Quotes from Thinkers
mindswitness
least likely to say them. (I've been gathering them in an attempt to open
the mind of a hyper-rational acquaintance... to no avail, unfortunately ;)
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As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science,
to the study of matter, I can tell you as the result of my research about
the atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and
exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to
vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We
must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent
mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
- Max Planck
Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you -- and all other
conscious beings as such -- are all in all. Hence this life of yours
which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is
in a certain sense the Whole... Thus you can throw yourself flat on the
ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that
you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as
invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable.
As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you
forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely "someday":
Now, today, everyday, she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands
upon thousands of times, just as everyday she engulfs you a thousand times
over.
- Erwin Schroedinger
The notion that reality is to be understood as a process is an ancient
one, going back at least to Heraclitus, who said that everything flows.
The best image of process is perhaps that of the flowing stream, whose
substance is never the same. On this stream, one may see an ever-changing
pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have
no independent existence as such.
Ultimately, the entire universe (with all its particles, including those
constituting human beings, their laboratories, observing instruments,
etc.) has to be understood as a single undivided whole.
What we perceive through our senses as empty space is actually the plenum,
which is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.
The things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true
meaning can be seen only when we consider the plenum, in which they are
generated and sustained, and into which they must ultimately vanish.
Time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of
moments.
The atom . . . can perhaps best be regarded as a poorly defined cloud,
dependent for its particular form on the whole environment, including the
observing instrument.
The paradoxes of Zeno now seem to be open to more straightforward
explanation: the arrow is not a persisting object travelling through a
persisting substance, air; it is a pattern in relative translation through
a patterning of the substrate which is interpreted as the molecules and
atoms which appear to form air.
And similarly the earth in not travelling through an insubstantial ether;
it is a deformation, a pattern, of the universal material substrate, of
the same nature as the light which also is a patterning in the universal
material substrate.
The individual atom is a pattern which persists as a wave persists.
Michelson and Morley assumed that the river and its banks were different
in character. The river was flowing but so also were the banks.
Neither space nor time as substrates through which something moves are
real.
- David Bohm (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical
world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.
- Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we
live.
- Albert Einstein
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a
miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein
There is Being. Being is aware. Being acts. The action of Being (from our
perspective as participants) represents itself (in part) as the physical
universe in historical space and time. The universe enacts a pattern of
evolution in which accumulating action propagates as continuing process.
Evolution results in a nucleation of processes into complex process-
structures which are the physical representation of the nucleation of
Being into individual centers of awareness and action.
- Douglas J. Bilodeau,
Indiana University Cyclotron Facility - "Physics, Machines, and the Hard
Problem," Journal of Consciousness Studies (vol. 3, no. 5/6, 1996)
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual
thought. It's as simple as that.
- Joseph Campbell
The modern tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be
abandoned. For there is no reason to believe that human death severs the
quality of the oneness in the universe.
- Dr. Larry Dossey
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to
experience it.
- Max Frisch
I like to think that: religion is for those who are afraid of going to
hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.
- Deepak Chopra
God, seen through the senses, is matter. God, seen through the intellect,
is mind. God, seen through the spirit, is Atman or the Self.
- Sri Swami Sivananda
Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.
- Alexander Pushkin
[And my favourite...]
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
- Brendan Gill
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[And, from a recent book...]
... Einstein was absolutely not a pantheist, a label often applied to
Spinoza, and Isaacson quotes Einstein as saying so unequivocally,
I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The
problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the
position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books
in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those
books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in
which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order
in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it
seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being
toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying
certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.
At a dinner party in Berlin (before Einstein emigrated to the United
States), a guest who asserted that religion was mere superstition was
silenced by his host who noted that even Einstein was religious. "'It
isn't possible!' the skeptical guest said, turning to Einstein to ask if
he was, in fact, religious," Isaacson's account reports. "'Yes, you can
call it that,' Einstein replied calmly. 'Try and penetrate with our
limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the
discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle,
intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for that beyond anything we can
comprehend is my religion. To that extent, I am, in fact, religious.'"
- from _The Delusion of Disbelief_ by David Aikman, pp. 87-88
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-MW-
dipsy
<mindsw...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Some quotes for the New Year... some from those one'd think would be the
>least likely to say them. (I've been gathering them in an attempt to open
>the mind of a hyper-rational acquaintance... to no avail, unfortunately ;)
You overlooked: "I yam what I yam and thats all that I yam, I'm Popeye
the Sailor Man....toot...toot... I always goes swimmin' with barenaked
wimmin', I'm Popeye the Sailor Man"...well blow me down.
mindswitness
> You overlooked: "I yam what I yam and thats all that I yam, I'm Popeye
> the Sailor Man....toot...toot... I always goes swimmin' with barenaked
> wimmin', I'm Popeye the Sailor Man"...well blow me down.
Wow... how did I miss that one?! ;)
There's a bit of profundity in the former part... and the latter's more
interesting than I recall... surprised they allowed it on TV, especially
back then :)
-MW-
wanderriver
Guess Noname has been burnng wood again. fragrance in the air.
noname
Kids used to make up alternate wordings.
I'm popeye the sailor man
I live in a garbage can
We three kings of orient are
smoking on a rubber cigar
it was loaded
it exploded
blah blah blah etc.
Most of those never hit the airwaves until maybe Saturday Night Live
started up, they just got passed around like spliffs among the
under-aged and over-bored.
--
no ad
Woof Woof Woof
wrote:
It takes one to know one.
Don't Bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to me.