The Matter With Things

Introduction

• “Motion, then, is not an unusual departure from stasis, but stasis an unachievable imaginary state, which in reality can be approached only as an asymptote.”
• Just as stasis is the limit case of motion, the explicit is “merely the limit case of the implicit, with much of its vital meaning sheared off: narrowed down and ‘finalised’.” Likewise, the literal is “merely the limit case of the metaphorical, in which the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a 1:1 correspondence for a useful, temporary, purpose.”

• “Randomness is merely the limit case of order, which is the universal norm. Indeed, true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist.”

  • Hmm…

• Simplicity is the limit case of complexity, which is the norm, where complexity is cleaved off in an attempt to make the unintelligible intelligible. Simplicity is always a feature of the model, not of the reality modelled

  • “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they are not reality.” - Einstein
• The actual is the limit case to the potential, a lone petal in the blossoming flower of potentiality, which is equally real.
• Linearity is the limit case of nonlinearity, everything is curved and straightness can only be approximated by narrowing the view of a complex picture.
• Discontinuity is the limit case of continuity, independence the limit case of interdependence.
• “This cosmos is one from which we are never separate, but out of which we arise, in which we dwell, and to which, finally, we return.”
• The relationship between us and whatever-this-is (reality) is a reciprocally creative process, like a relationship between two conscious beings: “neither is of course ‘made up’ by the other, but both are to some extent, perhaps to a great extent, ‘made’ what they are through their relationship.”
• “It is true that we can see the world only partially, but we still each see the world directly. It is not a re-presentation, but a real presence: there is not a wall between us and the world. Our experience of whatever-it-is is not another thing, even if we can’t get away from the fact that it is we who are experiencing it.”
• “To be in the groove, in the flow, is to feel oneself played by, as much as playing, the music. As Yeats says, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’”
• Truth is an encounter, and whatever I find in “whatever-it-is does not pre-exist my encounter with it. There must be potential, true enough, but it is actualised only in my encounter with it. The encounter is genuinely creative. The whole universe is constantly creative—but not out of nowhere.”

• Summary of hemisphere differences

  • LH: fine details, local, foreground, graspable; RH: whole, background, periphery, difficult to grasp
  • LH: detects what is familiar; RH: detects what is new. RH is on the lookout for what might be erroneously assumed to be familiar by the LH
  • LH narrows to certainty; RH opens to possibility. RH tolerates ambiguity and holds together conflicting info, LH tends to collapse them into either/or decisions
  • LH: isolates, fragments, mechanical pieces and parts; RH: complex whole
  • LH: stasis; RH: flow
  • LH: favours explicit and struggles with implicit, and thus struggles with metaphor, myth, irony, nuances in tone, humour, and poetry. Takes things literally
  • LH categorized by absence or presence of a particular feature; RH by a ‘family resemblance’ approach (it sees Gestalt)
  • LH sees common parts; RH sees unique wholes
  • “One could say that the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience; the LH that of the map, the RH that of the terrain.”

  • The LH is optimistic, lacking insights to its limitations; the RH is realistic, but tends towards pessimism

    • Interesting…
• “So how might one characterise, as a whole, each hemisphere’s vision of reality? One view, the left hemisphere view, is of a world composed of static, isolated, fragmentary elements that can be manipulated easily, are decontextualised, abstracted, detached, disem-bodied, mechanical, relatively uncomplicated by issues of beauty and morality (except in a consequentialist sense) and relatively un troubled by the complexity of empathy, emotion and human signifi cance. They are put together, like brick on brick to build a wall, sc as to reach conclusions that are taken to be unimpeachable. It is ar inanimate universe - and a bureaucrat’s dream. There is an exces of confidence and a lack of insight. This world is useful for purpose of manipulation, but is not a helpful guide to understanding th nature of what it encounters. Its use is local and for the short term.”
• “In the other (the right hemisphere version), as in the world the map represents, and in the world revealed to us by physics, by poet-ry, and simply by the business of living, things are almost infinitely more complex. Nothing is clearly the same as anything else. All is flowing and changing, provisional, and complexly interconnected with everything else. Nothing is ever static, detached from our awareness of it, or disembodied; and everything needs to be understood in context, where, if it is not to be denatured, it must remain implicit. Here, wholes are different from the sum of the parts, and beauty and morality, along with empathy and emotional depth, help us to intuit meaning that lies beyond the banality of the familiar and everyday. It is an animate universe - and a bureaucrat’s nightmare. This is a world from which we cannot detach ourselves, since we are part of it and affect it by our relationship with it. The overall timbre is sober and tentative. This world is truer to what is, but is harder to comprehend and to express in language, and less useful for practical issues that are local and short-term. On the other hand, for a broader or longer-term understanding the right hemisphere is essential.”
• “Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.”
• ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.’ - Emerson Pugh

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Part 1: The Hemispheres and the Means to Truth

• “The more precise anything is, the less content it has: ‘the more certain our knowledge the less we know.’”
• Right hemisphere insult leads to an ignorance of ignorance. If a patient is harmed by their inattention caused by hemineglect, they blame others (e.g., if they bump into a stranger due to lack of left-sided vision, they blame the stranger). Responsibility is downplayed.
• Left hemisphere insult leads to an opposite, where people claim responsibility for things they had nothing to do with. This is what occurs in depression, as people claim responsibility for atrocities clearly beyond their control.
• Hierarchy of attention: we see things as a whole first (right hemisphere) before homing in on details with the left hemispheres sharp, narrow, focused attention. Right hemisphere deals with the form of the whole, the left with bits and pieces.

• “The musician does not only manipulate the instrument like a separate object, but lives in it like a limb and inhabits the expressive musical space it opens.” - Behnke

  • A technological extension of us (techno in the art/craft sense)
• From a developmental perspective, the right hemisphere (both the upper neocortex and the lower limbic system) nurture the development of the left hemisphere. The whole nurtures the parts…
• Attention is not only responsible for the ‘how’ and ‘what’, but for the ‘whether-at-all’ of existence. What the left hemisphere doesn’t attend to, doesn’t exist.
• “Perception is the act whereby we reach out from our cage of mental constructs to taste, smell, touch, hear, and see the living world.”
• Disgust in many modalities is associated with the left insula. Interesting… Disgust removes emotional depth from, emotional embodiment with the object of disgust. Makes sense.
• Information flowing to the left hemisphere tends to attribute ‘successes to internal, stable and global causes, while failures were blamed on external, unstable, and specific causes.’ (Drake and Seligman, 1989)
• The left hemisphere “takes kudos when things go well, and denies responsibility when they do not.”
• “The left hemisphere appears to detest uncertainty; it creates explanations and fills in gaps of information in order to build a cohesive story and extinguish doubt.” (Marinsek, Turner, Gazzaniga et al., 2014)
• “The layman’s grounds for accepting the models propounded by the scientist are often no different from the young African villager’s ground for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders.” (Robin Horton)
• We have a tendency toward magical beliefs, belief that we believe are real yet are invalid. This is probably adaptive; it would pay to mistakingly conjure a tiger behind the leaves more than it would to miss it altogether. A creative mind is functional, and uncreative mind is closed of to the new, incapable of adapting, and excessive creativity leads to overwhelming delusion
• “To put it crudely, the right hemisphere is our bullshit detector. It is better at avoiding nonsense when asked to believe it, but it is also better at avoiding falling prey to local prejudice and just dismissing rational argument because the argument does not happen to agree with that prejudice.”
• The left hemisphere is a conformist, and whose “job is to create a model and maintain it at all costs.” (Ramachandran, 1998)
• The left hemisphere adopts a theory, and denies what doesn’t fit the theory. As John Whitfield said “the LH seems to suppress sensory information that conflicts with its idea of what the world should be like, the right sees the world how it really is.”
• While the LH excels at processing verbal material, the RH has the advantage at language comprehension. Understanding requires “retention and integration of different types of verbal information over long time spans, and the ability to revise as new words are encountered and integrated with prior contexts.”
• “My model, says the LH, is better than your reality: in the canonical, theoretical world of general abstractions, things should work out according to my plan. But then reality, with all its messy complexities and differences, gets in the way and spoils the story.”
• “Rushing into action, you fail. Trying to grasp things, you lose them.” — Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching 64)
• Apprehend: Latin for to hold on to; Comprehend: Latin for to hold together.
• The brain region associated with right hand grasping is next to the one for language (a sort of symbolic grasping).
• Language likely started with music, originating in the RH and gradually migrating to the LH as language was formalized. This might have happened as social groups grew and became more specialized, as relationships shifted more from I-Thou to I-It (reference to objects more common)
• “[Language] instead may be a way of mapping the world — a system of symbols that reflects the world. Words, according to this view, are tokens for things, and grammar a schema of how they relate, enabling us to plan a strategy and manipulate more effectively.”
• “Tokens or symbols cannot escape being a part of the real world in the RH, and the real world cannot escape becoming tokens or symbols in the LH.”
• Abstract: dragged away; discourse: running to and fro; metaphor: carried across
• “It is metaphor alone that can carry us across the apparent gap between language and the real lived world.”
• Writes of the decline in general intelligence, which is tied to the right hemisphere. While IQ has risen, IQ tests much depends on procedural, abstract, unembodied knowledge that the left hemisphere excels at. But we’ve been teaching children to focus on those procedural tasks, given them ‘scientific spectacles’, and fundamentally ‘overfit’ them to narrow tasks. And now their ability to deal with phenomena that fall outside of those procedures, novel phenomena, is receding.

• Three phases of creativity:

  • ”The first of these phases, preparation, is partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly willed and partly serendipitous, and may go on for years. It is generally associated with some pretty hard work, acquiring skills and knowledge, thinking consciously and mulling things over unconsciously, so as to prepare the fertile ground in which the seed can grow.
  • The second phase, incubation, is unconscious, and not under voluntary control: it can only be impeded by conscious effort and introspection, much as it does a plant no good to keep digging it up to see how its roots are growing.
  • The third phase, illumination, flowers out of the unconscious quite suddenly, again unwilled, and is effortless and accompanied by feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and fulfilment. Insight is effectively this third phase of creativity considered in isolation: the so-called ‘light bulb’ moment.”
• “Talent hits a target no-one else can hit, wrote Schopenhauer; genius hits a target no-one else can see.”
• “Furthering creativity is mainly about not doing, rather than doing… The creative process is inevitably governed by uncertainty, without which neither self-realisation nor creative innovation is possible… The less we leave things to fortune, the less likely we are to make a fortunate find.”
• Spotlight analogy: “Certain kinds of mind-wandering are creative; narrow attention hampers creativity. Only turning off the spotlight of left hemisphere attention enables the more complex and diffuse arrays of neurones in the right hemisphere to work on solving the problem.”
• “Trying to see what has to be an unconscious process is like ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks,’ as William James memorably put it.”
• “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, but to know how to create is better… Without [intuition], the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.” — Poincaré
• “Analysis reveals elements in [art], and can go on indefinitely, yielding more and more understanding; but it will never yield a recipe.” — Susanne Langer

• “[The subliminal self] knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed. In a word, is not the subliminal self superior to the conscious self?” — Poincaré

  • Divine - guess/discover (from the French deviné)
• ‘To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion - not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense, and you still don’t understand what your creature is up to; to have a break-through idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it’ — Paul Lockhart
• “A good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of dissimilars” - Aristotle

• “You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” (Boswel, Life of Johnson)

  • Right hemisphere is melancholic, left hemisphere is optimistic
• “A brain disease or mental illness…is a change in a person’s whole way of being in the world.” It is not necessarily a specific part disfunctioning. It’s a holistic change in how the world comes into being for that person.
• It’s fruitless to argue with a deluded schizo patient, since they cannot know what they don’t know. Their reality does not coincide with the best evidenced view, so we are right to think them mistaken, but for them the experience is authentic.

• Three RH functions impacted by schizophrenia (and modern culture): sustained attention, the ability to read faces, and empathy

  • (TO READ) Madness and Modernism, Louis Sass

• One schizophrenic patient described by Saas reported that ‘the world consists of tools, and … everything that we glance at has some utilization.’

  • I’m drawn to this…but utilization for whom? Over what timescale?
• Dopamine antagonists are used to treat schizophrenia and mania, because the left hemisphere relies more heavily on dopamine than the right hemisphere.
• Autism means morbid self-absorption (from Greek autos, self) and a lack of contact with reality.
• “Without a self, there is no capacity for intersubjectivity, for the experience of shared time in a shared world…”
• “As Merlau-Ponty noted, ‘presence’ concerns both self and world: subject and object are just two abstract ‘moments’ within a unique structure — presence.”
• Self and other, as distinct but not isolated, is a necessary for there to be relation, betweenness. If there is no separation, nothing can flow between to reconcile the distinction
• We are experiencing a rise in so-called dissociative disorders such as borderline personality disorder, conditions in which the sense of one’s own identity is weakened or lost altogether. In the modern world the individual may experience himself or herself as no longer having a role and a place in a close-knit community on a human scale, and therefore as engulfed in the mass - of the populace, of the city, of bureaucratic organisations and global corporations-relatively powerless. No wonder people emphasise (with tragic and damaging results) something called identity, in which, ironically their true identity is swallowed up.”
• Is an intact self of self required for self-transcendence (e.g., enlightenment)? Is the sense of self required as a stable base from which we ascend? Transcendence is more of an orthogonal ascension though…there needs to be some coherent motion on the material plane (self, vortex) to orient oneself vortically…
• Excessive abstraction is characteristic of schizophrenia, “living in the map, not the world: words that refer only to other words; abstractions that become more real than actualities; symbols that usurp the power of what they symbolize: the triumph of theory over embodied experience.”
• “Kretschmer describes the schizoid temperament as having ‘a certain tenacious characteristic, a tendency to the enumeration of names and figures, to numbering, and schematisation, to logical abstraction, and to the building of a system at all costs.’”
• “A triumph of literal-mindedness [a schizoid/LH quality], an inability to deal with the purely implicit, and indeed a fear of humour (as dangerously dealing in the implicit) are also identifiable in public discourse today.”

• LH dominated activity leads to a loss of uniqueness (and thus uncertainty) in exchange for increased generality and perceived certainty, where uniqueness is transmuted into abstract categories. People lose their individuality and become typical of a certain class of people.

  • Our tendency to generalize and drop people into categories denatures them and robs them of their identity. We do it to make things more simple, in protest against uncertainty and ambiguity. In doing so we devitalize the people we categorize.
• “Those who espouse grand theories supposedly based on love for mankind, are by no means the kindest people one meets; and those that are innately suspicious of such schemes often surpass them in generosity and kindly warmth towards actual human individuals.”
• “He who binds to himself a joy / Does the wingèd life destroy / He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise.” — Blake
• “To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.” — Bashō
• “Because [the LH’s] ‘experience’ is not in touch with the presenting of life known to the RH, and it therefore experiences its own re-presentations, it seems to itself to live in a self-enclosed theatre, where experience is projected on the walls of the cell: ‘created by my own mind’, like the world as imagined by certain philosophers and psychologists.”

• “Let us, then, understand our condition: we are something and we are not everything. Such being as we have removes us from knowledge of first principles, which arise out of nothingness. And the smallness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite.” — Pascal

  • First principles arise from nothingness? Why… Because they stand on their own, unsupported. Nothing is beneath them, for they are the base.
• “The schizophrenic subject appears to occupy two extremes simultaneously: both skeptical to the point of paralysis about matters that must be taken for granted if one is to function at all, and yet gullible enough to espouse enormously improbable belief systems that are clearly delusional.”

Part 2: The Hemispheres & the Paths to Truth

Ch10: What is Truth?

• LH approach to truth
  • Truth is a thing.
  • Can be experienced in the mind as a representation from something outside of the mind. Subjective experience of the objective
  • Starts with a secure set of facts and piles them on top of each other to build a representation of truth.
  • Impersonal truth, timeless, unchanging, independent of context.
  • Ultimately single, in that if a path is rigorously followed, everyone should reach the same conclusion
  • Ultimately perfect, precise, certain
  • All these descriptors deal with something that was, a process that has now stopped. Representation, fact, perfect, precise, certain, and concluded. These words describe stasis, eternity, fixity rather than motion, time, and flow
• RH approach to truth
  • Truth as a process
  • Has no ending (infinite game)
  • Truth as a relationship, a continual reverberation between the (never completely distinct) interdependent subject and object modes of consciousness that answer or co-respond to one another
  • This accord or attunement would be the evolving truth
  • Incomplete yet in the process of completing itself, uncertain but approaching certainty
  • Ungraspable except through embodied being, through a consciousness that is in the flesh and engaged with the world
  • These descriptors (reverberation, answer, accord (literally to bring heart to heart), attunement, engagement) involve motion, reciprocity, and energy.
• “Truth and trust (belief) go together. One cannot have trust in a society where there is no truth; and one cannot be true to a society in which there is no trust.”
• An opinion about what is good or beautiful cannot be forced upon a soul not ready to accept it. Yet, as Edmund Burke notes: “There is rather less difference upon matters of taste among mankind, than upon most of those which depend on naked reason…men are far better agreed on the excellence of a description of Virgil, than on the truth or falsehood of a theory of Aristotle.”

• Truth as a process of revealing itself to us only through our experience. The Greek word for truth, aletheia, literally means ‘un-forgetting’

  • Woah, similar to the avatara of eastern thought. The lessons re-remembered, the un-forgetting.
• “The ambition of being able finally to demonstrate truth to someone incapable of seeing, or determined not to see, what one means is a complete waste of time. Why should truth have a coercive quality? Truth might be more a matter of something to which we are drawn freely as it were ‘from in front’—attracted—rather than compelled inevitably ‘from behind’—pushed. Very little that we take for granted as most essential to life—love, energy, matter, consciousness—can[not] be convincingly argued about, or even described, without becoming ultimately self-referential. You have to experience it to know it: all we can do is point.”

Ch11: Science’s claims on truth

• “Perceptions are laden with theory. We never just see something without seeing it as something. We may think that our theories are shaped by observations, but it is as true that our observations are shaped by theories.”
• “To the extent that we have knowledge or experience of the world on which to base an understanding, we cannot know what it is like when we don’t know it.”
• “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” — Max Planck
• The view that anything goes is pernicious and incoherent. “Pernicious, because it effortlessly exalts any crack ideology to the same level as the distilled wisdom of a civilization, and thereby debases the distilled wisdom of a civilization to the level of any cracked ideology. Incoherent, because, if anything goes, nothing goes: we no longer have any purchase on reality.”
• The danger of social philosophies lie “not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole…in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.” — John Stuart Mill
• “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” — Whitehead
• “All we know is that there are local habits in the part of universe we inhabit.”
• “In contrast to terms such as ‘theories’ and ‘laws’ which radiate some sense of absolute truth, the term ‘pattern’ is more subtle, less committed, less definitive, more open to modification…If we keep in mind that every hypothesis, theory, or law is ultimately just a pattern, the day that theory or law is modified or revoked will be less surprising, less disconcerting.”

Ch 12: The science of life: a study in left hemisphere capture

• “When nature has come to exist in God through the essential unity of him in whom it was created, it will possess an ever-moving stability and a stable and changeless form of movement generated eternally round that which is one, unique, and always the same.” — Maximum the Confessor, 7th century theologian
  • Agree with all until ‘always the same’… but I get it, I think
• The organism as a whole acts in a co-ordinated fashion to create and respond to meaning in the pursuit of value-laden goals, whereby it is fully realised and fulfilled as an organism.”
• (TO READ) Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology
• Why Organism are Not Machines
  • No on-off switch. “The very existence of an organism is, from beginning to end, one unceasing flow of matter and energy. For it to stop, even for an instant, would mean immediate death. The being of an organism, its form, its becoming, is its movement. And its movement is its being.
  • Motion vs stasis. “The chief problem in the philosophy of Nature is not to explain what is active in Nature (for that, being her primary condition, is easily understood), but rather that which is static and permanent. The explanation however lies within that very condition—that whatever is permanent is for Nature the limit-point of her activity. For, given this, Nature strives against every limitation.” — Schelling
    • Interesting…I get stasis/permanence being the limit point of Nature…Why does Nature strive against it? Let it simmer…
• Organisms are “open systems that must constantly exchange energy and matter with their surrounding in order to keep themselves far from equilibrium. The persistence of an organism is dependent on its ability continuously to maintain a low-entropic ‘steady state’ in which there is a perfectly balanced import and export of materials.” — Dupré (2018)
• Metabolism comes from the Greek metabole, meaning change
• “Evolution is a flow that seamlessly connects all life. What seem like species are just our way of reifying that flow (‘thingifying’ it) at any one moment in time.”
• Organisms as processes that change/adapt in order to maintain stability (e.g., homeostasis). Seen this way, natural selection is not an agent of change, but of stabilization. By selecting the most adaptive phenotypes, the lineage is stabilized over longer periods of time.
• Again emphasises flow vs series of steps. “It is the difference between a sequence—a concatenation, a chain—and a single, indivisible movement, a flow. Flow is a process: a chain is a series of things, that are static until one is given a push or pull by the thing next to it. An organism is a flow, and is alive. A machine is a chain, and is dead.”
• Speaks of the problem of causation in flow, and an example by Alan Watts: you see a cat for the first time through a slit, its head appears first, followed by its tail. This repeats various times. With this narrow view, we assume the head caused the tail, the tail being the effect of the head. It’s this narrow view, this loss of the whole, that misleads us into thinking one part causes another.
• Does a waterfall or tornado have a cause? “That depends on seeing the world at large as a collection of things, not processes. For where does the precipitation of rainwater, the configuration of the land, the air pressure, the wind speed that would be said to be their causes begin and end?” Acknowledges that this is why we have to economize and think in terms of “things”, but that the assumptions we make are worth challenging.
• “Cells use DNA to adapt to new ends; it is not a matter of DNA using cells to further its own ‘selfish’ ones. The idea that genes are somehow (how?) ‘programmed’ to pass on their DNA does not sit well with the fact that cells are constantly acting on it to change or repair it; and such persistence as there is depends on ‘elongate editing and correcting processes in the cell.’”
  • Cells use DNA, not the other way around. Cells aren’t programmed, given directions by the gene itself. The DNA strand is under constant self correction, modification, by the whole of the cell and the context it finds itself in. There is no intrinsic soul of the cell, the gene, that directs modification while safely remaining unscathed by its surroundings. It utterly continges with its surrounding.

• Example of epigenetics: a fruit fly was stressed during development (the pupae were heat shocked) leading to abnormal wing veins. In 14 generations of consecutive heat shocking, the next generation inherited the abnormality even without heat shocking, meaning the gene had been altered directly by the environment, i.e., not only by random mutation.

• The role of science is to understand nothing less than who we are.
• “A purpose here is not a plan. It is a tendency inseparable from—woven into, as it were, the fabric of—a life, which leaves all the detail, and even the final outcome, undetermined.”
• Tend comes from the Latin tendere, to reach out to something. Tendencies are reaching outs, attending is reaching out with…attention? Awareness? Implies a drawing towards rather than pushing behind.
• In cells and multicellular organisms, seemingly free and undetermined sporadic action nevertheless exhibit patterned and purposeful behaviour. Cells divide, merge, lose and gain constituents, such that the same constellation of parts never recur. “Yet their joint behaviour converges upon a nonrandom resultant, keeping the state of the population as a whole relatively invariant.” (Weiss 1962)
  • Just like turbulence
• “Every machine we know of is designed by an intelligent mind that is external to the machine, conceived the design before building it, and creates it for his own utility, a purpose that is extrinsic to the machine itself.”
  • Intelligent design prior to the fact is a left-hemisphere concept. Man is not a machination made by God.
• “All attempts at stretching the machine model in one form or another come down to repeating La Mettrie’s absurdity, that of a ‘clock that winds itself’. The correct conclusion to draw is not that some watchmaker, blind or otherwise, did or does wind the machine, but that it is not a machine.”
• “Nature delights in her own.”
• Western philosophical distinction of nature: Natura naturans (nature naturing) vs. Natura naturata (nature natured). The former treats nature as an eternally becoming process, the latter a passive ‘thing’ already created in full.
• “Quantum fields manifest particle-like properties in virtue of their intersection being constrained to occur in multiples of fixed quanta, and the conservation of those quantized properties. The quantisation is reminiscent of particles, but it in fact a quantisation of wave-like processes, not particles…there are no physical particles…” — Mark Bickhard
• “As in modern physics there is no matter in the sense of rigid and inert particles, but rather atoms are node-points of a wave dynamic, so in biology there is no rigid organic form as a bearer of the processes of life; rather there is a flow of processes, manifesting itself in apparently persistent forms.” — von Bertalanffy
• “Over the past fifty years or so scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining. The insistence on bland impersonality and the widespread indifference to anything like the display of a unique human author in scientific exposition, have not only transformed the reading of most scientific papers into an act of tedious drudgery, but have also deprived scientists of some powerful tools for enhancing their clarity in communicating matters of great complexity. Scientists wrote beautifully through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. But somewhere after that, coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader.” — David Mermin (1990)

Ch13: Institutional science and truth

• “In an era where not just every organ, but every organelle, has its journal, and in which the jargon of each speciality becomes increasingly intimidating to outsiders, there is little incentive to look beyond the boundaries of your own ever narrower specialism. Indeed, the way to get on is to dig deeper in the hole you are already in, not to look around you to work out what all this spadework is about. For that way lies career death: you will cease to be an expert - one who has been defined as knowing more and more about less and less.”

• In regards to scientific papers, “the heavy acronymic jargon of research papers seems to me to present an almost impenetrable barrier to anyone other than the most highly specialized reader, and even then, if they are to get anything out of the exercise, they must have a huge capacity to tolerate boredom.”

• Issues with the scientific institution:
  • Reproducibility: studies consistently underestimate their uncertainty. This not only occurs in psychological and medical studies, but in physics studies of physical constants
  • Misdemeanours: in order to build a quantity (rather than quality) of published work, researchers will data mine (keep analyzing the same results in slightly different ways) until a p-value of significance is revealed
  • Mainstream positivity: large journals are more likely to publish positive outcomes rather than negative (such as finding that a medical intervention does not work). In medicine, this results in the illusion that treatments being more effective, and less harmful, than they might actually be
  • H-index/impact factor: authors pile their names onto journal papers in order to grow their h-index, even if they are dimly aware of the research. This allows them to distance themselves from a paper if it’s highly criticized, but claim glory when it’s time to dish out prizes.
  • Richard Smith, an editor at BMJ, conducted a study on peer review itself, finding it to be “a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless … science and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.”
  • Science departments increasingly treat researchers as numbers (publishing scores, or worse: by race, gender, etc.) rather than taking people they actually want to work with. While this is open to bias, “bias is intrinsic to human life. We just waste a lot of time and money pretending we’re avoiding it, and then kid ourselves that the outcome was ‘objective’—a more dangerous position, because it introduces complacency and is a much more difficult thing to fight, precisely because of its appearance of objectivity.”
• Experience comes from the Latin experientia, from experiri, meaning to ‘try out’. The per underlies the word ‘peril’, and is related to danger. “Experience is an inherently uncertain business that carries risks.”
• “My mother groaned, my father wept, / Into the dangerous world I leapt.” — Blake

Ch14: Reason’s claims on truths

• Reason is a blend of rationality (LH) and intuition (RH). Rationality is exclusive, reason is inclusive due to wending in intuition, emotion, and imagination.
• “We must reject the distinction between nature as it really is and experiences of it which are purely psychological. Our experiences of the apparent world are nature itself.” — Whitehead
• “No ‘-ism’ that is already parti pris can offer a rich and ordered landscape, because the mind that gives rise to it is closed, disregards the whole tapestry of reality in favour of just one strand, and inevitably needs to disparage those points of view it doesn’t share. The rich view, by contrast, will draw from a number of standpoints and achieve a balanced synthesis.”
• We all have different experiences, but they share a common ground. There is ‘betweenness’ that “links us to one another in intersubjectivity.” Human consciousness is not fused with, yet not wholly separate from, that of others; nor is the world wholly separate from consciousness.
• Rationality is grounded on axiom, an assumption deemed to be true. The word axiom comes from the Greek axia, which means ‘value’)
• “Reason, like both science and, in a different way, morality, can bring a verdict into doubt only if it is grounded on something which is exempt from the doubting process.”
  • Gives Wittgenstein’s analogy of a door requiring stable hinges to turn
• “Outside of courts there are no laws, only regularities.”
• “For [philosophy] does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.” (Plato, Epistles 7, 341c)
  • Philosophical truths are more subtle, and are difficult to make explicit. Instead they’re gradually kindled, gently blown on by others, gently growing
• “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — Hume 1896 Bk 2
• “Many professional philosophers and their students slide unthinkingly into proceeding as if philosophy is about argumentation and they lose sight of the fact that it is really about insight.” — Magee (1998)
• “Thinking analytically is like going on a diet. Its aim is a healthy austerity of thought, a certain trimness of mind. But when it’s carried too far, we’re left only with a skeleton. Carried too far too often, we lose the sense that something is amiss when the patient exhibits no life. We come to take pride in our cases of polished bone.”
• “One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one.” — Schlegel
• The Technical Philosopher fears natural and ordinary language. “Ordinary language is so obscure; words come dripping out of a sea of feelings and related meanings, and are logically unmanageable” (William Earle). Instead, they construct an artificial symbolism that takes years of training to read with any ease.
• “Some things can only be experienced or understood when they are not put to analysis. This is not because analysis defeats them, but because they defeat analysis. The effect of the direct glare is to banish the penumbra of myriad delicate threads that make it what it is to what nourishes it and gives it life, like the roots of a plant or the vessels that feed the heart and which it feeds. Snatch the plant from the soil, snatch the heart from the body, and they not only die, but can no longer be understood for what they are.”

Ch 15: Reason’s progeny

• The moment we express something in a word, “an alienation takes place, and the full experience is substituted for by the word. … When he thinks he grasps reality it is only his brain-self that grasps it, while he, the whole man, his eyes, his hands, his heart, his belly, grasp nothing—in fact, he is not participating in the experience which he believes is his.” (Fromm, 1960)
  • When we describe something we cease to participate with it to some degree…
• “Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain the one lead is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept of ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.”
• Conceptualizing anything is a way of asking what that concept can do for us. This type of linear thinking is “essentially power thought—the sort of thought…whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, is to give power to its possessor. Now power is a causal concept, and to obtain power over any given material one need only understand the causal laws to which it is subject. This is an essentially abstract matter, and the more irrelevant details we can omit from our purview, the more powerful our thoughts will become.” (Russel 1931)
• Russel then gives an example of the farmer growing corn makes less money than the railway company that transports it, who makes less money than the stock broker who invests in the industry. The more abstracted away from the activity, the more general the relationship, the more distanced from the unique, the more opportunity there is to exploit and make use of those general concepts to further oneself. The more devitalized, the more predictable.
• “There is a clear connexion between the will to power of the left hemisphere, and a tendency to try to make reality conform to our theory; wisdom lies in conforming one’s theory as far as possible to experience.”
• “The small wisdom is like water in a glass: clear, transparent, pure. The great wisdom is like water in the sea: dark, mysterious, impenetrable.” — Rabindranath Tagore
• “A people that has been deprived of its customs through a desire for written laws has imposed on itself the harsh necessity of writing down everything, even its customs.” (Louis de Bonald)
  • Increasing precision of law leads to longer text, a reduced likelihood in it being read, and a stronger justification for the permissibility of a dubious act that was (inevitably) missed by the list. How stupid do you have to assume people are (because they claim not to understand an ambiguous but accurate statement such as “Keep hands away from moving parts”).
• The assumption that philosophy can be done impersonally, objectively, is naive, neglecting the subjects that the philosophizing inevitably flows through. And “it is not just that philosophy can never free itself from personality: a person’s philosophy may be doing psychological work for that personality, which might explain why philosophies are so passionately defended.”
  • Philosophy as psychological work… a psychic framework that minimizes loss, preserves and maximizes efficiency for itself (whatever self that may be)
• “A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.” — Karen Armstrong
• Anthropologist Levi-Strauss suggested myths aren’t thought up, but rather myths think through us, bringing themselves into being through us. Levi-Strauss saw his work as getting thought within himself, unbeknownst to himself.
• The word immaterial itself refers to embodied experience. The Latin materia means wood, and even further mater means mother—in the sense of an origin. The immaterial means that which has no mother.
• “Direct experience which is never adequately communicable in words is the only knowledge we ever fully have. That is our one and only true, unadulterated, direct and immediate form of knowledge of the world, wholly possessed, uniquely ours. People who are rich in that are rich in lived life. But the very putting of it into words translates it into something of the second order, something derived, watered down, abstracted, generalised, publicly shareable. People who live most of their outer or inner lives in terms that are expressible in language - for example, people who live at the level of concepts, or in a world of ideas - are living a life in which everything is simplified and reduced, emptied of what makes it lived, purged of what makes it unique and theirs.” — Brian Magee
• “Propositions, however intricately devised, are the work of logos, and merely get in the way of the process of religion, which is, or should be, about how to find meaning and fulfilment in life, and to help us understand our relationships with one another, with the world at large, and with the divine, however we conceive it.”
• mythos implicit order, logos explicit order
• “What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.” — C. S. Lewis

Ch 16: Logical paradox: a further study in left hemisphere capture

• Paradoxes like Achilles and the Tortoise or the Dichotomy (distance from A to B halved infinitely means you never get there) fall prey to assuming abstractions can be brought together to recreate reality. What happens is a (1) fragmentation of (2) static instants of (3) re-presentations in a (4) abstract realm, rather than the intuitive understanding of a (1) indivisible whole in (2) motion (3) present within a (4) embodied experience.
• An infinity of points does not make up a line, since they have no length, and to presuppose a length would be to smuggle in the thing you’re trying to create (a line). Same goes for instants in time, an infinity of instants will not get you a duration. The nature of temporal extension or spatial depth requires a leap into something of an irreducibly different nature.
• “It is easy to kill something with a knife, but with the knife you cannot make it alive again.”
• Evermore straight line tangents will only approximate a curve; increasing a polygon’s sides will only asymptotically approach a circle; a mechanized doll may be as lifelike as you can make it, but it will never actually live. The process doesn’t work when discrete parts are aggregated. “In every case what can only be called a ‘leap’ has to be made from one realm into another, to bring it to life.”

Ch 17: Intuition’s claims on truth

• An archetype is not like a stereotype. Unlike the stereotype, which is a post factum abstraction that is purely general in nature, the archetype exists ante factum, and is instantiated. It is the coming together of the absolutely unique with the absolutely universal - in fact this absolutely unique experience is felt as both absolutely unique and absolutely universal at the same time. Every time someone falls in love, the experience seems unique, as though it could never have happened before or ever happen again in the history of the world. And yet it is as ancient as humanity itself - or older - as the experiencer also acknowledges. It is both a typical human experience, and a completely unique one, of unmatchable power and significance. And so it is, to one extent or another, with all archetypes. In fact their constantly repeated nature is part of their power: according to Jung, ‘endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution.’ When we encounter them afresh, it is the experience, not of cognition, but of re-cognition, or anamnesis.”

Ch 18: The untimely demise of intuition

• Philosopher Gadamer pints of that “in as much as tradition serves as the condition of one’s knowledge, the background that instigates all inquiry, one can never start from a tradition-free place. A tradition is what gives one a question or interest to begin with.”
  • Tradition as the Wittgenstein’s door hinges, the ground upon which we stand (which can change as well)
• “A tradition changes by being born anew in each member of the community that shares in it.”
• “To embrace a tradition is to make it one’s own by altering it. A passive acknowledgement of a tradition does not allow one to live within it. One must apply the tradition as one’s own.” — Barthold
• Perhaps one consequence in a society that lacks trust is one that must become more reliant on explicit reasoning rather than intuitive reasoning (and thus the trend of ridiculing intuitions, prejudices, and the like). One can be expressed, the other is less expressible and thus must be taken on faith. But if we hardly know our fellow interlocutors, why would we trust their intuitions?
• “By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects. To analyse, therefore, is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view from which we note as many resemblances as possible between the new object which we are studying and others which we believe we know already.” — Bergson
• TO READ: The Tyranny of Metrics, Jerry Muller
• “When organisations committed to metrics wake up to this fact [that simplifying diminishes the complexity of life], they typically add more performance measures - which creates a cascade of data, data that becomes ever less useful, while gathering it sucks more and more time and resources .. Because belief in its efficacy seems to outlast evidence that it frequently doesn’t work, metric fixation has elements of a cult. Studies that demonstrate its lack of effectiveness are either ignored, or met with the assertion that what is needed is more data and better measurement. Metric fixation, which aspires to imitate science, too often resembles faith.” — Muller
• “In situations where there are no real feasible solutions to a problem, the gathering and publication of performance data serves as a form of virtue signalling. There is no real progress to show, but the effort demonstrated in gathering and publicising the data satisfies a sense of moral earnestness. In lieu of real progress, the progress of measurement becomes a simulacrum of success.” — Muller
• When the LH is faced with evidence that its theory is bunk, it will at first reject the claim and, when pressed, will double down on its theory and claim not enough data has been gathered to validate the theory (which must be right).
  • Reminds of War and Peace, theory obsessed war general
• “The quest for numerical metrics of accountability is particularly attractive in cultures marked by low social trust.” — Muller
• “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” — Whitehead

Ch 19: Intuition, imagination and the unveiling of the world

• “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry’. The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within … but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.” — Shelley 1921
• “These percepts, these termini, these sensible things, these mere matters-of-acquaintance, are the only realities we ever directly know, and the whole history of our thought is the history of our substitution of one of them for another, and the reduction of the substitute to the status of a conceptual sign. Contemned though they be by some thinkers, these sensations are the mother-earth, the anchor-age, the stable rock, the first and last limits, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of the mind. To find such sensational termini should be our aim with all our higher thought.” — William James
  • On the primacy of the sense, the ground upon which higher thought springs
• “Analysis should always be a prelude to a synthesis, in which the original synthetic take and the subsequent analytic take are themselves synthesized. The whole purpose of division is to enrich a union.”
• So Coleridge calls this dividing the process of philosophy, and its reunion the result of philosophy
• “My contention is that imagination, far from deceiving us, is the only means whereby we experience reality: it is the place where our individual creative consciousness meets the creative cosmos as a whole. (It is no coincidence that the same Indo-European root, present in classical Greek, indicates both ‘to know’ and ‘to generate’ or ‘to be born. It is the virtual, re-presented world of the left hemisphere that is the deceit. Imagination is not, as it is sometimes conceived, the capacity to conjure the unreal, but, for the first time, to see the real - the real that is, for reasons of deeply ingrained habit, no longer present to us. It is not a means of placing something else between us and the world, but of removing the accretions that prevent us from that world’s fuller realisation. To see is not just to register sense-data, but to see ‘into’ the life of what is seen; and ‘through’ it to the greater picture that lies beyond it, is implicit in it, and makes sense of it in terms of the totality of experience.”

Part 3: The Unforeseen Nature of Reality

Chapter 20: The coincidentia oppositorum

• “The heart’s wave would never have risen up so beautifully in its cloud of spray, and become spirit, were it not for the grim old cliff of destiny standing in its way…” — Friedrich Hölderlin
• Harmony: the reconciliation of things that contend with one another.
• “They do not understand how a thing agrees at variance with itself: it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre.”
  • It is through the tension of opposing sides of the bow and lyre that each may function and breathe life
• “In 1953 I realized that the straight line leads to the downfall of man-kind. But the straight line has become an absolute tyranny. The straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is a line which does not exist in nature. And that line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization… The straight line is atheistic and immoral. The straight line is the only sterile line, the only line which does not suit man as the image of God. The straight line is the forbidden fruit. The straight line is the curse of our civilization. Any design undertaken with the straight line will be stillborn. Today we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist know-how and yet, at the same time, we find ourselves confronted with emptiness. An aesthetic void, desert of uniformity, criminal sterility, loss of creative power. Even creativity is prefabricated. We have become impotent. We are no longer able to create. That is our real illiteracy.” — Friedensreich Hundertwasser (painter and architect)
• Empodecles, a contemporary of Heroclitus, saw the origin of being as a circle. Each face of the circle represent a coincidence of opposites, man and woman. It represents both the finite and the infinite, since it has no end. It represents that which moves while also remaining still.
• “Stay with the contradiction. If you stay, you will see that there is always something more than two opposing truths. The whole truth always includes a third part, which is the reconciliation.” — Jacob Needleman
• “A gem stone is not polished without friction, not is a man without adversities.” — Seneca
• “One thing acquired through pain is better for man that one hundred things easily acquired.” — Midrash
• “Anyone who is afraid of suffering suffers already of being afraid.” — Montaigne
• “The extreme of the law is extreme injustice.” — Hegel
• “In order to be natural, we must try not to be so; if we wish happiness, it is fatal to pursue it; freedom requires self-discipline; sometimes we must be cruel to be kind.”
• “Most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.” — William James
  • Rigidity of rule results in rebellion.
• “Somehow life does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites at once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our civilization presents… the way to certainty lies through radical doubt; virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution. You hate your enemy? —well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of fire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your soul, first lose it; in short, die to live.” — William James
• The once-born and twice-born of William James: once-born are those who are naturally uncomplicatedly happy, twice born are those who attain happiness only through enduring and overcoming abject misery. On the twice-born, “the process is one of redemption, not of more reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.” — James
• Architective knowledge tends to accumulate in cultures since it is the kind that can be “precisely codified and stored, faithfully passed from generation to generation, built on and accumulated; while connective skills are not easily codified or handed down … a personal lifetime of connective nous is usually buried with the individual.”
• TO READ: Physical Spirituality: Changing the Paradigm, by Mike Abramowitz
• Life is constantly pursuing an equilibrium that is constantly disturbed and reestablished. This asymmetry keeps the ball of life rolling.
• “It is precisely because creatures are incomplete that they are living.” — Ssu-ma Ch’ien (1st century BC)
  • The Chinese tradition of leaving the last three roof tiles missing

Chapter 21: The One and the Many

• “No movement ever repeats. Looked at in enough detail, every event in the universe is unique…the more detail we note, the more apparent it is that no event or experiment can be an exact copy of another.” — Smolin
• The word identity comes from the Latin idem (meaning the same), thence identidem (again and again). Identity is what makes us the same again and again, which is also the very thing that makes us different from others.
• “Internal sameness is a condition of external difference.”
• “As we encounter experience it is unique; yet as we represent it to ourselves, it becomes general. As Whitehead put it, ‘we think in generalities, but we live in detail.’”
• “Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.” — James
• Categories merely help us manipulate things to our own ends, and we cannot love categories—the profundity of love requires a rich, unique individual. ‘Loving’ a category “devalues its objects, by substituting labels and categories for individually different living beings, makes them means rather than ends, and lends itself to greed, abuse and never-to-be-satisfied restlessness: Don Juanism.”
• “We are pierced, the this strikes into us like a shaft of light. We are focussed by it and experience it as focussed: what is this is unique, it has an utterly distinct - and here notice the sense modality we reach for - flavour or fragrance. (What is important about the metaphor is that it recognizes the object as knowable but neither visible nor graspable.) Often the experience also includes an awareness of not being able to give an account of the this - we can point, but not say.” Jan Zwicky
• “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass stains the white radiance of eternity.” — Shelley
• “It seems to me, also, that the tendency of the world, the living world especially, is not towards oneness and sameness, but towards pluralism, difference and particularity — towards beings with a history: away from generalisation and equality, towards ever greater differentiation, relishing the uniqueness, the ‘this-and-no-otherness’, of each being.”
  • The endless unfurling of potential. Entropy. The gradual expansions and reverberating contractions; disintegration and re-integration; exhale, inhale.
• “The non-duality of duality and non-duality.”
  • Both “either/or” and “both/and”
• A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing. “Yet the intellect requires both. In the one hand, the knowledge of many things is of no use if it is not capable of being held together into a coherent framework; on the other, the single great though requires unfolding and differentiation.”
• “The secret of Soto Zen is ‘yes, but.’” — Suzuki 1999
• “Non-duality [in Buddhism] is not the negation of multiplicity in favour of some idea of the absolute; it is also not the nihilism so many Westerners think Buddhism to be.” — Jane Hirshfield
• “When it comes to understanding the self, one can predict that each hemisphere will support a different version. The self as conceived by the left hemisphere, should be - and is - an entity that is relatively static, separate, fixed, yet fragmentary, a succession of moments, goal-orientated, with its needs at any moment perceived as essentially competitive (since others may similarly target the same resources), determinate, consciously wilful, circumscribed in the breadth and depth of what it sees, at ease with the familiar, certain and explicit, but less so with all that is fluid, ambiguous, and implicit, and unaware of the limitations of its own knowledge. The self as conceived by the right hemisphere should be - and is - more akin to a process than a thing, essentially fluid and less determinate, nonetheless forming a unique whole over time, aware that it is fundamentally inseparable from all else that exists, open to others and to experience, more concerned with co-operation than competition, less consciously wilful, more engaged in what one might call ‘active passivity’ (an open attendant disposition, in which one is ready to respond to what emerges), seeing the greater picture in space and time, and aware of the extent of its ignorance.”
• “I earlier quoted Bergson’s observation that we can move from an insight to analysis, but not from analysis to insight. The broad and flexible can see the value of being narrow and rigid at times, whereas the narrow and rigid, by definition, can only see the value of being narrow and rigid.”

Chapter 22: Time

• “To think away time and space is completely impossible, while it is very easy to think away everything that appears in them. The hand can let go of everything, except itself.” — Schopenhauer
• Time is to humans as water is to fish. As a fish discovers the true value of water after being removed from it, so it is with us and time (schizophrenia, for example, distorts our sense of time)
• Bergson describes reality as the flow of experience itself, and that ‘things’ come forth from that fluid ground, rather than the other way around.
• Substantial literally means ‘stand under’, as in things are substantial and lay the ground on which phenomena play out. But Bergson says this is upside-down. “Reality is what we experience—ever moving, changing, and continuous. Things, however, are secondary, static, products of perception which supervene on ‘from above’, not support ‘from beneath’, that field of flow.”
• “The brain […] shows us less the things themselves than the use we can make of them. It classifies, it labels them beforehand; we scarcely look at the object, it is enough for us to know to which category it belongs.” — Bergson
• “It is therefore a much more direct vision of reality that we find in the different arts; and it is because the artist is less intent on utilizing his perception that he perceives a greater number of things.” — Bergson
• “There is a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it. They can, properly speaking, only be said to form multiple states when i have already passed them and turn back to observe their track.”— Bergson
• TO READ: Creative Evolution by Bergson
• “When you have broken reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness can you manufacture the concrete.” — William James
• “The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” — Borges
• The past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
• “Science…sets out to rediscover the natural seams of the universe, where we have carved it artificially.” — Bergson
• “An organic whole, in contrast to a mechanism, does not consist of a hierarchy of parts which exert control over other parts. Instead, it is a maximally responsive and transparent system in which changes and adjustments propagate simultaneously upwards, downwards and sideways, in the maintenance of the whole.”
• The root meaning of the word ‘cause’ is ‘that without which something would not be’, a source taking credit (or blame) for that ‘somethings’ coming about.
• Aristotle distinguished between four types of causes: material (horseshoe is caused by metal), formal (horseshoe is caused by its shape), efficient (because its blacksmith made it so), and final (because it preserves a horses hoof, its purpose).
• Those distinctions are useful for analysis, but that analysis cuts up the truth, which is closer to the fact that “there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.” (Borges)
• “Only a privative focus on detail delivers the clear cause and effect mechanism. Does the trumpeter cause a sound, or the trumpet - or is it the air blowing through it that causes the sound? Or the trumpeter’s lungs, or the listener’s ear? Or the instrument maker’s skill? Or Handel, who wrote the music? Or all their parents for bringing them into being? Or the musical history of Europe? Or - the audience that will hear the performance tomorrow?”
• Chains of causation imply past causes present which then causes future, but does future also cause phenomena of present? Are all living beings not striving for an idealized future?
• Past and future aren’t symmetrical. Time flows one way. “The past has been ‘passed’ through the filter of being present, in the process acquiring embodiment, richness of human meaning and uniqueness. By contrast, the future is a theoretical projection, general, disembodied, and free to accept whatever meanings we care to throw at it. In that sense the future is all theory.”
• “When we are absorbed, neither time nor our embodiment is in the foreground of our attention: when I am a lived body, I live time.”
• “Clock time is invented time, but man has been too gullible, he has ended up believing that his invention has an objective existence … Objective time, clock time, exists because the mind invented clocks. That invention gave us a definition of an apparently objective time that we believe in too much … [However] objective time has gone. It has gone in relativity, gone from the quantum world, gone in cos-mology… Only in the ‘normal’ world, which has been impoverished by our definitions and explanations which define poorly and explain little, does objective time still hold sway.” — Michael Shallis
• “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” — Borges
• “So it is that each note of a melody is prepared by, and still contains the presence of, the notes that come before it, and prepares for and already contains an anticipatory experience of the notes that are to come. If this were not the case, there would be no meaning whatsoever in the note at the instant it was heard.”
• The word scholarship comes from the Greek ‘scholē’ meaning leisure, and the pursuit of insight, simplicity, beauty. “Leisure was the disposition of receptive openness to what is, all that we miss as we rush through life on our highway to the grave.”
• “The world is not made in time, but with time.” — St. Augustine

Chapter 23: Flow and movement

• “For, while there may well be a stream of consciousness, one aspect of consciousness, namely conceptual thought, as James realised, is not part of that flow. What he may have overlooked is that, to continue the metaphor, it provides rocks and stones in the steam: resistance to flow… And for anything to ‘arise’…tend, grow,change—there needs to be a degree of architective resistance within the connective flow.”
• “A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resistance. Where there is resistance - a whirlpool forms. Every original product of nature is such a whirlpool, every organism. The whirlpool is not something immobilized, it is rather something constantly transforming - but reproduced anew at each moment. Thus no product in nature is fixed, but it is reproduced at each instant through the force of nature entire … Nature as a whole co-operates in every product.”
• In Schelling’s view each distinct consciousness arises as a vortex within an endless flow, an eddy in the stream. Compared with other aspects of, or ‘products’ of, Nature, ‘we are simply more advanced whirlpools, more clearly articulated expressions of the absolute.’ For Schelling, the emergence of thinking subjects from nature is part of a process whereby an absolute subjective consciousness comes to know itself. The process of consciousness is creative not just of what it comes to know but of itself, which are ultimately one and the same thing: ‘What in us knows’, says Schelling, ‘is the same as what is known.’”
• “…the world-soul, itself does not know what is to come, since it gets to know itself only through the process of creation whereby simultaneously it and the world come into being together - not again as two distinct events just happening to happen simultaneously, but simultaneous because we are seeing one and the same process, just from two different standpoints.”
• “In listening we do not stand stock still on the bank of the stream with a flow gauge and a clipboard in hand, but move together with an entrained by the flow.”
  • The more time we spend indoors, the more we become like the clipboard holder. We measure everything via our devices, yet don’t submerge ourselves within the musical reality we inhabit. We make ourselves full of measurements and statistics and numbers so that our flutes become stuffed and the music dies out.
• When it comes to music, we have to surrender ourselves to experience it in its entirety. “We must be actively receptive in relation to it, not actively expressive—as also in prayer and meditation.”
• “The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent. But these concepts are not parts of reality, not real positions taken by it, but suppositions rather, notes taken by ourselves, and you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you can dip up water with a net, however finely meshed.” — William James
• “What is differentiated can never be separate, because it is what it is only in relationship to everything else.”
• “Early Celtic and Teutonic cosmologies held that life emerges from a vortex, an idea also common to many pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.”
  • TO READ: learn about this Celtic and Teutonic guys
• “Movement is the essence of knowledge; take away this vital element, and it dies like fruit stripped from the living tree.” — Schelling
• “Consciousness is always consciousness of something, reaching out and going to meet something beyond the self…Creation of other is also creation of self; knowledge of other is also knowledge of self.”
• “Space is the potential for something to move within it; time is the potential for something to change within it.”

Chapter 24: Space and matter

• After an experiment where subjects were hypnotized to see more/less depth, the more depth group “experimenters report that ‘the usual perception of objects in the environment as things in themselves, independent of their surrounding, seems replaced by a perception of objects as being in interaction with their surrounds and with the active properties of the space around them.’ In other words the world showed itself to be resonant.”
  • When people have psychedelic experiences, this is what I think is happening. The pulsing whole is being revealed to them, but it is always pulsing if you take the time and effort to tune into it.
• “We see the general not by turning away from the particular, but by looking intently at it so as to see into it, whereby the value of the particular is not in any way negated, but taken up into something greater beyond. Similarly, I suggest, we find the soul not by turning away from the body, but by embracing it in a way that spiritualises the body; and we find the sacred not by turning away from the world, but by embracing it, in a move that sanctifies matter. The soul is both in and transcends the body, as a poem is in and yet transcends mere language, a melody in, yet transcends, mere sound, a painting in, yet transcends, the merely frescoed wall.“
• “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” — Bohr
• “Wave and particle are two modes of being of the same field phenomenon: this makes possible the coming together of union and division, of continuity (the wave) with discreteness (the particle) within a single uniting phenomenon (the field). Louis de Broglie proposed that the dipole of wave and particle is universal: everything that moves—which is another way of saying everything—has some aspects of a wave and some aspects of a particle.”
• It’s not that there are no quanta (particles), but that they are emergent from continua.
• Mass is the tendency of an entity to resist movement. Harking back to the flow chapter, “nothing comes into existence except by means of resistance to flow. The recalcitrance of mass gives rise to the possibility of enduring form.”
• “It could be said that while mass comes about because of an attachment to - a drive to make cohere and endure - some particular form, weight comes about because of an attraction between existing material forms. The first causes a new event to persist, for a while, in the face of instabil-ity; the second causes the coming together of what so persists, so that this creative achievement can grow, can realise further potential. Gravity converts a resistant or disjunctive force, namely mass, into a propulsive or conjunctive force, namely weight.”
• “A particle exists in space and around it is empty space. A field, on the other hand, is something that exists everywhere as a property of space. Its intensity may be small, but it is never zero. Even in areas where there are no quanta, there is a small amount of field called the vacuum field. In [Quantum Field Theory] there is no such thing as empty space.” — Brooks
• “What we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and … matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of the background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.” — Bohm

Chapter 25: Matter and consciousness

• Consciousness means “knowing with” (con-, with, + scientia, knowledge). It is not a thing, but a process of betweenness.
• Whether we unconsciously respond to something or consciously do, it implies some subjective awareness. Reflective awareness is still awareness, and most of our psychological actions are reflective.
• The brain can be either involved in the emission, the transmission, or the permission of consciousness. Emission implies the brain secretes consciousness, transmission implies the brain as a passive, noncreative participant in consciousness, and permission implies the brain is an active, creative participant with consciousness.
• “Something about me—in the ‘field of me’—permits these particular activities: and that something is what, in the broad definition, I am calling my consciousness.”
  • Experiential, both conscious and subconscious (these are two manifestations of the same things, not exclusive)
• “Thinking, however, is not so much a substitute for the earlier processes as a subsidiary addition to them. It only pays in certain cases, and intelligence may be shown also by discerning what they are and when it is wiser to act without thinking … Philosophers, however, have very mistaken ideas about rational action. They tend to think that men ought to think all the time, and about all things. But if they did this they would get nothing done, and shorten their lives without enhancing their merriment how marvellous that a philosopher could then say such things!]. Also they utterly misconceive the nature of rational action. They represent it as consisting in the perpetual use of universal rules, whereas it consists rather in perceiving when a general rule must be set aside in order that conduct may be adapted to a particular case.” — Wolfgang Pauli
  • We think about that which cannot be reconciled habitually, automatically. I think a lot of this resistance stems from the tension between individual and collective in humanity. We are a deeply collaborative and competitive species, thought springs forth from that collision
• “Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.” — Whitehead
• “It is a general principle in psychology that consciousness deserts all processes where it can no longer be of use.” — William James
  • Ever-increasing sophistication of technology seems like it may encroach on thought… will it? Or will we become more useless and thought amplifies? Hmmm
• “Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum nechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes he only rational alternative to solipsism.” — Richard Conn Henry, Astrophysicist, writing in Nature
• “It is not matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that creates an illusion of matter.” - Bernard Haisch, Astrophysicist
• “Contemplation of the world in a spirit of openness and humility fundamentally enlarges our being, where dogma and complacency simply narrow it. Equally it enables the greater reality of the cosmos - whatever it may be - to fulfil itself through us.”
• “Where there is animacy, both consciousness and matter equally evolve much faster than they would do in its absence; or, to use a both more familiar and less appropriable terminology, they become faster than in its absence.”
• “Is [music] out there, on its own? Clearly not. Is it, then, just in my brain? Clearly not. It exists only when outer and inner come together: that is, it lies in the betweenness. Experience - mind - is always a betweenness. And I believe all reality is like this.”
• “Nature has neither kernel nor shell: she is everything at once.” — Goethe
• “While it is the job of the membrane in a single cell to be aware of the environment and set in motion an appropriate response to the environment, in our bodies those functions have been taken over by a specialised group of cells we call the nervous system. It is not a coincidence that the human nervous system is derived from the embryonic skin [the ectoderm], the human counterpart of the cell’s membrane.” — Lipton
  • The cell membrane acts as a permissive barrier, allowing somethings in and prohibiting others. Interestingly, the brain derives from a similar material, and also acts as a sort of permissive membrane to allow certain experiences to flow in and out
• Brain activity was found to reduce in those entering trance-like states, and their writings were more complex than the non-trance counterparts. It seems like the filter is relaxed, and more experience can pour through.
• “It’s as if the damaged brain prevents the person from consciousness, but then as the brain finally begins to die, consciousness is released from the grasp of the degenerating brain.” (Greyson)
  • A not uncommon experience for brain damaged, dull or unconscious patients near death is to awaken with elevation of mood and spiritual expression from about a week to a day before death.
• [Reality] has breadths and depths beyond our wildest imagination. The quality of our vision depends entirely on the extent our consciousness permeates and resonates within her magical realm. In this respect, there is complete symmetry between science and art. Both are creative acts of the most intimate communion with reality.” — Ho
• The brain increases power through shedding neurones and pruning connections; the corpus callosum functions to inhibit; of the most important functions of the frontal lobes is to inhibit behaviour; and the brain has proportionally more inhibitory neurones than any other species. The brain is built to inhibit, to provide a necessary resistance, to impede an otherwise free flow of Consciousness, which gives life to our swirling consciousnesses.
• Consciousness may not be to our purpose, but we to the purpose of consciousness.
• Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic purposiveness: to say the purpose of music is to help you relax or the purpose of mindfulness is to help you extract more resources from the market is to denature them. These processes have a kind of purpose which is fulfilled by merely being themselves. This is why an engineering, omnipotent God who imports extrinsic purposes on everything is a destructive idea, it is inherently reductive rather than fulfilling.
• “It is not that consciousness is fragmentary and must be integrated if there are to be individual beings; it’s that consciousness is integral and must somehow be divided if there are to be individual beings. The whole business of consciousness limiting itself by embracing the stickiness of matter (remember, matter slows energy down and makes its forms persist longer than they otherwise would), is to produce differenti-ation, individuation, thisness, actuality precipitated out of a sea of potential. The process of individuation involves sculpting, filtering - however one wants to put it, delimiting and distinguishing - parts of the seamless whole. Thus the brain needs two streams of con-sciousness, one in each hemisphere, but they are like two branches of a stream that divide round an island and then reunite.”
• Are thoughts and feelings in us, or are we in thoughts and feelings? Is what we are conscious of selected from a larger field of consciousness that envelopes and enters us?
• “We become what we love and yet remain ourselves.” — Heidegger
• “In the psychological, ethical and social sphere an uncompromisingly rigid definition or argument often leads away from, rather than to-wards, Reality. It is true that the facts tend to assume a certain order within the framework supplied by our reason; but it is no more thar a tendency, and the facts invariably overflow if the framework is too exactly defined…” — de Broglie
• “‘We cannot observe any of the properties of a multiverse…as they have no causal effect on our universe…The hypothesis that a multiverse actually exists will always be untestable,’ writes astrophysicist Luke Barnes. There is nothing wrong with that — unless one claims it is science, rather than faith.”
• “Unless you are intellectually numb, you can’t escape the awe-inspiring feeling that the essence of reality is unknowable.” — Strawson

Chapter 26: Value

• “There is something in common between truth, beauty, and goodness: they each make demands on us, and also fulfil us, and also leave us thirsty for more.” — Andrew Steane (Physic prof at Oxford)
• “Truth—is as old as God— / His Twin Identity / And will endure as long as He / A Co-Eternity.” — Emily Dickinson
• “It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.” — Max Planck
• A leap of faith isn’t a random plunge into the unknown, but a leap towards what is valued. We leap into the light, not into the dark.
• “Belief is not holding a proposition, but a disposition, an openness to trust, in order that one may experience, and therefore know. Conviction will come, if it comes at all, from experience—never from trading propositions.”
• Love discloses. Love must first disclose what reason then may judge.
• To have a disposition towards the world, an active, open consciousness towards it, implies that we find the world valuable—we preclude it having value. In this sense, faith is involved.
• “If we reflect deeply upon what we feel as we look [upon a exceptional artist], we shall find that, if we accept them and admire them, it is because we have already perceived something of what they show us. But we had perceived without seeing.” — Bergson
  • Great art reveals what we already know deep down. Truth as unconcealing.
• “Beauty — be not caused — It Is — / Chase it, and it ceases — / Chase it not, and it abides —“ — Dickinson
• “Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled…It instantly deserts possession.” — Emerson
• “Do not think to place holiness in doing; we should place holiness in being, for it is not the works that sanctify us, but we who should sanctify the works.” — Meister Eckhart
  • Moral acts are the result of the disposition of a morally good being. Moral action is an expression of a morally good being.

• Acts are still important, ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’, but these fruits consistently arise out of the being, and a good intentioned being is more likely to produce fruits over the long run, even if sometimes they don’t

• Deontology is derived from the Greek word for duty/obligation. Deontology = ideas concerning duty, judgments based on intrinsic rightness/wrongness of action separate from consequence
• “The price of certainty is absurdity; the prize of uncertainty is wisdom.”
• “What matters most in all religious ethics is the underlying attitude: and the attitude that all the great religions demand of us is always the same. All preach personal humility, and all teach what the Buddhists call compassion and Jesus called love. I suggest that these two - personal humility and compassion (and particularly compassion) - are indeed the most fundamental notions or feelings that underpin all moral codes, of everyone, whether they deem themselves to be religious’ or not. We could (and I believe should) add a third: the sense of reverence towards all life and towards the universe as a whole.“ — Tudge (2013)
• “Symmetry is about relations between parts, but asymmetry is about the relations between symmetry and its absence, something still deeper.”
• “Beauty depends on contrast. If everything attracts us equally, nothing in particular attracts us.”

Chapter 27: Purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos

• “Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to dissipate entropy as quickly as possible (I doubt it). Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to produce more lioness genes (I doubt it). Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to kill, eat, and copulate (I doubt that, too). Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to be a lioness (this seems to me to be on the right track). Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to express whatever good a lioness is capable of expressing (I am inclined to pick this one). Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to express an aspect of what the verb to be can signify.” — Andrew Steane
  • Entropy dissipation, reproduction, survival at the level of the individual do not fulfil a global purposes, though they could be considered local purposes. The global purpose could be something closer to: express good, fulfil your particular role so that the whole can fulfil itself.
• “Would [Dawkins] be willing to consider a description of Nature as something that discovers what it is in the process of becoming what it is, and the point and purpose of which lies in itself: a free, exuberant creation, not a micro-controlled one? No algorithm, no programme, no robots: just an endless self-discovering act of creation?”
• Randomness in the toss of a dice is not the a result of disorder, but highly specialized order: the weight distribution of the dice, roughness of surface, aerodynamic nuances, etc.
• “Randomness is the limit came of order (one that is strictly speaking impossible fully to achieve); not order the limit case of randomness.”
• “A concrete example of the necessary fruitful relation between purpose and indeterminacy comes from a cell’s response to threat. Cells actively promote mutations under certain circumstances, and this process begins not from DNA, but merely uses DNA as a resource. Faced with the need for a new antigen, the mutation rate in part of the genome can be accelerated by as much as 1,000,000 times. According to Noble, so far as we know, the mutations occur randomly. But the location in the genome is certainly not random. The functionality in this case lies precisely in the targeting of the relevant part of the genome.”
  • DNA mutations are locally random, but arise from a global order whereby the cell uses variation as a creative resource to adapt to threats.
• Nature proceeds not randomly, but gropingly.
• “Cancerous tumour cells can suppress apoptosis, a mechanism that ensures the death of excessive cells where appropriate, rewire metabolism, so as to promote the proliferation of blood supply to the tumour, and evade immune responses, in such a way as to promote tumour growth at the expense of the organism.” (See Fouad and Aanei 2017 for a review)
  • Cancerous cells are adaptive too… of course!
• Appetite means literally (ad+petere) a seeking, a tendency
• “life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value. The art of per-sistence is to be dead. Only inorganic things persist for great lengths of time… The problem set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolved. They certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them. It may be possible to explain “the origin of species” by the doctrine of the strug foresten. among such organisms. But certainly this struggle throws no light whatever upon the emergence of such a general type of complex organism, with faint survival power.” — Whitehead

Chapter 28: The sense of the sacred

• “The first gulp from the beaker of knowledge estranges us from God, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for him who seeks.” — Carl Friedrich Von Weizsacker
• “There is a parallel between the false view that we are separate from and over against Nature (encapsulated in the disastrous idea of Nature as the ‘environment’) and the idea that we are separate from and over against the cosmos. This cannot be true, for the same reason in either case. We were born out of, and return to, the one and the other. It therefore makes no sense to set us up as proud, lonely, tragic figures, struggling against Nature, trying to subdue her, or struggling defiantly to bring love, goodness and beauty into a hostile cosmos. Any love, goodness and beauty we can bring come out of Nature and out of the cosmos in the first place: where else can they possibly come from?”
• “The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.” — Wittgenstein
• “Having ready answers means you don’t understand; understanding here means never letting go of the questions. Unknowing will turn out to be a sign not of weakness, but of wisdom.”
• The RH “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.” — Shelley
• “The deeper we know our unknowing, the nearer we are to truth.” — Nicholas of Cusa (On Learned Ignorance TO READ)
• “God cannot be said to ‘exist’ (Latin, ex- ‘out’, + -sistere, reduplicative of stare, ‘to stand’) in the way that a thing stands forth for us against the ground of our already existing field of vision. God is that ground.”
• “When we speak of God, we do not clear up a puzzle; we draw attention to a mystery.” — Herbert McCabe (theologian)
• ”We [modernity] are like someone who, having found a magnifying glass a revelation in dealing with pond life, insists on using it to gaze at the stars - and then solemnly declares that if only people in the past had had such a wonderful magnifying glass to look through, they’d have known that, on closer inspection, stars don’t actually exist at all.”
• “We do not, it is true, grasp it by knowledge, but that does not mean that we are utterly void of it … Those divinely possessed and inspired have at least the knowledge that they hold some greater thing within them though they cannot tell what it is; from the movements that stir them and the utterances that come from them they perceive the power, not themselves, that moves them …” — Plotinus
• “One can sit on the brink for a lifetime waiting to learn how to swim, but without getting into the water one can never learn to swim at all. ‘Seek not to understand so that you may believe’, wrote St Augustine, ‘but to believe so that you can understand.’”
• “Modern man is neither more pious nor more impious than man in any other period. The loss of the dimension of depth is caused by the relation of man to his world and to himself in our period, the period in which nature is being subjected scientifically and technically to the control of man. In this period, life in the dimension of depth is replaced by life in the horizontal dimension. The driving forces of the industrial society of which we are a part go ahead horizontally and not vertically… He transforms everything he encounters into a tool: and in doing so he himself becomes a tool. But if he asks, a tool for what, there is no answer …” — Tillich (1958)
• “The meaning is not in the words. But it responds to the inquiring impulse.” (Baojing Sanmei)
  • Religion at its best is a cultural expression of that inquiring impulse.
• Religion is derived from the Latin religare, to bind. Religion is to bind together a community (common+unity)
• “There is nothing blind about faith, but there is nothing certain about it either.”
• The God of deism is a product of the proud intellectual LH: “the ‘dead’, static, finished, concatenated products of a controlling, ever obvious, will; God as the tao is a product of the humble RH: “the ‘living’ creations of an animating, in some sense hidden and unknowable spirit, which are themselves unknown ahead of time, and come seamlessly into being, as if generating themselves within the flow.”
• “The world of a great poetic dramatist is a world in which the creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden.”
• “To reconcile therefore is truly the work of the Inspired! This is the true Atonement — i.e. to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various Finite with the Permanent.” (Coleridge)
• “Atonement is literally ‘at-one-ment’: reconciliation of apparent incompatibles.”
• Nicholas of Cusa’s understanding of the relationship between god and his creation is that all beings are an ‘unfolding’ of God in time and space, but are meanwhile ‘enfolded’ in the undifferentiated oneness of God, their divine source.
• “What is at first implicate is first taken up by the right hemisphere, then explicated by the left hemisphere, and then the products of that explication [are] re-enfolded or reintegrated in its more complicated form by the right hemisphere’s vision of the whole once more. This is how the hemispheres, when they work well together, co-operate in giving us insights into the depths of reality.”
• Cusanus would refer to God as posse ipse (Possibility Itself). But he also used the term possest (Can-Is). Potential and Actual.
• “Such ideas as these are hardly peripheral or unorthodox in the istory of Christianity. Thomas Aquinas thought of God as an infinite potential, attracting things to their fulfilment. Yet in doing so god is not seen as determining, engineering or controlling, though neither is God merely passive. From this perspective, God is seen as the ultimate good who attracts all things to their flourishing, the possibility that is most fulfilling for them, but does not compel them to take that path: they have the freedom to respond for better or for worse. This is like a lover, who by virtue of love draws whatever merges in the loving relationship towards a greater fulfilment in love, but cannot in any way enforce such an outcome.”
• “We need immanence, yes, which pantheism offers; but we need the union of transcendence with immanence, which only some form of panentheism encompasses. Yet again, we need union, but we need that to be the union of division with union.”
• “I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through. [Hafiz, Persian poet] (Note that for Hafiz there was no insuperable divide — quite the opposite — between Christ and Mohammed)”
• “Do not imagine that God is like a human carpenter, who works or not as he likes, who can do or leave undone as he wishes. It is different with God: as and when God finds you ready, He has to act, to overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure the sun has to burst forth and cannot refrain.” — Meister Eckhart
• “contradiction would have to be taken as the profounder determination and more characteristic of essence. For as against contradiction, identity is merely the determination of the simple immediate, of dead being; but contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.”
  • Consciousness/love depends on contradiction. An act of love depends on a gap being bridged.
• ”By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “If God is an eternal Becoming, fulfilled as God through the response of his creation, and we, for our part, [are] constantly more fulfilled through our response to God; then we are literally partners in the creation of the universe, perhaps even in the becoming of God (who is himself Becoming as much as Being): in which case it is imperative that we try to reach and know and love that God. Not just for our own sakes, but because we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation (and indeed how ‘big’ or ‘small’ we cannot know: the terms are derived from our limited experience of a finite world).”
• “Analysis on its own not only fails to see most of the picture…but removes the connexions between what we take to be ‘things’, and deceives us into thinking that this is how we come to know what they are: it is the very connexions, not the things, that constitute reality.“
• “In the panentheistic view, God, having created the world, also dwells in it, and conversely, the world which he has created exists in him…” — Moltmann
• “When the left hemisphere predominates, the space of unknowing in which spiritual life flourishes comes to be replaced by dogma; openness by contention; tolerance by self-righteousness; forgiveness by stigma; orderliness by legalism. There emerge steep hierarchies. Fundamentalism insists that the truth lies in a written word, a holy book; whatever wisdom the book enshrines no longer seen as the work of variously inspired, yet fallible, humans, but of a divine hand; taken out of its historical setting and viewed as absolute; conferring on its adherents the possibility to be finally right, and those who doubt them unquestionably wrong. Truth indeed changes its nature, and becomes simplistic, literal, stateable and knowable, explicit and abstracted from context. The body becomes no longer the best image of the human soul, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, but the soul’s prison and antagonist. Representations come to replace the living presence they purport to represent.”
• “The smaller the question, the clearer the answer. Expecting clear answers to big questions is to be thinking too small.”
• “Why should we consider literal truth superior to, rather than just different from, metaphoric truth? We need both and they have different proper applications. They are not in conflict. It may be that, ultimately, literal truth is merely a special case, the limit case, of metaphorical truth, as actuality is a special case, the limit case, of potentiality; and that making the difference into a dichotomy is a product of modern Western ways of thinking. Mythos was considered anciently truer than logos, and not by simple people either, but by sophisticated people who had a different outlook on the world.”
• “The notion that the only things worthy of belief are those which are objectively verifiable is not itself an objectively verifiable belief.” — Jonathan Gaisman
• “There is something much too small about a world in which we are isolated from the divine; in a ‘disenchanted’ world, as it has been called, one that has no place for the sacred, we ourselves loom, im-aginatively, far too large, as if occupying too much of the screen. At the same time we see ourselves conceptually as diminished, because as soon as we pan out, we see ourselves dwindle to a pointless speck in a barren cosmos. A religious cast of mind sets the human being and human life in the widest context, reminding us of our duties to one another, and to the natural world that is our home; duties, how-ever, that are founded in love, and link us to the whole of existence. The world becomes ensouled. And we have a place in it once more.”
• “Soul is the Gothic saivala, and this is clearly related to another Gothic word, saivs, which means the sea. The sea was called saivs from a root si or siv, the Greek seio, to shake; it meant the tossed-about water, in contradistinction to stagnant or running water. The soul being called saivala, we see that it was originally conceived by the Teutonic nations as a sea within, heaving up and down with every breath, and reflecting heaven and earth on the mirror of the deep.“ — Max Müller
• “This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves’, the universe ‘peoples’. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” — Allan Watts
• “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things… are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” — Lewis
• “Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; / And this our life exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” — Shakespeare, As you like it
• 367 Sikka 1994 (426): ‘Evil is thus nothing merely nega-tive. It is positive discord, arising when the part strives to be the whole, when a particular will opposes itself to the universal will by seeking to be the creative ground of all reality. It then seeks to usurp the place of God, who is that ground, and does so by perversely asserting its own existence in opposition to, rather than in harmony with, the existence of other natures and other beings. It is not limitation that is evil, then, but the refusal, on the part of a finite being, to accept limitation.’
• It’s possible that redemption brings us closer to god than had we never been alienated or divided at all. It is from the divine sparks within the shards of the vessels that this greater unity, this fulfilment of creation, this redemption, is achieved, so that ‘a world that is alienated from and then reunited with God is superior to one that had never been alienated or divided at all’.
• Evil as the intentional forgetfulness of the higher entity.
• The map depends on the world, but the world does not depend on the map.

Epilogue

• Speaks of the diminution of sorrow, and the rise of anger, resentment, and self-righteous indignation in its place. “Sorrow and sadness depend on connexion; anger, resentment, and self-righteousness on alienation. Sorrow leads to insight; anger to blindness.”
  • Sorrow reaches us out to others, anger reaches us into ourselves
• “Let us allow Nature to play her part, she understands her business better than we do.” — Montaigne
• “Wisdom and humour are both expressions arising from the shared suffering involved in acquiring one of the greatest flowed of life, a sense of proportion.”
• “Myths oversee—or underwrite—what we are capable of seeing. The nature of the attention that we bring to bear on the world, and the values which we bring to the encounter, change what we find; and in some absolutely non-trivial sense, change what it is. At the same time, the encounter, as is always the way with encounters, changes who we are.”
• “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” Thoreau (quasi-quote)

So. Good.