little miracles of self-reference

    

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We view films in the context of darkness. We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision. In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark theatre, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen. 

We watch the world from the dark theater of our skull. The darker the room, the more luminous the screen. 

It is important to understand what we’re participating in, to realize that we rest in darkness and experience vision. 


—Nathaniel Dorsky

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When you see that the mind invents everything…
All will vanish… 

The good will vanish, the evil will vanish 
…..and you will remain as you are..


—Ramana Maharshi

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In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.  We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them.  Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. 

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems – vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.


—Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop

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