“To see truth, contemplate all phenomena as a lie.” Thaganapa
“The famous physicist, Niels Bohr, once said that when the great innovation appears, it will seem muddled and strange. It will be only half-understood by its discoverer and a mystery to everyone else. For any idea that does not appear bizarre at first, there is no hope.” Karl Pribram
“The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.” Arthur Koestler
“The irrational richness of life has taught me never to disregard anything, even though it may violate all our (unfortunately so often short-lived) theories, or what may at first glance look completely inexplicable. These things are disturbing; but one cannot be sure whether the compass is pointing in the right direction—anyway, one doesn’t make new discoveries in an atmosphere of security, certainty, and restfulness. “ Carl Jung
“The solar system-like picture of the atom has become familiar to us from the covers of numerous high school physics books and from the logo of the old Atomic Energy Commission. But this symbol is a domesticated, smoothed-over version of the real thing. Rutherford found that the atom, and therefore matter as a whole, consists overwhelmingly of empty space. If an atom were blown up to the size of a domed football stadium, the nucleus would be size of a fly in the center; scattered throughout the enclosure is a sprinkling of even tinier electrons. More strangely still, the nucleus is incredibly heavy: it accounts for almost all the weight of the stadium, while all the grandstands and roof panels are as light as mist. The apparent solidity of everyday objects is due to the play of electrical forces among atoms and molecules, not the substance of the material itself; in truth, substance is one of humanity’s most persistent illusions. With the discovery of the emptiness in matter, nuclear physics—indeed, the whole nuclear age—was born.” (underscore is mine. GT) Robert P. Crease
“The inherent baselessness of physical and mental objects is called reality.” Avatamsaka Sutra
“As he ages, he finds his body resting more, and his mind taking longer walks.” Katy Simpson Smith, from the novel “The Story of Land and Sea.”
“The greatest music cannot be heard; the greatest form has no shape.” Tao Te Ching
“Reality is a wave function traveling both backward and forward in time.” John Castri
““I am more and more convinced that there is a plane of consciousness that we are all sharing, and that the brain is a limiting machine that pulls it in. It is possible to sink back, lose this definition, and participate in that plane of consciousness. How else do you explain extrasensory perception? And since time is a form of sensibility—meaning, that which is going to happen has already happened in a certain sense—you cannot say that premonitions are coincidences. They are not. They happen too often to be attributed to chance.” Joseph Campbell
“What we are look for is what is looking.” St. Francis of Assisi
“Suzuki Roshi, who established the first Zen center in the United States, told his students that it is not difficult to attain enlightenment, but it is difficult to keep a beginner’s mind. “In the beginner’s mind,” he told them, “there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
“If you think you know much, you know little.” Kena-Upanishad
“It is appropriate that this radical, satisfying new paradigm has emerged from Carl Prigram, a brain researcher-neurosurgeon who was a friend of the Western Zen teacher Alan Watts…and David Bohm, a theoretical physicist, close friend of Krishnamurti and former associate of Einstein.” Ken Wilber
“And let us not forget that the pioneer physicist Wolfgang Pauli was a friend and associate of the depth psychologists Carl Jung, and their discussions of the ‘unknowable’ aspects of physical and psychological realities informed the work of each of them.” Glenda Taylor
“Alas, the world is full of enormous lights and mysteries, and man shuts them from himself with one small hand!” Baal Shem Tov
“When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, “This is certainly not like we thought it was!” Rumi
“O to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song.” Theodore Roethke
“The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.” Joseph Campbell
“Blessedness is nothing but the peace of mind which springs from the intuitive knowledge of God…” Baruch Spinza.
“The assumption of being an individual is our greatest limitation.” Pir Vilayat Khan.
“What stuff is the soul made of? The question is as meaningless as asking what stuff citizenship or Wednesdays are made of. The soul is a holistic concept. It is not made of stuff at all. Where is the soul located? Nowhere. To talk of the soul as being in a place is as misconceived as trying to locate the number seven, or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Such concepts are not in space at all.” Physicist Paul Davies, from God and the New Physics.
“If our minds can manifest non-locally in all the ways we have mentioned–-dreams, visions intuitions, and so on–why are we not more aware of these types of experiences? Why are they not more common? Philosopher William Irwin Thompson suggests the reason is that we are suffering a kind of collective hypnosis, a cultural trance, that prevents us from seeing things the way they really are. ‘We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,’ he states. ‘We cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true…reality of our condition is invisible to us.” Larry Dossy, Recovering the Soul, pg. 37.
“I can no longer make a strong distinction between the brain and the body…the research findings…indicate that we need to start thinking about how consciousness can be projected into various parts of the body.” Candace B. Pert, Former Chief of Brain Chemistry National Institute of Mental Health. (Quoted by Larry Dossy)
“I don’t express myself in my painting. I express my not-self.” Mark Rothko
Jung’s theory of synchronicity owes its origin in part to Albert Einstein, who, like Jung, was a professor in Zurich at the time. Jung records this in a letter.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Nonsense, Gary Zukof
“The importance of nonsense hardly can be overstated. The more clearly we experience something as “nonsense,” the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of our own self-imposed cognitive structures. “Nonsense” is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have super¬imposed on reality. There is no such thing as “nonsense” apart from a judgmental intellect which calls it that.
“True artists and true physicists know that nonsense is only that which, viewed from our present point of view, is unintel¬ligible. Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.
“In general, physicists do not deal in nonsense. Most of them spend their professional lives thinking along well-established lines of thought. Those scientists who establish the established lines of thought, however, are those who do not fear to venture boldly into nonsense, into that which any fool could have told them is clearly not so. This is the mark of the creative mind; in fact, this is the creative process. It is characterized by a steadfast confidence that there exists a point of view from which the “nonsense” is not nonsense at all–in fact, from which it is obvious.
“In physics, as elsewhere, those who most have felt the exhilaration of the creative process are those who best have slipped the bonds of the known to venture far into the unexplored territory which lies beyond the barrier of the obvious. This type of person has two characteristics. The first is a childlike ability to see the world as it is, and not as it appears according to what we know about it.
“This is the moral of the (child’s?) tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” When the emperor rode naked through the streets, only a child proclaimed him to be without clothes, while the rest of his subjects forced themselves to believe, because they had been told so, that he wore his finest new clothing.” Gary Zukav
“This is where perception begins to be distorted by the perceiver’s training and needs. Eskimos have been trained to distinguish seven or more kinds of snow. We do not see these different kinds of snow, even though they exist, for we do not need to make these distinctions. To us it is all snow. Our one internal representation of snow is triggered indiscriminately by any kind of actual snow….
“So our perception may indeed be realistic, but it is only with respect to a very tailored segment of reality, a concensus reality, a small selection of things we have agreed are ‘real’ and ‘important.’ …
“This is a way of saying that our perceptions are highly selective and filtered, that there is a major subsystem of consciousness that filters the outside world for us….
“Each of us is simultaneously the beneficiary of his cultural heritage and the victim and slave of his culture’s narrowness. What I believe is worse is that few of us have any realization of this situation. Like almost all people in all cultures at all times, we think our culture is the best and other peoples are uncivilized or savages…
“Adults, because of the power over physical reality given them by their consensus reality state of consciousness, are the most free; yet, because they are the most thoroughly indoctrinated in consensus reality, they are the most bound. They receive many rewards for participating in the consensus reality in an acceptable way, and they have an enormous number of external and internalized prohibitions that keep them from thinking and experiencing in ways not approved by the consensus reality.” Charles Tart
___________________
“A Zen story tells of Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era. A professor came to inquire of Nan-in about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain him¬self.
“It is overfull. No more will go in.”
“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
