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One of the things I want to distinguish in all my work is the difference between the subtle and the manifest. The manifest is what can be held in the hand, in the eye or in the head; this is the explicate order. The other side of this is the subtle. To define something means to ‘grasp’ it, so that which cannot be grasped is undefinable, and whatever is beyond such limits has to be subtle. 

Infinity does not really mean more and more space, or more and more time – these are rather crude conceptions of it – but rather, it means more and more subtlety. The nature of the implicate order is that it is subtle, and within it there are many different levels of subtlety. These deeper things could be like vibrations that we can sense, as we might sense more and more subtle feelings, pointing to something out of which ideas and images emerge.

—David Bohm

Wholeness, Timelessness and Unfolding Meaning

 

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Now this lesson is quite simply this, that any experience that we have through our senses, whether of sound or of light, or touch, is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects, one called “on” and the other called “off”. 

Vibration seems to be propagated in waves and every wave system has crests and it has troughs. And so, life is a system of “now you see it, now you don’t”. And these two aspects always go together.

For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence. And that’s simply the way things are. Only you must remember that the crest and the trough of the wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests, just as you don’t encounter, in life, people with fronts but no backs. Just as you don’t encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails.

Just as the heads and tails, backs and fronts, the positives and the negatives are different, they are at the same time One. And one must get used to the notion that different things can be inseparable.


—Alan Watts

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Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? 

By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity.


—Jack Kerouac

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