Being of the Moment
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From: Automutt on 20 May 2010 02:47 Being of the Moment by ~Automutt Being of the Moment Forget that which says you must be in the moment at all times Be in what you want of the moment or that moments future Doing so you will bring the what maybe into the now and forever ;) Golden Sayings Of Epictetus The Golden Sayings Of Epictetus Epictetus. (c.A.D. 50-c.A.D. 138). The Harvard Classics. 1909-14. LXIX I Think I know now what I never Knew Before -- The Meaning of the common saying, A fool you can neither bend nor break. Pray heaven I may never have a wise fool for my friend! There is nothing more intractable.-- "My Resolve Is Fixed!" -- Why, so madmen say too; but the more firmly they beleive in their delusions, the more they stand in need of treatment.... XXXIII Knowest thou what a speck thou art in comparison with the Universe?- That is, with respect to the body; since with respect to Reason, thou art not inferior to the Gods, nor less than they. For the greatness of Reason is not measured by length or height, but by the resolves of the mind. Place then thy happiness in that wherein thou art equal to the Gods. XVI He that hath grasped the administration of the World, who hath learned that this Community, which consists of God and men, is the foremost and mightiest and most comprehensive of all:-that from God have descended the germs of life, not to my father only and father's father, but to all things that are born and grow upon the earth, and in an especial manner to those endowed with Reason (for those only are by their nature fitted to hold communion with God, being by means of Reason conjoined with Him)-why should not such an one call himself a citizen of the world? Why not a son of God? Why should he fear aught that comes to pass among men? Shall kinship with Cæsar, or any other of the great at Rome, be enough to hedge men around with safety and consideration, without a thought of apprehension: while to have God for our Maker, and Father, and Kinsman, shall not this set us free from sorrows and fears? IX If a man could be thoroughly penetrated, as he ought, with this thought, that we are all in an especial manner sprung from God, and that God is the Father of men as well as of Gods, full surely he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself. Whereas if Cæsar were to adopt you, your haughty looks would be intolerable; will you not be elated at knowing that you are the son of God? Now however it is not so with us: but seeing that in our birth these two things are commingled-the body which we share with the animals, and the Reason and Thought which we share with the Gods, many decline towards this unhappy kinship with the dead, few rise to the blessed kinship with the Divine. Since then every one must deal with each thing according to the view which he forms about it, those few who hold that they are born for fidelity, modesty, and unerring sureness in dealing with the things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of themselves: but the multitude the contrary. Why, what am I?-A wretched human creature; with this miserable flesh of mine. Miserable indeed! but you have something better than that paltry flesh of yours. Why then cling to the one, and neglect the other? ------------------------- Poets of a New Reality by ~Automutt Excerpt from: The Non-Local Universe - The new Physics and Matters of the Mind Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos - Oxford - ISBN 0-19-513256-4 Chapter 10 - Mind Matters: Poets of the New Reality. We do not know whether we shall succeed in once more expressing the spiritual form of our future communities in the old religious language. A rationalistic play with words and concepts is of little assistance here; the most important preconditions are honesty and directness. But since ethics is the basis for the communal life of men, and ethics can only be derived from that fundamental human attitdude which I have called the spiritual pattern of the community, we must bend all our efforts to reuniting ourselves, along with the younger generation, in a common human outlook. I am convinced that we can succeed in this if again we can find the right balance between the two kinds of truth. - Werner Heisenberg The worldview of classical physics allowed the physicist to assume that communion with the essences of the physical reality via mathematical laws and associated theories was possible, but it made no other provisions for the knowing mind. In our new situation, the status of the knowing mind seems quite different. All of modern physics contributes to a view of the universe as an unbroken, undissectible, and undivided dynamic whole. "There can hardly be a shaper contrast," said Melic Capek,"than that between the everlasting atoms of classical physics and the vanishing 'particles' of modern physics." As Stapp put it, ....[E]ach atom turns out to be nothing but the potentialities in the behaviour pattern of others. What we find, therefore, are not elementary space-time realities, but rather a web of relationships in which no part can stand alone; every part derives its meaning and existence only from its place within the whole. The characteristics of particles and quanta are not isolatable,, given particle-wave dualism and the incessant exchange of quanta within matter-energy fields. Matter cannot be dissected from the omnipresent sea of energy, nor can we in theory or in fact observe matter from the outside. As heisenberg put it decades ago, the cosmos appears to be "a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate and overlay or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole." This means that a purely reductionist approach to understanding physical reality, which was the goal of classical physics, is no longer appropriate... http://godsquod.deviantart.com/ |