the complexity of a sphere

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The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings,
for it destroys the world in which you live.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.

—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

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First find the immutable center where all movement takes birth. Just like a wheel turns round an axle, so must you be always at the axle in the center and not whirling at the periphery.

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Listen: this world is the lunatic’s sphere,

Don’t always agree it’s real!

Even with my feet upon it

And the postman knowing my door

My address is somewhere else.

—Hafiz

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hush

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Hush.

I am so close, I may look distant.

So completely mixed with you, I may look separate.

So out in the open, I appear hidden.

So silent, because I am constantly talking with you.

—Rumi

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The clear bead at the center
changes everything.

There are
no edges to my loving now.

You've heard it said there's
a window that opens from one
mind to another,

but if there's no wall,
there's no need for
fitting the window, or the latch.


—Rumi

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location

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We are all made of bits moving in complicated quantum motions, but when we look closely at those bits, we find that they are located out at the farthest boundaries of space.

I don’t know anything less intuitive about the world than this.

Getting our collective head around the Holographic Principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics.


—Leonard Susskind
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to
Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

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I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.

—René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

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Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light steps, soft drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is just leaving,
the night yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
are just around the corner,
figurations of time
at the turn of this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward,
asleep with all five senses awake,
rain, light steps, a murmuring of syllables,
air and water, words without weight:
what we were and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time, great grief,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the wet asphalt sparkles,
the steam rises and walks,
the night unfolds and beholds me,
you are you and your waist of fog,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, slow lightning,
you cross the street and come in through my forehead,
footsteps of water upon both my eyelids,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt sparkles, you cross the street,
the fog wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the wave of your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn both of my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a welling up of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
years go by, moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the other room?
neither here nor there: you hear them
in another time that is also this time,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight or location,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the garden,
lightning has nested there among the leaves,
a restless garden lazily drifting
— come in, your shadow covers this page.

—Octavio Paz
As One Listens To The Rain
Paul Weinfeld translation

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A thought without a body is not a star. —Aaron Shurin

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Immanuel Kant perhaps composed the longest list of defect in classical Greek “pure reason”. One that has received less publicity than most goes like this:

When an arrow gets fired from a bow toward a target it appears to move through space. However, at every instant the arrow actually occupies one position in space, not two or three or more positions. Thus, at every instant the arrow exists in one place, not in two or three or more. In other words, at every instant the arrow has a position. If the arrow has one and only one definition position at every instant, then at every instant it does not move. If it does not move at any of these instants, it never moves at all.

You cannot escape this Logic by positing instants-between-instants. In these nanotime units, the same logic holds. At each nano-instant, the arrow has some location, not several locations. Therefore, even in nano-instant, the arrow does not move at all.

It seems the only way out of this absurdity consists of claiming that the arrow does, after all, occupy two locations at the same time. Alas, this leads to worse problems, which I leave you to discover for yourself.

And that shows where Logic gets you, if uncorrected by observations. If we do not correct our Logic by comparing it with experience, we may go on for centuries elaborating our most ancient errors endlessly.

—Robert Anton Wilson
Quantum Psychology

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Seek God in self-abasement and self-extinction,

for nothing but form is produced by thinking.

And if you derive no comfort except from form,

then the form that comes to birth within you involuntarily is best.

Suppose it is the form of a city to which you are going:

you are drawn there by a formless feeling of pleasure, O dependent one;

therefore, you are really going to that which has no location,

for pleasure is something different from time and place.

Suppose it is the form of a friend to whom you would go:

you are going for the sake of enjoying his company;

therefore, in reality you go to the formless world,

though you are unaware of that being the object of your journey.

In truth, then, God is worshiped by all, since all wayfaring

is for the sake of the pleasure of which He is the source.

—Rumi 
Mathnawi VI: 3749-3755
Camille and Kabir Helminski version

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put thoughts to rest

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Wherever you are can be considered the center, because all directions from you are infinite; and, therefore, if you wish to put it this way, they are all the same distance. 

No one spot really is any more ‘The’ center than any other spot; no one spot is really more the end, or the edge, than any other spot. No one reality is actually any more or less ‘real’ than any other reality. 

Everything is the same one thing; the same one thing manifesting in all the simultaneous, multidimensional ways that it can manifest.

—Bashar

...

Put thoughts to rest.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

If you want to be free, get to know your real self. It has no form, no appearance, no root, no basis, no abode, but is lively and buoyant. It responds with versatile facility, but its function cannot be located. Therefore when you look for it you become further from it, when you seek it you turn away from it all the more.

Just put thoughts to rest and don't seek outwardly anymore. When things come up, then give them your attention; just trust what is functional in you at present, and you have nothing to be concerned about.

If you want to perceive and understand objectively, just don't allow yourself to be confused by people. Detach from whatever you find inside or outside yourself – detach from religion, tradition, and society, and only then will you attain liberation. When you are not entangled in things, you pass through freely to autonomy.

—Lin Chi

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question

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Do you see the space between our bodies? 
Barely a hand, hardly a breath,
it is the space mountains and rivers are made of. 

It is the beginning of oceans, the space
between either and or, both and neither.
the happiness of forgetting
our names and the happiness of hearing them
for the first time.

–Li-Young Lee
Trading for Heaven

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space is not empty

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We see the the universe as a solid fact,
God sees it as liquid law. 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson


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Space is not empty — nor is it an ‘ether’. The space which surrounds every particle of matter in every wave field is the negative half of the wave field. The solid nucleus is the positive half. Both halves are equal in potential but vastly unequal in volume. 

Science thinks of space either as a void or as an ether through which solids of matter travel. The fact is that space travels with its solids, for each solid is surrounded by a minus zero equal-and-opposite vacuity of the plus zero which we call matter. Matter floats in these insulating spatial counterparts.

Positive electricity is accountable for the solids and negative electricity is accountable for the space. All matter comes out of space by the action of positive electricity and is returned to space by the action of negative electricity. White-hot suns come from the blackness of cold space and cold space radiates from hot suns.

The matter of space consists of holes surrounded by corpuscular solids, while the matter of solids consists of small dense cores surrounded by vast tenuous holes of space. All unfolding and refolding patterns are gyroscopically manipulated, electrically motivated and magnetically measured and controlled.

In the chemical elements, the sharps and flats are isotopes. These can be produced by man in greater numbers than Nature has produced them, for Nature does not begin to split her tones until she has passed two octaves beyond carbon, malleability and conductivity await division in vast quantities from carbon and silicon. These will be found when science discards its concept of matter as being substance, and becomes aware of the gyroscopic control of motion which will split the carbon tone into isotopes as a musical tone is split into sharps and flats.

The elements of matter are not different substances, or different things. They are pressure conditions of light waves. The light units of the elements are all alike but are differently conditioned by the electric pressures exerted upon them during the inward or outward spiral journey from zero to zero.

The unanswered mystery of how the elements become mathematically precise octave tones, just as musical tones or color tones of the spectrum are mathematically precise in vibration orderliness, lies in the wave field gyroscopic principle.
 

–-Walter Russell

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Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence ... are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things eternally separated?

—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science 

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Live to the point of tears. —Albert Camus

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Awareness matters, because
Matter is a materialisation of Awareness.

Just as ‘energy’ is the formative activity of Awareness.

Just as space is a vast universal field of Awareness, and
Time is the presencing of things in that field, so
All bodies are Embodiments of Awareness,
Formed of its Elemental qualities.


—Peter Wilberg
The Awareness Principle

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Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness,
When your fears surrender to your strengths,
You will begin to experience
That all existence
Is a teeming sea of infinite life.

In a handful of ocean water
You could not count all the finely tuned
Musicians
Who are acting stoned
For very intelligent and sane reasons
And of course are becoming extremely sweet
And wild!

In a handful of the sky and earth,
In a handful of God,
We cannot count
All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there
Behind the mysterious veil.

True art reveals there is no void
Or darkness.
There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic
In this luminous, brimming
Playful world.


—Hafiz

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Perfect Numerical Ratios appearing through Music

Pythagorean Harmonic Music Interval Diagram
showing Perfect Numerical Ratios appearing through Music

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Pythagoras used various intervals of harmonic ratios as a medicine for diseases of the body, the emotions and the Soul. He aligned Souls to their divine nature and through music he performed what he called, “Soul Adjustments”. Pythagoras was able to discern the harmony and consonance of heavenly bodies, the “Music of the Spheres”, and put to use his discovery of mathematics as they relate to the harmonic ratios. He made stringed instruments that could be tuned so that they would consistently produce layered consonant musical intervals. Later Pythagoras calculated other chromatic and enharmonic orders, (using simple ratios to create complex intervals). He recognized that music was an expression of “Harmonia”, the Divine principle that brings order to chaos and discord. Thus music has a dual value because like mathematics, it enables humans to see into the structures of nature.

Pythagoras taught that if it was utilized correctly, music can:

a) bring the faculties of the Soul into harmony 


b) compose and purify the mind


c) heal the physical body, thus restoring and maintaining perfect health.

One of his most important discoveries was that harmonic musical intervals could be expressed by perfect numerical ratios, a finding that led him to the realization that all sensible phenomena follow the pattern of number.

Pythagoras said the first important lesson to learn is that which subsists through music, for it possesses remedies of human manners and passions that are able to restore pristine harmony and faculties of the soul.

The more immediate, evident, and undeniable evidence of the influence of Number on our (mental, psychic, emotional) state is through the medium of music. Pythagorean philosophy is a “purification”, the aim of which is the assimilation to God. The universe is divine because of its order (kosmos), harmonies and symmetries it contains and reflects. These principles make the universe divine for they are the characteristics of divinity and so they also innately subsist within the human soul. The Pythagoreans taught that the soul is a harmony. If we are to become like God, then according to Pythagorean philosophy the soul must become aware of its harmonic origin. According to Pythagoras, all harmony and order is the divine principle of number, and for them, mathematical studies are the contemplation of divine principles.

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etherealblend
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the blessedness at the heart of things

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In a different mode, or another plane of being, music is the equivalent of some of man’s most significant and most inexpressible experiences. By mysterious analogy it evokes in the mind of the listener, sometimes the phantom of these experiences, sometimes even the experiences themselves in their full force of life — it is a question of intensity; the phantom is dim, the reality, near and burning. Music may call up either; it is chance or providence which decides. The intermittences of the heart are subject to no known law.

...

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Music “says” things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements “in our own words” is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original. Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in the Missa Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of things. But this is about as far as “our words” will take us. If we were to start describing in our “own words” exactly what Beethoven felt about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature to be, we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense… Only music, and only Beethoven’s music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell us with any precision what Beethoven’s conception of the blessedness at the heart of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen — on a still June night, by preference, with the breathing of the invisible sea for background to the music and the scent of lime trees drifting through the darkness, like some exquisite soft harmony apprehended by another sense.


—Aldous Huxley
Music at Night and Other Essays

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via Maria Popova at Brainpickings
see entire article here
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listen

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Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us.


—Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893)

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Life is like music for its own sake.

We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.


—Alan Watts

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