Thursday, March 22, 2018

The Usayable


"...trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work."

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Our Quixotic Purpose


"We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe."

Monday, March 19, 2018

The Flow of the Process


"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... 

Understanding must move with the flow of the process." 

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1920 - 1986)

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Become a River


"Become a river and then nothing is needed.
That’s what The Secret of the Golden Flower says:
Achieve inaction through action,
achieve effortlessness through effort.
But first comes the effort, 
the action—it will melt you—and then
the river starts flowing.
In that very flow it has
reached the ocean."

- Osho (1931 - 1990)

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Outside World


"As far as I know,
there is no proof whatever
of the existence of an
objective reality apart 
from our senses,
and I do not see why
we should accept the
 outside world as such
solely by virtue
of our senses."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Monday, February 26, 2018

Perpetual Stream of Energy


"Living forms are not in being,
they are happening,
they are the expression of
a perpetual stream of
matter and energy which
passes through the organism
and at the same time
constitutes it."

- Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901 - 1972)