Category: Quotes

Humans share much with other animals — the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example — but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

Oliver Sacks ‘Hallucinations’

“The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject – and us along with it – from the interconnected totality of deep truth.”

……

“It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.”

John Steinbeck

Quotes from ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’ by Gary Zukav

“According to quantum mechanics, there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture.”

“Quantum mechanics views particles as ‘tendencies to exist’ or ‘tendencies to happen’. How strong these tendencies are is expressed in terms of probabilities…

…It may be that the search for the ultimate ‘stuff’ of the universe is a crusade for an illusion. At the subatomic level, mass and energy change unceasingly into each other.”

“By watching time-lapse photography we know that plants often respond to stumlae with human-like reactions. They retreat from pain, advance toward pleasure, and even languish in the absence of affection. The only difference is they do it at a much slower rate than we do. So much slower, in fact, that it appears to the ordinary perception that they do not react at all…

If this is so, then how can we say with certainty that rocks, and even mountain ranges, do not react also as living organisms, but with a reaction time so slow that to catch it with time-lapse photography would require millenia between exposures! Of course, there is no way to prove this, but there is no way of disproving it either. The distinction between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ is not so easy to make.”

“The importance of ‘nonsense’ cannot 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 doesn’t fit into the prearranged patterns which we have super-imposed on reality. There is no such thing as ‘nonsense’ apart from a judgemental intellect which calls it that.”

“According to Buddhist theory, reality is ‘virtual’ in nature. What appear to be ‘real’ objects in it, like trees and people, actually are transient illusions which result from a limited mode of awareness. The illusion is that parts of an overall virtual process are ‘real’ (permanent) ‘things’. Enlightenment is the experience that things, including ‘I’, are transient, virtual states, devoid of separate existences, momentary links between illusions of the past and illusions of the future unfolding in the illusion of time.”

“The appearance of physical reality, according to Mahayana Buddhism, is based upon the interdependence of all things (Indra’s Net).”

“The history of scientific thought, if it teaches us anything at all, teaches us the folly of clutching ideas too closely. To this extent, it is an echo of eastern wisdom, which teaches us the folly of clutching anything at all.”

“The way we pose our questions often illusorily limits our responses… There is always an alternative between every ‘this’ and every ‘that’.”

Quotes from ‘Paradoxical Life’ by Andreas Wagner

“…awareness of paradox returns to humans a great power and responsibility: the power and responsibility of actively participating in the conversation that creates their world. All of the ever-refined perspectives that emerge from science’s conversations depend on a human mind and the meaning this mind creates…
…Each choice depends on a perspective taken, and each will lead the conversation to vastly different places. Humans are central to this conversation. They are not the insignificant cogwheels of a monstrous machinery they have invented themselves to be.”
(Pg 200)

“Humans become human when absolute certainty and truth dissipate. And with the importance of human choice comes the ultimate freedom, the freedom to create one’s world out of conversations with it. Living in the paradox is the ultimate luxury. It is a place where humans are invited to make a difference – every moment until their dying breath; a place where human choices can initiate conversations that can change the world; a place where no human effort could be discussed as quixotic, futile, or crazy.”
(Pg 201)

“Living in the face of paradoxes means power, but it also means a voyage through a heaving bottomless ocean. This is not easy to accept. Our inquiries are driven by the desire for final answers, but the paradox stands forever in the way of final answers, making any human inquiry as unending as the creation it is a part of. In contrast to Sysiphus, however, who pushes a giant boulder up a mountain only to see it tumble down in an endless cycle of tedious toil, human conversations never return to the same place. They continually create new realms of inquiry and wonder.

The role of humans in making the world through their conversations is adventurous and thrilling. This role makes any human endeavour, including science, a most elaborate, colourful, and fantastic drama. It is a drama with an open ending for the paradox makes the world a possibility, not a certainty. In this drama you are not a replaceable stagehand. You are the star of the play. And you are invited to take a role, to become a minute part of the grand conversation. It is the only thing to do, if you choose to do anything at all. To see this possibility, of course, requires a choice. Nobody can take this choice away from you, but neither can anybody make this choice for you. It is the choice behind all choices… it is the choice to choose.”
(Pg 203)

“I had noticed that, coincidental with the experience of awakening, there actually were such steps and realms, and that each time a life stage was coming to an end it was fraught with decay and a desire for death before leading to a new realm, and awakening and to a new beginning.”
-	Joseph Knecht
	(From ‘The Glass Bead Game’ by Herman Hesse)