questions

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It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant.

But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. 

In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.

–Freeman Dyson

...

Niels Bohr ... understood that the energy of electrons in atoms can take on only certain values, like the energy of light, and crucially that electrons can only jump between one atomic orbit and another with determined energies, emitting or absorbing a photon when they jump. These are the famous "quantum leaps." ...

Werner Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The "quantum leaps" from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being "real": an electron is a set of jumps of one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place. It is not in a "place" at all.

It's as if God had not designed reality with a line that was heavily scored but just dotted it with a faint outline.

–Carlo Rovelli 
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

...

... in the final stages of his quest to find a new way of thinking the essence of being, Heidegger (came) to an understanding of awareness as the very ground of such a thinking - indeed of being itself - recognizing awareness itself as the open field or clearing which first gives or grants Being to beings ...

—Peter Wilberg

Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought

...

So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quartz, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics? Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings. 

What is chemistry? Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings and then what is the mind of God? Its the cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace.

–Michio Kaku

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frothy wakings

Tracks made by atomic particles from a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up the particles.

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The eye can’t see protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles, but a camera records their frothy wakes in a chamber of liquefied neon and hydrogen at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Physicists study the tracks to learn about the characteristics of the particles that produced them.

—National Geographic 1978

... 

When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what chessman is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen.

—Paul A. M. Dirac (1902 - 1984)

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no(thingness

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Know all things to be like this: 
A mirage, a cloud castle, 
A dream, an apparition, 
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen. 
 

Know all things to be like this:  
As the moon in a bright sky 
In some clear lake reflected, 
Though to that lake the moon has never moved. 
 

Know all things to be like this:  
As an echo that derives 
From music, sounds, and weeping, 
Yet in that echo is no melody. 
 

Know all things to be like this:  
As a magician makes illusions 
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things, 
Nothing is as it appears.

–Samadhiraja (Moon Lamp) Sutra

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Living creatures believe they own something as soon as they love it. They refuse to believe otherwise, no matter how many times a beloved vanishes. —GennaRose Nethercott

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The Buddha recommends that we recite the “Five Remembrances” every day: 1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. 2. I am of the nature to have ill-health. There is no way to escape having ill-health. 3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. 4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. 5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

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wait - what ?
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not to worry

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A thousand times I have ascertained and found it to be true: the affairs of this world are really nothing into nothing.

Still though, we should dance.


—Hafiz

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bless

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Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment

—W. S. Merwin
from To Paula in Late Spring

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exercises

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First, forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
and do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
and then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them
around after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backwards
starting with even numbers
with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
forgetting it all until everything
is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire


–W. S. Merwin

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love is a place

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This is a place where a door might be

here where I am standing
In the light outside all the walls

there would be a shadow here
all day long
and a door into it
where now there is me

and somebody would come and knock
on this air
long after I have gone
and there in front of me a life
would open


–W. S. Merwin

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a cloud in my hand, excerpt

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سَبْعُ سنابِلَ تكفي لمائدةِ الصَيْفِ…”
سَبْعُ سَنَابِلَ بين يديَّ. وفي كل سُنْبُلَةٍ
يُنْبِتُ الحقلُ حقلاً من القمح. كانَ
أَبي يَسْحَبُ الماءَ من بئرِهِ ويقولُ
لَهُ: لا تجفَّ. ويأخذني من يَدِيْ
…لأَرى كيف أكبُرُ كالفَرْفَحِينَةِ
أَمشي على حافَّة البئر: لِيْ قَمَرانْ
واحدٌ في الأعالي
آخرُ في الماء يسبَحُ … لِيْ قمرانْ

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…Seven sheaths of grain are enough for the summer table
Seven sheaths of grain in my hands. And in each grain
a wheat field makes another grow. My father
drew water from his well. Don’t dry up, he
told it. He took me by the hand
to see how I’d grow like rose moss…
I walk at the edge of the well: I have two moons
one above
and another in the water swimming… I have two moons

[…] A cloud in my hand wounds me. I don’t
want from earth more than
this earth : the scent of cardamom and hay
between my father and a horse
In my hand is a cloud that wounded me. But I
don’t want from the sun more
than an orange seed and more than
the gold that flowed from the call to prayer

—Mahmoud Darwish
Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?
Jeffrey Sacks translation

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buffleheadcabin
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looking closely

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Every particle of the world is a mirror,
In each atom lies the blazing light
of a thousand suns.

Cleave the heart of a raindrop
a hundred pure oceans will flow forth.
Look closely at a grain of sand,
The seed of a thousand beings can be seen.

The foot of an ant is larger than an elephant;
In essence, a drop of water 
Is no different than the Nile.

In the heart of a barley-corn
lies the fruit of a hundred harvests;
Within the pulp of a millet seed
an entire universe can be found.

In the wing of a fly, an ocean of wonder;
In the pupil of the eye, an endless heaven.

Though the inner chamber of the heart is small,
the Lord of both worlds
gladly makes his home there.


–Mahmud Shabestari

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The Square

Soekmin Ko
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listen

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I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of anger because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound and it is the Beloved's.

I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way to an even greater being of soul, a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play with Him.

I have come into this world to hear this: every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in the Divine's womb and began spinning from His wish, every song by wing and fin and hoof, every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child, every song of stream and rock, every song of tool and lyre and flute, every song of gold and emerald and fire, every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity to know itself as God: for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching - only imbibing the glorious Sun will complete us. 

I have come into this world to experience this: men so true to love they would rather die before speaking an unkind word, men so true their lives are His covenant - the promise of hope.

I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of rage because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound.

–Hafiz

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mean(ing

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It is extremely interesting ... to think about the meaning of the word ‘form’ as it applies to constructions of arbitrarily complex shapes. For instance, what is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty? Is it the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina? Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us feel that we are not merely looking at a two-dimensional surface; we are responding to some sort of inner meaning inside the picture, a multidimensional aspect trapped somehow inside those two dimensions. It is the word ‘meaning’ which is important here. Our minds contain interpreters which accept two-dimensional patterns and then ‘pull’ from them high-dimensional notions which are so complex that we cannot consciously describe them. The same can be said about how we respond to music, incidentally.

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.


—Douglas R. Hofstadter

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theater in the mind

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Theories don’t give final true knowledge. Theories give a way of looking. The very word theoria in Greek means theater. It’s sort of a theater in the mind that gives insight. Science is involved in a perceptual enterprise.

–David Bohm
on Perception

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Properties Of Water
Lee Chee Wai

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two orders of reality & the light of consciousness\

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[Physicist David] Bohm suggested that the explicate order is extracted from the implicate order in a similar way in which a holographic image is extracted from a series of swirls and shadings into a three-dimensional image when illuminated by laser light. 

The illumination that extracts the physical universe from the implicate order is the light of consciousness. 

In this model the act of observation draws ‘in-formation’ out of the implicate order and manifests it in the explicate order. Bohm was keen to use the term in-formation rather than information. By this he meant a process that actually ‘forms’ the recipient.

–Anthony Peake
Infinite Mindfield

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question

  

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Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone, who could make such music? 


–Chuang Tzu (369-286 BCE)

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Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul. —Sylvia Plath

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We are all bound together in a tapestry that like the sea gives the impression of movement towards something but is actually just a maternal body of material...

The flowers buzz when the vibration of the bees stimulates their pistons and their molecules swell and their petals hum like cellos. Rocks are alive, the firstborn of the natural world, somber without will.

There is no freedom from this universe we were born into, because it is our vague source of sensation, our soul, the container of our guilt.

Skins liquefy in heat. And when a bald baby swallow dies on your palm, you feel warmth pouring over your skin, a  burning fountain that scalds you like pepper spray.

Do you think this is a sign of the spirit ripping its energy into you to carry to the other side? I do. There are no actual objects over there, no materials but unformed steaming clouds, colors that harmonize musically, no gravity exists but elasticity composed of invisible images. 


–Fanny Howe
from 'The Child's Child'
The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth

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lute strings

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In the ocean are many bright strands and many dark strands like veins that are seen when a wing is lifted up.

Your hidden self is blood in those, those veins that are lute strings that make ocean music – not the sad sound of surf, but the sound of no shore.


–Rumi

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divine be(ing

(click on image!)

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There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. It was not and is not in the power of this Being—any more than it is in your own—to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his Existence; but just as it is in your power to expand or to concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion.

What you call The Universe is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures—the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself. All these creatures—all—those which you term animate, as well as those to whom you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation—all these creatures have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain:—but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself.

These creatures are all, too, more or less conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One.

Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.

—Edgar Allan Poe
Eureka: A Prose Poem

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tao-of-digital-photography
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All the physical matters are composed of vibration. –Dr. Max Planck

Musical tones depicted visually as vibration over frequency



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In the year 1905, Albert Einstein proved that we can break matter down into smaller components and that, when we do, we move beyond the material realm and into a realm in which everything is energy.

This is the Law of Vibration, a law of nature that states that ‘nothing rests; everything moves; every-thing vibrates.’ The lower the vibration, the slower the vibration; the higher the vibration the faster the vibration.

The difference between the manifestations of the physical, mental, emo-tional and spiritual result simply from different levels of vibrating energy, or frequencies. So, while the feelings of fear, grief and despair vibrate at a very low frequency, the feelings of love, joy and gratitude vibrate much quicker.

The most common unit of measure for frequency is the Hertz, which is one vibrational cycle per second. So a frequency of 460 Hz means that there are 460 cycles of vibration occurring every single second.

At the very leading edge of biophysics today, scientists are recognizing that the molecules in our bodies are actually controlled by these frequencies. In 1974, Dr. Colin W.F. McClare, Ph.D, an Oxford University Bio-Physicist, discovered that frequencies of vibrating energy are roughly one-hundred times more efficient in relaying information within a biological system than physical signals, such as hormones, neurotransmitters and other growth factors.[i]

Although most frequencies exist outside of our normal range of perception, all can be perceived as both colors and sounds. There are seven colors in a rainbow and seven notes in the musical scale. So the color blue is also heard as the musical key of D, which vibrates at 587 Hz.

But what is most interesting is that, if a frequency is vibrating fast enough, it’s emitted as a color of light. 

If we wanted to convert sound to Light, we would simply raise its frequency forty octaves. This results in a vibration in the trillions of cycles per second. So, if a pianist could press a key way above the eighty-eight keys that exist on a piano, that key would produce Light. They could create a chord of Light in the same way they can create a chord of sound. And it would be seen as colors of Light because it would be moving at the speed of Light.

The philosophical and scientific basis for this Law of Vibration can be found in quantum physics and in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Energy is related to matter and the speed of Light. This is Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation.

When two frequencies are brought together, the lower will always rise to meet the higher. This is the principle of resonance. So, when a piano is tuned, a tuning fork is struck, and then brought close to the piano string that carries that same musical tone. The string then raises its vibration automatically and attunes itself to the same rate at which the fork is vibrating.

Using this principal of resonance, we can actually increase the speed at which the molecules in our bodies vibrate, through our thoughts of love, joy and gratitude. When atoms slow down, third dimensional matter is created; when they speed up, the higher dimensions of consciousness can be reached. And the higher our consciousness is raised, the closer to spirit we become.


–Vicky Anderson

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say i am

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Of all that God has shown me

I can speak just the smallest word,

Not more than a honey bee

Takes on his foot

From an overspilling jar.


–Mechtild of Magdeburg
Jane Hirshfield translation
Women in Praise of the Sacred

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