Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

When you realize Monday isn't going to be such a bad day afterall.

Another literary giant has left us.

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”

—Milan Kundera, (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023)

“the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. (...) we would seem forced to say that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. The universe does not 'exist, out there' independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe”
― John Archibald Wheeler

“He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.”
― Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

Monist musings:

Being is not a substance like matter or plastic or glass. It is not something that fundamentally composes physicality like potter's clay composes the sculpted vase.

Being is the light that in its shining manifests the phenomenal while at the same time in its shadowing manifests in-itselfness. It is at once the incandescence of the present and the concealedness of the universal. Everything is experiencable because Being makes it so. Everything gets startled awake by the novelty and suddenness of Being. It is the threshold of actuality and the horizon of possibility. It is the othering of the transcendent and the inhering of the immanent. It is the circumference that is nowhere and the center that is everywhere. It is the one absolute core of nowness submerged in a seething ocean of infinitely-myriad relativities.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.”
― Laozi, Tao Te Ching

(Jul 13, 2023 06:31 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]“the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. (...) we would seem forced to say that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. The universe does not 'exist, out there' independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe”
― John Archibald Wheeler

The outside universe we perceive doesn’t exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions we generate a reality internally. We create forests and oceans, warmth and cold. We read words and hear voices, and form interpretations, and then in an instance, we produce a response. All this in a world of our own creation. —Rick Rubin

“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. "---Kevin Kelly