listen

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Listen for presences inside poems, let them take you where they will

Follow these private hints and never leave the premises

—Rumi

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fons vitae

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wonder(ful

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Once the realization is accepted that
even between the closest human beings infinite
distances continue to exist, a wonderful living
side by side can grow up,

if they succeed in loving the
distance between them which makes it
possible for each to see the other
whole against the sky.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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question

 

  

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Why is the physical world experienced as external and the mental world experienced as internal?

[...] The physical world is res extensa, body with extension, and therefore subject to division. In other words, the physical world is distinguished by the division of micro and macro, the latter being conglomerates of the micro.

In the physical world, we do not have direct conscious access to the micro. We see the micro only with the amplifying help of the macro, the measuring-aid apparatuses. But there is a reward. Once the measurement is made and a particular pointer reading of the measurement apparatus has been chosen out of the myriad macro possibilities, the pointer does not run away, jumping on the train of quantum uncertainty. Its possibility waves are very sluggish, almost to the point of certainty, a certainty that can be shared by many observers. As a result, physical objects are experienced as parts of a shared reality, an external reality in awareness.

But the mind, res cogitans, is without extension, it is one thing. It is like the infinite medium of the physicist in which there can be waves, and thoughts are such waves. 

However there is no micro/macro distinction in the mental world. So we experience thoughts directly without the intermediary of amplifying apparatuses, but we pay a price. One price is that one person's experiencing a thought object effects the thought object due to the uncertainty principal, so that it is impossible (normally) for another person to experience the same thought object in an identical manner. Thoughts are private, thus experienced in awareness as internal.

The other price for the lack of micro/macro distinction in the realm of thought is that it is impossible to develop a tangled-heirarchical quantum-measurement apparatus. So mind can exist independent of the brain, but its movements can be registered and experienced in consciousness only when correlated with a physical brain.


—Amit Goswami
Quantum Doctor

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The Mouth of Krishna

Albarran Cabrera

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pi

 

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The admirable number pi:

three point one four one.

All the following digits are also initial,

five nine two because it never ends.

It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,

eight nine by calculation,

seven nine or imagination,

not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison

four six to anything else

two six four three in the world.

The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.

Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.

The pageant of digits comprising the number pi

doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.

It goes on across the table, through the air,

over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,

through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.

Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!

How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!

While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen

my phone number your shirt size the year

nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor

the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents

hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,

in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert

alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,

as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,

but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,

it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,

its uncommonly fine eight,

its far from final seven,

nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity

to continue.


—Wisława Szymborska

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hummingbird nest image