phase-lock

  

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We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment…

Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous. Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. 

Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous…

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Telling is Listening
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

 

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For Serres, information is emitted, stored, processed and received by all entities, from humans to crystals, and human communication is only a quiet whisper in the cacophony of the information exchange between entities in the world. 

Where Morton’s ecomimesis remains anthropocentric (for only people do ‘nature writing’), Serres’ Great Story is geocentric in a way that does not exclude human communication, but does not give it a qualitatively privileged status either. 

So for Morton, a mark will always be “either a squiggle or a letter” (Ecology 50), with nothing in between, but Serres is painting on a broader canvas and, for him, what might be a squiggle or a letter for us human beings (or neither, if its information falls outside our visible spectrum or range of audible frequencies, for example) could well carry a thousand different meanings to a thousand different information receivers, and be meaningless or inexistent to ten thousand more.


—Christopher Watkin
Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology

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The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely large. 

—Louis Pasteur

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what is it that you love?

 

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To be conscious of oneself right to the core is to perceive, at the depths of the self, an Other. This is prayer: to be conscious of oneself to the very center, to the point of meeting an Other. 

Thus prayer is the only human gesture which totally realizes the human being’s stature.


—Luigi Giussani

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It is natural and good to love oneself. 

Only, you should know exactly what it is that you love. 

It is not the body that you love, it is Life: perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. 

Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. 

Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. 
Every person is glad to be. But few know the fullness of it. 

You come to know by dwelling in your mind on “I am,” “I know,” “I love” - with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That

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The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within. 

The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. 

Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.


—Louis Pasteur

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A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it. —Henry David Thoreau

 

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The careful observer can observe the seemingly impossible even with the unaided eye, a fact which forces one to prostrate oneself in adoration before the mysterious origin of all things.  

We all walk in mysteries. We do not know what is stirring in the atmosphere that surrounds us, nor how it is connected with our own spirit. So much is certain—that at times we can put out the feelers of our soul beyond its bodily limits; and a presentiment, an actual insight is accorded to it.

—Geothe

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The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within. 

The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. 

Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.


—Louis Pasteur

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