you shall not lose your way

beautiful

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We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. 

Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we have to shatter that plate glass, we have to reach in there. 

So the old world observer simply has to be crossed off the books and we must put in the new term: participator. 

In this way we have come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.


—John Wheeler

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The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. 

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


—Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, excerpt

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All things are little, changeable, perishable.

All things come from thence, from that universal ruling power either directly proceeding or by way of sequence.

And accordingly the lion’s gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every harmful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful.

Do not then imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.

[...] Think always of the universe as one living creature, made of one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.


—Marcus Aurelius
April 26, 121 — March 17, 180, Rome
Meditations

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