all things

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I once asked my physicist friend David Bohm this question: From the perspective of modern science, apart from the question of misrepresentation, what is wrong with the belief in the independent existence of things?

His response was telling.

He said that if we examine the various ideologies that tend to divide humanity, such as racism, extreme nationalism, and the Marxist class struggle, one of the key factors of their origin is the tendency to perceive things as inherently divided and disconnected.

From this misconception springs the belief that each of these divisions is essentially independent and self-existent. Bohm’s response, grounded in his work in quantum physics, echoes the ethical concern about harbouring such beliefs that had worried Nagarjuna, who wrote nearly two thousand years before.


—The Dalai Lama
The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality
(treasure)

 

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Atoms themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

—Werner Heisenberg

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All things are full of God. Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God. But he changes like fire which, when it mingles with the smoke of incense, is named according to each man’s pleasure.

And what is in us is the same thing: living and dead, awake and sleeping, as well as young and old; for the latter of each pair of opposites having changed becomes the former, and this again having changed becomes the latter.

We must not act and speak like men asleep.

To those who are awake, there is one ordered universe common to all, whereas in sleep each man turns away from this world to one of his own.

—Heraclitus

excerpts

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I believe the first living cell 

Had echoes of the future in it, and felt 

Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest 

And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth 

Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods, 

But feels and chooses. And the Galaxy, the firewheel 

On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in 

which our sun is one dust-grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe 

Is not blind force, but fulfils its life and intends its courses. 


—Robinson Jeffers
De Rerum Virtute, II, excerpt

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