real(ly

   

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Explain quantum mechanics in 5 words or less.

"Don’t look : waves.
Look : particles."

(an answer to a challenge asked by Sean Carroll on Twitter, originally posed by physicist John Wheeler) 

There is a lot to say about quantum mechanics, perhaps the most mysterious idea ever to be contemplated by human beings, but all we need is one simple (but hard to accept) fact: 

How the world appears when we look at it is very different from how it really is.


—Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
The Particle at the End of the Universe - The Hunt for the Higgs and the Discovery of a New World

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The view of things that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. 

It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788–1860)

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The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an 

atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

—Werner Heisenberg, 1901-1976
Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics,
Pantheist

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A purpose of human life is to love whoever is around to be loved. —Kurt Vonnegut

 

Memorial to those lost at sea, Cardiff, Wales, UK

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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. 

This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. 

Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. 

It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element... 

Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the riddles of the universe.

—Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) 

The Riddle of the Universe

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I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things and they come
toward me, to meet and be met.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I-I

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real illusions

  

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I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

—Albert Einstein

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The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One. 

That art thou.

Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes into contact, is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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being to timelessness as it's to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy's
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

-do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools,all's well


—E. E. Cummings

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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
via Maria Popova here 

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As the sun needs an eye in order to shine, and music an ear in order to sound, so the worth of every masterpiece in art and science is conditioned by the mind related and equal to it to which it speaks. 

Only such a mind possesses the incantation to arouse the spirits imprisoned in such a work and make them show themselves. The commonplace head stands before it as before a magic casket he cannot open, or before an instrument he cannot play and from which he can therefore summon only inchoate noises, however much he would like to deceive himself in the matter. 

A beautiful work requires a sensitive mind, a speculative work a thinking mind, in order really to exist and to live. 


—Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)
from Essays and Aphorisms
R. J. Hollingdale version

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make it rain

 

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The view of things that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. 

It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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We are not one but many.

Every other living organism has a point of view, something like mind, a feeling for life and a strong inclination to go on getting about in it. We humans not only construct a world but are, ourselves, an often intimate part of the makings, the natural constructions, of other kinds of equally semiotic life in this ecology of meanings.

Our various, always subjectively experienced, umwelten overlap, not with shared points of view but with shared biosemiotic systems. This shared and finally semiotically interdependent ecology of meanings is what we mean when we talk about reality.


—Wendy Wheeler
A Feeling for Life

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I will light candles this Christmas.

Candles of joy, despite all the sadness.
Candles of hope where despair keeps watch.
Candles of courage where fear is ever present.
Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days.
Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens.
Candles of love to inspire all of my living.
Candles that will burn all the year long. 


—Howard Thurman
Meditations Of The Heart (1953)

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My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. —Rilke

 

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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. 

This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things and they come
toward me, to meet and be met.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I-I

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free(dom

 

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Imagining we have free will is
exactly as if water spoke to itself:  

I can make waves 
(yes! in the sea during a storm), 

I can rush downhill 
(yes! in the river bed), 

I can plunge down foaming and gushing 
(yes! in the waterfall), 

I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air 
(yes! in the fountain), 

I can, finally, boil away and disappear 
(yes! at a certain temperature); 

but I am doing none of these things now, 
and am of my own accord remaining quiet 
and clear water in the reflecting pond.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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