“As our knowledge expands up beyond galaxies and down to the quarks and neutrinos, we pass through one incomprehensibly large order of magnitude after another, dwarfing us with the complexity of it all.”
—Rob Bryanton, Rob, Imagining the Tenth Dimension
November 2010
23 posts
“In sensing my body as a river—as a dynamic flow rather than as a relatively static object—I begin to realize that I do not know what I am. My body becomes a mystery to me. I become a mystery to myself. And I begin to realize that there is nothing—“no thing”—to cling to or to identify with.”
—Bodhipaksa, Living as a River
“If all things are linked in one vast web in constant flux, ultimately there is just one thing: the universe. If we cannot separate ourselves from the universe, we are part and parcel of that universe. This is a key point. Its all one just one thing, and we are it.”
—Tam Hunt, Mind, World, God: Science and Spirit in the 21st Century
“This is a key link between science and spirit: the realization that all matter has some degree of experience and that the process that leads to complex experience in us,as human beings, likely leads to higher levels of experience far beyond human comprehension.”
—Tam Hunt, Mind, World, God: Science and Spirit in the 21st Century
“The idea that all things are experiential—panpsychism—is an explanatory theme on a par with the principle of evolution. Indeed, it multiplies the explanatory power of the principle of evolution because it builds upon that power.”
—Tam Hunt, Mind, World, God: Science and Spirit in the 21st Century
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The only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
Alan Watts, The Myth of Myself
” —quoted in Tam Hunt, Mind, World, God: Science and Spirit in the 21st Century
“Of all the strange features of the universe, none are stranger than these: time is transcended, laws are mutable, and observer participancy matters.
—John Wheeler” —Graham Smetham, Quantum Buddhism
—John Wheeler” —Graham Smetham, Quantum Buddhism
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Even if you watched the TV version before it was cancelled, this is a good read!
We really do live in a Minkowski block universe, and the concept of ‘now’ really is an illusion. The future, the present, and the past are each just as real and just as immutable.
” —Robert Sawyer, Flashforward
“What we call a self is not a thing. It is a process. It is an activity. It is the sum total of what we do. It is not static. The self does not exist as a separate entity that interacts with the world, but is the sum total of the interactions of a living being and its environment. Living with the notion that the self is separate and static leads to suffering, because such a notion flies in the face of reality.”
—Bodhipaksa, Living as a River
“The phenomenon of the ‘collapse of the wavefunction’ is a direct indication of the fundamental self-perceiving process of the universe.
In other words the universe uses the perceiving process within the dualistic world of experience in order to explore and also perfect its own nature. Human beings occupy a central place in the process because they are the universe’s agents in the process of universal self-exploration, self-perfection and self-transcendence.” —Graham Smetham, Quantum Buddhism
In other words the universe uses the perceiving process within the dualistic world of experience in order to explore and also perfect its own nature. Human beings occupy a central place in the process because they are the universe’s agents in the process of universal self-exploration, self-perfection and self-transcendence.” —Graham Smetham, Quantum Buddhism
“The technium wants what we design it to want and what we try to direct it to do. But in addition to those drives, the technium has its own wants. It wants to sort itself out, to self-assemble into hierarchical levels, just as most large, deeply interconnected systems do. The technium also wants what every living system wants: to perpetuate itself, to keep itself going. And as it grows, those inherent wants are gaining in complexity and force.”
—Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
“Therefore every thing, which is a manifestation of cosmic energy (consciousness in motion), arises in awareness (consciousness at rest) exists in awareness, is known by awareness and finally subsides back into awareness.”
—Colin Drake, Beyond the Separate Self
“We tend to think of the human brain as the most powerful-force in the world (although we should remember what is telling us that). But the technium has overtaken its brainy parents. The powers of our minds can be only slightly increased by mindful self-reflection; thinking about thoughts will only make us marginally smarter. The power of the technium, however, can be increased indefinitely by reflecting its transforming nature upon itself.”
—Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
“Because the universe has direction, we ourselves have direction. There is meaning in the movement, intrinsic value in the embrace. As Emerson put it, we lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which by any other name is Spirit. There is a theme inscribed on the original face of the Kosmos. There is a pattern written on the wall of Nothingness. There is a meaning in its every gesture, a grace in its every glance.”
—Ken Wilber, The Simple Feeling of Being
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Is technology a part of us?
Or are we a part of a larger “technology”?
Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organization that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.
” —Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
“Awareness is like a field of light which is always here. Being aware is being connected to this field.”
—Shimon Malin, The Eye That Sees Itself
“The self is, in a simile I’ll return to frequently, like an eddy in a stream. It has the appearance of being a separate thing and of having permanence, but in what sense can an eddy be separate? There’s no borderline we can say for sure marks where the eddy stops and the river begins. The eddy cannot exist without the stream, and the stream itself is nothing more than a mass of eddies and other currents. I suggest that the self is like that too. We are not separate from the world around us; we instead exist as the sum total of our relationships with a vast web of interconnected processes. We are not physically separate, and we are not mentally separate, and realizing these facts is infinitely enriching.”
—Bodhipaksa, Living as a River
“Rather than look for some illusory refuge of permanence in the ever-flowing river of life, we’re able to let go and realize we’re the river itself.”
—Bodhipaksa, Living as a River
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On the nature of “nowness”
Being in now is being in transcendence. What is called “being in now,” when “now” is part of time is never really being in now, since now has no duration, it cannot contain contents for awareness. Hence, whenever I am aware of something, I am really aware of the past. But there is a possibility of really being in the now: All contents are removed and now expands into a domain to which measurements do not apply.
” —Shimon Malin, The Eye That Sees Itself
“At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold and yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable. Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor eternity, only Being.”
—Albert Einstein
