of seeing, and as such it can only be experienced in its own terms. In particular, it cannot be understood by the verbal-intellectual mind because this functions in the analytical mode of consciousness, for which it is not possible to appreciate adequately what it means to say that a relationship can be experienced as something real in itself. In an analytical mode of consciousness it is the elements which are related that stand out in experience, compared with which the relationship is but a shadowy abstraction. The experience of a relationship as such is only possible through a transformation from a piecemeal way of thought to a simultaneous perception of the whole. Such a transformation amounts to a restructuring of consciousness itself. … Whereas we imagine movement and change analytically, as if the process really consisted of a linear sequence of instantaneously stationary states (like a sequence of snapshots), when movement and change are experienced holistically, they are experienced as a whole. The elements which are experienced simultaneously in this mode are thus dynamically related to each other, and this dynamical simultaneity replaces the static simultaneity of the analytical mode."

- Henri Bortoft (1938 - 2012)

The Wholeness of Nature

Mysterious and Unexplorable

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Appearance and Reality

"Art is the link

between appearance

and reality."

- Evelyn Underhill (1875 - 1941)

Mysticism

Sit and Quiet Yourself

"Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told."

- Frank McCourt (1930 - 2009)

Calmness

"Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Siddhartha

Perspectival View

"What prohibits me from treating my perception as an intellectual act is that an intellectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary. But in perception it is 'real'; it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which is it given exhaustively."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961)

Reciprocal Analogy

"It is imagination that first taught man the moral meaning of color, of contour, of sound, and of scent. In the beginning of the world it created analogy and metaphor. What would be truly surprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, that colours could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colour were unsuitable for the translation of ideas, seeing that things have always found their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy."

- Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)

Everything We See

"Everything we see 

hides another thing,

we always want to see 

what is hidden by what we see."

"Only thought can resemble.

It resembles by

 being what it sees, 

hears, or knows; 

it becomes what 

the world offers it."

- Rene Magritte (1898 - 1967)

Matter into Spirit

"It is not God
who will save us,
it is we who
will save God...

...by battling,
by creating,
and by transmuting
matter into spirit."

- Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 - 1957)

Making the Invisible Visible

"The camera is not only an 

extension of the eye but of the brain.

It can see sharper, farther, 

nearer, slower, faster than the eye.

It can see by invisible light.

It can see in the past, 

present, and future.

Instead of using the camera 

only to reproduce objects, 

 I wanted to use it to make what is 

invisible to the eye — visible. "

- Wynn Bullock (1902 - 1975)

Oneness

"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 the Great Spirit,

and that this center is 

really everywhere,

it is within each of us."

- Black Elk (1863 - 1950)

Penetrating Matter

“The farther and more deeply

we penetrate into matter,

by means of increasingly

powerful methods,

the more we are confounded by

the interdependence of its parts...

It is impossible to cut into the network,

to isolate a portion without it becoming

frayed and unravelled at all its edges.”

- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881-1955)

World and Self

"To the vast majority of people 

a photograph is an

image of something within 

their direct experience:

a more-or-less factual reality.

It is difficult for them 

to realize that the

photograph can be the source 

of experience, as well as the

reflection of spiritual awareness 

of the world and of self."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Intellectual Rays

"Many an object is not seen, 

though it falls within our range of visual ray,

because it does not come within the

range of our intellectual ray,

i.e., we are not looking for it.

So, in the largest sense,

we find only the world we look for."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Place

"There is no place at all

that is not looking at you."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(1875 - 1926)