TERMS STARTING WITH
TERMS ANYWHERE
2. The attempted clarification of the basic concepts, presuppositions and postulates of the sciences, and the revelation of the empirical, rational, or pragmatic grounds upon which they are presumed to rest. This aspect of the philosophy of science is closely related to the foregoing but includes, in addition to the logical and epistemological subject-matter, a large portion of metaphysics. Roughly, the task here is two-fold. On the one hand it involves the critical analysis of certain basic notions, such as quantity, quality, time, space, cause and law, which are used by the scientist but not subjected to examination. On the other hand it includes a similar study of certain presupposed beliefs, such as the belief in an external world, the belief in the uniformity of nature, and the belief in the rationality of natural processes.
::: "As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, — for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga
“As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body,—for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga
FIFTH HUMAN TYPE is the scientist, research-worker with a sense of detail, discoverer, inventor, etc. K 2.7.13
Genius: Originally the word applied to a demon such as Socrates' inner voice. During the 17th century it was linked to the Plntonic theory of inspiration and was applied to the rejection of too rigid rules in art. It defined the real artist and distinguished his creative imagination from the logical reasoning of the scientist. In Kant (Critique of Judgment), genius creates its own rules. -- L.V.
Geological Eras When H. P. Blavatsky was writing about the age of the earth in The Secret Doctrine she compared the teachings of the scientists of that time and found nothing but confusion and uncertainty as to geological figures. However, Professor Lefevre in his Philosophy adopted an original method of interpreting the data available. Instead of trying to reach exact figures in regard to the length of the entire fossil-bearing period of sedimentation from the Laurentian period to the present day, or of its subdivisions, he worked out the relative durations of the sedimentary deposits. With this for a background the actual duration of the eras and periods could easily be calculated when reliable evidence was found. Lefevre’s studies were based on the erosion of rocks and the deposition of sediments, and his conclusions have stood with little modification till now. H. P. Blavatsky noticed that his estimates of the relative duration of the geological ages agreed fairly well with the ‘esoteric’ information in her possession, and so by adapting her knowledge of the real figures to Lefevre’s proportional scale she constructed a time table which, she says, approximates the truth “in almost every particular.” Her total of “320,000,000 years of sedimentation” is much less than that of modern geologists, even though she includes the Laurentian period in her table, which they omit. Her “Esoteric” table (SD 2:710) is as follows:
He was the first to recognize a fundamental critical difference between the philosopher and the scientist. He found those genuine ideals in the pre-Socratic period of Greek culture which he regarded as essential standards for the deepening of individuality and real culture in the deepest sense, towards which the special and natural sciences, and professional or academic philosophers failed to contribute. Nietzsche wanted the philosopher to be prophetic, originally forward-looking in the clarification of the problem of existence. Based on a comprehensive critique of the history of Western civilization, that the highest values in religion, morals and philosophy have begun to lose their power, his philosophy gradually assumed the will to power, self-aggrandizement, as the all-embracing principle in inorganic and organic nature, in the development of the mind, in the individual and in society. More interested in developing a philosophy of life than a system of academic philosophy, his view is that only that life is worth living which develops the strength and integrity to withstand the unavoidable sufferings and misfortunes of existence without flying into an imaginary world.
Prana and linga-sarira are general terms for the energic and vehicular aspects of our physical constitution, and Dr. Richardson’s nervous ether in many respects fits in with both of them. But the scientist begins with the physical structure, which he assumes as a self-existent basis, and then proceeds to add something to it; while the theosophist begins with the life principle and derives the physical structure from it. For the latter, every cell, every atom, is a living unit, endowed with its own power of movement; and no outside nervous ether need be added for the production of the phenomena of life or vitality.
Sadducees [from Greek saddoukaioi from Hebrew tsadoq supposed to be the founder of the sect, meaning just, righteous] Among Europeans, a skeptic or doubter; originally the party of the Jewish priestly aristocracy which arose in the 2nd century BC under the later Hasmoneans. The Sadducees have come to be regarded as primarily a political party opposed to the Pharisees, called by some the party of the Scribes, but later Jewish tradition following Josephus more accurately regarded them as a philosophico-religious school. The Sadducees, a sect of erudite philosophers, opposed a great deal of the commonly accepted beliefs of the majority of the Jews, who were actually nearly all Pharisees — as for instance, the immortality of the personal soul, and the actual resurrection of the physical body; yet they strongly upheld what they considered the genuine meaning, and therefore the true authority, of the Jewish scriptures. They likewise opposed no small number of doctrinal or religious innovations, some of them true, and some of them less true in nature, which had been accepted by the body of the Pharisees — virtually by the Jewish people. And the reason for their reluctance to accept these innovations, whether of doctrine or interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, seems to be that they preferred a highly philosophical and even perhaps mystical interpretation, which they said the Jewish scriptures contained, rather than the more popular versions accepted by the Hebrew people as a whole. One may say that what the Gnostics were to the body of the Christians in the early centuries of the Christian era, the Sadducees were to the body of the Jews or Pharisees. The Sadducees likewise claimed to be the scientists and genuine philosophers of the Hebrews; although it is apparently quite true that as time went on their attitude of opposition, and even of reluctance, often became, at least among individual Sadducees, an attitude of cynicism and even possibly of cynical disbelief.
These desires and drives, however, tend to stray beyond their proper provinces and to become intermingled and confused in attempts to identify truth, goodness, and beauty, to turn justifications into explanations, to regard subsistent ideals as concretely existent facts, and to distort facts into accordance with desired ideals. It is the business of reason and philosophy to clear up this confusion by distinguishing human drives and interests from one another, indicating to each its proper province and value, and confining each to the field in which it is valid and in which its appropriate satisfaction may be found. By so doing, they dispel the suspicion and antagonism, with which the scientist, the moralist, the artist, and the theologian are wont to view one another, and enable a mind at harmony with itself to contemplate a world in which subsistent and the existent form a harmonious whole. --
KEYS (10k)
1 Nikola Tesla
1 Margaret Atwood
1 Carl Sagan
1 Sri Aurobindo
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
10 Carl Sagan
9 John Green
7 Anonymous
6 Neil deGrasse Tyson
5 Al Gore
4 Tahereh Mafi
4 A G Riddle
3 Vladimir Nabokov
3 Shawn Lawrence Otto
3 Nikola Tesla
3 Irving Langmuir
3 Henry Miller
3 Henri Poincare
3 Albert Einstein
2 Willard Van Orman Quine
2 Tycho Brahe
2 Tom Robbins
2 Thomas S Kuhn
2 Terence McKenna
2 Richard Rhodes
1:The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Barbarism, #KEYS
2:This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcending element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the harmony of the spheres, the origin of life, the equations of a unified field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power, the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life'.
This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond. ~ Arthur Koestler,#KEYS
3:It is thus by an integralisation of our divided being that the Divine Shakti in the Yoga will proceed to its object; for liberation, perfection, mastery are dependent on this integralisation, since the little wave on the surface cannot control its own movement, much less have any true control over the vast life around it. The Shakti, the power of the Infinite and the Eternal descends within us, works, breaks up our present psychological formations, shatters every wall, widens, liberates, presents us with always newer and greater powers of vision, ideation, perception and newer and greater life-motives, enlarges and newmodels increasingly the soul and its instruments, confronts us with every imperfection in order to convict and destroy it, opens to a greater perfection, does in a brief period the work of many lives or ages so that new births and new vistas open constantly within us. Expansive in her action, she frees the consciousness from confinement in the body; it can go out in trance or sleep or even waking and enter into worlds or other regions of this world and act there or carry back its experience. It spreads out, feeling the body only as a small part of itself, and begins to contain what before contained it; it achieves the cosmic consciousness and extends itself to be commensurate with the universe. It begins to know inwardly and directly and not merely by external observation and contact the forces at play in the world, feels their movement, distinguishes their functioning and can operate immediately upon them as the scientist operates upon physical forces, accept their action and results in our mind, life, body or reject them or modify, change, reshape, create immense new powers and movements in place of the old small functionings of the nature. We begin to perceive the working of the forces of universal Mind and to know how our thoughts are created by that working, separate from within the truth and falsehood of our perceptions, enlarge their field, extend and illumine their significance, become master of our own minds and active to shape the movements of Mind in the world around us. We begin to perceive the flow and surge of the universal life-forces, detect the origin and law of our feelings, emotions, sensations, passions, are free to accept, reject, new-create, open to wider, rise to higher planes of Life-Power. We begin to perceive too the key to the enigma of Matter, follow the interplay of Mind and Life and Consciousness upon it, discover more and more its instrumental and resultant function and detect ultimately the last secret of Matter as a form not merely of Energy but of involved and arrested or unstably fixed and restricted consciousness and begin to see too the possibility of its liberation and plasticity of response to higher Powers, its possibilities for the conscious and no longer the more than half-inconscient incarnation and self-expression of the Spirit. All this and more becomes more and more possible as the working of the Divine Shakti increases in us and, against much resistance or labour to respond of our obscure consciousness, through much struggle and movement of progress and regression and renewed progress necessitated by the work of intensive transformation of a half-inconscient into a conscious substance, moves to a greater purity, truth, height, range. All depends on the psychic awakening in us, the completeness of our response to her and our growing surrender. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 183, #KEYS
4:
Can a Yogi attain to a state of consciousness in which he can know all things, answer all questions, relating even to abstruse scientific problems, such as, for example, the theory of relativity?
Theoretically and in principle it is not impossible for a Yogi to know everything; all depends upon the Yogi.
But there is knowledge and knowledge. The Yogi does not know in the way of the mind. He does not know everything in the sense that he has access to all possible information or because he contains all the facts of the universe in his mind or because his consciousness is a sort of miraculous encyclopaedia. He knows by his capacity for a containing or dynamic identity with things and persons and forces. Or he knows because he lives in a plane of consciousness or is in contact with a consciousness in which there is the truth and the knowledge.
If you are in the true consciousness, the knowledge you have will also be of the truth. Then, too, you can know directly, by being one with what you know. If a problem is put before you, if you are asked what is to be done in a particular matter, you can then, by looking with enough attention and concentration, receive spontaneously the required knowledge and the true answer. It is not by any careful application of theory that you reach the knowledge or by working it out through a mental process. The scientific mind needs these methods to come to its conclusions. But the Yogi's knowledge is direct and immediate; it is not deductive. If an engineer has to find out the exact position for the building of an arch, the line of its curve and the size of its opening, he does it by calculation, collating and deducing from his information and data. But a Yogi needs none of these things; he looks, has the vision of the thing, sees that it is to be done in this way and not in another, and this seeing is his knowledge.
Although it may be true in a general way and in a certain sense that a Yogi can know all things and can answer all questions from his own field of vision and consciousness, yet it does not follow that there are no questions whatever of any kind to which he would not or could not answer. A Yogi who has the direct knowledge, the knowledge of the true truth of things, would not care or perhaps would find it difficult to answer questions that belong entirely to the domain of human mental constructions. It may be, he could not or would not wish to solve problems and difficulties you might put to him which touch only the illusion of things and their appearances. The working of his knowledge is not in the mind. If you put him some silly mental query of that character, he probably would not answer. The very common conception that you can put any ignorant question to him as to some super-schoolmaster or demand from him any kind of information past, present or future and that he is bound to answer, is a foolish idea. It is as inept as the expectation from the spiritual man of feats and miracles that would satisfy the vulgar external mind and leave it gaping with wonder.
Moreover, the term "Yogi" is very vague and wide. There are many types of Yogis, many lines or ranges of spiritual or occult endeavour and different heights of achievement, there are some whose powers do not extend beyond the mental level; there are others who have gone beyond it. Everything depends on the field or nature of their effort, the height to which they have arrived, the consciousness with which they have contact or into which they enter.
Do not scientists go sometimes beyond the mental plane? It is said that Einstein found his theory of relativity not through any process of reasoning, but through some kind of sudden inspiration. Has that inspiration anything to do with the Supermind?
The scientist who gets an inspiration revealing to him a new truth, receives it from the intuitive mind. The knowledge comes as a direct perception in the higher mental plane illumined by some other light still farther above. But all that has nothing to do with the action of Supermind and this higher mental level is far removed from the supramental plane. Men are too easily inclined to believe that they have climbed into regions quite divine when they have only gone above the average level. There are many stages between the ordinary human mind and the Supermind, many grades and many intervening planes. If an ordinary man were to get into direct contact even with one of these intermediate planes, he would be dazzled and blinded, would be crushed under the weight of the sense of immensity or would lose his balance; and yet it is not the Supermind.
Behind the common idea that a Yogi can know all things and answer all questions is the actual fact that there is a plane in the mind where the memory of everything is stored and remains always in existence. All mental movements that belong to the life of the earth are memorised and registered in this plane. Those who are capable of going there and care to take the trouble, can read in it and learn anything they choose. But this region must not be mistaken for the supramental levels. And yet to reach even there you must be able to silence the movements of the material or physical mind; you must be able to leave aside all your sensations and put a stop to your ordinary mental movements, whatever they are; you must get out of the vital; you must become free from the slavery of the body. Then only you can enter into that region and see. But if you are sufficiently interested to make this effort, you can arrive there and read what is written in the earth's memory.
Thus, if you go deep into silence, you can reach a level of consciousness on which it is not impossible for you to receive answers to all your questions. And if there is one who is consciously open to the plenary truth of the supermind, in constant contact with it, he can certainly answer any question that is worth an answer from the supramental Light. The queries put must come from some sense of the truth and reality behind things. There are many questions and much debated problems that are cobwebs woven of mere mental abstractions or move on the illusory surface of things. These do not pertain to real knowledge; they are a deformation of knowledge, their very substance is of the ignorance. Certainly the supramental knowledge may give an answer, its own answer, to the problems set by the mind's ignorance; but it is likely that it would not be at all satisfactory or perhaps even intelligible to those who ask from the mental level. You must not expect the supramental to work in the way of the mind or demand that the knowledge in truth should be capable of being pieced together with the half-knowledge in ignorance. The scheme of the mind is one thing, but Supermind is quite another and it would no longer be supramental if it adapted itself to the exigencies of the mental scheme. The two are incommensurable and cannot be put together.
When the consciousness has attained to supramental joys, does it no longer take interest in the things of the mind?
The supramental does not take interest in mental things in the same way as the mind. It takes its own interest in all the movements of the universe, but it is from a different point of view and with a different vision. The world presents to it an entirely different appearance; there is a reversal of outlook and everything is seen from there as other than what it seems to the mind and often even the opposite. Things have another meaning; their aspect, their motion and process, everything about them, are watched with other eyes. Everything here is followed by the supermind; the mind movements and not less the vital, the material movements, all the play of the universe have for it a very deep interest, but of another kind. It is about the same difference as that between the interest taken in a puppet-play by one who holds the strings and knows what the puppets are to do and the will that moves them and that they can do only what it moves them to do, and the interest taken by another who observes the play but sees only what is happening from moment to moment and knows nothing else. The one who follows the play and is outside its secret has a stronger, an eager and passionate interest in what will happen and he gives an excited attention to its unforeseen or dramatic events; the other, who holds the strings and moves the show, is unmoved and tranquil. There is a certain intensity of interest which comes from ignorance and is bound up with illusion, and that must disappear when you are out of the ignorance. The interest that human beings take in things founds itself on the illusion; if that were removed, they would have no interest at all in the play; they would find it dry and dull. That is why all this ignorance, all this illusion has lasted so long; it is because men like it, because they cling to it and its peculiar kind of appeal that it endures.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, 93?
,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:As truly as the mystic, the scientist is following a light; and it is not a false or an inferior light. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 2:Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 3:Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 4:When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 5:But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 6:The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 7:[A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first." ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 8:Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. ..even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 9:The vast difference between astrology and other sciences, if I may put it thus, is that astrology deals not with facts but with profundities. The solid ground on which the scientist pretends to rest gives way, in astrology, to imponderables. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 10:Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 11:Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 12:Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 13:Strong, deeply rooted desire is the starting point of all achievement. Just as the electron is the last unit of matter discernible to the scientist. DESIRE is the seed of all achievement; the starting place, back of which there is nothing, or at least there is nothing of which we have any knowledge. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 14:The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 15:A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work." ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 16:Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 17:People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 18:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever, " said the old lady. "But it turtles all the way down! ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 19:The external world of physics has … become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse illusion. But if so, that is of little concern to the scientist, who has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination of its exact status in regard to reality. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Without the scientist, there is no future. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
2:Exploration is the sport of the scientist ~ Auguste Piccard, #NFDB
3:How long?” The scientist exhaled. “A day, maybe two. ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
4:The Scientist - with capital letters and no smile. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
5:The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination. ~ Max Planck, #NFDB
6:What we need to do is to humanize the scientist and simonize the humanist. ~ C P Snow, #NFDB
7:I’m the scientist that gave us the Atlantis Gene. I’m one of the Atlanteans. ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
8:The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
9:I have learned to have more faith in the scientist than he does in himself. ~ David Sarnoff, #NFDB
10:The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth. ~ Irving Langmuir, #NFDB
11:The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
12:The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
13:The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
14:In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god. ~ Josef Albers, #NFDB
15:The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset. ~ Roberto Unger, #NFDB
16:There is more in this heaven and earth than what the scientist knows and is revealed in the x-ray. ~ Ray Davies, #NFDB
17:You can always spot the scientist at a strip club, because he is the only one examining the audience. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
18:And when statesman or others worry [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions. ~ Tycho Brahe, #NFDB
19:You’re the scientist. I think you’ve got plenty of hard evidence that I don’t find you repulsive at all. ~ Sarah Fine, #NFDB
20:To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
21:The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions. ~ Claude L vi Strauss, #NFDB
22:The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
23:We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. ~ Murray Gell Mann, #NFDB
24:The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions. ~ Claude Levi Strauss, #NFDB
25:Technology has developed to a whole other level and theres the scientist part of me that loves that stuff. ~ Herbie Hancock, #NFDB
26:The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies. ~ Imre Lakatos, #NFDB
27:The scientist who has acquired faith in a law of nature will no longer transgress that law. He will obey it. ~ John A Widtsoe, #NFDB
28:though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
29:One clue is that in pseudoscience, every piece fits neatly inside a theory and the scientist is never wrong. ~ Nell Freudenberger, #NFDB
30:The scientist's inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature. ~ Kenneth G Wilson, #NFDB
31:To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
32:Goddamn. Well, let's call that an experiment and chalk it up to experience. All hail Jill Kismet the scientist. ~ Lilith Saintcrow, #NFDB
33:Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses. ~ Thomas Kuhn, #NFDB
34:Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
35:The young child approaching a new subject or anew problem is like the scientist operating at the edge of his chosen field. ~ Jerome Bruner, #NFDB
36:The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists. ~ Erwin Schr dinger, #NFDB
37:The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists. ~ Erwin Schrodinger, #NFDB
38:art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception. ~ Dore Ashton, #NFDB
39:though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world. Nevertheless, ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
40:What’s Going On in There?, by Lise Eliot, and The Scientist in the Crib, by Alison Gopnick, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl.) ~ Harvey Karp, #NFDB
41:Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this," he said.
The scientist said, "That's absolutely and precisely right. ~ Nevil Shute,#NFDB
42:The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
43:If science has no country, the scientist should have one, and ascribe to it the influence which his works may have in this world. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
44:The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
45:Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
46:The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Barbarism, #NFDB
47:while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
48:The artist's conception of his art or the scientist's of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small. ~ Giacomo Leopardi, #NFDB
49:As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
50:To the scientist’s surprise, the bodies were intact. “Extraordinary. No signs of cannibalism. These survivors knew each other. They could have ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
51:while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,#NFDB
52:Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
53:The scientist and the artist are both passionate about their exploration. What leads to my work is that I'm equally an artist and an engineer. ~ Arthur Ganson, #NFDB
54:The layman thinks objectively of an apple as a solid object, but the scientist should think of the apple as one fleeting part of a whole cycle. ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
55:The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. ~ Henri Poincare, #NFDB
56:The natural pattern of current astronomy is provided by the cryptic unity of nature itself (belief in which is the chief act of faith of the scientist). ~ Nigel Calder, #NFDB
57:Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
58:The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration. Mathematics was unfathomable and unreliable. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
59:Human intelligence is a function of man’s evolutionary urge; the scientist and the philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
60:Science, almost from its beginnings, has been truly international in character. National prejudices disappear completely in the scientist's search for truth. ~ Irving Langmuir, #NFDB
61:To explain new phenomena, that is my task; and how happy is the scientist when he finds what he so diligently sought, a pleasure that gladdens the heart. ~ Carl Wilhelm Scheele, #NFDB
62:A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
63:Science” in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the “Laws of Nature” as objective facts to be revered. ~ William James, #NFDB
64:The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
65:The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
66:Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly: That's not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
67:The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work. ~ Ernest Lawrence, #NFDB
68:A scientist shouldn't be asked to judge the economic and moral value of his work. All we should ask the scientist to do is find the truth and then not keep it from anyone. ~ Harmony Korine, #NFDB
69:There's nothing within science per se that says medical researchers must not experiment on human subjects; it is the imposition of ethical dogma that constrains the scientist. ~ Jonah Goldberg, #NFDB
70:Science is the study of what Is, Engineering builds what Will Be. The scientist merely explores that which exists, while the engineer creates what has never existed before. ~ Theodore von Karman, #NFDB
71:The scientist states that pressure is exerted outwards in all directions equally, whereas natural pressure (e.g. air pressure) is exerted inwards from all directions equally. ~ Viktor Schauberger, #NFDB
72:Have you seen those people?” the scientist demanded. “How can I cower in a corner with them depending on me? Hell, no. I’m going.” Brad smiled. Courage came in all sizes and forms. ~ Glynn Stewart, #NFDB
73:The artist is now giving a first coat of paint to that tautly stretched canvas which the scientist has been so busy stretching that he has forgotten the use he intended to put it to. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
74:An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
75:To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
76:To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher. ~ Arthur Compton, #NFDB
77:The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
78:For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The how is the mystery. The how is fragile. ~ E L Konigsburg, #NFDB
79:I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read. ~ Karen Thompson Walker, #NFDB
80:When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
81:The scientist is activated by a wonder and awe before the mysterious comprehensibility of the universe which is yet finally beyond his grasp. In its profoundest depths it is inaccessible to man. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
82:But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
83:Arikawa is the scientist who discovered that butterflies have color vision, and that their tiny brains contain sophisticated visual systems. He also discovered that butterflies have eyes on their genitals. ~ Jeremy Narby, #NFDB
84:I don’t understand,” said the scientist, “why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves.” “How curious,” said the lemming. “The one thing I don’t understand is why you human beings don’t. ~ James Thurber, #NFDB
85:Scientific greatness is less a matter of intelligence than character; if the scientist refuses to compromise or accept incomplete answers and persists in grappling the most basic and difficult questions. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
86:The whole project of science,” she explains, “is to crush any notion of powerful nonhuman Others,” and the vocation of the scientist is “to keep all that was uncanny or unspeakable stuffed out of sight. ~ Jeffrey J Kripal, #NFDB
87:Happy indeed is the scientist who not only has the pleasures which I have enumerated, but who also wins the recognition of fellow scientists and of the mankind which ultimately benefits from his endeavors. ~ Irving Langmuir, #NFDB
88:PISA was developed by a kind of think tank for the developed world, called the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the scientist at the center of the experiment was Andreas Schleicher. ~ Amanda Ripley, #NFDB
89:The scientist … must always be prepared to deal with the unknown. It is an essential part of science that you should be able to describe matters in a way where you can say something without knowing everything. ~ Hermann Bondi, #NFDB
90:The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
91:Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
92:To the extent that the scientist's capacity for pursuing the truth depends upon costly apparatus, institutional collaboration and heavy capital investment by government or industry he is no longer his own master. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
93:The impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
94:Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. “It thundered,” we exclaim, and go our earthly way. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
95:The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
96:I was thinking maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is the product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it. ~ John Green, #NFDB
97:I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it. ~ John Green, #NFDB
98:[A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first." ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
99:Cant you understand that romanticism is no more an enemy of science than mysticism is? In fact, romanticism and science are good for each other. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
100:And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man. ~ Jacob Bronowski, #NFDB
101:The scientist’s skin crackled with excitement. “That’s the question that humans always ask—always, always. They want to scoop out the brains of their dead friends, plop them inside a nice new carapace, and presto! Resurrection! ~ Annalee Newitz, #NFDB
102:... some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes fishing. ~ Margaret Mead, #NFDB
103:The scientist knows that the ultimate of everything is unknowable. No matter What subject you take, the current theory of it if carried to the ultimate becomes ridiculous. Time and space are excellent examples of this. ~ Charles Proteus Steinmetz, #NFDB
104:For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars ~ Richard Fortey, #NFDB
105:There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry... There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
106:... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman, #NFDB
107:From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the infinite, was the principle inspiration of that winged and flat-footed creature, the scientist. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
108:There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician. ~ Edward Kasner, #NFDB
109:This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
110:In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science. ~ Jacques Monod, #NFDB
111:Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. ..even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
112:The artist does not illustrate science; ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
113:Science is a system of rational thought devised to investigate the world and establish the laws by which it operates. The scientist uses those laws to achieve an effect. One which might easily appear magical in the eyes of the primitive. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
114:The responsibility of the scientist or journalist is to convey the context. If you're talking about the Arctic Sea ice, you have to embrace the reality that there's a huge number of other things that influence that on a year-to-year basis. ~ Andrew Revkin, #NFDB
115:I found that it was easiest to convey the information in the context of the life of the scientist or in the context of our own personal experience, and there was no idea that was too complicated that couldn't be explained clearly and directly. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
116:The vast difference between astrology and other sciences, if I may put it thus, is that astrology deals not with facts but with profundities. The solid ground on which the scientist pretends to rest gives way, in astrology, to imponderables. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
117:We affirm the neutrality of Science ... Science is of no country. ... But if Science has no country, the scientist must keep in mind all that may work towards the glory of his country. In every great scientist will be found a great patriot. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
118:most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live. ~ Margaret Mead, #NFDB
119:The ultimate aim of the scientist is not only knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge with the aim of overcoming that in our environment which he views as hostile. None of the acts of nature (or Nature) is more hostile than death. ~ Sherwin B Nuland, #NFDB
120:If something comes up that is completely freaky, it's spiritual-looking to the scientist, the first explanation is not going to be that it's God, because the history of that has failed. It would have to be, like, the hundredth explanation. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
121:It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
122:The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not 'meant' to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, 'But we're working on it. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
123:The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it... but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
124:Diminish the mass of evils that afflict the human species, increase enjoyment and well-being. And even if the new routes opened up could prolong the average life of mankind by only a few hours, or even a few days, then the scientist, too could aspire. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
125:The particular thing about science is to combine that [the dreams of obtaining power] with a retreat from the world. Other people want to obtain power by going out into the world, but the scientist really wants to obtain power by retreating from the world. ~ Max Delbruck, #NFDB
126:The song ends and tears spring to my eyes. I quickly scroll to another—“The Scientist” by Coldplay—one of Kate’s favorite bands. I know the track, but I’ve never really listened to the lyrics before. I close my eyes and let the words wash over and through me. ~ E L James, #NFDB
127:But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding. ~ Robertson Davies, #NFDB
128:Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
129:But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself. ~ Elaine Dundy, #NFDB
130:By explanation the scientist understands nothing except the reduction to the least and simplest basic laws possible, beyond which he cannot go, but must plainly demand them; from them however he deduces the phenomena absolutely completely as necessary. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
131:The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems. ~ Gordon Allport, #NFDB
132:Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
133:The philosopher and the scientist emphasize different features of the world, follow different interests and inspire different passions in the soul. But the aim of their study is in each case the same: the supreme good which consists in the adequate knowledge of God ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
134:From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. Art is not just simple arithmetic, it's a delicate calculus. Keep in mind the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
135:In a way our job is not so much to inspire the scientist in kids, but rather to allow it to grow on its natural trajectory. We typically don’t do that by virtue of the way we teach science in schools and the cultural attitude toward science. That can and will shift. ~ Rivka Galchen, #NFDB
136:scientists may be “authorities” in their fields and able to speak “with authority” on a given topic, what authority they have comes only from the antiauthoritarian exploration of nature. It is not grounded in the scientist, but in the evidence from nature itself. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
137:Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process. ~ Loren Eiseley, #NFDB
138:There is no need for the scientist to go into whether an observation was made, nor into the who, what, when, or where. The data on which scientific theorizing is based are rather the propositional contents of the instrument readings recorded, or the facts detected thereby. ~ Ernest Sosa, #NFDB
139:Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
140:It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the “given-world” of the scientist and the “made-world” of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. ~ Henry Petroski, #NFDB
141:I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it. ~ John Green, #NFDB
142:We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
143:The scientist knows very well that he is approaching ultimate truth only in an asymptotic curve and is barred from ever reaching it; but at the same time he is proudly aware of being indeed able to determine whether a statement is a nearer or a less near approach to the truth. ~ Konrad Lorenz, #NFDB
144:The scientist opened her eyes and shook her head, trying to clear it. The ship had rushed her awakening sequence. Why? The awakening process usually happened more gradually, unless… The thick fog in her tube dissipated a bit, and she saw a flashing red light on the wall—an alarm. ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
145:But more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report-the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over the climate-were changed or deleted after the scientist charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text. ~ Frederick Seitz, #NFDB
146:I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part. I ran. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
147:The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living ~ Jules Henri Poincar, #NFDB
148:...it's just a matter of time, and the words, before you return to me, knowing, in fact, that the possibility of our ever being together will require an altogether less linear, less knowable set of possibilities, an alchemy of which I am neither the scientist nor the author. (p. 150) ~ Tahmima Anam, #NFDB
149:The scientist does not study Nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If Nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if Nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.’ One ~ Marcus du Sautoy, #NFDB
150:And when statesmen or others worry him [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions. With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland. ~ Tycho Brahe, #NFDB
151:What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils. ~ Henri Poincare, #NFDB
152:The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot). ~ Erwin Chargaff, #NFDB
153:There is a familiar formula—perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas—developed by Euler from a discovery of De Moivre: eiπ + 1 = 0. ...It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician. ~ Edward Kasner, James R. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination (1940)., #NFDB
154:I have been asked whether I would agree that the tragedy of the scientist is that he is able to bring about great advances in our knowledge, which mankind may then proceed to use for purposes of destruction. My answer is that this is not the tragedy of the scientist; it is the tragedy of mankind. ~ Leo Szilard, #NFDB
155:A nation which has no great philosophers will never have any great scientists. Heidegger says that the philosopher is a man who is always capable of wonder. This also characterizes the scientist. The utilitarian man is not capable of wonder. Hence, it is doubtful whether he can develop science ~ Pervez Hoodbhoy, #NFDB
156:Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas. ~ Aldo Leopold, #NFDB
157:Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past. ~ Phyllis McGinley, #NFDB
158:That is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy with his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all-that all his accumulation proves an entirely different thing. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
159:Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream, looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming things of superstition. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
160:Strong, deeply rooted desire is the starting point of all achievement. Just as the electron is the last unit of matter discernible to the scientist. DESIRE is the seed of all achievement; the starting place, back of which there is nothing, or at least there is nothing of which we have any knowledge. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
161:The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
162:Professor [John] Tyndall once said the finest inspiration he ever received was from an old man who could scarcely read. This man acted as his servant. Each morning the old man would knock on the door of the scientist and call, 'Arise, Sir: it is near seven o'clock and you have great work to do today. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
163:There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge. ~ Richard Fortey, #NFDB
164:To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of pictures; to the poet she is a storehouse of images, fancies, a source of inspiration; to the moralist she is a storehouse of precepts and parables; to all she may be a source of knowledge and joy. ~ John Burroughs, #NFDB
165:'Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men's varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science. ~ Gottlob Frege, #NFDB
166:while scientists may be “authorities” in their fields and able to speak “with authority” on a given topic, what authority they have comes only from the antiauthoritarian exploration of nature. It is not grounded in the scientist, but in the evidence from nature itself. It is the authority of gravity. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
167:For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. ~ Robert Jastrow, #NFDB
168:The scientist who recognizes God knows only the God of Newton. To him the God imagined by Laplace and Comte is wholly inadequate. He feels that God is in nature, that the orderly ways in which nature works are themselves the manifestations of God's will and purpose. Its laws are his orderly way of working. ~ Arthur Compton, #NFDB
169:I could head east from Fifth Avenue and reliably reach Madison, turn south from 53rd and get to 52nd every single time. The scientist—or the Buddhist—might declare such perceptions were illusions, but not one of them would head uptown to get to the Bowery. They knew what they knew. They saw what they saw. So ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
170:Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago. ~ Betty Friedan, #NFDB
171:I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It's a shame that science hasn't been taught that way, in a long time. It's usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
172:the future lay in cultivating the scientist in all of us. If science is an unfinished project, the next stage will be about reconnecting and integrating the rigor of scientific method with the richness of direct experience to produce a science that will serve to connect us to one another, ourselves, and the world. ~ Peter M Senge, #NFDB
173:Wow,” Amos said over the comm. “Three hits. Small projectiles, probably PDC rounds. Managed to go right through us without hitting anything that mattered.” “It went through my room,” the scientist, Prax, said. “Bet that woke you up,” Amos said, his voice a grin. “I soiled myself,” Prax replied without a hint of humor. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
174:Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
175:Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
176:The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. The metaphysician reasons from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from facts to theory. The metaphysician explains the universe by himself, the scientist explains himself by the universe. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
177:The scientist does not defy the universe. He accepts it. It is his dish to savor, his realm to explore; it is his adventure and never-ending delight. It is complaisant and elusive but never dull. It is wonderful both in the small and in the large. In short, its exploration is the highest occupation for a gentleman. ~ Isidor Isaac Rabi, #NFDB
178:There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
179:When the uncultured man sees a stone in the road it tells him no story other than the fact that he sees a stone ... The scientist looking at the same stone perhaps will stop, and with a hammer break it open, when the newly exposed faces of the rock will have written upon them a history that is as real to him as the printed page. ~ Elisha Gray, #NFDB
180:All the scientist creates in a fact is the language in which he enunciates it. If he predicts a fact, he will employ this language, and for all those who can speak and understand it, his prediction is free from ambiguity. Moreover, this prediction once made, it evidently does not depend upon him whether it is fulfilled or not. ~ Henri Poincare, #NFDB
181:For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
182:This picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humor—he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors “Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
183:To other scientists, the scientist who corrects a colleague’s error, or cites good reasons for seriously doubting his or her conclusions, performs a noble deed, like a Zen master who boxes the ears of a novice straying from the meditative path, although scientists correct one another more as equals than as master and student. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
184:Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
185:Only when he has published his ideas and findings has the scientist made his contribution, and only when he has thus made it part of the public domain of scholarship can he truly lay claim to it as his own. For his claim resides only in the recognition accorded by peers in the social system of science through reference to his work. ~ Robert K Merton, #NFDB
186:The wolf stands on its hind legs, places its forelegs on the scientist’s shoulders, and places its jaws around the scientist’s head. This is just the wolf’s way of being friendly. If you’re an animal who doesn’t know how to talk, a very clear signal is communicated: “See my teeth? Feel them? I could hurt you, I really could. But I won’t. I like you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
187:If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.
Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic. ~ Walker Percy,#NFDB
188:The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
189:But weightier still are the contentment which comes from work well done, the sense of the value of science for its own sake, insatiable curiosity, and, above all, the pleasure of masterly performance and of the chase. These are the effective forces which move the scientist. The first condition for the progress of science is to bring them into play. ~ Lawrence Joseph Henderson, #NFDB
190:The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work. Instead of an attic with a few test tubes, bits of wire and odds and ends, the attack on the atomic nucleus has required the development and construction of great instruments on an engineering scale. ~ Ernest Lawrence, #NFDB
191:there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
192:A system such as classical mechanics may be 'scientific' to any degree you like; but those who uphold it dogmatically - believing, perhaps, that it is their business to defend such a successful system against criticism as long as it is not conclusively disproved - are adopting the very reverse of that critical attitude which in my view is the proper one for the scientist. ~ Karl Popper, #NFDB
193:In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result, many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that talk. Sculpture that swims. Books that turn to ash. New formulas just like the scientist. But that isn't science of course, nor is it art. Just the end of the road. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
194:Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude). ~ Evan Thompson, #NFDB
195:In his long and often stormy life, Jung was many things; the dichotomy between “Jung the scientist” and “Jung the mystic” highlights only two. Jung was a doctor, a husband, a lover, a friend, a parent, a teacher, a student, a genius. He was also, from another perspective and among other things, an opportunist, an adulterer, a crank, an egoist, an absentee father, and a bully. ~ Gary Lachman, #NFDB
196:Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time tells the story of a cosmologist whose speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. Ah, yes, madame, the scientist replies, but what does the turtle rest on? The old lady shoots back: You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down. ~ George Will, #NFDB
197:British physicist, novelist, and science advisor C. P. Snow, a man who straddled many worlds, like the scientist/artist/statesmen of old. In a famous 1959 lecture titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Snow warned that the widening communication gulf between the sciences and the humanities threatened the ability of modern peoples to solve their problems: ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
198:The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, "God." The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things. Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
199:Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies. ~ John B S Haldane, #NFDB
200:Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world... I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a re-interpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable. ~ Thomas Kuhn, #NFDB
201:In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
202:The Private Life of the Brain (New York: John Wiley, 2000); John McCrone’s Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) is a more easygoing, detailed exploration. David Hubel’s Eye, Brain and Vision (San Francisco: Scientific American Library, 1988) is a fine vision of what seeing entails, presented by the scientist who did much to reveal ~ David Bodanis, #NFDB
203:To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them. ~ Robin G Collingwood, #NFDB
204:As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down. ~ Jacques Derrida, #NFDB
205:A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work." ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
206:He’s a scientist. Above all things, scientists are protectors of our world. “Scientist is another word for hero,” Mayor Cardinal was fond of saying. They use science to not only learn things but also to change those things so that everything is better going forward. Just like the scientist who cured polio, or that couple who invented radiation, or the astrologers who write our futures for us. ~ Joseph Fink, #NFDB
207:Those without the gate frequently question the wisdom and right of the occultist to guard his knowledge by the imposition of oaths of secrecy. We are so accustomed to see the scientist give his beneficent discoveries freely to all mankind that we feel that humanity is wronged and defrauded if any knowledge be kept secret by its discoverers and not at once made available for all who desire to share in it. ~ Dion Fortune, #NFDB
208:[The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration. ~ Robert Watson Watt, #NFDB
209:As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
210:But will I always love her? Does my love for her reside in my head or my heart? The scientist in her believed that emotion resulted from complex limbic brain circuitry that was for her, at this very moment, trapped in the trenches of a battle in which there would be no survivors. The mother in her believed that the love she hadd for her daughter was safe from the mayhem in her mind, because it lived in her heart. ~ Lisa Genova, #NFDB
211:Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
212:The three most effective incentives to human action may be ... classified as creed, greed and dread. ... In examining the scientist it is perhaps worth while to examine how far he is moved by these three incentives. I think that, rather peculiarly and rather exceptionally, he is very little moved by dread. ... He is in fact essentially a person who has been taught he must be fearless in his dealing with facts. ~ Robert Watson Watt, #NFDB
213:Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious—as when a scientist works on nerve gases—he cannot properly claim that such applications are “none of his business,” merely on the ground that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
214:The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. There is truth in this clever crack, but, as Niels Bohr impressed, while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. ~ Dorion Sagan, #NFDB
215:Self-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
216:During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and the opening decades of the nineteenth, a constellation of literary and scientific luminaries appeared in the European sky which indicated and inaugurated the Age of Reason. God was dethroned and Reason became the throned sovereign of philosophy. Now science receives our highest worship. The scientist is the pope of today and sits in the Vatican of world authority. We ~ Paul Brunton, #NFDB
217:Scientific “facts” are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious “facts” were taught only a century ago.… But science is excepted from criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgment of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago.… science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. (ibid., p. 182) ~ Stephen Arroyo, #NFDB
218:The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist's job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives. ~ Edward Teller, #NFDB
219:There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician. ~ Glenn T Seaborg, #NFDB
220:I cannot countenance the traditional belief that postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter with a 'vocation' equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
221:The scientist is not much given to talking of the riddle of the universe. "Riddle" is not a scientific term. The conception of a riddle is "something which can he solved." And hence the scientist does not use that popular phrase. We don't know the why of anything. On that matter we are no further advanced than was the cavedweller. The scientist is contented if he can contribute something toward the knowledge of what is and how it is. ~ Charles Proteus Steinmetz, #NFDB
222:History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method. My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves. I’ve pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
223:Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
224:For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances. ~ Daniel Levitin, #NFDB
225:My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature? ~ Murray Gell Mann, #NFDB
226:For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will ve replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances. ~ Daniel J Levitin, #NFDB
227:You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that's what scientists believe. In fact many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day, you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
228:Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
229:It was the scientist in me, you see. It was the desire to see all the everything beyond the Golden City. To escape the sycophants, the provincial. The hunger to know. It is my greatest weapon. But the mask conceals this. And a lie meant for my people ensnares everyone. Even my enemies. They think they have me-- a king reduced to chains. But I know a secret that I cannot yet tell. First I must put villainous means to proper ends... and let them feed my hunger to know. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
230:Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. ~ Krista Tippett, #NFDB
231:How will they be able to tell the difference between enemy combatants and our own troops?"
"All soldiers will have an RFID chip implanted," explained the major. "No WarDog will fire on someone who has a chip."
"That's all well and good," said Schoeffel, "but ISIL and the Taliban tend to hide in urban areas and among civilian populations. How do we keep civilians safe?"
The scientist didn't meet her eyes.
Major Schellinger said "We're still working on that. ~ Jonathan Maberry,#NFDB
232:There are two men in each one of us: the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observations, experimentation and reasoning, and the man of sentiment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them again, but who believes that he will, and lives in the hope – the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that the force that is within him cannot die. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
233:Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
234:The Researcher can have her/his own conviction on whatever field she/he studies even if it was preposterously construed, it is the Scientist (who by the merit of her/his title) is not allowed to use elements of belief in weaving the fabric of Science into an irrational geometry. If a Researcher wants, however, to transcend beyond her/his limits and into the realm of Science, only forsaking the elements of belief could allow for such a thrust into the Kingdom of Mental Authority. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
235:After an insight occurs, one must check it out to see if the connections genuinely make sense. The painter steps back from the canvas to see whether the composition works, the poet rereads the verse with a more critical eye, the scientist sits down to do the calculations or run the experiments. Most lovely insights never go any farther, because under the cold light of reason fatal flaws appear. But if everything checks out, the slow and often routine work of elaboration begins ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
236:Objectivity is made possible because experiment and logical consistency are the sole arbiters of truth - of no consequence is the scientist's mood or moral character, his political beliefs or nationality. or even his status in the world of science. On this last point, consider, for example, that Einstein was never taken too seriously when he (wrongly) set out to criticize quantum mechanics - this in spite of the fact that he was acknowledged as the greatest living physicist of the time. ~ Pervez Hoodbhoy, #NFDB
237:A mad scientist builds a monster out of body parts. The monster heads into the woods and kills a little girl. Who, then, is most responsible? The mad scientist or the monster?"
"The answer to that question is obvious, sir."
"It is?"
"Of course, sir - it's neither the scientist nor the monster."
"Then who is the most responsible?"
"The little girl in the woods."
"The little girl in the woods?"
"For failing to adequately protect herself, sir. ~ Anthony O Neill,#NFDB
238:I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and society that the scientist can appreciate better than anyone else, and if he does not insist on this significance no one else will, with the result that the relation of science to society will become warped, to the detriment of everybody. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman, #NFDB
239:Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."... Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens? ~ Konrad Lorenz, #NFDB
240:I tried so hard to fix what I'd ruined. I tried every single day to be what they wanted. I tried all the time to be better but I never really knew how.
I only know now that the scientist are wrong.
The world is flat.
I know because I was tossed right off the edge and I've been trying to hold on for 17 years. I've been trying to climb back up for 17 years but its nearly impossible to beat gravity when no one is willing to give you a hand.
When no one wants to risk touching you. ~ Tahereh Mafi,#NFDB
241:the scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
242:From that night on, the electron-up to that time largely the plaything of the scientist-had clearly entered the field as a potent agent in the supplying of man's commercial and industrial needs... The electronic amplifier tube now underlies the whole art of communications, and this in turn is at least in part what has made possible its application to a dozen other arts. It was a great day for both science and industry when they became wedded through the development of the electronic amplifier tube. ~ Robert Andrews Millikan, #NFDB
243:There must necessarily be agreement between a reason coming from God and a revelation coming from God.46 Let us say, then, that faith teaches truths which seem contrary to reason; let us not say that it teaches propositions contrary to reason. The rustic thinks it contrary to reason that the sun should be larger than the earth. But this proposition seems reasonable to the scientist.47 Let us rest assured that apparent incompatibility between faith and reason is similarly reconciled in the infinite wisdom of God. ~ tienne Gilson, #NFDB
244:The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
245:Creativity has three layers; the ultimate is the mystic: he lives in a climate of creativity. The poet, once in a while, brings some treasures from the beyond; the scientist, also very rarely, but whenever he can visit the ultimate he brings something precious to the world. But one thing is certain - mystic, scientist or poet, whatsoever comes into this world comes from the beyond. To bring the beyond is creativity. To bring the beyond into the known is creativity. To help God to be manifested in some form is creativity. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
246:Those without the gate frequently question the wisdom and right of the occultist to guard his knowledge by the imposition of oaths of secrecy. We are so accustomed to see the scientist give his beneficent discoveries freely to all mankind that we feel that humanity is wronged and defrauded if any knowledge be kept secret by its discoverers and not at once made available for all who desire to share in it.
The knowledge is reserved in order that humanity may be protected from its abuse at the hands of the unscrupulous. ~ Dion Fortune,#NFDB
247:The scientist’s behavior while facing the refutation of his ideas has been studied in depth as part of the so-called attribution bias. You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness. This explains why these scientists attributed their failures to the “ten sigma” rare event, indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them. Why? It is a human heuristic that makes us actually believe so in order not to kill our self-esteem and keep us going against adversity. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
248:Scientists are educated from a very early time and a very early age to believe that the greater scientist is the scientist who makes discoveries or theories that apply to the greatest ambit of things in the world. And if you've only made a very good theory about snails, or a very good theory about some planets but not about the universe as a whole, or about all the history of humankind, then you have in some sense accepted a lower position in the hierarchy of the fame of science as it's taught to you as a young student. ~ Richard Lewontin, #NFDB
249:I don't want to get too dippy about all this. If you take the view of the scientist and everything is in a state of vibration, then every note is a vibration, which has a certain frequency, and you know that if you put 40 beats into a frequency it's going to be the same note every time. You take that into infrasound and people can be made to be sick, actually killed. Taking it the other way, not to be too depressing, what about euphoria, etc., and what about consciousness being totally... no, I won't go into that one. Time warps. ~ Jimmy Page, #NFDB
250:The significance of a fact is relative to [the general body of scientific] knowledge. To say that a fact is significant in science, is to say that it helps to establish or refute some general law; for science, though it starts from observation of the particular, is not concerned essentially with the particular, but with the general. A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance. In this the scientist differs from the artist, who, if he deigns to notice facts at all, is likely to notice them in all their particularity. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
251:It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist for example Vincent Van Gogh, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself. ~ Loren Eiseley, #NFDB
252:The scientist is a practical man and his are practical (i.e., practically attainable) aims. He does not seek the ultimate but the proximate. He does not speak of the last analysis but rather of the next approximation. His are not those beautiful structures so delicately designed that a single flaw may cause the collapse of the whole. The scientist builds slowly and with a gross but solid kind of masonry. If dissatisfied with any of his work, even if it be near the very foundations, he can replace that part without damage to the remainder. ~ Gilbert N Lewis, #NFDB
253:Absolutely delightful, at first for its unspoiled picture of late-nineteenth-century Japan as seen through the eyes of three remarkable but very different Americans, [the missionary William Elliot Griffis [1843-1928], the scientist Edward Sylvester Morse [1838-1925], and the writer Lafcadio Hearn], and then for the marvelous reconstruction of how Japan worked on their minds, radically changing their perceptions of the country and the whole relationship between East and West--between the barbarian and the civilized. The book is a tour de force. ~ Edwin O Reischauer, #NFDB
254:There are two processes which we adopt consciously or unconsciously when we try to prophesy. We can seek a period in the past whose conditions resemble as closely as possible those of our day, and presume that the sequel to that period will, save for some minor alterations, be similar. Secondly, we can survey the general course of development in our immediate past, and endeavor to prolong it into the near future. The first is the method the historian; the second that of the scientist. Only the second is open to us now, and this only in a partial sphere. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
255:What happens when world petroleum production plateaus, as it has done for nearly a decade, and begins to decline, as it will do for the rest of our lives, has very little to do with physical questions. The forces that are taking the lead in the opening phases of the deindustrial age will be political, cultural, and psychological, not physical. About these issues the methods of the scientist and the engineer have very little useful to say, and most of that was drowned out decades ago by the louder voices of political opportunism and middle-class privilege. ~ John Michael Greer, #NFDB
256:There is no "religious language" or "scientific language". There is rather the international notation of mathematics and logic; and English, French, Spanish and the like. In short, "religious discourse" and "scientific discourse" are part of the same overall conceptual structure. Moreover, in that conceptual structure there is a large amount of discourse, which is neither religious nor scientific, that is constantly being utilized by both the religious man and the scientist when they make religious and scientific claims. In short, they share a number of key categories. ~ Kai Nielsen, #NFDB
257:The scientist was first discovering the laws of God, in the faith that the workings of the world could be reformulated into the terms of the word, the reason, and the law which they were obeying. As the hypothesis of God made no difference to the accuracy of his predictions, he began to leave it out and to consider the world as a machine, something which followed laws with no lawgiver. Lastly, the hypothesis of pre-existing and determinative laws became unnecessary. They were seen simply as human tools, like knives, with which nature is chopped up into digestible portions. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
258:People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
259:The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp. ~ Henri Poincare, #NFDB
260:There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry... There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
261:Neuroanatomists categorize themselves into “clumpers” and “splitters” based on how they like to organize the brain. Clumpers prefer to simplify the brain into as few sections as possible, while splitters divide the brain into thousands of pieces, all with their own Latin or Greek names. To make things even more confusing, splitters like to throw into the mix the name of the scientist who first described that brain area, so we end up with names like “Zuckerkandl’s fasciculus,” “the ventral tegmental relay zone of Giolli,” and the “nucleus reticularis tegmenti pontis of Bechterew. ~ James Fallon, #NFDB
262:Neuroanatomists categorize themselves into “clumpers” and “splitters” based on how they like to organize the brain. Clumpers prefer to simplify the brain into as few sections as possible, while splitters divide the brain into thousands of pieces, all with their own Latin or Greek names. To make things even more confusing, splitters like to throw into the mix the name of the scientist who first described that brain area, so we end up with names like “Zuckerkandl’s fasciculus,” “the ventral tegmental relay zone of Giolli,” and the “nucleus reticularis tegmenti pontis of Bechterew. ~ James Fallon, #NFDB
263:The scientist has to take 95 per cent of his subject on trust. He has to because he can't possibly do all the experiments, therefore he has to take on trust the experiments all his colleagues and predecessors have done. Whereas a mathematician doesn't have to take anything on trust. Any theorem that's proved, he doesn't believe it, really, until he goes through the proof himself, and therefore he knows his whole subject from scratch. He's absolutely 100 per cent certain of it. And that gives him an extraordinary conviction of certainty, and an arrogance that scientists don't have. ~ Christopher Zeeman, #NFDB
264:There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress. —J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, 1949 ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
265:Hang on for some metaphysics. The Aneristic Principle is that of order, the Eristic Principle is that of disorder. On the surface, the Universe seems (to the ignorant) to be ordered; this is the aneristic illusion. Actually, what order is “there” is imposed on primal chaos in the same sense that a person’s name is draped over his actual self. It is the job of the scientist, for example, to implement this principle in a practical manner and some are quite brilliant at it. But on closer examination, order disolves into disorder, which is the ERISTIC ILLUSION. —Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., Principia Discordia ~ Robert Shea, #NFDB
266:A scientist has a frog and he says, "Jump, frog." The frog jumps ten feet. The scientist writes down, FROG JUMPS 10 FEET. Then the scientist chops of one of the frogs' legs and says, "Jump, frog." and the frog jumps five feet. The scientist writes CUT OFF ONE FOOT, FROG JUMPS 5 FEET. Then he chops off another leg and says, "Jump." and the frog jumps two feet. The scientist writes down CUT OFF TWO LEGS, FROG JUMPS TWO FEET. Then he cuts off all the frogs' legs and says, "Jump." and the frog just lies there.The scientist writes down the conclusions of the test: CUTTING OFF ALL THE FROGS' LEGS MAKES THE SUBJECT GO DEAF. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
267:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
268:Through the theories they embody, paradigms prove to be constitutive of the research activity. They are also, however, constitutive of science in other respects, and that is now the point. In particular, our most recent examples show that paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making. In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture. Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
269:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever, " said the old lady. "But it turtles all the way down! ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
270:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down! ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
271:It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular
story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us.... In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us. If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed. ~ Loren Eiseley,#NFDB
272:When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
273:What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
274:So a scientist and an engineer are tossed into separate rooms, stocked with tools and parts, and told that they aren't allowed out until they've produced a working prototype for a radio receiver. After two days, the scientist has covered the walls in scribbling and looks like a mad man, raving about how not only is it impossible to build a receiver with the parts given but that he's proven that radio is theoretically impossible anyway. When they check on the engineer, they find that he'd built the receiver in less than a day, fashioned a crude speaker and antenna, and had found a radio broadcast he liked and hadn't bothered to tell them he'd finished. ~ Joshua Dalzelle, #NFDB
275:Of the two or three natural dogmas that mankind, after long centuries of debate and after ceaseless critical examination, is now definitely establishing, the most categorical and the dearest to us is certainly that of the infinite value of the universe and its inexhaustible store of richness. ‘Our world contains within itself a mysterious promise of the future, implicit in its natural evolution.’ When the newborn mind surveys the grandeurs of the cosmos, those are the first words it falters; and that is the final assertion of the scientist as he closes his eyes, heavy and weary from having seen so much that he could not express. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, #NFDB
276:I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it? ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
277:This habit starts awfully early. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, who has been studying the nature of stereotypes for many years, once reported that her daughter returned from kindergarten complaining that “boys are crybabies.”25 The child’s evidence was that she had seen two boys crying on their first day away from home. Brewer, ever the scientist, asked whether there hadn’t also been little girls who cried. “Oh yes,” said her daughter. “But only some girls cry. I didn’t cry.” Brewer’s little girl was already dividing the world, as everyone does, into us and them. Us is the most fundamental social category in the brain’s organizing system, and it’s hardwired. ~ Carol Tavris, #NFDB
278:It reminds me of a story told by my friend Holly Youngbear Tibbetts. A plant scientist, armed with his notebooks and equipment, is exploring the rainforests for new botanical discoveries, and he has hired an indigenous guide to lead him. Knowing the scientist’s interests, the young guide takes care to point out the interesting species. The botanist looks at him appraisingly, surprised by his capacity. “Well, well, young man, you certainly know the names of a lot of these plants.” The guide nods and replies with downcast eyes. “Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.” I was teaching the names and ignoring the songs. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, #NFDB
279:The books of the great scientists are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries. And rightly so. The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers. His message is not devoid of universality but its universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and also no stronger link with the world than his work. ~ Max Delbruck, #NFDB
280:When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.11 ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
281:The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
282:So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, 'That's all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.' The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, 'Well, but if that's so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?' And the woman says, 'It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle. And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, 'Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?' And the old woman says 'Sir, you don't understand. It's turtles all the way down. ~ John Green, #NFDB
283:But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
284:The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it—taking the art seriously always, himself never quite—he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now—asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life—can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in. ~ Herman Wouk in Kirk Polking, "An Exclusive Interview with Herman Wouk", Writer's Digest (September 1966), p. 50., #NFDB
285:But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and beyond the moment, the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however blasphemously and colloquially he may describe it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory of God above pleasant daily virtues. With this sadness there was envy that he should be left out of things, that others should go ahead of him, ever surer in technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of biological chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the pioneers had but fumbled and hinted. ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
286:When 'consciousness' is unawares transferred from great things to small' - which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter-the result will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the trivial planes meet; he 'sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero perish or a sparrow fall'. The scientist's attitude is basically similar in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal event and a general law of nature - Newton's apple or the boiling kettle of James Watt. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
287:[...] dGT: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?"
(another) interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.
dGT: Well, I’m still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions so that you cannot move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress.
(Neil deGrasse Tyson - EPISODE 489: NERDIST PODCAST, 20m19s) ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
288:The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and points of view. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
289:Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
290:The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,#NFDB
291:Doubt is not a fearful thing,” Feynman observed, “but a thing of very great value.”10 It’s what propels science forward. When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
292:The scientist of today is distressed by the fact that the results of his scientific work have created a threat to mankind since they have fallen into the hands of morally blind exponents of political power. He is conscious of the fact that technological methods, made possible by his work, have led to a concentration of economic and also of political power in the hands of small minorities which have come to dominate completely the lives of the masses of people, who appear more and more amorphous. But even worse: the concentration of economic and political power has not only made the man of science dependent economically, it also threatens his independence from within; the shrewd methods of intellectual and psychic influences which it brings to bear will prevent the development of independent personalities. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
293:What I am about to say is no secret to the scientist, but it is not generally known by the layman. The secret is simply this: the scientist, in practicing the scientific method, cannot utter a single word about an individual thing or creature insofar as it is an individual, but only insofar as it resembles other individuals. [...]
If the scientist cannot address himself to this reality, who can? My discovery, of course, was that the writer can, and most particularly the novelist. Oddly enough, it was the reading of two nineteenth-century writers, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, which convinced me that only the writer, the existential philosopher or the novelist, can explore the gap with all the passion and seriousness and expectation of, say, an Einstein discovering that Newtonian physics no longer works. ~ Walker Percy,#NFDB
294:The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again. ~ Alice W Flaherty, #NFDB
295:In 1962, before he’d written “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” Good edited a book called The Scientist Speculates. He wrote a chapter entitled, “The Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence,” kind of a warm-up for the superintelligence ideas he was developing. Like Steve Omohundro would argue almost fifty years later, he noted that among the problems intelligent machines will have to address are those caused by their own disruptive appearance on Earth. Such machines … could even make useful political and economic suggestions; and they would need to do so in order to compensate for the problems created by their own existence. There would be problems of overpopulation, owing to the elimination of disease, and of unemployment, owing to the efficiency of low-grade robots that the main machines had designed. ~ James Barrat, #NFDB
296:The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone. The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told. The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another. The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
297:Shortly after Bush took office, a government scientist prepared testimony for a Congressional committee on the dangerous effects of industrial uses of coal and other fossil fuels in contributing to “global warming,” a depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer. The White House changed the testimony, over the scientist’s objections, to minimize the danger (Boston Globe, October 29, 1990). Again, business worries about regulation seemed to override the safety of the public. The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: “Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
298:The philosopher seeks to hear within himself the echoes of the world symphony and to re-project them in the form of concepts. While he is contemplative-perceptive like the artist, compassionate like the religious, a seeker of purposes and causalities like the scientist, even while he feels himself swelling into a macrocosm, he all the while retains a certain self-possession, a way of viewing himself coldly as a mirror of the world. This is the same sense of self-possession which characterizes the dramatic artist who transforms himself into alien bodies and talks with their alien tongues and yet can project this transformation into written verse that exists in the outsitle world on its own. "Vhat verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Regnery Publishing, 1998, 117. (p.48) ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#NFDB
299:I am used to facing, at the end of a conference lecture, the question “So what is the difference between robust and antifragile?” or the more unenlightened and even more irritating “Antifragile is resilient, no?” The reaction to my answer is usually “Ah,” with the look “Why didn’t you say that before?” (of course I had said that before). Even the initial referee of the scientific article I wrote on defining and detecting antifragility entirely missed the point, conflating antifragility and robustness—and that was the scientist who pored over my definitions. It is worth re-explaining the following: the robust or resilient is neither harmed nor helped by volatility and disorder, while the antifragile benefits from them. But it takes some effort for the concept to sink in. A lot of things people call robust or resilient are just robust or resilient, the other half are antifragile. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
300:Setup: Alicia (the scientist) is speaking to an elementary school class about what she does. She’s just taken scads of questions from several young boys.
The teachers says, “Maybe you could talk for a little bit about what it’s like to be a women in science……for the girls.”
And I just got so sad. What the hell am I supposed to say? When I’m doing science my gender isn’t interesting to me. The science I’m doing is interesting. And okay, there was a past when women in science were anomalies but that was a dark and ridiculous time. We live in the future now. Can we just agree I can talk about gravitation without having to point out the existence of my vagina before I begin? It’s all so trivial. I half-way feel like I wasted my time going out there. I could have spent that time in the lab. We could have sent the possessor of a penis out there to handle the PR while I got some serious work done. ~ Dexter Palmer,#NFDB
301:In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
302:Anyway.
I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,#NFDB
303:The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end. ~ Robert Musil, #NFDB
304:The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,”that would be easy enough for children to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user- friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
305:The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would be easy enough for children to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
306:A scientist who studied monkeys on an island in Indonesia was able to teach a certain one to wash bananas in the river before eating them. Cleansed of sand and dirt, the food was more flavorful. The scientist who did this only because he was studying the learning capacity of monkeys did not imagine what would eventually happen. So he was surprised to see that the other monkeys on the island began to imitate the first one. "And then, one day, when a certain number of monkeys had learned to wash their bananas, the monkeys on all of the other islands in the archipelago began to do the same thing. What was most surprising, though, was that the other monkeys learned to do so without having had any contact with the island where the experiment had been conducted." He stopped. "Do you understand?" "No," I answered. "There are several similar scientific studies. The most common explanation is that when a certain number of people evolve, the entire human race begins to evolve. We don't know how many people are needed but we know that's how it works. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
307:This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcending element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the harmony of the spheres, the origin of life, the equations of a unified field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power, the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life'.
This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond. ~ Arthur Koestler,#NFDB
308:This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcending element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the harmony of the spheres, the origin of life, the equations of a unified field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power, the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life'.
This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond. ~ Arthur Koestler,#NFDB
309:But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo’s natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur – all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
310:Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis. ~ Krista Tippett, #NFDB
311:Knowledge as a past fact, as something dead and done with—knowledge by the time it gets into encyclopaedias and text-books—does consist of assertion, and those who treat it as an affair of encyclopaedias and text-books may be forgiven for thinking that it is assertion and nothing else. But those who look upon it as an affair of discovery and exploration have never fallen into that error. People who are acquainted with knowledge at first hand have always known that assertions are only answers to questions. So Plato described true knowledge as ‘dialectic’, the interplay of question and answer in the soul’s dialogue with itself; so Bacon pointed out once for all that the scientist’s real work was to interrogate nature, to put her, if need be, to the torture as a reluctant witness; so Kant mildly remarked that the test of an intelligent man was to know what questions to ask, and the same truth has lately dawned on the astonished gaze of the pragmatists. Questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge, assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force ~ R G Collingwood, #NFDB
312:For the admirable gift of himself, and for the magnificent service he renders humanity, what reward does our society offer the scientist? Have these servants of an idea the necessary means of work? Have they an assured existence, sheltered from care? The example of Pierre Curiee, and of others, shows that they have none of these things; and that more often, before they can secure possible working conditions, they have to exhaust their youth and their powers in daily anxieties. Our society, in which reigns an eager desire for riches and luxury, does not understand the value of science. It does not realize that science is a most precious part of its moral patrimony. Nor does it take sufficient cognizance of the fact that science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering. Neither public powers nor private generosity actually accord to science and to scientists the support and the subsidies indispensable to fully effective work. ~ Marie Curie, #NFDB
313:The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
314:Every elementary chemistry text must discuss the concept of a chemical element. Almost always, when that notion is introduced, its origin is attributed to the seventeenth-century chemist, Robert Boyle, in whose Sceptical Chymist the attentive reader will find a definition of ‘element’ quite close to that in use today. Reference to Boyle’s contribution helps to make the neophyte aware that chemistry did not begin with the sulfa drugs; in addition, it tells him that one of the scientist’s traditional tasks is to invent concepts of this sort. As a part of the pedagogic arsenal that makes a man a scientist, the attribution is immensely successful. Nevertheless, it illustrates once more the pattern of historical mistakes that misleads both students and laymen about the nature of the scientific enterprise. According to Boyle, who was quite right, his “definition” of an element was no more than a paraphrase of a traditional chemical concept; Boyle offered it only in order to argue that no such thing as a chemical element exists; as history, the textbook version of Boyle’s contribution is quite mistaken.3 ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
315:We can get some relatively clear thought in science. But even there it is not entirely clear because scientists are worried about their prestige and status, and so on. Sometimes they won't consider ideas that don't go along with their theories or with their prejudices. Nevertheless, science is aimed at seeing the fact, whether the scientist likes what he sees or not—looking at theories objectively, calmly, and without bias. To some extent, relatively coherent thought has been achieved better in science than in some other areas of life. Some results flowed out of science and technology which are quite impressive—a great power was released. But now we discover that whenever the time comes to use science we just forget the scientific method. We just say that the use of what scientists have discovered will be determined by the needs of our country, or by my need to make money, or by my need to defeat that religion or merely by my need to show what a great powerful person I am. So we see that relatively unpolluted thought has been used to develop certain things, and then we always trust to the most polluted thought to decide what to do with them. That's part of the incoherence ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
316:For a scientist, who has placed his faith in the testability of the scientific method, and in his own intellectual ability to figure things out for himself, egoism would tend to push him in the direction of a belief that the origin of the universe is explainable and rational. “He has no need for a supernatural explanation. In fact, he may even find the idea that a God created the universe repugnant. If there is a God who created the universe, and who can manipulate its properties from time to time, then the scientist’s proofs of natural laws, chemical properties and physical interactions would be relegated to second position behind God’s ultimate set of rules. A scientist may not embrace the demotion. “Another interesting thought is that the self-centeredness present to some degree in all human minds might cause us to consider any God to be a threat to humanity’s supremacy in the universe. “Think about it. If there is no God, who or what would be the greatest, most intelligent, most advanced being in the universe? Humans. So if a person has no convincing evidence one way or the other, his self-centeredness would lead him to conclude that there is no God – thus ratifying his own supremacy. ~ John L Betcher, #NFDB
317:When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe. In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock. Wang ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
318:The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not "the given" of experience but rather "the collected with difficulty." They are not what the scientist sees-at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations. The measurements to be performed on a pendulum are not the ones relevant to a case of constrained fall. Nor are the operations relevant for the elucidation of oxygen's properties uniformly the same as those required when investigating the characteristics of dephlogisticated air. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
319:It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. . . . The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognizes in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation.
And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego have become one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. . . .The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself. ~ Otto Weininger,#NFDB
320:It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. . . . The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognizes in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation.
And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego have become one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. . . . The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself. ~ Otto Weininger,#NFDB
321:The principal differences between law and science are as follows:
1. In the administration of the law, facts are necessary to enable the umpire (jury, judge) to decide whether rules have been broken and, if so, the type of penalty to apply. In science, facts are necessary to form new or better theories and to develop novel applications (for example, drugs, machines). Novelty is not a positive value in law. Instead, the lawyer looks for precedent. For the scientist, however, novelty is a value; new facts and theories are sought, whether or not they will prove useful.
2. If we endeavor to change objects or persons, the distinction between law (both as law making and law enforcing) and applied science disappears. In applying scientific knowledge, one seeks to change objects, or persons, into new forms. The scientific technologist may thus wish to shape a plastic material into the form of a chair, or a delinquent youth into a law-abiding adult. The aims of the legislator and the judge are often the same. Thus, legislators may wish to change people from drinkers into nondrinkers; or judges many want to change fathers who fail to support their dependent wives and children into fathers who do. This [is a] "therapeutic" function of law. ~ Thomas Szasz,#NFDB
322:What's your name?" he asked.
She'd turned to him with a deep frown, instantly terrifying him. About to turn to escape back into the bookshop, Walt was stopped by her shrug.
"Cora."
"That's a funny name."
"It isn't, actually." Cora's frown deepened. She pulled herself up to her full height of four foot three inches. 'Officially my name is Cori, but Grandma calls me Cora. I'm named in honor of Gerty Cori, the first woman winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. I bet you didn't know that."
"No," Walt admitted, embarrassed. "I didn't."
"What's your name?"
"Walt," he offered quietly, expecting her to retort that his was an even sillier name, but she didn't.
"After the scientist?"
Walt frowned, thrown. "What scientist?"
Cora shrugged. "Maybe Luis Walter Alvarez or Walter Reed, but... actually Walter Sutton is the most famous. He invented a theory about chromosomes and the Mendelian laws of inheritance." Cora let slip a little smile of satisfaction at the blank look on the boy's face. "Or maybe Walter Lewis-"
"No," Walt interrupted, "I've never heard of any of them."
"Oh." Cora folded her arms and tilted her nose upward. "Then who are you named after?" she asked, as if this was a given.
"Walt Whitman," he retorted. "The poet. ~ Menna van Praag,#NFDB
323:We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his work "junk", simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this even if we differ with his worldview... Yet where his work shows his worldview, it must be judged by its relationship to the Christian worldview.
If we stand as Christians before a man's canvas and recognize that he is a great artist in technical excellence, we have been fair with him as a man. Then we can say that his worldview is wrong. We can judge his views on the same basis as we judge anybody else- philosopher, common man, laborer, business man, or whatever. God's Word binds the great man and the small, the scientist and the simple, the king and the artist.
We should realize that if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art, it can be far more devastating than if it is expressed in poor art. The greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and it's worldview under the judgment of Christ and the Bible. The common reaction among many however, is just the opposite. Ordinarily, many seem to feel that the greater the art, the less we ought to be critical of its worldview. This we must reverse. ~ Francis A Schaeffer,#NFDB
324:Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light; in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his “criminal skull” as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose. When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don’t deny the dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it’s the very reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it’s actually suppression of what we know. It’s treating a friend as a stranger, and pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It’s like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours. Well, what you call “the secret” is exactly the opposite. I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
325:A thrilling sense of having been chosen for something is the best and the only certain thing in one whose glance surveys the world for the first time. If he monitors his feelings, he finds nothing he can accept without reservation. He seeks a possible beloved but can't tell whether it's the right one; he is capable of killing without being sure that he will have to. The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet
everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end. ~ Robert Musil,#NFDB
326:When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word "depression." Depression, most people know, used to be termed "melancholia," a word which appears in English as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. "Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a blank tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.
It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated -- the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer -- had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control. ~ William Styron,#NFDB
327:...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?
How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright,#NFDB
328:Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend, #NFDB
329:The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
330:All this means, then,” he threw in, “is that until further notice you refuse to be a human being!” “That’s about it. It has such a disagreeable touch of the dilettante. But,” Ulrich continued after some thought, “I am even prepared to admit something else, something quite different. The experts never get to the end of anything. It’s not only that they haven’t got to the end of anything today. But they can’t even picture the idea of their activities ever being complete. Perhaps they can’t even wish it. Can one imagine, for instance, that man will still have a soul once he has learnt to understand it completely and manage it biologically and psychologically? And yet that is the state of things we are trying to achieve! There it is. Knowledge is an attitude, a passion. Actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is just like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all true that the scientist goes out after truth. It is out after him. It is something he suffers from. The truth is true and the fact is real without taking any notice of him. All he has is the passion for it. He is a dipsomaniac whose tipple is facts, and that leaves its mark on his character. And he doesn’t care a damn whether what comes of his discoveries is something whole, human, perfect—or indeed, what comes of them! It’s all full of contradictions and passive suffering and at the same time enormously active and energetic. ~ Robert Musil, #NFDB
331:In other cases, however-those of Copernicus, Einstein, and contemporary nuclear theory, for example-considerable time elapses between the first consciousness of breakdown and the emergence of a new paradigm. When that occurs, the historian may capture at least a few hints of what extraordinary science is like. Faced with an admittedly fundamental anomaly in theory, the scientist's first effort will often be to isolate it more precisely and give it structure. Though now aware that they cannot be quite right, he will push the rules of normal science harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work. Simultaneously he will seek for ways of magnifying the breakdown, of making it more striking and perhaps also more suggestive than it had been when displayed in experiments the outcome of which was thought to be known in advance. And in the latter effort, more than in any other part of the post-paradigm development of science, he will look almost like our most prevalent image of the scientist. He will, in the first place, often seem a man searching at random, trying experiments just to see what will happen, looking for an effect whose nature he cannot quite guess. Simultaneously, since no experiment can be conceived without some sort of theory, the scientist in crisis will constantly try to generate speculative theories that, if successful, may disclose the road to a new paradigm and, if unsuccessful, can be surrendered with relative ease. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
332:The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone. The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told. The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another. The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have. The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them. The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate. The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix. The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
333:In his well-known statement in the Poetics that poetry has a higher truth than history since it expresses truth of general application whereas that of history is partial and limited, he is not speaking as a scientist nor would the statement commend itself to the scientific mind outside of Greece. There is no evidence, again, of the scientist’s point of view in the great passage where he sets forth the reason for the work of his life, his search into the nature of all living things: The glory, doubtless, of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation of these lowly things, but the heavens are high and far off, and the knowledge of celestial things that our senses give us, is scanty and dim. Living creatures, on the contrary, are at our door, and if we so desire we may gain full and certain knowledge of each and all. We take pleasure in a statue’s beauty; should not then the living fill us with delight? And all the more if in the spirit of the love of knowledge we search for causes and bring to light evidences of meaning. Then will nature’s purpose and her deep-seated laws be revealed in all things, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the beautiful. Did ever scientist outside of Greece so state the object of scientific research? To Aristotle, being a Greek, it was apparent that the full purpose of that high enterprise could not be expressed in any way except the way of poetry, and, being a Greek, he was able so to express it. Spirituality inevitably brings to our mind ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
334:The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual, even redemptive, but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it's a precious mote and, for the moment, it's the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave, an indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
335:there are no other professional communities in which individual creative work is so exclusively addressed to and evaluated by other members of the profession. The most esoteric of poets or the most abstract of theologians is far more concerned than the scientist with lay approbation of his creative work, though he may be even less concerned with approbation in general. That difference proves consequential. Just because he is working only for an audience of colleagues, an audience that shares his own values and beliefs, the scientist can take a single set of standards for granted. He need not worry about what some other group or school will think and can therefore dispose of one problem and get on to the next more quickly than those who work for a more heterodox group. Even more important, the insulation of the scientific community from society permits the individual scientist to concentrate his attention upon problems that he has good reason to believe he will be able to solve. Unlike the engineer, and many doctors, and most theologians, the scientist need not choose problems because they urgently need solution and without regard for the tools available to solve them. In this respect, also, the contrast between natural scientists and many social scientists proves instructive. The latter often tend, as the former almost never do, to defend their choice of a research problem—e.g., the effects of racial discrimination or the causes of the business cycle—chiefly in terms of the social importance of achieving a solution. Which group would one then expect to solve problems at a more rapid rate? The ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
336:Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Turgenev's poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has
analytically taken apart. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom desire coordinated in the light of all experience- can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom. ~ Will Durant,#NFDB
337:Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you.
Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration -- an idea that would underlie his new theory of gravity -- it was the "happiest thought of my life." On projects of far smaller weight, I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation, a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing.
All of the scientists I've known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life.
This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80's, why a visitor to Einstein's apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant with one hand while doing mathematical calculations with the other. This mixed blessing and burden must have been the "sweet hell" that Walt Whitman referred to when he realized at a young age that he was destined to be a poet. "Never more," he wrote, "shall I escape. ~ Alan Lightman,#NFDB
338:The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it’s more than about what you know. It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:
The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
339:How hard can it be to follow five black SUVs?” Serge leaned over the steering wheel. “Except we’re in Miami.” “So?” “Miami drivers are a breed unto their own. Always distracted.” He uncapped a coffee thermos and chugged. “Quick on the gas and the horn. No separation between vehicles, every lane change a new adventure. The worst of both worlds: They race around as if they are really good, but they’re really bad, like if you taught a driver’s-ed class with NASCAR films.” He watched the first few droplets hit the windshield. “Oh, and worst of all, most of them have never seen snow.” “But it’s not snow,” said Felicia. “It’s rain. And just a tiny shower.” “That’s right.” Serge hit the wipers and took another slug from the thermos. “Rain is the last thing you want when you’re chasing someone in Miami. They drive shitty enough as it is, but on top of that, snow is a foreign concept, which means they never got the crash course in traction judgment for when pavement slickness turns less than ideal. And because of the land-sea temperature differential, Florida has regular afternoon rain showers. Nothing big, over in a jiff. But minutes later, all major intersections in Miami-Dade are clogged with debris from spectacular smash-ups. In Northern states, snow teaches drivers real fast about the Newtonian physics of large moving objects. I haven’t seen snow either, but I drink coffee, so the calculus of tire-grip ratio is intuitive to my body. It feels like mild electricity. Sometimes it’s pleasant, but mostly I’m ambivalent. Then you’re chasing someone in the rain through Miami, and your pursuit becomes this harrowing slalom through wrecked traffic like a disaster movie where everyone’s fleeing the city from an alien invasion, or a ridiculous change in weather that the scientist played by Dennis Quaid warned about but nobody paid attention.” Serge held the mouth of the thermos to his mouth. “Empty. Fuck it— ~ Tim Dorsey, #NFDB
340:In order to understand how engineers endeavor to insure against such structural, mechanical, and systems failures, and thereby also to understand how mistakes can be made and accidents with far-reaching consequences can occur, it is necessary to understand, at least partly, the nature of engineering design. It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. While the practice of engineering may involve as much technical experience as the poet brings to the blank page, the painter to the empty canvas, or the composer to the silent keyboard, the understanding and appreciation of the process and products of engineering are no less accessible than a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. Indeed, just as we all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we have all experienced the essence of structual engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the most boring of cocktail parties without the social accident of either our bodies or our glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember those early efforts of ours to raise ourselves up among the towers of legs of our parents and their friends, then we can begin to appreciate the task and the achievements of engineers, whether they be called builders in Babylon or scientists in Los Alamos. For all of their efforts are to one end: to make something stand that has not stood before, to reassemble Nature into something new, and above all to obviate failure in the effort. ~ Henry Petroski, #NFDB
341:The immediate catalyst for the emergence of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which included three momentous discoveries in astronomy: Johannes Kepler delineated the rules that govern the movement of the planets, Galileo Galilei placed the sun at the center of the universe, and Isaac Newton discovered the force of gravity, invented calculus (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently discovered it at the same time), and used it to describe the three laws of motion. In so doing, Newton joined physics and astronomy and illustrated that even the deepest truths in the universe could be revealed by the methods of science. These contributions were celebrated in 1660 with the formation of the first scientific society in the world: the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, which elected Isaac Newton as its president in 1703. The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe to function according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher—was to employ the scientific method to discover the physical principles underlying the universe and thereby decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos. Success in the realm of science led eighteenth-century thinkers to assume that other aspects of human action, including political behavior, creativity, and art, could be improved by the application of reason, leading ultimately to an improved society and better conditions for all humankind. This confidence in reason and science affected all aspects of political and social life in Europe and soon spread to the North American colonies. There, the Enlightenment ideas that society can be improved through reason and that rational people have a natural right to the pursuit of happiness are thought to have contributed to the Jeffersonian democracy that we enjoy today in the United States. ~ Eric R Kandel, #NFDB
342:Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and “different” as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace…. Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated? As an example—a young man I know lately told me that he means to write a story about a scientist who wishes to dominate the earth, and who to accomplish his ends trains and overdevelops germs … and leads armies of them in the manner of the Egyptian plagues. I told him that although this theme has promise, it is made utterly commonplace by assigning the scientist a normal motive. There is nothing outré about wanting to conquer the earth; Alexander, Napoleon, and Wilhelm II wanted to do that. Instead, I told my friend, he should conceive a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself. That would be tolerably original. But after all, originality lies with the author. One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
343:The realist, then, would seek in behalf of philosophy the same renunciation the same rigour of procedure, that has been achieved in science. This does not mean that he would reduce philosophy to natural or physical science. He recognizes that the philosopher has undertaken certain peculiar problems, and that he must apply himself to these, with whatever method he may find it necessary to employ. It remains the business of the philosopher to attempt a wide synoptic survey of the world, to raise underlying and ulterior questions, and in particular to examine the cognitive and moral processes. And it is quite true that for the present no technique at all comparable with that of the exact sciences is to be expected. But where such technique is attainable, as for example in symbolic logic, the realist welcomes it. And for the rest he limits himself to a more modest aspiration. He hopes that philosophers may come like scientists to speak a common language, to formulate common problems and to appeal to a common realm of fact for their resolution. Above all he desires to get rid of the philosophical monologue, and of the lyric and impressionistic mode of philosophizing. And in all this he is prompted not by the will to destroy but by the hope that philosophy is a kind of knowledge, and neither a song nor a prayer nor a dream. He proposes, therefore, to rely less on inspiration and more on observation and analysis. He conceives his function to be in the last analysis the same as that of the scientist. There is a world out yonder more or less shrouded in darkness, and it is important, if possible, to light it up. But instead of, like the scientist, focussing the mind's rays and throwing this or that portion of the world into brilliant relief, he attempts to bring to light the outlines and contour of the whole, realizing too well that in diffusing so widely what little light he has, he will provide only a very dim illumination. ~ Ralph Barton Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical Background of the World War (1918), #NFDB
344:A Christian people doesn't mean a lot of goody-goodies. The Church has plenty of stamina, and isn't afraid of sin. On the contrary, she can look it in the face calmly and even take it upon herself, assume it at times, as Our Lord did. When a good workman's been at it for a whole week, surely he's due for a booze on Saturday night. Look: I'll define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old. You'll be saying that isn't a very theological definition. I agree...
Why does our earliest childhood always seem so soft and full of light? A kid's got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and he's really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness. Childhood and old age should be the two greatest trials of mankind. But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a child's joy. He just leaves it all to his mother, you see. Present, past, future -- his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile. Well, lad, if only they'd let us have our way, the Church might have given men that supreme comfort. Of course they'd each have their own worries to grapple with, just the same. Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy -- we'd never be able to pocket the devil once and for all, you may be sure. But man would have known he was the son of God; and therein lies your miracle. He'd have lived, he'd have died with that idea in his noddle -- and not just a notion picked up in books either -- oh, no! Because we'd have made that idea the basis of everything: habits and customs, relaxation and pleasure, down to the very simplest needs. That wouldn't have stopped the labourer ploughing, or the scientist swotting at his logarithms, or even the engineer making his playthings for grown-up people. What we would have got rid of, what we would have torn from the very heart of Adam, is that sense of his own loneliness...
God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is? ~ Georges Bernanos,#NFDB
345:It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist=s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
346:but in the meanwhile here were these slow undulations of lips and cheek, the articulate movements of tongue and jaw, the glow of alabaster skin.
Sometimes in the woods near the farm in Percussina he lay on the leaf-soft ground and listened to the two-tone song of the birds, high low high, high low high low, high low high low high. Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of “deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected from the what-ness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery.
Here in this woman's body the mystery could be seen. This apparently inert being, her self erased or buried beneath this never-ending story, this labyrinth of story-rooms in which more tales had been hidden than he was interested to hear. This toothsome sleepwalker. This blank. The rote-learned words poured out of her as he looked on, and while he unbuttoned and caressed. He exposed her nudity without compunction, touched it without guilt, manipulated her without any feelings of remorse. He was the scientist of her soul. In the smallest motion of an eyebrow, in the twitch of a muscle in her thigh, in a sudden minuscule curling of the left corner of her upper lip, he deduced the presence of life. Her self, that sovereign treasure, had not been destroyed. It slept and could be awakened. He whispered in her ear, "This is the last time you will ever tell this story. As you tell it, let it go." Slowly, phrase by phrase, episode by episode, he would unbuild the “only a man looking for the deeper truth would have seen it, her back arched in return. There was nothing wrong in what he did. He was her rescuer. She would thank him in time”
Excerpt From: Toppy. “The Enchantress of Florence - Salman Rushdie. ~ Salman Rushdie,#NFDB
347:We noted in Section II that an increasing reliance on textbooks or their equivalent was an invariable concomitant of the emergence of a first paradigm in any field of science. The concluding section of this essay will argue that the domination of a mature science by such texts significantly differentiates its developmental pattern from that of other fields. For the moment let us simply take it for granted that, to an extent unprecedented in other fields, both the layman’s and the practitioner’s knowledge of science is based on textbooks and a few other types of literature derived from them. Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field. Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
348:In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which is still popular today) to use alternatives only when refutations have already discredited the orthodox theory puts the cart before the horse. Also, some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis. A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with other ideas rather than with 'experience' and he must try to improve rather than discard the views that have failed in the competition. Proceeding in this way he will retain the theories of man and cosmos that are found in Genesis, or in the Pimander, he will elaborate them and use them to measure the success of evolution and other 'modern' views. He may then discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis. Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others in greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account. Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius, and not Dirac or von Neumann, are the models for presenting a knowledge of this kind in which the history of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself - it is essential for its further development as well as for giving content to the theories it contains at any particular moment. Experts and laymen, professionals and dilettani, truth-freaks and liars - they all are invited to participate in the contest and to make their contribution to the enrichment of our culture. The task of the scientist, however, is no longer 'to search for the truth', or 'to praise god', or 'to synthesize observations', or 'to improve predictions'. These are but side effects of an activity to which his attention is now mainly directed and which is 'to make the weaker case the stronger' as the sophists said, and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend, #NFDB
349:The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
350:Had she witnessed his swim? He didn’t see how she could have missed it if she’d indeed been lunching by the water. The more intriguing question was, had she liked what she’d seen? Ever the scientist, Darius couldn’t let the hypothesis go unchallenged. Ignoring his boots where they lay in the grass at the edge of the landing, he strode barefoot toward his quarry. “So I’m to understand that you lunch by the pond every day, Miss Greyson?” he asked as he stalked her through the shin-high grass. Her chin wobbled just a bit, and she took a nearly imperceptible step back. He’d probably not have noticed it if he hadn’t been observing her so closely. But what kind of scientist would he be if he didn’t attend to the tiniest of details? “Every day,” she confirmed, her voice impressively free of tremors. The lady knew how to put up a strong front. “After working indoors for several hours, it’s nice to have the benefits of fresh air and a change of scenery. The pond offers both.” He halted his advance about a foot away from her. “I imagine the scenery changed a little more than you were expecting today.” His lighthearted tone surprised him nearly as much as it did her. Her brow puckered as if he were an equation she couldn’t quite decipher. Well, that was only fair, since he didn’t have a clue about what he was trying to do, either. Surely not flirt with the woman. He didn’t have time for such vain endeavors. He needed to extricate himself from this situation. At once. Not knowing what else to do, Darius sketched a short bow and begged her pardon as if he were a gentleman in his mother’s drawing room instead of a soggy scientist dripping all over the vegetation. “I apologize for intruding on your solitude, Miss Greyson, and I hope I have not offended you with my . . . ah . . .” He glanced helplessly down at his wet clothing. “Dampness?” The amusement in his secretary’s voice brought his head up. “My father used to be a seaman, Mr. Thornton, and I grew up swimming in the Gulf. You aren’t the first man I’ve seen take a swim.” Though the way her gaze dipped again to his chest and the slow swallowing motion of her throat that followed seemed to indicate that she hadn’t been as unmoved by the sight as she would have him believe. That thought pleased him far more than it should have. “Be that as it may, I’ll take special care not to avail myself of the pond during the midday hours in the future.” He expected her to murmur some polite form of thanks for his consideration, but she didn’t. No, she stared at him instead. Long enough that he had to fight the urge to squirm under her perusal. “You know, Mr. Thornton,” she said with a cock of her head that gave him the distinct impression she was testing her own hypothesis. “I believe your . . . dampness has restored your ability to converse with genteel manners.” Her lips curved in a saucy grin that had his pulse leaping in response. “Perhaps you should swim more often. ~ Karen Witemeyer, #NFDB
351:Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for "where" has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made. Timeless, spaceless, single, lonely, Yet sublimely Three, Thou art grandly, always, only God is Unity! Lone in grandeur, lone in glory, Who shall tell Thy wondrous story? Awful Trinity! FREDERICK W. FABER It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good - about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. And for this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularlzation of our religion and the decay of our inner lives. Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. "What bearing does this have on my life?" he may ask. "What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?" To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene. The much-quoted advice of Alexander Pope, "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man," if followed literally would destroy any possibility of man's ever knowing himself in any but the most superficial way. We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is. For this reason the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is in fact as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
352:It is thus by an integralisation of our divided being that the Divine Shakti in the Yoga will proceed to its object; for liberation, perfection, mastery are dependent on this integralisation, since the little wave on the surface cannot control its own movement, much less have any true control over the vast life around it. The Shakti, the power of the Infinite and the Eternal descends within us, works, breaks up our present psychological formations, shatters every wall, widens, liberates, presents us with always newer and greater powers of vision, ideation, perception and newer and greater life-motives, enlarges and newmodels increasingly the soul and its instruments, confronts us with every imperfection in order to convict and destroy it, opens to a greater perfection, does in a brief period the work of many lives or ages so that new births and new vistas open constantly within us. Expansive in her action, she frees the consciousness from confinement in the body; it can go out in trance or sleep or even waking and enter into worlds or other regions of this world and act there or carry back its experience. It spreads out, feeling the body only as a small part of itself, and begins to contain what before contained it; it achieves the cosmic consciousness and extends itself to be commensurate with the universe. It begins to know inwardly and directly and not merely by external observation and contact the forces at play in the world, feels their movement, distinguishes their functioning and can operate immediately upon them as the scientist operates upon physical forces, accept their action and results in our mind, life, body or reject them or modify, change, reshape, create immense new powers and movements in place of the old small functionings of the nature. We begin to perceive the working of the forces of universal Mind and to know how our thoughts are created by that working, separate from within the truth and falsehood of our perceptions, enlarge their field, extend and illumine their significance, become master of our own minds and active to shape the movements of Mind in the world around us. We begin to perceive the flow and surge of the universal life-forces, detect the origin and law of our feelings, emotions, sensations, passions, are free to accept, reject, new-create, open to wider, rise to higher planes of Life-Power. We begin to perceive too the key to the enigma of Matter, follow the interplay of Mind and Life and Consciousness upon it, discover more and more its instrumental and resultant function and detect ultimately the last secret of Matter as a form not merely of Energy but of involved and arrested or unstably fixed and restricted consciousness and begin to see too the possibility of its liberation and plasticity of response to higher Powers, its possibilities for the conscious and no longer the more than half-inconscient incarnation and self-expression of the Spirit. All this and more becomes more and more possible as the working of the Divine Shakti increases in us and, against much resistance or labour to respond of our obscure consciousness, through much struggle and movement of progress and regression and renewed progress necessitated by the work of intensive transformation of a half-inconscient into a conscious substance, moves to a greater purity, truth, height, range. All depends on the psychic awakening in us, the completeness of our response to her and our growing surrender. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 183, #NFDB
353:My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.
For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’.
Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme. ~ Muhammad Asad,#NFDB
354:To Joy
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter from Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly, your sanctuary.
Your spells bind again
What the fashion sword shared
Beggars become prince brothers
Where your gentle wing rests.
Choir us
Be embraced, millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers - over the stars
Must a dear father live.
Who succeeded the big hit,
To be a friend's friend
Whoever has won a devoted wife,
Mix in his cheers!
Yes - whoever even has a soul
His names on the earth!
And if you never could, steal
Weeping from this covenant
Choir us
What inhabits the great ring,
Pay homage to sympathy!
She leads to the stars
Where the unknown is enthroned.
All beings drink joy
On the breasts of nature
All good, all bad,
Follow their rose trail.
She gave us kisses and vines
A friend tested in death
Pleasure was given to the worm,
And the cherub stands before God.
Choir us
Are you falling, millions?
Do you suspect the Creator, world?
Find him over the canopy of stars.
He must live above the stars.
The strong pen is called joy
In eternal nature.
Joy, joy, drives the wheels
In the great world clock.
She lures flowers from the bud,
Suns from the firmament,
She rolls spheres in the rooms,
Which the seer pipe does not know.
Choir us
Glad how its suns fly
By heaven's glorious plan
Run, brothers, your path,
Happy as a hero to victory.
From the truth, the mirror of fire
She smiles at the researcher.
To the virtue of a steep hill
Guide the path of the sufferer.
On the mountains of the sun of faith
If you see their flags waving
Through the crack of blasted saerge
You stand in the choir of angels.
Chorus
Endure courageously, millions!
Tolerate for the better world!
Up above the starry canopy
Will a great god reward.
Gods cannot be repaid
It's nice to be like them.
Sorrow and poverty should report,
Rejoice with the happy.
Resentment and vengeance be forgotten,
Pardon our mortal enemy,
No tear shall press him,
No regrets gnaw him.
Choir us
Our debt register be destroyed!
The whole world is paved!
Brothers, over the stars
Judge God as we judged.
Joy gushes in cups,
In the cluster of golden blood
Drink gentleness cannibals,
Despair heroism
Brothers, fly from your seats
When the full Roman circles
Let the foam rise to the sky:
This glass to the good spirit.
Choir us
Praise the vortex of the stars
Who praises the seraph's hymn,
This glass to the good spirit
Above the starry tent up there!
Strong courage in grave suffering
Help where innocence weeps
Eternal sworn oaths,
Truth against friend and foe,
Male pride in front of royal thrones
Brothers, there is good and blood. -
His crowns to merit,
Downfall of the brood of lies!
Choir us
Closes the sacred circle more closely
Swear by this golden wine:
To be faithful to the vow
Swear it to the judge of the stars!
Rescue from chains of tyrants,
Generosity even to the villain,
Hope in the deathbeds
Mercy on the high court!
Let the dead live too!
Brothers, drink and join in
Let all sinners forgive
And no longer be hell.
Choir us
A cheerful farewell hour!
Sweet sleep in the shroud!
Brothers - a gentle saying
From the mouth of the judge of the dead.
To Joy
Joy, beautiful spark of Gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, fire-imbibed,
Heavenly, thy sanctuary.
Thy magic powers re-unite
What custom's sword has divided
Beggars become Princes' brothers
Where thy gentle wing abides.
Chorus
Be embraced, millions!
This kiss to the entire world!
Brothers - above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.
Whoever has had the great fortune,
To be a friend's friend,
Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife,
Add his to our jubilation!
Indeed, whoever can call even one soul
His own on this earth!
And whoever was never able to must creep
Tearfully away from this circle.
Chorus
Those who dwell in the great circle,
Pay homage to sympathy!
It leads to the stars,
Where the Unknown reigns.
Joy all creatures drink
At nature's bosoms;
All, Just and Unjust,
Follow her rose-petalled path.
Kisses she gave us, and Wine,
A friend, proven in death,
Pleasure was given (even) to the worm,
And the Cherub stands before God.
Chorus
You bow down, millions?
Can you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy.
Above the stars He must dwell.
Joy is called the strong motivation
In eternal nature.
Joy, joy moves the wheels
In the universal time machine.
Flowers it calls forth from their buds,
Suns from the Firmament,
Spheres it moves far out in Space,
Where our telescopes cannot reach.
Chorus
Joyful, as His suns are flying,
Across the Firmament's splendid design,
Run, brothers, run your race,
Joyful, as a hero going to conquest.
As truth's fiery reflection
It smiles at the scientist.
To virtue's steep hill
It leads the sufferer on.
Atop faith's lofty summit
One sees its flags in the wind,
Through the cracks of burst-open coffins,
One sees it stand in the angels' chorus.
Chorus
Endure courageously, millions!
Endure for the better world!
Above the starry canopy
A great God will reward you.
Gods one cannot ever repay,
It is beautiful, though, to be like them.
Sorrow and Poverty, come forth
And rejoice with the joyful ones.
Anger and revenge be forgotten,
Our deadly enemy be forgiven,
Not one tear shall he shed anymore,
No feeling of remorse shall pain him.
Chorus
The account of our misdeeds be destroyed!
Reconciled the entire world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy
God judges as we judged.
Joy is bubbling in the glasses,
Through the grapes' golden blood
Cannibals drink gentleness,
And despair drinks courage
Brothers, fly from your seats,
When the full rummer is going around,
Let the foam gush up to heaven *:
This glass to the good spirit.
Chorus
He whom star clusters adore,
He whom the Seraphs' hymn praises,
This glass to him, the good spirit,
Above the starry canopy!
Resolve and courage for great suffering,
Help there, where innocence weeps,
Eternally may last all sworn Oaths,
Truth towards friend and enemy,
Men's pride before Kings' thrones
Brothers, even it if meant our Life and blood,
Give the crowns to those who earn them,
Defeat to the pack of liars!
Chorus
Close the holy circle tighter,
Swear by this golden wine:
To remain true to the Oath,
Swear it by the Judge above the stars!
Delivery from tyrants' chains,
Generosity also towards the villain,
Hope on the deathbeds,
Mercy from the final judge!
Also the dead shall live!
Brothers, drink and chime in,
All sinners shall be forgiven,
And hell shall be no more.
Chorus
A serene hour of farewell!
Sweet rest in the shroud!
Brothers a mild sentence
From the mouth of the final judge!
Many thanks to Oldpoetry reader Vladimir for locating the original version. http://www.raptusassociation.org/
~ Friedrich Schiller, Ode To Joy - With Translation
,#NFDB
355:
Can a Yogi attain to a state of consciousness in which he can know all things, answer all questions, relating even to abstruse scientific problems, such as, for example, the theory of relativity?
Theoretically and in principle it is not impossible for a Yogi to know everything; all depends upon the Yogi.
But there is knowledge and knowledge. The Yogi does not know in the way of the mind. He does not know everything in the sense that he has access to all possible information or because he contains all the facts of the universe in his mind or because his consciousness is a sort of miraculous encyclopaedia. He knows by his capacity for a containing or dynamic identity with things and persons and forces. Or he knows because he lives in a plane of consciousness or is in contact with a consciousness in which there is the truth and the knowledge.
If you are in the true consciousness, the knowledge you have will also be of the truth. Then, too, you can know directly, by being one with what you know. If a problem is put before you, if you are asked what is to be done in a particular matter, you can then, by looking with enough attention and concentration, receive spontaneously the required knowledge and the true answer. It is not by any careful application of theory that you reach the knowledge or by working it out through a mental process. The scientific mind needs these methods to come to its conclusions. But the Yogi's knowledge is direct and immediate; it is not deductive. If an engineer has to find out the exact position for the building of an arch, the line of its curve and the size of its opening, he does it by calculation, collating and deducing from his information and data. But a Yogi needs none of these things; he looks, has the vision of the thing, sees that it is to be done in this way and not in another, and this seeing is his knowledge.
Although it may be true in a general way and in a certain sense that a Yogi can know all things and can answer all questions from his own field of vision and consciousness, yet it does not follow that there are no questions whatever of any kind to which he would not or could not answer. A Yogi who has the direct knowledge, the knowledge of the true truth of things, would not care or perhaps would find it difficult to answer questions that belong entirely to the domain of human mental constructions. It may be, he could not or would not wish to solve problems and difficulties you might put to him which touch only the illusion of things and their appearances. The working of his knowledge is not in the mind. If you put him some silly mental query of that character, he probably would not answer. The very common conception that you can put any ignorant question to him as to some super-schoolmaster or demand from him any kind of information past, present or future and that he is bound to answer, is a foolish idea. It is as inept as the expectation from the spiritual man of feats and miracles that would satisfy the vulgar external mind and leave it gaping with wonder.
Moreover, the term "Yogi" is very vague and wide. There are many types of Yogis, many lines or ranges of spiritual or occult endeavour and different heights of achievement, there are some whose powers do not extend beyond the mental level; there are others who have gone beyond it. Everything depends on the field or nature of their effort, the height to which they have arrived, the consciousness with which they have contact or into which they enter.
Do not scientists go sometimes beyond the mental plane? It is said that Einstein found his theory of relativity not through any process of reasoning, but through some kind of sudden inspiration. Has that inspiration anything to do with the Supermind?
The scientist who gets an inspiration revealing to him a new truth, receives it from the intuitive mind. The knowledge comes as a direct perception in the higher mental plane illumined by some other light still farther above. But all that has nothing to do with the action of Supermind and this higher mental level is far removed from the supramental plane. Men are too easily inclined to believe that they have climbed into regions quite divine when they have only gone above the average level. There are many stages between the ordinary human mind and the Supermind, many grades and many intervening planes. If an ordinary man were to get into direct contact even with one of these intermediate planes, he would be dazzled and blinded, would be crushed under the weight of the sense of immensity or would lose his balance; and yet it is not the Supermind.
Behind the common idea that a Yogi can know all things and answer all questions is the actual fact that there is a plane in the mind where the memory of everything is stored and remains always in existence. All mental movements that belong to the life of the earth are memorised and registered in this plane. Those who are capable of going there and care to take the trouble, can read in it and learn anything they choose. But this region must not be mistaken for the supramental levels. And yet to reach even there you must be able to silence the movements of the material or physical mind; you must be able to leave aside all your sensations and put a stop to your ordinary mental movements, whatever they are; you must get out of the vital; you must become free from the slavery of the body. Then only you can enter into that region and see. But if you are sufficiently interested to make this effort, you can arrive there and read what is written in the earth's memory.
Thus, if you go deep into silence, you can reach a level of consciousness on which it is not impossible for you to receive answers to all your questions. And if there is one who is consciously open to the plenary truth of the supermind, in constant contact with it, he can certainly answer any question that is worth an answer from the supramental Light. The queries put must come from some sense of the truth and reality behind things. There are many questions and much debated problems that are cobwebs woven of mere mental abstractions or move on the illusory surface of things. These do not pertain to real knowledge; they are a deformation of knowledge, their very substance is of the ignorance. Certainly the supramental knowledge may give an answer, its own answer, to the problems set by the mind's ignorance; but it is likely that it would not be at all satisfactory or perhaps even intelligible to those who ask from the mental level. You must not expect the supramental to work in the way of the mind or demand that the knowledge in truth should be capable of being pieced together with the half-knowledge in ignorance. The scheme of the mind is one thing, but Supermind is quite another and it would no longer be supramental if it adapted itself to the exigencies of the mental scheme. The two are incommensurable and cannot be put together.
When the consciousness has attained to supramental joys, does it no longer take interest in the things of the mind?
The supramental does not take interest in mental things in the same way as the mind. It takes its own interest in all the movements of the universe, but it is from a different point of view and with a different vision. The world presents to it an entirely different appearance; there is a reversal of outlook and everything is seen from there as other than what it seems to the mind and often even the opposite. Things have another meaning; their aspect, their motion and process, everything about them, are watched with other eyes. Everything here is followed by the supermind; the mind movements and not less the vital, the material movements, all the play of the universe have for it a very deep interest, but of another kind. It is about the same difference as that between the interest taken in a puppet-play by one who holds the strings and knows what the puppets are to do and the will that moves them and that they can do only what it moves them to do, and the interest taken by another who observes the play but sees only what is happening from moment to moment and knows nothing else. The one who follows the play and is outside its secret has a stronger, an eager and passionate interest in what will happen and he gives an excited attention to its unforeseen or dramatic events; the other, who holds the strings and moves the show, is unmoved and tranquil. There is a certain intensity of interest which comes from ignorance and is bound up with illusion, and that must disappear when you are out of the ignorance. The interest that human beings take in things founds itself on the illusion; if that were removed, they would have no interest at all in the play; they would find it dry and dull. That is why all this ignorance, all this illusion has lasted so long; it is because men like it, because they cling to it and its peculiar kind of appeal that it endures.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, 93?
,#NFDB
72 Integral Yoga
4 Psychology
4 Christianity
3 Yoga
3 Philosophy
2 Science
2 Poetry
2 Integral Theory
2 Fiction
1 Occultism
1 Hinduism
1 Education
1 Cybernetics
1 Alchemy
29 Sri Aurobindo
26 Nolini Kanta Gupta
22 The Mother
9 Satprem
9 A B Purani
4 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
4 George Van Vrekhem
3 Jordan Peterson
2 Swami Krishnananda
2 R Buckminster Fuller
2 H P Lovecraft
2 Aldous Huxley
9 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
5 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
4 The Secret Doctrine
4 Preparing for the Miraculous
4 Essays Divine And Human
4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
3 The Synthesis Of Yoga
3 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
3 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
3 On the Way to Supermanhood
3 Maps of Meaning
3 Letters On Yoga I
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
2 The Study and Practice of Yoga
2 The Phenomenon of Man
2 The Perennial Philosophy
2 The Human Cycle
2 Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Questions And Answers 1954
2 Questions And Answers 1953
2 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
2 On Education
2 Lovecraft - Poems
2 Letters On Yoga IV
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Isha Upanishad
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A scientist once thought that he had clinched the issue and cut the Gordian knot when he declared triumphantly with reference to spirit sances: "Very significant is the fact that spirits appear only in closed chambers, in half obscurity, to somnolent minds; they are nowhere in the open air, in broad daylight to the wide awake and vigilant intellect!" Well, if the fact is as it is stated, what does it prove? Night alone reveals the stars, during the day they vanish, but that is no proof that stars are not existent. Rather the true scientific spirit should seek to know why (or how) it is so, if it is so, and such a fact would exactly serve as a pointer, a significant starting ground. The attitude of the jesting Pilate is not helpful even to scientific inquiry. This matter of the Spirits we have taken only as an illustration and it must not be understood that this is a domain of high mysticism; rather the contrary. The spiritualists' approach to Mysticism is not the right one and is fraught with not only errors but dangers. For the spiritualists approach their subject with the entire scientific apparatus the only difference being that the Scientist does not believe while the spiritualist believes.
Mystic realities cannot be reached by the scientific consciousness, because they are far more subtle than the subtlest object that science can contemplate. The neutrons and positrons are for science today the finest and profoundest object-forces; they belong, it is said, almost to a borderl and where physics ends. Nor for that reason is a mystic reality something like a mathematical abstraction, -n for example. The mystic reality is subtler than the subtlest of physical things and yet, paradoxical to say, more concrete than the most concrete thing that the senses apprehend.
0.00 - The Wellspring of Reality, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
Science's self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would require the Scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical-because synergetically weightless. Metaphysical has been science's designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected-like it or not-life is but a dream.Science has found no up or down directions of Universe, yet scientists are personally so ill-coordinated that they all still personally and sensorially see "solids" going up or down-as, for instance, they see the Sun "going down." Sensorially disconnected from their theoretically evolved information, scientists discern no need on their part to suggest any educational reforms to correct the misconceiving that science has tolerated for half a millennium.
Society depends upon its scientists for just such educational reform guidance.
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When the gulf between actual life and the temperament of the thinker is too great, we see as the result a sort of withdrawing of the Mind from life in order to act with a greater freedom in its own sphere. The poet living among his brilliant visions, the artist absorbed in his art, the philosopher thinking out the problems of the intellect in his solitary chamber, the Scientist, the scholar caring only for their studies and their experiments, were often in former days, are even now not unoften the Sannyasins of the intellect. To the work they have done for humanity, all its past bears record.
But such seclusion is justified only by some special activity.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The modern critical self-consciousness in the artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity the Scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting, changing the conditions of our reactions, mental or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarm and constitutes almost the whole of Valry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn.
The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualitiessuch as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
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Like the modern scientist the artist or craftsman too of today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher. The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the object of inquiry and investigation and expression and revelation for the Scientist as well as for the artist. The external sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The artist and the Scientist are occult alchemists. What to make of this, for example:
Beyond the shapes of empire, the capes of Carbonek, over
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, what such an uncompromising individualism fails to recognise is that individuality and ego are not the same thing, that the individual may have his individuality intact and entire and yet sacrifice his ego, that the soul of man is a much greater thing than his vital being. It is simply ignoring the fact and denying the truth to say that man is only a fighting animal and not a loving god, that the self within the individual realises itself only through competition and not co-operation. It is an error to conceive of society as a mere parallelogram of forces, to suppose that it has risen simply out of the struggle of individual interests and continues to remain by that struggle. Struggle is only one aspect of the thing, a particular form at a particular stage, a temporary manifestation due to a particular system and a particular habit and training. It would be nearer the truth to say that society came into being with the demand of the individual soul to unite with the individual soul, with the stress of an Over-soul to express itself in a multitude of forms, diverse yet linked together and organised in perfect harmony. Only, the stress for union manifested itself first on the material plane as struggle: but this is meant to be corrected and transcended and is being continually corrected and transcended by a secret harmony, a real commonality and brotherhood and unity. The individual is not so self-centred as the individualists make him to be, his individuality has a much vaster orbit and fulfils itself only by fulfilling others. the Scientists have begun to discover other instincts in man than those of struggle and competition; they now place at the origin of social grouping an instinct which they name the herd-instinct: but this is only a formulation in lower terms, a translation on the vital plane of a higher truth and reality the fundamental oneness and accord of individuals and their spiritual impulsion to unite.
However, individualism has given us a truth and a formula which collectivism ignored. Self-determination is a thing which has come to stay. Each and every individual is free, absolutely free and shall freely follow his own line of growth and development and fulfilment. No extraneous power shall choose and fix what is good or evil for him, nor coerce and exploit him for its own benefit. But that does not necessarily mean that collectivism has no truth in it; collectivism also, as much as individualism, has a lesson for us and we should see whether we can harmonise the two. Collectivism signifies that the individual should not look to himself alone, should not be shut up in his freedom but expand himself and envelop others in a wider freedom, see other creatures in himself and himself in other creatures, as the Gita says. Collectivism demands that the individual need not and should not exhaust himself entirely in securing and enjoying his personal freedom, but that he can and should work for the salvation of others; the truth it upholds is this that the individual is from a certain point of view only a part of the group and by ignoring the latter it ignores itself in the end.
0 1963-12-07 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I think (I think, like the Scientists it appears) I can announce that something is getting organized in the Subconscientits beginning to get organizedin the subconscient of individuals as well as in the general Subconscient. Its less unconscious (!) Its a bit more yes, a bit more conscious, reflective and organizeda very faint beginning of organization, very little, but a growth in consciousness; it isnt quite so unconscious any more.
Its always the last part of the night that I spend there. You remember that story of the supramental ship and how things were organized by the will, not by external means? Well, thats the action which is beginning to exist in the Subconscient.
0 1964-03-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Perhaps the modern scientific mind that has studied atoms would understand better. Its the same kind of understanding as that of the Scientist who analyzes the constitution of Matter. I distinctly feel it is an extension of that study and that its the only true approach for the most material part of Matter. Any psychological explanation is meaningless.1
This very morning, I was following the movement, observing the control this Vibration of Truth has in the body in the presence of certain disorders (very small things in the body, you know: discomforts, disorders), I was observing how this Vibration of Truth abolishes those disorders and discomforts. It was very clear, very obvious, and ABSOLUTELY REMOVED from any spiritual notion, from any religious notion, from any psychological notion, so that the person who possessed this knowledge of opposition of one vibration to the other very clearly didnt in any way need to be a disciple or someone with philosophical knowledge or anything at all: he only had to have mastered this in order to realize a perfectly harmonious existence.
0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I think this is what Sri Aurobindo meant; its only once the other consciousness is developed that the Scientist will smile; he will say, Yes, this is all very nice, but
Basically, one cannot lead to the other. Except through a phenomenon of grace; if there is inwardly an absolute sincerity enabling the Scientist to see, to have the foreknowledge, the perception of the point at which things elude him, then that may lead him to the other state of consciousness, but NOT THROUGH HIS METHODS. There must be something must give in something must give in and accept the new methods, the new perceptions, the new vibrations, the new state of soul.
Then its an individual question. It isnt a question of class or category: its the Scientist who becomes ready to be something else.
(silence)
0 1966-09-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oddly, these last few days again, this has been the subject of my meditations (not willed ones: they are imposed from above). Because in all the transition from plant to animal and from animal to man (especially from animal to man), the differences of form are, ultimately, minor: the true transformation is the intervention of another agent of consciousness. All the differences between the life of the animal and the life of man stem from the intervention of the Mind; but the substance is essentially the same and it obeys the same laws of formation and construction. There isnt much difference, for instance, between the calf being formed in a cows womb and the child being formed in its mothers womb. There is one difference: that of the Minds intervention. But if we envisage a PHYSICAL being, that is, as visible as the physical now is and with the same density, for instance a body that wouldnt need blood circulation and bones (especially these two things: the skeleton and blood circulation) its very hard to imagine. And as long as it is like this, with this blood circulation, this functioning of the heart, we could imaginewe can imagine the renewal of strength, of energy through a power of the Spirit, through other means than food. Its conceivable. But the rigidity, the solidity of the body, how is it possible without a skeleton? So it would be an infinitely greater transformation than that from animal to man; it would be a transition from man to a being that would no longer be built in the same way, that would no longer function in the same way, that would be like a densification or concretization of something. Up till now, it doesnt correspond to anything we have seen physically, unless the Scientists have found something I am not aware of.
We may conceive of a new light or force giving the cells a sort of spontaneous life, a spontaneous strength.
0 1969-02-01, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body,for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. the Scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.
Sri Aurobindo
02.08 - Jules Supervielle, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
His poetry is very characteristic and adds almost a new vein to the spirit and manner of French poetry. He has bypassed the rational and emotional tradition of his adopted country, brought in a mystic way of vision characteristic of the East. This mysticism is not however the normal spiritual way but a kind of oblique sight into what is hidden behind the appearance. By the oblique way I mean the sideway to enter into the secret of things, a passage opening through the side. The mystic vision has different ways of approachone may look at the thing straight, face to face, being level with it with a penetrating gaze, piercing a direct entry into the secrets behind. This frontal gaze is also the normal human way of knowing and understanding, the scientific way. It becomes mystic when it penetrates sufficiently behind and strikes a secret source of another light and sight, that is, the inner sight of the soul. The normal vision which I said is the Scientist's vision, stops short at a certain distance and so does not possess the key to the secret knowledge. But an aspiring vision can stretch itself, drill into the surface obstacle confronting it, and make its contact with the hidden ray behind. There is also another mystic way, not a gaze inward but a gaze upward. The human intelligence and the higher brain consciousness seeks a greater and intenser light, a vaster knowledge and leaps upward as it were. There develops a penetrating gaze towards heights up and above, to such a vision the mystery of the spirit slowly reveals itself. That is Vedantic mysticism. There is a look downward also below the life-formation and one enters into contact with forces and beings and creatures of another type, a portion of which is named Hell or Hades in Europe, and in India Ptl and rastal. But here we are speaking of another way, not a frontal or straight movement, but as I said, splitting the side and entering into it, something like opening the shell of a mother of pearl and finding the pearl inside. There is a descriptive mystic: the suprasensuous experience is presented in images and feeling forms. That is the romantic way. There is an explanatory mysticism: the suprasensuous is set in intellectual or mental terms, making it somewhat clear to the normal understanding. That is I suppose classical mysticism. All these are more or less direct ways, straight approaches to the mystic reality. But the oblique is differentit is a seeking of the mind and an apprehension of the senses that are allusive, indirect, that move through contraries and negations, that point to a different direction in order just to suggest the objective aimed at. The Vedantic (and the Scientific too) is the straight, direct, rectilinear gaze the Vedantin says, May I look at the Sun with a transfixed gaze'; whether he looks upward or inward or downward. But the modem mystic is of a different mould. He has not that clear absolute vision, he has the apprehension of an aspiring consciousness. His is not religious poetry for that matter, but it is an aspiration and a yearning to perceive and seize truth and reality that eludes the senses, but seems to be still there. We shall understand better by taking a poem of his as example. Thus:
Alter Ego
02.11 - Hymn to Darkness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is said, the occultists say, that between the light of the day, that is to say, the light of the ordinary consciousness and the higher spiritual light, there is an interim world, an intermediate zone of consciousness. When one leaves the earthly day, the normal consciousness and goes within and to the heights, towards the other Light, one enters at first into a dark region (the selva oscura of Dante). Physically also, the Scientists say today that when you leave the earth's atmosphere, from a certain height you no longer see the earthly light but you dive into a darkness where the sun does not shine in its glory as on earth. You see and feel the sunlight again when you approach the sun and are about to be consumed in its fires. In the same way, we are told that on the spiritual path too, the path of inner consciousness, when you leave the ordinary consciousness, when you lose that normal light and yet have not arrived at the other higher light you grope in an intermediary region of darkness. You have lost the lower knowledge and have not yet gained the higher knowledge, then you are in that uncertain world of greyness or darkness. Or it happens also that while in the comparatively faint light of the ordinary consciousness, you are suddenly confronted with the Superior Lightthrough some grace perhapsyou cannot stand the light and get blinded and see sheer darkness. Again, the infinite sky in its fathomless depth appears to the naked eye blue, deep blue, blue-black. Light concentrated, solidified, materialised becomes a speck of darkness to the human eye. Do we not say today that a particle of matter (consolidated darkness) is only a quantum of concentrated light-energy?
Something of these supraphysical experiences must have entered into the consciousness of the modern poets who have also fallen in love with darkness and blackness -have become adorers, although they do not know, of Shyma and Shyma.
03.05 - Some Conceptions and Misconceptions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The exclusive concentration was the logical and inevitable final term of a movement of separativity and exteriorisation. It had its necessity and utility. Its special function was utilised by Nature for precision and perfection in details of execution in the most material order of reality. Indeed, what can be more exact and accurate than the laws of physics, the mathematical laws that govern the movements of the material particles? Furthermore, if we look at the Scientist himself, do we not find in him an apt image of the same phenomenon? A scientist means a specialist the more specialised and restricted his view, the surer he is likely to be in his particular domain. And specialised knowledge means a withdrawal from other fields and viewpoints of knowledge, an ignorance of them. Likewise, a workman who moulds the head of a pin is all concentrated upon that single point of existencehe forgets the whole world and himself in that act whose perfect execution seems to depend upon the measure of his self-oblivion. But evidently this is not bound to be so. A one-pointed self-absorption that is Ignoranceis certainly an effective way of dealing with material objectsthings of Ignorance; but it is not the only way. It is a way or mechanism adopted by Nature in a certain status under certain conditions. One need not always forget oneself in the act in order to do the act perfectly. An unconscious instinctive act is not always best doneit can be done best consciously, intuitively. A wider knowledge, a greater acquaintance with objects and facts and truths of other domains too is being more and more insisted upon as a surer basis of specialisation. The pinpointed (one might almost say geometrically pointed) consciousness in Matter that resolves itself into unconsciousness acts perfectly but blindly; the vast consciousness also acts there with absolute perfection but consciouslyconscious in the highest degree.
As we have said, super-consciousness does not confine itself to the supreme status alone, to the domain of pure infinity, but it comes down and embraces the most inferior status too, the status of the finite. Precisely because it is infinity, it is not bound to its infinity but can express its infinity in and through infinite limits.
04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In India we have an echo of the transition, rather perhaps, she held up the type of the transition required. For here the evolution seems to have been more gradual and the steps are more clearly visible leading one to the other. India maintained an unbroken continuity in the cyclic change of the human consciousness. She was coeval with Egypt and Chaldea, Sumeria and Babylon: she communed with them perhaps in similar and parallel terms. And yet she changed or evolved and knew to express herself in other terms in other times. She had talked in mystic terms with the mystics and later on she talked in rational terms with rationalists. And today we see signs of her parleying with the Scientists in scientific terms. That is how India still lives, while Egypt and Chaldea have gone the way of Atlantis and Gondwanaland. For something is enshrined there which is eternal, something living and dynamic which is pressing forward to manifest and embody itself, some supreme truth and reality of the future which she is fostering within her to deliver to nature and humanitya new humanity with a new nature.
The Olympians as opposed to the Chthonian gods. The Olympians were white in colour, the Chthonians black or blood-red: the Olympian temples faced the East, while the Chthonian faced the West and so on.
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed the second way of approach to the problem is the positivist's own way. That is to say, let us take our stand on the terra firmaof the physical and probe into it and find out whether there are facts there which open the way or point to the other side of nature, whether there are signs, hints, intimations, factors involved there that lead to conclusions, if not inevitable, at least conformable to supraphysical truths. It is usually asserted, for example, that the Scientist the positivist par excellencefollows a rigid process of ratiocination, of observation, analysis and judgment. He collects facts and a sufficient number of them made to yield a general law the probability of a generic factwhich is tested or exemplified by other correlate facts. This is however an ideal, a theoretical programme not borne out by actual practice, it is a rationalisation of a somewhat different actuality. the Scientist, even the most hard-headed among them, the mathematician, finds his laws often and perhaps usually not by a long process of observation and induction or deduction, but all on a sudden, in a flash of illumination. The famous story of Newton .and the falling apple, Kepler's happy guess of the elliptical orbit of the planetsand a host of examples can be cited as rather the rule than the exception for the methodology of scientific discovery. Prof. Hadamard, the great French mathematician the French are well-known for their intransigent, logical and rational attitude in Science,has been compelled to admit the supreme role of an intuitive faculty in scientific enquiry. If it is argued that the so-called sudden intuition is nothing but the final outburst, the cumulative resultant of a long strenuous travail of thinking and reasoning and arguing, Prof. Hadamard says', in reply, that it does not often seem to be so, for the answer or solution that is suddenly found does not lie in the direction of or in conformity with the, conscious rational research but goes against it and its implications.
This faculty of direct knowledge, however, is not such a rare thing as it may appear to be. Indeed if we step outside the circumscribed limits of pure science instances crowd upon us, even in our normal life, which would compel one to conclude that the rational and sensory process is only a fringe and a very small part of a much greater and wider form of knowing. Poets and artists, we all know, are familiar only with that form: without intuition and inspiration they are nothing. Apart from that, modern inquiries and observations have established beyond doubt certain facts of extra-sensory, suprarational perceptionof clairvoyance and clairaudience, of prophecy, of vision into the future as well as into the past. Not only these unorthodox faculties of knowledge, but dynamic powers that almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight siddhis, super-natural powers attained by the Yogi when he learns to control nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but it is too late now in the day to deny them their right of existence. Only Science, to maintain its scientific prestige, usually tries to explain such phenomena in the material way, but with no great success. In the end she seems to say these freaks do not come within her purview and she is not concerned with them. However, that is not for us also the subject for discussion for the moment.
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After all, only one bold step is needed: to affirm unequivocally what is being suggested and implied and pointed to in a thousand indirect ways. And Science will be transformed. the Scientist too, like the famous Saltimbanque (clown) of a French poet, may one day in turning a somersault, suddenly leap up and find himself rolling into the bosom of the stars.
***
05.05 - Man the Prototype, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The earth has been created for a special purpose; it has a divine role to fulfil. And so there is only one earth and not many, in spite of what the Scientists may say. The earth is not a mass of dead matter, not merely the dwelling-place of the growths that have occurred upon it, of plants and animals and men. She is the home and she is the mother of them all. She has a consciousness and a personality, the outer form that we see is only her body.
Indeed, all the luminaries of heaven have each its conscious personality, the planets, the moon and above all the great sun. It is not a fancy or idle imagination that made the astrologers ascribe definite influences to these heavenly bodies. In Hindu astrology, for example, they are considered as real persons, each with a definite form and character, a dhyna rpa. The so-called Nature-gods in the Vedas or in ancient mythology generally are in the same way not creations of mere poetic imagination: they are realities, more real in a sense than the real objects that represent and incarnate them.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is the world that we see really like? Is it mental, is it material? This is a question, we know, philosophers are familiar with, and they have answered and are still answering, each in his own way, taking up one side or other of the antinomy. There is nothing new or uncommon in that. The extraordinary novelty comes in when we see today even scientists forced to tackle the problem, give an answer to it,scientists who used to smile at philosophers, because they seemed to assault seriously the windmills of abstract notions and airy concepts, instead of reposing on the terra firmaof reality. The tables are turned now. the Scientists have had to start the same business the terra firmaon which they stood as on the securest rock of ages is slipping away under their feet and fast vanishing into smoke and thin air. Not only that, it is discovered today that the Scientist has always been a philosopher,' without his knowledgea crypto-philosopher,only he has become conscious of it at last. And furthermirabile dictum!many a scientist is busy demonstrating that the Scientist is, in his essence, a philosopher of the Idealist school!
Physical Science in the nineteenth century did indeed develop or presuppose a philosophy of its own; it had, that is to say, a definite outlook on the fundamental quality of things and the nature of the universe. Those were days of its youthful self-confidence and unbending assurance. The view was, as is well-known, materialistic and deterministic. That is to say, all observation and experiment, according to it, demonstrated and posited:
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So the Scientists of today are waking up to this disconcerting fact. And some have put the question very boldly and frankly: do not all laws of Nature contain this original sin of the observer's interference, indeed may not the laws be nothing else but that? Thus Science has landed into the very heart the bog and quagmire, if you likeof abstruse metaphysics. Eddington says, there is no other go for Science today but to admit and delcare that its scheme and pattern of things, as described by what is called laws of Nature, is only a mental construct of the Scientist. The "wonderful" discoveries are nothing but jugglery and legerdemain of the mindwhat it puts out of itself unconsciously into the outside world, it recovers again and is astonished at the miracle. A scientific law is a pure deduction from the mind's own disposition. Eddington goes so far as to say that if a scientist is sufficiently introspective he can trace out from within his brain each and every law of Nature which he took so much pains to fish out from Nature by observation and experiment. Eddington gives an analogy to explain the nature of scientific law and scientific discovery. Suppose you have a fishing net of a particular size and with interstices of a particular dimension; you throw it into the sea and pull out with fishes in it. Now you count and assort the fishes, and according to the data thus obtained, you declare that the entire sea consists of so many varieties of fish and of such sizes. The only error is that you could not take into account the smaller fishes that escaped through the interstices and the bigger ones that did not at all fall into the net. Scientific statistics is something of this kind. Our mind is the net, and the pattern of Nature is determined by the mind's own pattern.
Eddington gives us absolutely no hope for any knowledge of an objective world apart from the objectification of mind's own constructs. This is a position which a scientist, quascientist, finds it difficult to maintain. Remedies and loop-holes have been suggested with what result we shall presently see.
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Apart from the standpoint of theoretical physics developed by Einstein, the more practical aspect as brought out in Wave Mechanics leads us into no less an abstract and theoretical domain. The Newtonian particle-picture, it is true, has been maintained in the first phase of modern physics which specialised in what is called Quantum Mechanics. But waves or particlesalthough the question as to their relative validity and verity still remains opendo not make much difference in the fundamental outlook. For in either view, the individual unit is beyond the ken of the Scientist. A wave is not a wave but just the probability of a wave: it is not even a probable wave but a probability wave. Thus the pattern that Wave Mechanics weaves to show the texture of the ultimate reality is nothing more than a calculus of probabilities. By whichever way we proceed we seem to arrive always at the same inevitable conclusion.
So it is frankly admitted that what Science gives is not a faithful description of actuality, not a representation of material existence, but certain conventions or convenient signs to put together, to make a mental picture of our sensations and experiences. That does not give any clue to what the objective reality mayor may not be like. Scientific laws are mental rules imposed upon Nature. It may be asked why does Nature yield to such imposition? There must be then some sort of parallelism or commensurability between Nature and the observing Mind, between the pattern of Nature and the Mind's scheme or replica of it. If we successfully read into Nature things of the Mind, that means that there must be something very common between the two. Mind's readings are not mere figments, hanging in the air; for they are justified by their applicability, by their factual translation. This is arguing in a circle, a thorough-going mentalist like Eddington would say. What are facts? What is life? Anything more than what the senses and the mind have built up for us?
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Science means objectivity, that is to say, elimination of the personal elementtruth as pure fact without being distorted or coloured by the feelings and impressions and notions of the observer. It is the very opposite of the philosopher's standpoint who says that a thing exists because (and so long as) it is perceived. the Scientist swears that a thing exists whether you perceive it or not, perception is possible because it exists, not the other way. And yet Descartes is considered not only as the father of modern philosophy, but also as the founder o( modern mathematical science. But more of that anon. The scientific observer observes as a witness impartial and aloof: he is nothing more than a recording machine, a sort of passive mirror reflecting accurately and faithfully what is presented to it. This is indeed the great revolution brought about by Science in the world of human inquiry and in human consciousness, viz.,the isolation of the observer from the observed.
In the old world, before Science was born, sufficient distinction or discrimination was not made between the observer and the observed. The observer mixed himself up or identified himself with what he observed and the result was not a scientific statement but a poetic description. Personal feelings, ideas, judgments entered into the presentation of facts and the whole mass passed as truth, the process often being given the high-sounding name of Intuition, Vision or Revelation but whose real name is fancy. And if there happened to be truth off act somewhere, it was almost by chance. Once we thought of the eclipse being due to the greed of a demon, and pestilence due to the evil eye of a wicked goddess. The universe was born out of an egg, the cosmos consisted of concentric circles of worlds that were meant to reward the virtuous and punish the sinner in graded degrees. These are some of the very well-known instances of pathetic fallacy, that is to say, introducing the element of personal sentiment in our appreciation of events and objects. Even today Nazi race history and Soviet Genetics carry that unscientific prescientific tradition.
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Science also declared that it is not the observation of one person, however qualified, that determines the truth or otherwise of a fact, but the observation of many persons and the possibility of observations of all persons converging, coinciding, corroborating. It is only when observation has thus been tested and checked that one can be sure that the personal element has been eliminated. Indeed the ideal condition would be if the observer, the Scientist himself, could act as part of the machine for observation: at the most he should be a mere assembler of the parts of the machine that would record itself, impersonally, automatically. The rocket instruments that are sent high up in the sky to record the temperature, pressure or other weather condition in the stratosphere or the deep-sea recording machines are ingenious inventions in that line. The wizard Jagadish Chandra Bose showed his genius precisely in the way he made the plant itself declare its life-story: it is not what the Scientist thinks or feels about the plant, but what the plant has to say of its own accord, as it wereits own tale of growth and decay, of suffering, spasm, swoon, suffocation or death under given conditions. This is the second step that Science took in the direction of impersonal and objective inquiry.
It was thought for long a very easy matterat least not extraordinarily difficultto eliminate the observer and keep only to the observed. It was always known how the view of the observer that is to say, his observation changed in respect of the observed fact with his change of position. The sun rises and sets to the observer on earth: to an observer on Mars, for example, the sun would rise and set, no doubt, but earth too along with, in the same way as Mars and sun appear to us now, while to an observer on the sun, the sun would seem fixed while the planets would be seen moving round. Again, we all know the observer in a moving train sees things outside the train moving past and himself at stand-still; the same observer would see another train moving alongside in the same direction and with the same speed as stuck to it and at stand-still, but as moving with double the speed if going in a contrary direction: and so on.
05.09 - The Changed Scientific Outlook, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a scientific obscurantism, which is not less obscure because it is scientific, and one must guard against it with double care and watchfulness. It is the mentality of the no-changer whose motto seems to be: plus a change, plus a reste le mme.. Let me explain. the Scientist who prefers still to be called a materialist must remember that the (material) ground under his feet has shifted considerably since the time he first propounded his materialistic position: he does not stand in the same place (or plane?) as he did even twenty years ago. The change has been basic and fundamentalfundamental, because the very definitions and postulates with which we once started have been called in question, thrown overboard or into the melting-pot.
Shall we elucidate a little? We were once upon a time materialists, that is to say, we had very definite and fixed notions about Matter: to Matter we gave certain invariable characteristics, inalienable properties. How many of them stand today unscathed on their legs? Take the very first, the crucial property ascribed to Matter: "Matter is that which has extension." Well, an electric charge, a unit energy of it, the ultimate constituent of Matter as discovered by Science today, can it be said to occupy space? In the early days of Science, one Boscovich advanced a theory according to which the ultimate material particle (a molecule, in his time) does not occupy space, it is a mere mathematical point toward or from which certain forces act. The theory, naturally, was laughed out of consideration; but today we have come perilously near it. Again, another postulate describing Matter's dharma was: "two material particles cannot occupy the same place at the same time". Now what do you say of the neutron and proton that coalesce and form the unit of a modern atomic nucleus? Once more, the notion of the indestructibility of Matter has been considerably modified in view of the phenomenon of an electric particle (electron) being wholly transmuted ("dematerialised" as the Scientists themselves say) into a light particle (photon). Lastly, the idea of the constancy of massa bed-rock of old-world physicsis considered today to be a superstition, an illusion. If after all these changes in the idea of Matter, a man still maintains that he is a materialist, as of old, well, I can only exclaim in the Shakespearean phrase: "Bottom, thou art translated"! What I want to say is that the changes that modern physics proposes to execute in its body are not mere amendments and emendations, but they mean a radical transfiguration, a subversion and a mutation. And more than the actual changes effected, the possibilities, the tendencies that have opened out, the lines along which further developments are proceeding do point not merely to a reformation, but a revolution.
Does this mean that Science after all isveering to the Idealist position? Because we have modified the meaning and connotation of Matter does it 'follow that we have perforce arrived at spirituality? Not quite so. As Jeans says, the correct scientific position would be to withhold one's judgment about the ultimate nature of matter, whether it is material or mental (spiritual, we would prefer to say): it is an attitude of non possumus. But such neutrality, is it truly possible and is it so very correct? We do see scientists lean .on one side or the other, according to the vision or predisposition that one carries.
07.01 - Realisation, Past and Future, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But there is a kind of Grace that comes to your help. If a scientist had again to go over all the experiments that have been done, all that others have found in the past in his line in order to make a further progress, to come to a new discovery, then he will have to pass his whole life in repeating the past and will have no time left for anything else. the Scientist just opens instead a book or consults another person who is conversant with the past and gets all the knowledge he re-quires of it. Sri Aurobindo wanted to do something like that in the spiritual domain. He asks you to gather the experience of the past,it is all there recorded in earth's history, and pass on; basing yourself upon that, you rise up to still higher ranges.
You may pertinently ask, however, why we have not started with overmental beings; we should have had here, say, Vivekanandas only and not ordinary frail human creatures.
07.19 - Bad Thought-Formation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You go into the very origin of things. Why are there inconscience, ignorance and obscurity? You ask for the why and wherefore of the universe. Why is creation like this and not otherwise? Everyone has explained in his own way. The philosophers have done so, the Scientists have done so on different lines. But, none has found the way out. You ask why there is bad will, but the truly interesting and important thing is to find a means whereby there would be no bad will. What is the use of asking why there is pain and suffering and misery, unless it is to find out the remedy? If you look for the why, you may find as many explanations as you like, each may be useful in a way, but none leads you anywhere, except into a blind alley.
There are many things in the world you do not approve of. Some people who, as they put it, wish to have the knowledge, want to find out why it is so. It is a line of knowledge. But I say it is much more important to find out how to make things otherwise than they are at present. That is exactly the problem Buddha set before himself. He sat under a tree and continued till he found the solution. The solution, however, is not very satisfactory: You say, the world is bad, let us then do away with the world; but to whose profit, as Sri Aurobindo asks very pertinently? The world will no longer be bad, since it will exist no more. The world will have to be rolled back into its origin, the original pure existence or non-existence. Then man will be, in Sri Aurobindo's words, the all-powerful master of something that does not exist, an emperor without an empire, a king without a kingdom. It is a solution. But there are others, which are better. We consider ours to be the best. There are some who say, like the Buddha, evil comes from ignorance, remove the ignorance and evil will disappear. Others say that evil comes from division, from separation; if the universe were not separated from its origin, there would be no evil. Others again declare that it is an evil will that is the cause of all, of separation and ignorance. Then the question is, where does this bad will come from? If it were at the origin of things, it must have been in the origin itself. And then some question the bad will itself,there is no such thing, essentially, fundamentally, it is pure illusion.
07.21 - On Occultism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Only the Scientist did not know one thingan element of occult knowledge escaped him. The physical movement of the serpent was accompanied by a considerable amount of a vital projection of its nervous energy. It was that which struck him with an irresistible force. It was almost like a violent physical shock and mere reason has no power to control it. To check and control, you must learn the occult way.
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08.37 - The Significance of Dates, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But going further we can say that there is very little difference between science and superstition! The only difference is in the manner of expressing oneself. If you take care to say like the Scientists, "it seems it is like that, one might conclude that things appear like that" etc., etc. then it is no longer superstition. But if you assert point-blank, "it is like that", then you land in superstition.
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100.00 - Synergy, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
our planet are those of the Scientist-artists, the name joined, or artist, or scientist.
The name of artist or scientist, though often self-professed, can only be accredited
1.001 - The Aim of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All knowledge gathered through observations, whether through a microscope or telescope, in laboratories, etc., is ultimately invalid because it presupposes the static existence of the observer himself, the Scientist's capacity to impartially observe and to unconditionally understand the conditions of what he observes very strange indeed, really. How does the Scientist take for granted or imagine that he is an unconditioned observer and everything that he observes is conditioned? It is not true, because the observing scientist is as much conditioned by factors as the object that he observes. So, who is to observe the conditions of his own observing apparatus: his body, his senses the eyes, for example, and even the mind, which is connected to the body? Inasmuch as the observing scientist the observing individual, the knowing person is as much conditioned and limited as the object that is observed or seen, it is not possible to have ultimately valid knowledge in this world.
All our knowledge is insufficient, inadequate, temporal, empirical ultimately useless. It does not touch the core of life. Therefore, we will find that any learned person, whatever be the depth of his learning, whatever be the greatness of his scholarship, is miserable in the end. The reason is that life is different from this kind of knowledge. It is an all-comprehensive organic being in which the knowing individual is unfortunately included, a fact which misses the attention of every person. It is not possible for anyone to observe or see or know anything, inasmuch as the conditions which describe the object of observation also condition the subject of observation. The Veda points this out in a mystical formula:tam eva viditv atimtyum eti nnya panth vidyate ayanya. Now, when it is said, by knowing 'That', every problem is solved, the Veda does not mean knowing this object or that object, or this person or that person, or this thing or that thing, or this subject or that subject it is nothing of that kind. It is a 'That' with a capital 'T', which means to say, the true object of knowledge. The true object of knowledge is to be known, and when 'That' is known, all problems are solved.
10.07 - The World is One, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The material world is a factual unity. For it is one matter that exists everywhere; the same fundamental elements constitute, although in different degrees, the earth, the sun, the stars, the distant galaxies and the extragalactic rays. It is in the last analysis charges of electricityinfinitesimal and infinite charges of electric force, points of energy that form the entire creationpullulating particles that fill the universe; but they are not isolated, disconnected, disunited, they are a continuum. This continuum was called 'ether' at one time, it is now called 'field'. This material unity consists in the one extension that turns and swirls into creases and eddies giving the impression of separativeness and disunity. The task of the Scientist is to know how to recondition the swirling dispersing expanse so as to as similarise, polarise the disparate elements. That is the meaning of what the Scientists are now handling as the 'laser' or 'maser' beams.1
Likewise, the vital world is also one. It is one life that pulsates in and through all living formationsone sea as it were, swaying and heaving and breaking into innumerable waves and ripples. In spite of infinite variations there is one overall pattern that persists through the living creation. Anatomy and more clearly physiology links in a strange way even the plant and the animal and man. And in humanity if there is a great vital upsurge somewhere, it spreads its vibration far and wide like a seismic motion. And it is because of this vital unity that there arises the phenomenon known as contagion or pest and pestilence that is to say, mass-movements are occasioned by one indivisible life-urge. A common suffering or a common elation is normal to human life.
1.009 - Perception and Reality, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Nowadays, our scientists also have conjectured the possibility of the universe having been once upon a time constituted as a sort of a cosmic atom. One scientist said, "The whole cosmos was like an atom." By "an atom", he means an indivisible something. The whole universe originally was like an atom, and that atom split into two parts. This is also mentioned in the Manu Smriti, prior to the declaration of this scientist. In the first chapter of the Manu Smriti we find the process of creation described, and instead of an atom, Manu says "anda" it was like an egg. Well, the Scientist says "an atom". Does an atom not look something like an egg? It split into two parts. This original split of the atom into two parts is the cause of all our problems today. And it goes on, splitting and splitting two became four, four became eight, eight became sixteen, and umpteen, a millionfold and uncountable in number. These little split parts are the individuals you, me, and everybody included. We are struggling to become the original atom once again, as something unnatural has happened to us.
While the physical scientist thinks that the atom has really split into a millionfold parts, the sages tell us that really it has not split itself like that it is only an appearance. Really there is no split, because if it has really split, we cannot go back into the original, just as curd cannot be converted into milk once it has become curd since the change is irreversible. But that is not the case here. If that had happened, there would be no urge of the part to go back to the whole. If we really have been cut off, then it is finished; the matter is over. Why are we urging back to unite ourselves with the whole? That means a real split has not taken place. A kind of mysterious bifurcation has taken place.
1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
intuitive power. Or consider the change in his being which the Scientist is able to
induce mechanically by means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectroscope and
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
an outward knowledge. the Scientists and philosophers came
afterwards; they were preceded by the mystics and often like
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
enables the Scientist to retain undimmed enthusiasm, while he endlessly studies his fruitflies.
How, precisely, did people think, not so very long ago, before they were experimentalists? What were
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
graphic even while subject to revision, enabling the Scientist to
put together and to show the non-contradiction of the ever more
1.02 - Groups and Statistical Mechanics, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
contemporary Heaviside, Gibbs is one of the Scientists whose
physico-mathematical acumen often outstrips their logic and72
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
description as the Scientist might have it but categorization of the implications of an unexpected
occurrence for specification of means and ends. Such categorization is what an object is, from the
1.02 - Prana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
In this universe there is one continuous substance on every plane of existence. Physically this universe is one: there is no difference between the sun and you. the Scientist will tell you it is only a fiction to say the contrary. There is no real difference between the table and me; the table is one point in the mass of matter, and I another point. Each form represents, as it were, one whirlpool in the infinite ocean of matter, of which not one is constant. Just as in a rushing stream there may be millions of whirlpools, the water in each of which is different every moment, turning round and round for a few seconds, and then passing out, replaced by a fresh quantity, so the whole universe is one constantly changing mass of matter, in which all forms of existence are so many whirlpools. A mass of matter enters into one whirlpool, say a human body, stays there for a period, becomes changed, and goes out into another, say an animal body this time, from which again after a few years, it enters into another whirlpool, called a lump of mineral. It is a constant change. Not one body is constant. There is no such thing as my body, or your body, except in words. Of the one huge mass of matter, one point is called a moon, another a sun, another a man, another the earth, another a plant, another a mineral. Not one is constant, but everything is changing, matter eternally concreting and disintegrating. So it is with the mind. Matter is represented by the ether; when the action of Prana is most subtle, this very ether, in the finer state of vibration, will represent the mind and there it will be still one unbroken mass. If you can simply get to that subtle vibration, you will see and feel that the whole universe is composed of subtle vibrations. Sometimes certain drugs have the power to take us, while as yet in the senses, to that condition. Many of you may remember the celebrated experiment of Sir Humphrey Davy, when the laughing gas overpowered him how, during the lecture, he remained motionless, stupefied and after that, he said that the whole universe was made up of ideas. For, the time being, as it were, the gross vibrations had ceased, and only the subtle vibrations which he called ideas, were present to him. He could only see the subtle vibrations round him; everything had become thought; the whole universe was an ocean of thought, he and everyone else had become little thought whirlpools.
Thus, even in the universe of thought we find unity, and at last, when we get to the Self, we know that that Self can only be One. Beyond the vibrations of matter in its gross and subtle aspects, beyond motion there is but One. Even in manifested motion there is only unity. These facts can no more be denied. Modern physics also has demonstrated that the sum total of the energies in the universe is the same throughout. It has also been proved that this sum total of energy exists in two forms. It becomes potential, toned down, and calmed, and next it comes out manifested as all these various forces; again it goes back to the quiet state, and again it manifests. Thus it goes on evolving and involving through eternity. The control of this Prana, as before stated, is what is called Pranayama.
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
up the Scientists prevailing attitude to the status of life in
the universe. The human race is just a chemical scum on
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
"Perspective is a proof or test confirmed by our experience, that all things project their images toward the eye in pyramidal lines." In addition to the fact that we again meet up with Alberti's important idea of the pyramid, now given its valid restatement by Leonardo, the remark expresses the very essence of Leonardo's rather dramatic situation: it expresses his Platonic, even pre-Platonic animistic attitude that "all things project their image toward the eye," which the eye does not perceive, but rather suffers or endures. This creates an unusual and even disquieting tension between the two parts of the sentence, since the purely Aristotelian notion of the first part not only speaks of proof but indeed proceeds from the "experience" of early science. This struggle in Leonardo himself between the Scientist demonstrating things and the artist enduring them reflects the transitional situation between the unperspectival and the perspectival worlds.
A note on perspective of presumably later date is illustrative of Leonardos complete dissociation from the dominant unperspectival structure of ancient and early medieval consciousness. In Manuscript G of the Institut de France he writes: "In its measurements perspective employs two counter posed pyramids. The one has its vertex in the eye [he often calls the vertex `the point'] and its base on the horizon. The second has its base resting against the eye and its vertex at the horizon. The first pyramid is the more general perspective since it encompasses all dimensions of an object facing the eye . . . while the second refers to a specific position . . . and this second perspective results from the first."
1.03 - Man - Slave or Free?, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The exclusive pursuit of Yoga by men who seclude themselves either physically or mentally from the contact of the world has led to an erroneous view of this science as something mystic, far-off and unreal. The secrecy which has been observed with regard to Yogic practices,a necessary secrecy in the former stages of human evolution,has stereotyped this error. Practices followed by men who form secret circles and confine the instruction in the mysteries strictly to those who have a certain preparatory fitness, inevitably bear the stamp to the outside world of occultism. In reality there is nothing intrinsically hidden, occult or mystic about Yoga. Yoga is based upon certain laws of human psychology, a certain knowledge about the power of the mind over the body and the inner spirit over the mind which are not generally realised and have hitherto been considered by those in the secret too momentous in their consequences for disclosure until men should be trained to use them aright. Just as a set of men who had discovered and tested the uttermost possibilities of mesmerism and hypnotism might hesitate to divulge them freely to the world lest the hypnotic power should be misused by ignorance or perversity or abused in the interests of selfishness and crime, so the Yogins have usually preserved the knowledge of these much greater forces within us in a secrecy broken only when they were sure of the previous ethical and spiritual training of the neophyte and his physical and moral fitness for the Yogic practices. It became therefore an established rule for the learner to observe strict reserve as to the inner experiences of Yoga and for the developed Yogin as far as possible to conceal himself. This has not prevented treatises and manuals from being published dealing with the physical or with the moral and intellectual sides of Yoga. Nor has it prevented great spirits who have gained their Yoga not by the ordinary careful and scientific methods but by their own strength and the special grace of God, from revealing themselves and their spiritual knowledge to mankind and in their intense love for humanity imparting something of their power to the world. Such were Buddha, Christ, Mahomed, Chaitanya, such have been Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. It is still the orthodox view that the experiences of Yoga must not be revealed to the uninitiated. But a new era dawns upon us in which the old laws must be modified Already the West is beginning to discover the secrets of Yoga. Some of its laws have revealed themselves however dimly and imperfectly to the Scientists of Europe while others through Spiritualism, Christian Science, clairvoyance, telepathy and other modern forms of occultism are being almost discovered by accident as if by men groping in the dark and stumbling over truths they cannot understand. The time has almost come when India can no longer keep her light to herself but must pour it out upon the world. Yoga must be revealed to mankind because without it mankind cannot take the next step in the human evolution.
The psychology of the human race has not yet been discovered by Science. All creation is essentially the same and proceeds by similar though not identical laws. If therefore we see in the outside material world that all phenomena proceed from and can be reduced to a single causal substance from which they were born, in which they move and to which they return, the same truth is likely to hold good in the psychical world. The unity of the material universe has now been acknowledged by the scientific intellect of Europe and the high priests of atheism and materialism in Germany have declared the ekam evdvityam in matter with no uncertain voice. In so doing they have merely reaffirmed the discovery made by Indian masters of the Yogic science thousands of years ago. But the European scientists have not discovered any sure and certain methods, such as they have in dealing with gross matter, for investigating psychical phenomena. They can only observe the most external manifestations of mind in action. But in these manifestations the mind is so much enveloped in the action of the outer objects and seems so dependent on them that it is very difficult for the observer to find out the springs of its action or any regularity in its workings. The European scientists have therefore come to the conclusion that it is the stimulations of outside objects which are the cause of psychical phenomena, and that even when the mind seems to act of itself and on its own material it is only associating, grouping together and manipulating the recorded experiences from outside objects. The very nature of mind is, according to them, a creation of past material experience transmitted by heredity with such persistence that we have grown steadily from the savage with his rudimentary mind to the civilised man of the twentieth century. As a natural result of these materialistic theories, science has found it difficult to discover any true psychical centre for the multifarious phenomena of mind and has therefore fixed upon the brain, the material organ of thought, as the only real centre. From this materialistic philosophy have resulted certain theories very dangerous to the moral future of mankind. First, man is a creation and slave of matter. He can only master matter by obeying it Secondly, the mind itself is a form of gross matter and not independent of and master of the senses. Thirdly, there is no real free will, because all our action is determined by two great forces, heredity and environment. We are the slaves of our nature, and where we seem to be free from its mastery, it is because we are yet worse slaves of our environment, worked on by the forces that surround and manipulate us.
1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
from the earth. But, more logical than the Scientists who
lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
That Nirvana and Samsara are one is a fact about the nature of the universe; but it is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly experienced, except by souls far advanced in spirituality. For ordinary, nice, unregenerate people to accept this truth by hearsay, and to act upon it in practice, is merely to court disaster. All the dismal story of antinomianism is there to warn us of what happens when men and women make practical applications of a merely intellectual and unrealized theory that all is God and God is all. And hardly less depressing than the spectacle of antinomianism is that of the earnestly respectable well-rounded life of good citizens who do their best to live sacramentally, but dont in fact have any direct acquaintance with that for which the sacramental activity really stands. Dr. Oman, in his The Natural and the Supernatural, writes at length on the theme that reconciliation to the evanescent is revelation of the eternal; and in a recent volume, Science, Religion and the Future, Canon Raven applauds Dr. Oman for having stated the principles of a theology, in which there could be no ultimate antithesis between nature and grace, science and religion, in which, indeed, the worlds of the Scientist and the theologian are seen to be one and the same. All this is in full accord with Taoism and Zen Buddhism and with such Christian teachings as St. Augustines Ama et fac quod vis and Father Lallemants advice to theocentric contemplatives to go out and act in the world, since their actions are the only ones capable of doing any real good to the world. But what neither Dr. Oman nor Canon Raven makes sufficiently clear is that nature and grace, Samsara and Nirvana, perpetual perishing and eternity, are really and experientially one only to persons who have fulfilled certain conditions. Fac quod vis in the temporal world but only when you have learnt the infinitely difficult art of loving God with all your mind and heart and your neighbor as yourself. If you havent learnt this lesson, you will either be an antinomian eccentric or criminal or else a respectable well-rounded-lifer, who has left himself no time to understand either nature or grace. The Gospels are perfectly clear about the process by which, and by which alone, a man may gain the right to live in the world as though he were at home in it: he must make a total denial of selfhood, submit to a complete and absolute mortification. At one period of his career, Jesus himself seems to have undertaken austerities, not merely of the mind, but of the body. There is the record of his forty days fast and his statement, evidently drawn from personal experience, that some demons cannot be cast out except by those who have fasted much as well as prayed. (The Cur dArs, whose knowledge of miracles and corporal penance was based on personal experience, insists on the close correlation between severe bodily austerities and the power to get petitionary prayer answered in ways that are sometimes supernormal.) The Pharisees reproached Jesus because he came eating and drinking, and associated with publicans and sinners; they ignored, or were unaware of, the fact that this apparently worldly prophet had at one time rivalled the physical austerities of John the Baptist and was practising the spiritual mortifications which he consistently preached. The pattern of Jesus life is essentially similar to that of the ideal sage, whose career is traced in the Oxherding Pictures, so popular among Zen Buddhists. The wild ox, symbolizing the unregenerate self, is caught, made to change its direction, then tamed and gradually transformed from black to white. Regeneration goes so far that for a time the ox is completely lost, so that nothing remains to be pictured but the full-orbed moon, symbolizing Mind, Suchness, the Ground. But this is not the final stage. In the end, the herdsman comes back to the world of men, riding on the back of his ox. Because he now loves, loves to the extent of being identified with the divine object of his love, he can do what he likes; for what he likes is what the Nature of Things likes. He is found in company with wine-bibbers and butchers; he and they are all converted into Buddhas. For him, there is complete reconciliation to the evanescent and, through that reconciliation, revelation of the eternal. But for nice ordinary unregenerate people the only reconciliation to the evanescent is that of indulged passions, of distractions submitted to and enjoyed. To tell such persons that evanescence and eternity are the same, and not immediately to qualify the statement, is positively fatalfor, in practice, they are not the same except to the saint; and there is no record that anybody ever came to sanctity, who did not, at the outset of his or her career, behave as if evanescence and eternity, nature and grace, were profoundly different and in many respects incompatible. As always, the path of spirituality is a knife-edge between abysses. On one side is the danger of mere rejection and escape, on the other the danger of mere acceptance and the enjoyment of things which should only be used as instruments or symbols. The versified caption which accompanies the last of the Oxherding Pictures runs as follows.
Even beyond the ultimate limits there extends a passageway,
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Michael Polyani378 has brilliantly developed a very similar theme, arguing that much of the Scientists
success depends upon tacit knowledge, i.e., upon knowledge that is acquired through practice and that
--
When acute, this situation is sometimes recognized by the Scientists involved. Copernicus
complained that in his day astronomers were so inconsistent in these [astronomical] investigations...
1.05 - 2010 and 1956 - Doomsday?, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
Earth is as critical as the Scientists in the previous section
(together with most reasonable people) think it is. In addi-
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
ing in them. This has led to the image of the Scientist, more
specifically the physicist, as a sort of higher being with an
--
prayer, and with a God outside his creation. the Scientists
and science writers who have any notion of a divine Pres
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
It is significant, in the first place, because for the Scientist it
bridges the long-standing, troublesome and seemingly irreducible
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is thus by an integralisation of our divided being that the Divine Shakti in the Yoga will proceed to its object; for liberation, perfection, mastery are dependent on this integralisation, since the little wave on the surface cannot control its own movement, much less have any true control over the vast life around it. The Shakti, the power of the Infinite and the Eternal descends within us, works, breaks up our present psychological formations, shatters every wall, widens, liberates, presents us with always newer and greater powers of vision, ideation, perception and newer and greater life-motives, enlarges and newmodels increasingly the soul and its instruments, confronts us with every imperfection in order to convict and destroy it, opens to a greater perfection, does in a brief period the work of many lives or ages so that new births and new vistas open constantly within us. Expansive in her action, she frees the consciousness from confinement in the body; it can go out in trance or sleep or even waking and enter into worlds or other regions of this world and act there or carry back its experience. It spreads out, feeling the body only as a small part of itself, and begins to contain what before contained it; it achieves the cosmic consciousness and extends itself to be commensurate with the universe. It begins to know inwardly and directly and not merely by external observation and contact the forces at play in the world, feels their movement, distinguishes their functioning and can operate immediately upon them as the Scientist operates upon physical forces, accept their action and results in our mind, life, body or reject them or modify, change, reshape, create immense new powers and movements in place of the old small functionings of the nature. We begin to perceive the working of the forces of universal Mind and to know how our thoughts are created by that working, separate from within the truth and falsehood of our perceptions, enlarge their field, extend and illumine their significance, become master of our own minds and active to shape the movements of Mind in the world around us. We begin to perceive the flow and surge of the universal life-forces,
184
1.07 - The Fire of the New World, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
This new materialism has a most powerful microscope: a ray of truth that does not stop at any appearance but travels far, far, everywhere, capturing the same frequency of truth in all things, all beings, under all the masks or scrambling interferences. It has an infallible telescope: a look of truth that meets itself everywhere and knows, because it is what it touches. But that truth has first to be unscrambled in ourselves before it can be unscrambled everywhere; if the medium is clear, everything is clear. As we have said, man has a self of fire in the center of his being, a little flame, a pure cry of being under the ruins of the machine. This fire is the one that clarifies. This fire is the one that sees. For it is a fire of truth in the center of the being, and there is one and the same Fire everywhere, in all beings and all things and all movements of the world and the stars, in this pebble beside the path and that winged seed wafted by the wind. Five thousand years ago the Vedic Rishis were already singing its praises: O Fire, that splendour of thine, which is in heaven and which is in the earth and in growths and its waters... is a brilliant ocean of light in which is divine vision...9 He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there for man, he is there in the middle of his house...10 O Fire... thou art the navel-knot of the earths and their inhabitants.11 That fire the Rishis had discovered five thousand years before the Scientists they had found it even in water. They called it the third fire, the one that is neither in the flame nor in lightning: saura agni, the solar fire,12 the sun in darkness.13 And they found it solely by the power of direct vision of Truth, without instruments, solely by the knowledge of their own inner Fire from the like to the like. While through their microscopes the Scientists have only discovered the material support the atom of that fundamental Fire which is at the heart of things and the beginning of the worlds. They have found the effect, not the cause. And because they have found only the effect, the Scientists do not have the true mastery, or the key to transforming matter our matter and making it yield the real miracle that is the goal of all evolution, the point of otherness that will open the door to a new world.
It is this Fire that is the power of the worlds, the original igniter of evolution, the force in the rock, the force in the seed, the force in the middle of the house. This is the lever, the seer, the one that can break the circle and all the circles of our successive thralldoms material, animal, vital and mental. No species, even pushed to its extreme of efficiency and intelligence and light, has the power to transcend its own limits not the chameleon, not the ape, not man by the fiat of its improved chromosomes alone. It is only this Fire that can. This is the point of otherness, the supreme moment of imagination that sets fire to the old limits, as one day a similar supreme moment of imagination lit one and the same fire in the heart of the worlds and cast that solar seed upon the waters of time, and all those waves, those circles around it, to help it grow better, until each rootlet, each branch and twig of the great efflorescence is able to attain its own infinite, delivered by its very greatness.
1.08 - Civilisation and Barbarism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is true that the first tendencies of Science have been materialistic and its indubitable triumphs have been confined to the knowledge of the physical universe and the body and the physical life. But this materialism is a very different thing from the old identification of the self with the body. Whatever its apparent tendencies, it has been really an assertion of man the mental being and of the supremacy of intelligence. Science in its very nature is knowledge, is intellectuality, and its whole work has been that of the Mind turning its gaze upon its vital and physical frame and environment to know and conquer and dominate Life and Matter. the Scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. Life and Matter are after all our standing-ground, our lower basis and to know their processes and their own proper possibilities and the opportunities they give to the human being is part of the knowledge necessary for transcending them. Life and the body have to be exceeded, but they have also to be utilised and perfected. Neither the laws nor the possibilities of physical Nature can be entirely known unless we know also the laws and possibilities of supraphysical Nature; therefore the development of new and the recovery of old mental and psychic sciences have to follow upon the perfection of our physical knowledge, and that new era is already beginning to open upon us. But the perfection of the physical sciences was a prior necessity and had to be the first field for the training of the mind of man in his new endeavour to know Nature and possess his world.
Even in its negative work the materialism of Science had a task to perform which will be useful in the end to the human mind in its exceeding of materialism. But Science in its heyday of triumphant Materialism despised and cast aside Philosophy; its predominance discouraged by its positive and pragmatic turn the spirit of poetry and art and pushed them from their position of leadership in the front of culture; poetry entered into an era of decline and decadence, adopted the form and rhythm of a versified prose and lost its appeal and the support of all but a very limited audience, painting followed the curve of Cubist extravagance and espoused monstrosities of shape and suggestion; the ideal receded and visible matter of fact was enthroned in its place and encouraged an ugly realism and utilitarianism; in its war against religious obscurantism Science almost succeeded in slaying religion and the religious spirit. But philosophy had become too much a thing of abstractions, a seeking for abstract truths in a world of ideas and words rather than what it should be, a discovery of the real reality of things by which human existence can learn its law and aim and the principle of its perfection. Poetry and art had become too much cultured pursuits to be ranked among the elegances and ornaments of life, concerned with beauty of words and forms and imaginations, rather than a concrete seeing and significant presentation of truth and beauty and of the living idea and the secret divinity in things concealed by the sensible appearances of the universe. Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for the most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources. Now that the stress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery. They have learned or are learning from the example of Science that Truth is the secret of life and power and that by finding the truth proper to themselves they must become the ministers of human existence.
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But why, it might be asked, should each subjective order or stratum of consciousness necessarily involve the co-existence of a corresponding order of beings & objective world-stratum? For the modern mind, speculative & introspective like the Vedic, is yet speculative within the limits of sensational experience and therefore unable to believe in, even if it can conceive of existence, least of all of an objective existence under conditions different from those [with] which we are familiar and of which our senses assure us. We may therefore admit the profundity & subtlety of the subjective distinction, but we shall be apt to regard the belief in objective worlds & beings unseen by our senses as either an early poetic fancy or a crude superstition of savages. But the Vedic mentality, although perfectly rational, stood at the opposite pole of ideas from the modern and its subjective consciousness admitted a class of experiences which we reject and cut short the moment they begin to present themselves by condemning them as hallucinations. The idea of modern men that the ancients evolved their gods by a process of poetic imagination, is an error due to inability to understand an alien mentality & unwillingness to investigate from within those survivals of it which still subsist though with difficulty under modern conditions. Encouraging this order of phenomena, fostering & developing carefully the states of mind in which they were possible and the movements of mind & sense by which they were effected, the Vedic Rishis saw and communed with the gods and threw themselves into the worlds of which they had the conception. They believed in them for the same reason that Joan of Arc believed in her saints & her voices, Socrates in his daemon or Swedenborg in his spirits, because they had constant experience of them and of the validity both of the experiences and of the instruments of mind & sense by which they were maintained in operation. They would have answered a modern objector that they had as good a proof of them as the Scientist has of the worlds & the different orders of life revealed to his optical nerve by microscope & telescope. Some of them might even question whether these scientific discoveries were not optical illusions due to the excitation of the nerve by the instruments utilised! We may, similarly, get rid of the Vedic experiences, disbelieve and discount them, saying that they missed one essential instrument of truth, the sceptical distrust of their instruments,but we cannot argue from them in the minds that received them a childish irrationality or a savage superstition. They trusted, like us, their experience, believed their mind & senses and argued logically from their premisses.
It is true that apart from these experiences the existence of various worlds & different orders of beings was a logical necessity of the Vedic conception of existence. Existence being a life, a soul expressing itself in forms, every distinct order of consciousness, every stratum or sea of conscious-being (samudra, sindhu, apah as the Vedic thinkers preferred to call them) demanded its own order of objective experiences (lokas, worlds), tended inevitably to throw itself into forms of individualised being (vishah, ganah, prajah). Moreover, in a world so conceived, nothing could happen in this world without relation to some force or being in the worlds behind; nor could there be any material, vital or mental movement except as the expression of a life & a soul behind it. Everything here must be supported from the worlds of mind or it could not maintain its existence. From this idea to the peopling of the world with innumerable mental & vital existences,existences essentially vital like the Naiads, Dryads, Nereids, Genii, Lares & Penates of the Greeks and Romans, the wood-gods, river-gods, house-gods, tree-deities, snake-deities of the Indians, or mental like the intermediate gods of our old Pantheon, would be a natural and inevitable step. This Animism is a remarkably universal feature in the religious culture of the ancient world. I cannot accept the modern view that its survival in a crude form among the savages, those waifs & strays of human progress, is a proof of their low & savage originany more than the peculiarly crude ideas of Christianity that exist in uneducated negro minds [and] would survive in a still more degraded form if they were long isolated from civilised life, would be a proof to future research that Christianity originated from a cannibal tribe on the African continent. The idea is essentially a civilised conception proceeding from keen susceptibility & only possible after a meditative dwelling upon Naturenot different indeed in rank & order from Wordsworths experience of Nature which no one, I suppose, would consider an atavistic recrudescence of old savage mentality, and impossible to the animal man. The dog & crow who reason from their senses, do not stand in awe of inanimate objects, or of dawn & rain & shine or expect from them favours.
1.09 - Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
much he appreciated the efforts of the Scientists to under
stand Nature and to advance a step further towards the
--
it out. Yet the Scientist Hubert Reeves warned recently:
That the observations support the idea of the Big Bang
1.09 - The Greater Self, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
But what eclipses our vision? We might as well ask, What eclipses the linear vision of the centipede? Or what eclipses the lotus in the seed? For our eyes, the universe is gradually becoming, but our eyes are really the supreme Look hiding from itself to look through the eternity of the ages and through our millions of eyes, and with millions of colors and faces, at the one perfection it saw in an eternal white second. The world is one; it is a single global unity, even the Scientists tell us so. And they are trying to find that equation. But to restore this oneness, they have divided and subdivided matter to infinity, or almost. They have come upon an infinitesimal existence and a smaller infinitesimal existence, a vastness and an even greater vastness. But this oneness is neither an addition nor a reduction to the microscopic level, any more than eternity is an infinite number of years or immensity so many miles plus one. This oneness is there, totally, in each point of space and at each second of time, as much as in all the infinitudes put together and all the vastness added up. Each point contains the whole; each second is eternity looking at itself. And we who stand in this point at this second are eternal and complete, and all the earths and all the galaxies meet in our essential point; an eternal lotus shines in our heart only we do not know it. We know it little by little. And it is not enough to know it in our heads and hearts we have to know it in our body. Then the marvel will be truly complete and the eternal lotus on the summits of the spirit will shine forever in our matter and in each second of time.
This perfection, this oneness of substance and consciousness and being, is like the world's golden memory, the blurred image that each one and each thing strives to conjure up and capture, the goad of the world's great Thirst, the driving force of its gigantic Need to be and embrace and grow. It is like a tenacious memory thrusting things and beings and even galaxies into a mortal embrace that would like to be an embrace of love, that would like to understand all, hold and possess and encompass all within its circumference. Each thing strives toward that gropingly: the sea anemone with its tentacles, the atom with its gravitation, and man with his intelligence and his heart. But our thirst cannot be quenched until it seizes all, encompasses all in its being, and there remains not one particle of the universe that has not become our substance, for, in reality, everything was always our substance and our being and our own face under millions of smiles or sufferings seeking their smile but which cannot really smile so long as they have not found what they always were. There is no other suffering in the world, no other gap, no other lack. But so long as this need is not fulfilled, we will go on and on; atoms will go on whirling to make increasingly purer and lighter kinds of matter, sea anemones ceaselessly seizing and men adding up their treasures, plundering or loving but only one thing is lovable, and until they love everything, they will have nothing really and will possess only their shadow.
11.08 - Body-Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The release of energy, material energy, in matter, is the business of Science and the Scientist; the release of consciousness, the energy of consciousness in matter is the business of yoga and the yogi. The tantrik discipline was in a large way occupied with this mystery. It found and developed -its own method and process and its success in its own field is also well recognised.
The body-content thus is essentially consciousness consolidated, crystallised. The problem then is how to release it. The first thing is that you must be conscious, you, that is to say, your body must be conscious, must be aware always of what it is doing: living, moving, acting; the body must be doing all that consciously, almost voluntarily: there shall be no in voluntary movements. Each physical gesture must know itself by feeling itself in the act. It is not that the mind should know, the mind can have only a memory, but that the limb itself has to pursue its function knowingly, in full awareness. At the beginning there is inevitably a mixture of mental knowing but that is to be cleaned out and over passed
1.10 - Fate and Free-Will, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The first is the answer of the devout and submissive mind in its dependence on God, but, unless we adopt a Calvinistic fatalism, the admission of the guiding and overriding will of God does not exclude the permission of freedom to the individual. The second is the answer of the Scientist; Heredity determines our Nature, the laws of Nature limit our action, cause and effect compel the course of our development, and, if it be urged that we may determine effects by creating causes, the answer is that our own actions are determined by previous causes over which we have no control and our action itself is a necessary response to a stimulus from outside. The third is the answer of the Buddhist and of post-Buddhistic Hinduism. It is our fate, it is written on our forehead, when our Karma is exhausted, then alone our calamities will pass from us;this is the spirit of tamasic inaction justifying itself by a misreading of the theory of Karma.
If we go back to the true Hindu teaching independent of Buddhistic influence, we shall find that it gives us a reconciliation of the dispute by a view of mans psychology in which both Fate and Free-will are recognised. The difference between Buddhism and Hinduism is that to the former the human soul is nothing, to the latter it is everything. The whole universe exists in the spirit, by the spirit, for the spirit; all we do, think and feel is for the spirit. Nature depends upon the Atman, all its movement, play, action is for the Atman.
1.10 - Harmony, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
And the bubble grows. It takes in families, peoples, continents; it takes in every color, every wisdom, every truth, and envelops them. There is that breath of light, that note of beauty, the miracle of those few lines caught in architecture or geometry, that instant of truth that heals and delivers, that lovely curve glimpsed in a flash which links that star to this destiny, this asymptote to that hyperbola, this man to that song, this gesture to that effect and more men come, men by the thousands, who come puffing and inflating the little bubble, creating pink and blue and everlasting religions, infallible salvations in the great bubble, summits of light that are the sum of their compounded little hopes, abysses of hell that are the sum of their cherished fears; who come adding this note and that idea, this grain of knowledge and that healing second, this conjunction and that curve, that moment of effectiveness beneath the dust of the myriads of galaxies, chromatic temples, devising unquestionable medicines under the great bubble, irreducible sciences, implacable geometries, charts of illness, charts of recovery, charts of destiny. And everything twists and turns as the doctor willed it under the great fateful Bubble, as the Scientist willed it, as that moment of coincidence among the countless myriads of lines in the universe has decided it for the eternity of time. We have seized a minute of the world and made it into the huge amber light that blinds and suffocates us in the great mental bubble. And there is nothing of the kind not one single law, not one single illness, not one single medical or scientific dogma, not one single temple is true,, not one perpetual chart, not one single destiny under the stars there is a tremendous mental hypnotism, and behind, far, far behind, and yet right here, so much here, immediately here, something impregnable, unseizable by any snare, unrestricted by any law, invulnerable to every illness and every hypnotism, unsaved by our salvations, unsullied by our sins, unsullied by our virtues, free from every destiny and every chart, from every golden or black bubble a pure, infallible bird that can recreate the world in the twinkling of an eye. We change our look, and everything changes. Gone is the pretty bubble. It is here if we want.
When the bubble bursts, we begin to enter supermanhood. We begin to enter Harmony. Oh, it does not burst through our efforts; it does not give way through any amount of virtues and meditation, which on the contrary further harden the bubble, give it such a lovely shine, such a captivating light that it indeed takes us captive, and we are all the more prisoners as the more beautiful the bubble is, held more captive by our good than by our evil there is nothing harder in the world then a truth caught in our traps; it does not care at all about our virtues and accumulated merits, our brilliant talents or even our obscure weaknesses. Who is great? Who is small and obscure, or less obscure, beneath the drifting of the galaxies that look like the dust of a great Sun? The Truth, the ineffable Sweetness of things and of each thing, the living Heart of millions of beings who do not know, does not require us to become true to bestow its truth upon us who could become true, who would become other than he is, what are we actually capable of? We are capable of pain and misery aplenty; we are capable of smallness and more smallness, error garbed in a speck of light, knowledge that stumbles into its own quagmires, a good that is the luminous shadow of its secret evil, freedom that imprisons itself in its own salvation we are capable of suffering and suffering, and even our suffering is a secret delight. The Truth, the light Truth, escapes our dark or luminous snares. It runs, breathes with the wind, cascades with the spring, cascades everywhere, for it is the spring of everything. It even murmurs in the depths of our falsehood, winks an eye in our darkness and pokes fun at us. It sets its light traps for us, so light we do not see them; it beckons us in a thousand ways at every instant and everywhere, but it is so fleeting, so unexpected, so contrary to our habitual way of looking at things, so unserious that we walk right past it. We cannot make head or tail out of it; or else we stick a beautiful label on it to trap it in our magic. And it still laughs. It plays along with our magic, plays along with our suffering and geometry; it plays the millipede and the statistician; it plays everything it plays whatever we want. Then, one day, we no longer really want; we no longer want any of all that, neither our gilded miseries, nor our captivating lights nor our good nor our evil, nor any of that whole polychromatic array in which each color changes into the other: hope into despair, effort into backlash, heaven into prison, summit into abyss, love into hate, and each wrested victory into a new defeat, as if each plus attracted its minus, each for its against, and everything forever went forward, backward, right and left, bumping into the wall of the same prison, white or black, green or brown, golden or less golden. We no longer want any of all that; we are only that cry of need in our depths, that call for air, that fire for nothing, that useless little flame that goes along with our every step, walks with our sorrows, walks and walks night and day, in good and evil, in the high and the low and everywhere. And this fire soon becomes like our drop of good in evil, our bit of treasure in misery, our glimmer of light in the chaos, all that remains of a thousand gestures and passing lights, the little nothing that is like everything, the tiny song of a great ongoing misery we no longer have any good or evil, any high or low, any light or darkness, any tomorrow or yesterday. It is all the same, miserable in black and white, but we have that abiding little fire, that tomorrow of today, that murmur of sweetness in the depths of pain, that virtue of our sin, that warm drop of being in the high and the low, day and night, in shame and in joy, in solitude and in the crowd, in approval and disapproval it is all the same. It burns and burns. It is tomorrow, yesterday, now and forever. It is our one song of being, our little note of fire, our paradise in a little flame, our freedom in a little flame, our knowledge in a little flame, our summit of flame in a void of being, our vastness in a tiny singing flame we know not why. It is our companion, our friend, our wife, our bearer, our country it is. And it feels good. Then, one day, we raise our head, and there is no more bubble. There is that Fire burning softly everywhere, recognizing all, loving all, understanding all, and it is like a heaven without trouble; it is so simple that we never thought of it, so tranquil that each drop is like an ocean, so smiling and clear that it goes through everything, enters and slips in everywhere it plays here, plays there, as transparent as air, a nothing that changes everything; and perhaps it is everything.
1.12 - The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This view of human life and of the process of our development, to which subjectivism readily leads us, gives us a truer vision of the place of the intellect in the human movement. We have seen that the intellect has a double working, dispassionate and interested, self-centred or subservient to movements not its own. The one is a disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake of Truth and of knowledge for the sake of Knowledge without any ulterior motive, with every consideration put away except the rule of keeping the eye on the object, on the fact under enquiry and finding out its truth, its process, its law. The other is coloured by the passion for practice, the desire to govern life by the truth discovered or the fascination of an idea which we labour to establish as the sovereign law of our life and action. We have seen indeed that this is the superiority of reason over the other faculties of man that it is not confined to a separate absorbed action of its own, but plays upon all the others, discovers their law and truth, makes its discoveries serviceable to them and even in pursuing its own bent and end serves also their ends and arrives at a catholic utility. Man in fact does not live for knowledge alone; life in its widest sense is his principal preoccupation and he seeks knowledge for its utility to life much more than for the pure pleasure of acquiring knowledge. But it is precisely in this putting of knowledge at the service of life that the human intellect falls into that confusion and imperfection which pursues all human action. So long as we pursue knowledge for its own sake, there is nothing to be said: the reason is performing its natural function; it is exercising securely its highest right. In the work of the philosopher, the Scientist, the savant labouring to add something to the stock of our ascertainable knowledge, there is as perfect a purity and satisfaction as in that of the poet and artist creating forms of beauty for the aesthetic delight of the race. Whatever individual error and limitation there may be, does not matter; for the collective and progressive knowledge of the race has gained the truth that has been discovered and may be trusted in time to get rid of the error. It is when it tries to apply ideas to life that the human intellect stumbles and finds itself at fault.
Ordinarily, this is because in concerning itself with action the intelligence of man becomes at once partial and passionate and makes itself the servant of something other than the pure truth. But even if the intellect keeps itself as impartial and disinterested as possible, and altogether impartial, altogether disinterested the human intellect cannot be unless it is content to arrive at an entire divorce from practice or a sort of large but ineffective tolerantism, eclecticism or sceptical curiosity,still the truths it discovers or the ideas it promulgates become, the moment they are applied to life, the plaything of forces over which the reason has little control. Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have served on one side a practical humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made possible a gigantic efficiency of organisation which has been used on one side for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and on the other for turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side to a large rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and success. It has drawn mankind together and given it a new hope and at the same time crushed it with the burden of a monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due, as is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers of good and evil and provided an intellectual conviction both for reaction and for progress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the past hounded men to crime and massacre and justified obscurantism and oppression.
1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
etc., but it only touches the effects, never the true cause. The yogi sees the cause before the effect. A scientist can deduce a certain cause from the effects produced, whereas a yogi deduces the effects from the cause; he can even deduce effects that do not yet exist from a cause that already exists (e.g., the accident will happen tomorrow from the force of the accident that is already there in the background). the Scientist manipulates effects, at times bringing about catastrophes; the yogi sees the cause, or, rather, identifies with the Cause, and thereby he can alter the effects, or as Sri Aurobindo puts it, the "habits" we call laws. Ultimately, all our physical effects, which we have codified into laws, are nothing more than a convenient support for the manifestation of forces that are behind, exactly as a performance of magic requires certain ritualistic diagrams, certain ingredients or formulas, so that the forces invoked can manifest themselves. This whole world is a gigantic magical performance, a constant act of magic. But the earthly diagram, all the ingredients we have so earnestly and unchangeably codified, all our infallible formulas, are merely conventions. The earthly ritual can change if, instead of remaining mesmerized by the effects, we go back to the cause behind them on the side of the Magician. There is a tale about a Hindu Brahmin who, every day at the hour of his worship, had the family cat tied up so that he would not be disturbed in his ritual. Eventually, both the Brahmin and the cat died, and the Brahmin's son, now in charge of the worship ceremony, procured a new cat, which he then conscientiously tied up during the sacrifice! From father to son, the cat had become an indispensable element in the effective performance of
the ritual. Our own unassailable laws, too, may contain a few little cats. If we go back to the original force concealed behind the physical support, to the "true movement," as the Mother describes it, then we begin to witness the Great Play, and to realize just how different it is from the rigid notions we have of it. Behind the phenomenon of gravitation, to take one of the rituals, there is what the ancient yogis called Vayu, which causes gravitation and the electromagnetic fields (as Sri Aurobindo mentioned also during that conversation of 1926),
1.4.02 - The Divine Force, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
How is the mere physical mind to know that it is there and working? By its results? but how can it know that the results were that of the Yoga-force and not of something else? One of two things it must do. Either it must allow the consciousness to go inside, to become aware of inner things, to believe in and experience the invisible and the supraphysical, and then by experience, by the opening of new capacities it becomes conscious of these forces and can see, follow and use their workings just as the Scientist uses the unseen forces of Nature. Or one must have faith and watch and open oneself and then it will begin to see how things happen; it will notice that when the Force was called in, there began after a time to be a result, - then repetitions, more repetitions, more clear and tangible results, increasing frequency, increasing consistency of results, a feeling and awareness of the Force at work - until the experience
The Divine Force
--
But neither can be done if one insists always on the extrovert attitude, the external concrete only and refuses to join to it the internal concrete - or if the physical Mind at every step raises a dance of doubts which refuses to allow the nascent experience to develop. Even the Scientist carrying out a new experiment would never succeed if he allowed his mind to behave in that way.
Concrete? what do you mean by "concrete"?1 It [spiritual force] has its own concreteness; it can take a form (like a stream for instance) of which one is aware and can send it quite concretely in whatever "direction" or on whatever object one chooses.
1929-05-05 - Intellect, true and wrong movement - Attacks from adverse forces - Faith, integral and absolute - Death, not a necessity - Descent of Divine Consciousness - Inner progress - Memory of former lives, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, but it must be an integral faith and it must be absolute. And it must be of the right kind, not merely a force of mental thought or will, but something more and deeper. The will put forth by the mind sets up opposite reactions and creates a resistance. You must have heard something of the method of Cou in healing diseases. He knew some secret of this power and utilised it with considerable effect; but he called it imagination and his method gave the faith he called up too mental a form. Mental faith is not sufficient; it must be completed and enforced by a vital and even a physical faith, a faith of the body. If you can create in yourself an integral force of this kind in all your being, then nothing can resist it; but you must reach down to the most subconscious, you must fix the faith in the very cells of the body. There is, for instance, now abroad the beginning of a knowledge among the Scientists that death is not a necessity. But the whole of humanity believes firmly in death; it is, one might say, a general human suggestion based on a long unchanging experience. If this belief could be cast out first from the conscious mind, then from the vital nature and the subconscious physical layers, death would no longer be inevitable.
But it is not only in the mind of man that this idea of death exists. The animal creation knew it before him.
1951-03-03 - Hostile forces - difficulties - Individuality and form - creation, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mental faith is not sufficient; it must be completed and enforced by a vital and even a physical faith, a faith of the body. If you can create in yourself an integral force of this kind in all your being, then nothing can resist it; but you must fix the faith in the very cells of the body. There is, for instance, now abroad the beginning of a knowledge among the Scientists that death is not a necessity. But the whole of humanity believes firmly in death. If this belief could be cast out first from the conscious mind, then from the vital nature and the subconscious physical layers, death would no longer be inevitable.
Questions and Answers 1929 (5 May)
1951-03-12 - Mental forms - learning difficult subjects - Mental fortress - thought - Training the mind - Helping the vital being after death - ceremonies - Human stupidities, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Take any general idea; for example: Is the worlds duration indefinite? or Has it a beginning and an end? Who has a precise thought on this subject? Or again: How did the earth begin and how did humanity commence on earth? The mind is incapable of resolving this question; it will find itself before an indefinite number of possibilities and will not know how to choose. Then, what does it do, how does it choose? by personal preference, the thought that gives it an agreeable, comfortable feeling; it says, Yes, that must be it. But if you are quite honest and scrupulous and do not allow your preferences to come into play, how will you decide? It is a subject close enough to humanity for it to take an interest in it, isnt it? Earth is, after all, its domain. Well, if you read one book, it will tell you one thing; if you read another, it will tell you another. Then the religions with their theories take a hand in the matter and, moreover, they will tell you that such and such an idea is the absolute Truth and you must believe it, otherwise you will be damned! You read the Scientists they will tell you scientific things. You read the philosophers they will tell you philosophical things. You read the spiritualists, they will dish up spirituality for you and you will be exactly at the same point from which you started. But there are people who like to have a kind of stability in their mind (precisely those who build fortresses they like to be in a fortress very much, it gives them a comfortable sensation), so they make a choice, and if they have sufficient mental strength, they make a choice out of a considerable number of ideas; then they trim it up for you, set up a fine wall by putting each thing in what they consider to be its proper place (that is, there must not be too many contradictions close together lest they clash! It must make a proper organisation) and they tell you, Now, I know!They know nothing at all!
It is quite interesting, for the more mental activity one has, the more does one indulge in this little game. And there are ideas to which one clings! One hangs on to them as though all life depended upon it! I have known people who had fixed upon one central idea in their formation and said, All the rest may go to pieces, I dont care, but this idea will stand: this is the truth. And when they come to yoga, amusingly enough it is this idea which is constantly battered, all the time! All events, all circumstances come and strike at it until it begins to totter, and then one fine day they say in despair, Ah, my idea has gone.
--
Ask the Scientists, they will tell you!
If, finally, progress consists in unlearning all that one has learned, what is the use of learning?
1951-03-14 - Plasticity - Conditions for knowing the Divine Will - Illness - microbes - Fear - body-reflexes - The best possible happens - Theories of Creation - True knowledge - a work to do - the Ashram, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The first movement of fear comes automatically. There was a great scientist who was also a great psychologist (I dont remember his name now); he had developed his inner consciousness but wanted to test it. So he undertook an experiment. He wanted to know if, by means of consciousness, one could control the reflex actions of the body (probably he didnt go far enough to be able to do it, for it can be done; but in any case, for him it was still impossible). Well, he went to the zoological garden, to the place where snakes were kept in a glass cage. There was a particularly aggressive cobra there; when it was not asleep, it was almost always in a fury, for through the glass it could see people and that irritated it terribly. Our scientist went and stood in front of the cage. He knew very well that it was made in such a way that the snake could never break the glass and that he ran no risk of being attacked. So from there he began to excite the snake by shouts and gestures. The cobra, furious, hurled itself against the glass, and every time it did so the Scientist closed his eyes! Our psychologist told himself, But look here, I know that this snake cannot pass through, why do I close my eyes? Well, one must recognise that it is difficult to conquer the reaction. It is a sense of protection, and if one feels that one cannot protect oneself, one is afraid. But the movement of fear which is expressed by the eyes fluttering is not a mental or a vital fear: it is a fear in the cells of the body; for it has not been impressed upon them that there is no danger and they do not know how to resist. It is because one has not done yoga, you see. With yoga one can watch with open eyes, one would not close them; but one would not close them because one calls upon something else, and that something else is the sense of the divine Presence in oneself which is stronger than everything.
This is the only thing that can cure you of your fear.
1953-04-29, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother, have the Scientists, then, a very small consciousness?
Why? All scientists are not like that. If you meet a true scientist who has worked hard, he will tell you: We know nothing. What we know today is nothing beside what we shall know tomorrow. This years discoveries will be left behind next year. A real scientist knows very well that there are many more things he doesnt know than those he knows. And this is true of all branches of human activity. I have never met a scientist worthy of the name who was proud. I have never met a man of some worth who has told me: I know everything. Those I have seen have always confessed: In short, I know nothing. After having spoken of all that he has done, all that he has achieved, he tells you very quietly: After all, I know nothing.
1953-07-08, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My child, it is as though you asked me why there is inconscience, ignorance, darkness in the nature! It is the why of the world you are asking me! Why is the world like this and not otherwise? There are people who have written volumes on the subject. And each one explains it in his own way and that changes nothing, in fact. You may ask me: Why is there ill-will? Why is there ignorance? Why is there stupidity? Why is there wickedness? Why is there all the evil? Why is the world not a very charming place? All the philosophers explain it to you, each in his own way. The materialists explain it in their way, the Scientists explain it in their way, but nobody in all that can find the means of getting out of it! and after all, the one thing thats truly important is, it would be just (you ask me: Why is there ill-will?) it would be to find the way so that there may no longer be any ill-will. That would be worth the trouble. If you tell me: Why is there suffering, why is there misery? What can that do to you, this why, unless it be a means of finding a remedy? But I dont believe it would, for (we have said that here) if you seek for the why, you will find within yourself simply all sorts of explanations which will be more or less useless and will lead you nowhere.
The fact is that it is so, isnt it? and the second fact is that one doesnt want it thus, and the third is to find the means that it may no longer exist. That is our problem. The world is not as we think it ought to be. There are lots of things in the world which we do not approve of. Well, there are people who like what they call knowledge very much and begin to inquire why it is like that. In a way this is very well, but as I said, it would be much more important to find out what to do so that it may be otherwise. This is exactly the problem the Buddha put to himself. He sat under a tree, it is said, until he found the solution. But his solution is not very good, for when you tell me: The world is bad, well, his solution is: Do away with the world.For whose benefit? as Sri Aurobindo has written somewhere. Then the world will no longer be bad, for it will not exist! But what is the use of its no longer being bad, since it will not exist? It is very simple logic. It is like those who want the whole world to return to its Origin; and so Sri Aurobindo answers: You will be the all-powerful master of something that no longer exists, an emperor without an empire or a king without a kingdom, thats all. It is one solution. But there are other better ones. I believe we have found better ones.
1954-02-10 - Study a variety of subjects - Memory -Memory of past lives - Getting rid of unpleasant thoughts, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are several methods. Generally but it depends on peoplegenerally, the easiest way is to think of something else. That is, to concentrate ones attention upon something that has nothing to do with that thought has no connection with that thought, like reading or some workgenerally something creative, some creative work. For instance, those who write, while they are writing (let us take simply a novelist), while he is writing, all other thoughts are gone, for he is concentrated on what he is doing. When he finishes writing, if he has no control, the other thoughts will return. But precisely when one is attacked by a thought, one can try to do some creative work; for example, the Scientist could do some research work, a special study to discover something, something that is very absorbing; that is the easiest way. Naturally, those who have begun to control their thought can make a movement of rejection; push aside the thought as one would a physical object. But that is more difficult and asks for a much greater mastery. If one can manage it, it is more active, in the see that if you reject that movement, that thought, if you chase it off effectively and constantly or almost repeatedly, finally it does not come any more. But in the other case, it can always return. That makes two methods.
The third means is to be able to bring down a sufficiently great light from above which will be the denial in the deeper see; that is, if the thought which comes is something dark (and especially if it comes from the subconscient or inconscient and is sustained by instinct), if one can bring down from above the light of a true knowledge, a higher power, and put that light upon the thought, one can manage to dissolve it or enlighten or transform itthis is the supreme method. This is still a little more difficult. But it can be done, and if one does it, one is curednot only does the thought not come back but the very cause is removed.
1954-03-03 - Occultism - A French scientists experiment, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Well, the other one is very short. It is also interesting. It is about curing oneself of fear. (Perhaps Pavitra knows the name!). There was a French scientist who had written a book in which he narrated an experience he had had in the Jardin des Plantes. He wanted to know to what extent reason can have an effect over reflexes. I dont remember now for years I knew his name; I have forgotten it, but still the story remain. He was a well-known scientist and he has written about his experiment in a book. It is often quoted as an example. He was very much interested in knowing to what extent reason, intelligence with clear knowledge, could have an effect upon reflexes, that is, upon movements which come up spontaneously from the subconscious, automatic movements, and he made this experiment: he went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris where not only plants but animals also are kept. And among these animals there were huge snakes. There was a snake there (I knew it, that snake), which had the reputation of having a very bad nature. That is, it could be made angry very easily. It was a very large snake and was very beautiful; it was black. And the Scientist had been told by the keeper that this snake was very aggressive. These snakes are enclosed in huge glass cases, the glass being sufficiently thick to prevent any accident, as you may well imagine. So, he went to the cage of this serpent just when it was hungry (it had not eaten; when they have eaten they sleep). It had not eaten, so it was active. And he stood there in front of the cage, quite close to the glass and began exciting the snake I dont remember now what he diduntil it started getting angry. Then it coiled up and shot out like a released spring against the glass, against the face of that gentleman who was on the other side, and the manwho knew very well that the glass was there and nothing could happen to himjumped back! And he repeated the experiment several times, and not once could he control his movement of recoil. He recoiledevery time the snake jumped he recoiled! (Laughter)
So he has spoken of his experiment. But he lacked one element of knowledge, for he did not know that the physical movement was accompanied by a considerable vital projection of the nervous force of the snake, and that it was this that affected him. It was because of this. He tried in vain to remain stiff, to tell himself, But after all there is no danger, nothing can happen to me, there is the glass; why do I recoil? (Laughter) It was that which came and gave him a shock and he jumped back.
1955-10-05 - Science and Ignorance - Knowledge, science and the Buddha - Knowing by identification - Discipline in science and in Buddhism - Progress in the mental field and beyond it, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother reads The Great Secret: the Scientist.
I had the intention of leaving out the last speeches and going straight to the answer of the Unknown Man. But I shall tell you, because it didnt raise it seemed to me that it didnt give rise to enough questions to justify all the time we would spend in reading it but it happens that, for this one, the Scientist, someone who, by the way, is not here, has urgently asked two questions which seem interesting to me. So I shall read the Scientist today, and next week we shall directly take up The Unknown Man.
(After Mother has read the Scientist, Pavitra gets ready to read the questions.)
So, will you read them, Pavitra? You cant see well? We can switch on the light again.
--
So for him, to come out of the ignorance meant coming out of this false conviction that the world was something real, and above all, from the desire to live which was the supreme stupidity. Only, he found himself facing another problem which was at least as serious, if not still more so than the problem of the Scientist. It was that his remedy was good only for the individual; it could apply only to an extremely limited number of individuals who had already undergone countless experiences, through lives as countless, to await the time when they were ready to understand this truth and liberate themselves from the world by liberating themselves from desire, and disappear into Nirvana.
But how can these final conversions be sufficiently multiplied so as to succeed in making the world disappear? This seems impossible, because the process is progressive and one must pass through all the stages of conscious life until one comes to the state when he is ready to take flight into Nirvana. And so, during all this time, what happens to all these poor people, not only to people but to animals also and to plants, to all this life which suffers and struggles and strains? So, even deprived of all hope because at least the Scientists tell you, We are going to find the means of making life more comfortable for you. They dont seem to have discovered this very well, because this kind of comfort complicates life and doesnt make it more pleasant. Still at least they give you a gleam of hope, while the other tells you, Wait, wait. When your turn comes you will pass over to the other side. But while waiting one is not happy. So perhaps it could be said that this way of approaching the problem is not altogether satisfactory, for it is a purely and exclusively mental way, and can satisfy only those who have a mental life, and they do not form the majority. Besides, this is what has caused all religions to be vulgarised, even those which had at the start something very high and very true to give; they have been obliged to reduce it to the proportion of the human consciousness. For humanity suffers and it is not with beautiful ideas that it is cured.
Something else is necessary. This perhaps we shall see at the end when we come to it. For the moment
1955-12-28 - Aspiration in different parts of the being - Enthusiasm and gratitude - Aspiration is in all beings - Unlimited power of good, evil has a limit - Progress in the parts of the being - Significance of a dream, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are two principal things. This, the capacity for enthusiasm which makes one come out of his greater or lesser inertia in order to throw himself more or less totally into the thing which rouses him. As for instance, the artist for his art, the Scientist for his science. And in general, every person who creates or builds has an opening, the opening of a special faculty, a special possibility, creating an enthusiasm in him. When this is active, something in the being awakens, and there is a participation of almost the whole being in the thing done.
There is this. And then there are those who have an innate faculty of gratitude, those who have an ardent need to respond, respond with warmth, devotion, joy, to something which they feel like a marvel hidden behind the whole of life, behind the tiniest little element, the least little event of life, who feel this sovereign beauty or infinite Grace which is behind all things.
1956-11-07 - Thoughts created by forces of universal - Mind Our own thought hardly exists - Idea, origin higher than mind - The Synthesis of Yoga, effect of reading, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Shakti, the power of the Infinite and the Eternal descends within us, works, breaks up our present psychological formations, shatters every wall, widens, liberates she frees the consciousness from confinement in the body; it can go out in trance or sleep or even waking and enter into worlds or other regions of this world and act there or carry back its experience. It spreads out, feeling the body only as a small part of itself, and begins to contain what before contained it; it achieves the cosmic consciousness and extends itself to be commensurate with the universe. It begins to know inwardly and directly and not merely by external observation and contact the forces at play in the world, feels their movement, distinguishes their functioning and can operate immediately upon them as the Scientist operates upon physical forces, accept their action and results in our mind, life, body or reject them or modify, change, reshape, create immense new powers and movements in place of the old small functionings of the nature. We begin to perceive the working of the forces of universal Mind and to know how our thoughts are created by that working.
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, pp. 172-73
1960 01 05, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In this aphorism, by they Sri Aurobindo means the materialists, the Scientists and, in a general way, all those who only believe in physical reality and consider human reason to be the one infallible judge. Furthermore, the things he speaks of here are all the perceptions that belong to worlds other than the material, all that one can see with eyes other than the physical, all the experiences that one can have in subtle domains from the sense perceptions of the vital world to the bliss of the Divine Presence.
It was while discussing these and other similar things that Sri Aurobindo was told that they were hallucinations. When you look up the word hallucination in the dictionary, you find this definition: Morbid sensation not produced by any real object. Objectless perception. Sri Aurobindo interprets this or puts it more precisely: A subjective or psychical experience which corresponds to no objective or no physical reality. There could be no better definition of these phenomena of the inner consciousness, which are most precious to man and make him something more than a mere thinking animal. Human reason is so limited, so down to earth, so arrogantly ignorant that it wants to discredit by a pejorative word the very faculties which open the gates of a higher and more marvellous life to man. In the face of this obstinate incomprehension Sri Aurobindo wonders ironically at the miracles of the human reason. For the power to change truth into falsehood to such a degree is certainly a miracle.
1965 05 29, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I think this is what Sri Aurobindo meant: only when the other consciousness has been developed will the Scientist smile and say, Yes, it was all very well, but
In reality, one cannot lead to the otherexcept by an act of grace; if inwardly, there is an absolute sincerity which enables the Scientist to see, to sense, to perceive the point at which it eludes him, then that can lead him to the other state of consciousness, but not by his own procedures. Something must abdicate and accept the new methods, the new perceptions, the new vibration, the new state of soul.
So, it is an individual matter. It is not a question of class or category the question is whether the Scientist is ready to be something else.
(Silence)
1969 09 17, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
151A man came to a scientist and wished to be instructed; his instructor showed him the revelations of the microscope and telescope, but the man laughed and said, These are obviously hallucinations inflicted on the eye by the glass which you use as a medium; I will not believe till you show these wonders to my naked seeing. Then the Scientist proved to him by many collateral facts and experiments the reliability of his knowledge but the man laughed again and said, What you term proofs, I term coincidences, the number of coincidences does not constitute proof; as for your experiments, they are obviously effected under abnormal conditions and constitute a sort of insanity of Nature. When confronted with the results of mathematics, he was angry and cried out, This is obviously imposture, gibberish and superstition; will you try to make me believe that these absurd cabalistic figures have any real force and meaning? Then the Scientist drove him out as a hopeless imbecile; for he did not recognise his own system of denials and his own method of negative reasoning. If we wish to refuse an impartial and open-minded enquiry, we can always find the most respectable polysyllables to cover our refusal or impose tests and conditions which stultify the inquiry.
Scientists, who are mostly materialists, use the same procedures to refute occult and spiritual knowledge as ignorant imbeciles use to refute science.
1f.lovecraft - Facts concerning the Late, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
body. Saddened by these family misfortunes, the Scientist sought relief
in work, and made two long expeditions in the interior of Africa. In
1f.lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
one of their human allies give the Scientists a hint.
There are mighty cities on Yuggothgreat tiers of terraced towers
1.fs - Ode To Joy - With Translation, #Schiller - Poems, #Friedrich Schiller, #Poetry
It smiles at the Scientist.
To virtue's steep hill
1.whitman - Passage To India, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
After the noble inventorsafter the Scientists, the chemist, the
geologist, ethnologist,
2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: The phenomenon of eyeless sight reminds me of the case of a man who emitted blue light. the Scientists were puzzled and thought that they were hypnotised to see the light. Then they exposed photographic plates and found that the light was being emitted.
Sri Aurobindo (smiling) : All these phenomena eyeless sight, light-emission or miraculous cures are psychic and it is absurd to try to explain them away and more absurd to doubt them.
--
Disciple: But that control is not perfect. Another question is whether the Scientists would come to believe or accept that the whole truth cannot be attained by mind, or would they turn sceptics like the positivists? Could they come to believe in the possibility of higher knowledge by mysticism?
Sri Aurobindo: Never mind what they accept or don't accept, but the control which science gives is a real control. The knowledge science gives, as I said, is not only useful but is even necessary. The main concern of the Scientist is with physical phenomena, he observes them, he studies the conditions, makes experiments and then deduces the laws.
Disciple: Can one study the planes of consciousness in the scientific way?
--
Even in knowing physical phenomena, the yogi's way of knowing is different from that of the Scientist. For instance, when I light a match I do not know the chemical composition of the match, and how it burns when struck. But I feel and know beforehand whether it will light or not, or whether it will do the work intended of it, and that is enough for me. I know it because I am in contact with the force that is in it, the Sat and the Chit in movement there.
The yogi's way of dealing with these physical forces is also different from that of the Scientist. Take, for instance, the fire that broke out in Tokyo. What the Scientist would do is to multiply means and organise devices to prevent and put out the fire. What the Yogi would do in the same case is that he would feel the spirit of fire approaching and, putting forth his force, he would be able to prevent the fire from breaking out in his vicinity.
These dealings are with quite different orders of facts.
--
Disciple: Scientists study the rainbow and find that it is caused by the difference in the wave-lengths of light and they might say that is the reality of the rainbow. But when the poet exclaims, "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky," we have no right to say that the knowledge or experience of the Scientist is right and that of the poet wrong.
Sri Aurobindo: In fact, the rainbow exists for neither. Only the Scientist gets excited over the process, while the poet is excited over the result of the process.
Disciple: Did you read Spengler's Decline of the West?
--
He has also argued against the Scientists who insist that the so-called objective view is the only view that is permissible or intended. The rainbow is not intended only to give man the knowledge or experience of the difference in the wave-lengths of light. The poet is equally entided to his experience when he says, "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky."
So also a 'ripple' in water is not meant only to give man the knowledge of the pressure of the air, and the force of surface-tension.
--
Now even the Scientists have been forced to admit that their conclusions are not all based on reason. Their formulas have become like magic formulas.
Disciple: They say that they can demonstrate their conclusions.
--
Disciple: the Scientists define gravitation as only a curvature of space and, as we know matter only by weight, matter is curvature of space.
Sri Aurobindo: But what about matter being the same as energy?
--
Disciple: Some of the Scientists say that the sun is losing weight at a certain rate and the time when it will be exhausted is calculated!
Sri Aurobindo: How do you know that the sun is not renewing its weight ?
2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
whole, or a selection, as the Scientists say, a natural selection
they call it or, as we should put it, selection by the action of
--
the basis of Evolution the Scientists have discovered a moral
sanction, which does replace the old religious sanctions, the
2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
has clearly seen. It is natural therefore for the Scientist to argue
that the material operation is the cause of the spiritual and
--
certainties, thinks the Scientist, my opponent from mere ideas
the truth of which cannot be demonstrated by definite evidence
--
the confidence of the Scientist in his modern methods of analysis
and observation. To a certain extent Hindu philosophy goes
2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: It ultimately becomes inspiration, when it ascends higher. The purer it becomes the nearer it gets to Truth. For instance, in the case of poets, generally it is the inspired imagination that works. What you meant to say about the Scientist was perhaps intuition.
(After a pause) The capital period of my intellectual development was when I could see clearly that what the intellect said might be correct and not correct, that what the intellect justified was true and its opposite also was true. I never admitted a truth in the mind without simultaneously keeping it open to the contrary of it.
2.08 - ALICE IN WONDERLAND, #God Exists, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
Go further still. The doctrine of relativity lands in a mere idea of the cosmos. The space-time stuff that they speak of as the ultimate substance is not a hard reality. Neither can space be called a hard reality like a table, nor time. But, researches into the substance of physics seem to conclude that the hardest realities like hills and rocks are constituted of configurations of the space-time continuum. We cannot understand what this space-time continuum is except that it is a mathematical heap of point-events in the brain of the Scientistand not a human scientist at that!
Here, Berkeley rectifies himself when he says that the world is an idea, not of Mr. Berkeley, but of a larger being in whom all the individual ideas are also included. We again come to the Hiranyagarbha of Vedanta philosophy, though such words were not used by Berkeley or Plato.
--
Now, even your own body is of the same nature. This substantiality of the world which has been reduced practically into nothing but a sensation and an idea of a cosmic existence includes the very notion of our body also, so that we also go, the Scientists also go into that conclusions. Sir Arthur Eddington said that no scientists can live in this world without going mad. Fortunately, he did not want to go mad, because, under these conclusions, no one can exist here for three minutes.
Buddha said this. A really perceiving individual cannot exist in this world for three days. He will melt into nothing. But the fact that perception has not arisen is the reason why we are very happy here. So, ignorance is the cause of our very comfortable existence. Now this comparative study of Eastern conclusions with Western discoveries seems to make us feel that all great men are thinking alikewhe ther Plato or Aristotle, Kent or Hegel, Acharya Sankara or Vidyaranya Swami.
2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: It ultimately becomes 'inspiration' when it ascends higher. The purer it becomes the nearer it gets to Truth. For instance, in the case of poets, generally, it is the inspired imagination that works. What you meant to say about the Scientist was perhaps 'intuition'.
(After a pause) The capital period of my intellectual development was when I could see clearly that what the intellect said may be correct and not correct, that what the intellect justifies is true and its opposite also is true. I never admitted a truth in the mind without simultaneously keeping it open to the contrary of it.
2.1.02 - Nature The World-Manifestation, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Chitshakti not mind has created the world. Chitshakti is the thing which the Scientists call in its various aspects Force & Energy, but it is no material Force or Energy, it is the divine power of self-conscious Being forming itself not materially, not in substance of matter but in the substance of that self-consciousness into these images of form and force which make up the world.
What we call world, is a harmony of things seen not by the individual mind or even by universal mind, but rather seen through universal mind, as through a reflecting medium, by the Eye of divine Being. The eye that sees is immaterial, the things seen are
2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This striving and slow outburst of Something that was hidden all along in Matter, in the Inconscient, is the whole sense of Evolution - not the mere development of a more and more organised living body out of protoplasm, as the Scientists with their eyes fixed only or mainly on physical things would have it, but the struggle of Consciousness somnambulised in Matter to wake and free, find and possess itself more and more completely, the emancipation and slow self-revealing of a Soul secret at first in Force and Form, the growth of a Spirit.
This evolution, it is sometimes pretended, ends in man, man is the term and end; but this is because we miss the real values of the process. At first indeed we see this Spirit spending numberless millions of years to evolve a material system of worlds empty in the beginning of life, a lesser but vast enough series of millions to develop an earth on which life can inhabit, a lesser series of millions to make possible and train, raise life itself with but a feeble and restricted apparatus of mind; but once it has found a body, a brain, a living apparatus not perfect, but still sufficient it is no longer concerned mainly with evolving a body or [ . . . ] an embodied life but can at last grapple with its own proper business. Evolution henceforth means the evolution of the consciousness, of mind and, if any such thing there be, of what is beyond mind, - and in that case as its last stride has been the evolution of the mental being, man, out of the vital being, the animal, so its next stride will be to evolve out of mental man a greater spiritual and supramental creature.
--
Plant-life is a most significant progress upon the mineral, but the difference is as nothing compared with the gulf that divides the dumb vitality of the plant from the conscious experience of the animal. The hiatus between the animal and the human is so great in consciousness, however physically small, that the Scientists' alleged cousinship of monkey and man looks psychologically almost incredible. And yet the difference between vital animal and mental man is as nothing to that which will be between man's mind and the superman's vaster consciousness and richer powers. That past step will be to this new one as the snail's slow march in the grass to a Titan's sudden thousand league stride from continent to continent.
Evolution on the terrestrial plane, even in the dullest brute matter is only in outward appearance a progression of physical function and form; in its essential fact, in its inner meaning, in its significant power, it is a progression of consciousness, a spiritual or psychological change.
2.12 - On Miracles, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: the Scientists have the mastery over the physical.
Disciple: No. I mean spiritual mastery.
--
Sri Aurobindo: This kind of emission of light waves from a human body is a proven fact. the Scientists went and found the light waves but then they thought that they were hypnotised and so they tried the photographic plate and found the photo of a hand. These phenomena like the eyeless sight, or emission of light waves or cures by occult powers are mostly 'psychic' phenomena. It is absurd to try to explain them away and still more absurd to doubt them.
Disciple: A missionary, it seems, has cured a blind man; and St. Xavier at Goa still cures many people of their diseases.
2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
the Scientist and the magician tried to save the girl. The magician failed. Then the Scientist tried; he found himself baffled by the opponents as they dasyus, the hostile vital powers were not struck down by the blows of the sword or of anything. The opponents were going to a king's capital. Then they fled and the girl was taken away.
the Scientist was a geologist who had made the discovery that the strata of the earth must be measured from the top and not from the bottom. When the enemies fled they left; their things behind and did not like to go into the capital wounded. the Scientist then found a big book on geology half as big as this room among the things left: behind, and he found the girl just between the cover and the pages.
The secret of the earth, the physical nature, was thus symbolicaily given.
--
Now, we have in atoms an example of a different law of life because they have a beginning and an end, but they have no growth and decay. Their death has been studied by science in the case of radio-active elements. the Scientists speak of the life of an atom as the period or length of time necessary for its disintegration. The life of an atom varies greatly; radium is said to have about 1300 years. But the point to be noted is that the death rate is exactly the same for old and newly formed atoms. They have practically no age, and their death is not brought about by decay and wearing away.
Sri Aurobindo: When I was speaking of 'life' the other day I meant to imply those forms of life like the plants and animals in which life is more organised and complex. Of course there is life as well as mind and even supermind in the atoms, but these are not manifest and not organised, not on the surface as it were.
2.1.4.2 - Teaching, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Did you attend the teachers meeting with X? They were meeting because in addition to their studies they wanted to give everyone a special project. They wanted to help them to discover what the Scientists are discovering at the momentWhat is water?, Why does sugar dissolve in water?and all these things that are leading scientists to the conclusion that they know nothing.
So I asked them the question: What is death?
2.16 - The 15th of August, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: That is only an aspect of it which the Scientist knows.
Disciple: If an atom were broken up, so much energy would be liberated that some scientists say it can blow up the whole world. And merely changing the position of the atoms in a substance, the properties of the substance entirely change. Is this energy you speak of in Matter a form of the same energy that the Scientists speak of?
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. What they know is only one aspect of it. For it is not merely force but has a consciousness of its own, also it can accept and reject things.
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: Anger, the Scientists say, is due to the secretions of glands even love. But (half-smiling) can egoism be cured like that?
Disciple: If it can be cured, I would be the first to apply for it.
--
The discoveries of modern science have outrun the human capacity to use them. the Scientists don't know what to do with these discoveries and they have been used for the purposes of destruction. Now they are trying to kill men by throwing germs from aeroplanes; smallpox and cholera at least end the suffering by death, but by bombing, etc., you mutilate for life.
Politics, science, even socialism, have not succeeded in finding a way out of suffering. They rally people to kill each other and involve the state into a peril unless you say that murders and massacres are necessary. From this state of chaos and suffering people have been shown ways of escape, but those who have shown these ways, you say, are not useful!
--
The same principle works out in science. the Scientists at one time reduced all multiplicity of elements to Ether and described it in the most contradictory terms. Now they have found the electron as the basis of Matter. By the difference of position and number of electrons you get the whole multiplicity of objects. There also you find the One that is Many, and yet they are not two different things. Both the One and the Many are true and through both you have to go to the Truth.
When you come to politics, democracy, plutocracy, monarchy, etc., all have some truth even Hitler and Mussolini stand for some truth.
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: I wonder how the Scientists would explain all this. Once they were invited to a demonstration but they refused to attend.
Disciple: They can't attend, for fear of their convictions being shaken.
--
Sri Aurobindo: The same thing happened in Germany. In one village [Alberfeltz] there was a man who used to train horses to do mathematical sums. He invited the Scientists. Not only did they refuse to believe it, they complained to the Government that it should be stopped because the trainer was following a scientifically unorthodox method.
Disciple: Maurice Maeterlinck went to see it and said that he himself did not believe it before he saw it. He examined the animals by giving his own figures and the answers given by the horses were correct. [Ref. his book 'L'hte inconnu'.]
2.18 - The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The first foundation in this emergence, the creation of forms of Matter, first of inconscient and inanimate, then of living and thinking Matter, the appearance of more and more organised bodies adapted to express a greater power of consciousness, has been studied from the physical side, the side of form-building, by Science; but very little light has been shed on the inner side, the side of consciousness, and what little has been observed is rather of its physical basis and instrumentation than of the progressive operations of Consciousness in its own nature. In the evolution, as it has been observed so far, although a continuity is there, - for Life takes up Matter and Mind takes up submental Life, the Mind of intelligence takes up the mind of life and sensation, - the leap from one grade of consciousness in the series to another grade seems to our eyes immense, the crossing of the gulf whether by bridge or by leap impossible; we fail to discover any concrete and satisfactory evidence of its accomplishment in the past or of the manner in which it was accomplished. Even in the outward evolution, even in the development of physical forms where the data are clearly in evidence, there are missing links that remain always missing; but in the evolution of consciousness the passage is still more difficult to account for, for it seems more like a transformation than a passage. It may be, however, that, by our incapacity to penetrate the subconscious, to sound the submental or to understand sufficiently a lower mentality different from ours, we are unable to observe the minute gradations, not only in each degree of the series, but on the borders between grade and grade: the Scientist who does observe minutely the physical data, has been driven to believe in the continuity of evolution in spite of the gaps and missing links; if we could observe similarly the inner evolution, we could, no doubt, discover the possibility and the mode of these formidable transitions. But still there is a real, a radical difference between grade and grade, so much so that the passage from one to another seems a new creation, a miracle of metamorphosis rather than a natural predictable development or quiet passing from one state of being to another with its well-marked steps arranged in an easy sequence.
These gulfs appear deeper, but less wide, as we rise higher in the scale of Nature. If there are rudiments of life-reaction in the metal, as has been recently contended, it may be identical with life-reaction in the plant in its essence, but what might be called the vital-physical difference is so considerable that one seems to us inanimate, the other, though not apparently conscious, might be called a living creature. Between the highest plant life and lowest animal the gulf is visibly deeper, for it is the difference between mind and the entire absence of any apparent or even rudimentary movement of mind: in the one the stuff of mental consciousness is unawakened though there is a life of vital reactions, a suppressed or subconscious or perhaps only submental sense vibration which seems to be intensely active; in the other, though the life is at first less automatic and secure in the subconscious way of living and in its own new way of overt consciousness imperfectly determined, still mind is awakened, - there is a conscious life, a profound transition has been made.
2.19 - Knowledge of the Scientist and the Yogi, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:2.19 - Knowledge of the Scientist and the Yogi
class:chapter
--
The climax of the ordinary consciousness is Science. For Science, what is upon the earth is true, simply because it is there. What it calls Nature is for it the final reality, and its aim is to build up a theory to explain the workings of it. So it climbs as high as the physical mind can go and tries to find out the causes of what it assumes to be the true, the real world. But in fact it adapts causes to effects, for it has already taken that which is for the true, the real, and seeks only to explain it mentally. For the yogic consciousness, however, this world is not the final reality. Rising above the mind into the Overmind and then into the Supermind, it enters the divine world of first truths, and looking down from there sees what has happened to those truths here. How distorted they have become, how completely falsified! So the so-called world of fact is for the Yogi a falsehood and not at all the only true reality. It is not what it ought to be, it is almost the very opposite; whereas for the Scientist it is absolutely fundamental.
Our aim is to change things. the Scientist says that whatever is, is natural and cannot be changed at heart. But, really speaking, the laws of which he usually speaks are of his own mental making; and because he accepts Nature as it is as the very basis, things do not and cannot change for him in any complete sense. But, according to us, all this can be changed, because we know that there is something above, a divine truth seeking manifestation. There are no fixed laws here; even Science in its undogmatic moments recognises that the laws are mere mental constructions. There are only cases, and if the mind could apply itself to all the circumstances it would find that no two cases are similar. Laws are for the minds convenience, but the process of the supramental manifestation is different, we may even say it is the reverse of the mind. In the supramental realisation, each thing will carry in itself a truth which will manifest at each instant without being bound by what has been or what will follow. That elaborate linking of the past with the present, which gives things in Nature such an air of unchangeable determinism is altogether the minds way of conceiving, and is no proof that all that exists is inevitable and cannot be otherwise.
The knowledge possessed by the Yogi is also an answer to the terrible theory that all that takes place is Gods direct working. For once you rise to the Supermind you immediately perceive that the world is false and distorted. The supramental truth has not at all found manifestation. How then can the world be a genuine expression of the Divine? Only when the Supermind is established and rules here, then alone the Supreme Will may be said to have au thentically manifested. At the same time, we must steer clear of the dangerous exaggeration of the sense of the falsehood of the world, which comes to those who have risen to the higher consciousness. What happened with Shankara and others like him was that they had a glimpse of the true consciousness, which threw the falsehood of this world into such sharp contrast that they declared the universe to be not only false but also a really non-existent illusion which should be entirely abandoned. We, on the other hand, see its falsehood, but realise also that it has to be replaced and not abandoned as an illusion. Only, the truth has got mistranslated, something has stepped in to pervert the divine reality, but the world is in fact meant to express it. And to express it is indeed our Yoga.
2.2.01 - The Problem of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
inexplicably aware. But such an explanation may account, - if we admit this impossible magic of the conscious response of an inconscient to the inconscient, - for sense and reflex action [yet] becomes absurd if we try to explain by it thought and will, the imagination of the poet, the attention of the Scientist, the reasoning of the philosopher. Call it mechanical cerebration, if you will, but no mere mechanism of grey stuff of brain can explain these things; a gland cannot write Hamlet or pulp of brain work out a system of metaphysics. There is no parity, kinship or visible equation between the alleged cause or agent on the one side and on the other the effect and its observable process. There is a gulf here that cannot be bridged by any stress of forcible affirmation or crossed by any stride of inference or violent leap of argumentative reason. Consciousness and an inconscient substance may be connected, may interpenetrate, may act on each other, but they are and remain things opposite, incommensurate with each other, fundamentally diverse. An observing and active consciousness emerging as a character of an eternal Inconscience is a self-contradictory affirmation, an unintelligible phenomenon, and the contradiction must be healed or explained before this affirmation can be accepted. But it cannot be healed unless either the Inconscient has a latent power for consciousness - and then its inconscience is phenomenal only, not fundamental, - or else is the veil of a Consciousness which emerges out of a state of involution which appears to us as an inconscience.
There is no doubt a connection and interdependence between consciousness and the inconscient substance in which it resides and through which it seems to operate. Consciousness depends upon the body and its functionings, on the brain, nerves, gland-action, right physiological working, for its own firm state and action. It uses them as its instruments and, if they are injured or unable to act, the action of the consciousness may also be in part or whole impaired, impeded or suspended. But this does not prove that the action of consciousness is an action of the body and nothing else. There is an instrumentation and if the instrument is impaired, the user of the instrument can no longer manifest himself rightly through it; if it is destroyed, he
--
Two lines of enquiry seem to give, though imperfectly and in opposition, a positive base for a reply to the question and the riddle, - the experiments of the Scientist and the experience of the mystic.
2.21 - 1940, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: the Scientists swore by the rigorous law of causation but now they find it difficult to apply it in their investigations.
Sri Aurobindo: What is causation? It only means that certain conditions follow certain other conditions.
2.3.02 - The Supermind or Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Truth presented to Mind as the whole sufficient explanation of things or exalting one of the Divine's Godheads above all others as the true God than whom there can be no other or none so high or higher. This divisionary principle pursues man's mental knowledge everywhere and even when he thinks he has arrived at the final unity and harmony, it is only a constructed unity based on an Aspect. It is so that the Scientist seeks to found the unity of knowledge on some original physical aspect of things,
Energy or Matter, Electricity or Ether, or the Mayavadin thinks he has arrived at absolute Adwaita by cutting existence into two and calling the upper side Brahman and the lower side Maya. It
2.4.2 - Interactions with Others and the Practice of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And if some find that retirement is the best way of giving oneself to the Higher, to the Divine by avoiding as much as possible occasions for the bubbling up of the lower, why not? The aim they have come for is that and why blame or look with distrust and suspicion on the means they find best or daub it with disparaging adjectives to discredit itgrim, inhuman and the rest? It is your vital that shrinks from it and your vital mind that supplies these epithets which express only your shrinking and not what the retirement really is. For it is the vital or the social part of it that shrinks from solitude; the thinking mind does not but rather courts it. The poet seeks solitude with himself or with Nature to listen to his inspiration; the thinker plunges into solitude to meditate on things and commune with a deeper knowledge; the Scientist shuts himself up in his laboratory to pore by experiment into the secrets of Nature; these retirements are not grim and inhuman. Neither is the retirement of the sadhak into the exclusive concentration of which he feels the need; it is a means to an end, to the end on which his whole heart is set. As for the Yogin or bhakta who has already begun to have the fundamental experience, he is not in a grim and inhuman solitude. The Divine and all the world are there in the being of the one, the supreme Beloved or his Ananda is there in the heart of the other.
I say this as against your depreciation of retirement founded on ignorance of what it really is; but I do not, as I have often said, recommend a total seclusion, for I hold that to be a dangerous expedient which may lead to morbidity and much error. Nor do I impose retirement on anyone as a method or approve of it unless the person himself seeks it, feels its necessity, has the joy of it and the personal proof that it helps to the spiritual experience. It is not to be imposed on anyone as a principle, for that is the mental way of doing things, the way of the ordinary mindit is as a need that it has to be accepted, when it is felt as a need, not as a general law or rule.
3.02 - THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
All things considered, the Scientist can affirm without further
hesitation that, thanks to the double discovery of Trinil man
3.02 - The Great Secret, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
the Scientist
The Artist
--
When the ship becomes clearly visible, the Athlete jumps up onto the gunwale waving a white handkerchief which he pulls from his pocket. The ship comes nearer. the Scientist exclaims:
They have seen us. They are coming!
3.03 - The Ascent to Truth, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let us call our friends - I think I have something to communicate to them. (He beckons and calls to the others. They draw near and the Scientist addresses them.)
My dear friends and fellow-travellers, as we move further and further away from the world and its concrete reality, I have
--
I too am thinking of leaving you. My reasons are not the same as those of our friend the Scientist, but they are just as compelling.
During this interesting climb of ours, I have had some experiences: new beauties have been revealed to me; or rather, a new sense of beauty has taken birth in me. At the same time, I have been seized with an ardent and imperious need to express my experience in concrete forms, to cast them in
--
They all go on except the Scientist and the Artist.
FOURTH STAGE
3.1.02 - Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is an intuition in Matter which holds the action of the material Energy together and dictates the organisation of the material world from the electron to the sun and planet and their contents. There is an intuition in Life which similarly supports and guides the play and development of life in matter till it is ready for the mental evolution of which man is the vehicle. In man also the creation follows the same upward process, - the intuition within develops according to the stage he has reached in his progress. Even the precise intellect of the Scientist, who is inclined to deny the separate existence or the superiority of intuition, yet cannot really move forward unless there is behind him a mental intuition which enables him to take a forward step or to divine what has to be done. Intuition therefore is present at the beginning of things and in their middle as well as at their consummation.
But Intuition takes its proper form only when one goes beyond the mental into the spiritual domain, for there only it comes fully forward from behind the veil and reveals its true and complete nature. Along with the mental evolution of man there has been going forward the early process of another evolution which prepares the spiritual and supramental being. This has had two lines, one the discovery of the occult forces secret in
31.06 - Jagadish Chandra Bose, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
JAGADISH Chandra Bose is a scientist; his field is the world of matter, his function is to discover the truth of matter by material means. The truth has to be proved by demonstration and to be established. Science denies the truth that does not come within the purview of the senses. Observation by the external senses and examination and analysis by the intellect - these are the approved and accepted instruments of knowledge for the Scientist.
Scientists are rationalists; the senses and the mind or the reasoning intellect are all they hold on to. In their quest for truth they do not rely on other faculties; for other faculties fall under the categories of guess, imagination and poetry. Science demands direct knowledge of the truth; the Scientist will act in accordance with the brain pure and simple; to utilise any other faculty is, for him, a frightful abuse of the scientific way. Besides, the concern of the Scientist is wholly with the material world; sufficient for the discovery of the facts and principles of this domain are the five senses and the reason; there is no necessity to seek other aids.
Again, the Scientist can at the same time be a poet, can have feeling, can be contemplative, can be spiritual. But that is a matter entirely for another field, another world. When the Scientist is occupied with science he must shut the door on this his other aspect. A combination of the two creates confusion. Scientific research has to be carried on under the strict vigilance of the brain and the senses. If into that there intrude hopes, desires, feelings of the heart, life or imagination, then in place of science there will emerge romance, fiction. Eddington and Lodge, despite their being great scientists, have not escaped this fault. They have always brought in extraneous things and mixed them up with things scientific. This is the mental attitude or the viewpoint of the orthodox scientist. Perhaps ordinary lovers of science will also support it.
About science and scientists this is no doubt the prevailing canon. But in actual practice we find something else. What distinguishes Jagadish Chandra Bose is that he is a scientist, yet, while being a scientist in the true sense of the term, he is also a kavi,a poet; and this, his poetic part, is not something different from his scientific self. It not only is not separate but is the very spring and mystery, the hidden power of his scientific genius. The poet does not mean a weaver of words; the poet is one who has a divine vision and who creates by the force of that vision. By virtue of this power Jagadish Chandra often appears more like a miracle-maker than a scientist. This is not to say that Jagadish Chandra is unique and matchless in this respect. In all creative spirits even in the realm of science we find in a more or less degree an evidence of this power; for at the root of all creation this power is bound to exist. In the' brain of all discoverers from Galileo to Einstein has played the high light of a supersensuous, supra-intellectual vision. All their achievements, at any rate all the achievements of Jagadish Chandra, show how this vision has been brought down into the framework of the mind and the senses, proved and objectified.
32.05 - The Culture of the Body, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now there are two ways of becoming conscious. To be conscious implies becoming conscious of one's self. This self can be the "I", that is, there is not only the "I" who does the work, but there is also the sense that I am doing the work while it is being done; whatever the nature of the work I remain aware all the time that it is I who am doing the work. But the "self" that becomes conscious may also be the individual consciousness of the particular organ or limb that does the work; it too becomes conscious in the course of the work that is being done. When, for instance, I run, not only do I remain aware that I am running, but all parts of the body that are involved in this running become themselves conscious of their action. That adds greatly to the success of the result. Thus to make the body conscious by infusing in its organs and limbs the movement of consciousness and vibrations of light, what the Scientist would describe as "energising" the body - this is the real aim, the true utility of physical culture and exercises.
But one need not stop with this; it is necessary to rise another step. The body must not only become conscious, it must become rightly conscious. My consciousness, the one that stands behind all my action, is not mine, at least not exclusively mine; it is a deeper, wider, higher, consciousness. What works and manifests itself through my personal consciousness is another kind of consciousness. Thus we find ourselves within the realm of spiritual discipline, yoga-sadhana,by following the line of physical culture.
3.2.06 - The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When I wrote in the Arya, I was setting forth an overmind view of things to the mind and putting it in mental terms, that was why I had sometimes to use logic. For in such a workmediating between the intellect and the supra-intellectuallogic has a place, though it cannot have the chief place it occupies in purely mental philosophies. The Mayavadin himself labours to establish his point of view or his experience by a rigorous logical reasoning. Only, when it comes to an explanation of Maya he, like the Scientist dealing with Nature, can do no more than arrange and organise his ideas of the process of this universal mystification; he cannot explain how or why his illusionary mystifying Maya came into existence. He can only say, Well, but it is there.
Of course, it is there. But the question is, first, What is it? is it really an illusionary Power and nothing else, or is the Mayavadins idea of it a mistaken first view, a mental imperfect reading, even perhaps itself an illusion? And next, Is illusion the sole or the highest Power which the Divine Consciousness or Superconsciousness possesses? The Absolute is an absolute Truth free from Maya, otherwise liberation would not be possible. Has then the supreme and absolute Truth no other active Power than a power of falsehood and with it, no doubt, for the two go together, a power of dissolving or disowning the falsehood,which is yet there for ever? I suggested that this sounded a little queer. But queer or not, if it is so, it is so for as you point out, the Ineffable cannot be subjected to the laws of logic.
32.06 - The Novel Alchemy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Culture of the Body The God of the Scientist
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta On Spirituality The Novel Alchemy
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The Culture of the Body The God of the Scientist
32.07 - The God of the Scientist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:32.07 - The God of the Scientist
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta On Spirituality The God of the Scientist
The God of the Scientist
IT is meaningless to hold that a scientist must necessarily be an atheist. There is no need to cite instances of the past. Leaving aside the examples of Newton, Kepler and Tycho Brahe, even in the world of to-day it is not rare to find more than one scientist who believes in God. In this respect Lodge, Eddington, Einstein and Planck are outstanding figures that require no introduction. It is generally said that a scientist may indeed be a God-believer, but not in the capacity of a scientist. The faculty by which he acquires religious certainty has no scientific bearing, it belongs to quite a different sphere of human life. The being of man comprises such a dual nature; on one side he may be a scientist and on the other he may remain a non-scientist.
The reasoning faculty, the intellectual power of the mental being is the instrument by which the Scientist carries on his search after truth. If he wants to remain strictly faithful to reality as it appears, then he cannot exceed the realm of sense-perceptions. But without reason he will simply indulge in chimeras and build castles in the air which are but deformations of: sense-perceptions. Bergson the philosopher, however, opines that the intellect by itself cannot go beyond the domain of sense-knowledge, because it comes into being and exists in the field of the senses by way of a necessity and as a reaction of the senses to their objects. The intellectual faculty develops in man so that he may handle material things properly and effectively. The so-called universal truths or laws of Nature that the Scientist discovers by virtue of his keen intellect have their chief advantage in enabling one to deal with the external world with considerable ease. That is why the Scientist is blind to any other mystery than that of Matter. This is a defect pertaining to and inherent in his nature. Be that as it may, we have still to say that the intellect has attained its acme in the Scientist. The speciality of the intellect has found its best manifestation in him. On the basis of the wealth of sense-perceptions and by their analysis and synthesis and by observation and experimentation, to arrive at a universal law as wide as possible marks the special genius of the Scientist.
The mysteries of Nature that have been discovered by scientific methods are not the last word or the whole of her truth. However, it may be said: There is no other means of arriving at the realistic truth. By treading any other path we can get into the worlds of imagination, poetry, illusion and delusion, surely not into the world of realities. We shall have occasion to say something about the possibility of other ways of knowledge and enquiry into the truth. For the present, we shall try to investigate whether the scientific method can lead us any further. And the Scientists who have made such an advancement in knowledge - where have they arrived and what is the value of their work?
We have already mentioned that sense-perception is the basis of scientific research. The whole gamut of scientific knowledge is founded on it. And the Scientist cannot violate or overpass the canons of science. Still there is one thing more and here we deal with the limits and limitations of human knowledge. But how can science or the scientific methodology assert that it has alone found the clue to the essence and nature of knowledge and truth? The question can be asked whether the theism of Einstein or Planck is the ultimate consequence of their scientific intellect or a reflection of some other non-scientific faculty. A class of continental scientists says that the religious sentiment and the puritanism of the Scientists of the British Isles are so strong that they will not feel happy unless they can introduce a few Biblical expressions even into the table of logarithms.
However that may be, it must be admitted that the theism of the Scientist may also be the natural and spontaneous out come of his scientific intellect. It is not necessary that it should originate from some primitive faculty apart from reason. The purely scientific intellect and the theistic spirit may belong to the same mode of human consciousness. The sense of infinity, the sense of magic and wonder are common to both; thus the two may be congruous and commensurate, although the purely religious spirit, the soul's seeking for the Divine and the type of theism proper to the scientific mind are different in nature and orientation and are independent of each other.
From the standpoint of norms and. ultimate values that science brings forward, reasoning does not occupy the most important place. Science presumes to arrive at a logical conclusion from observation of facts of Nature. The advantages and benefits that we get from science are its material side. But there is another aspect of the scientific intellect which is incorporated into it as its fragrance and beauty, like that of a fruit or flower. What is that thing? Different scientists have expressed it in different ways. But all expressions centre round the same truth. Science avowedly seeks to arrive at the truth within the framework of reasoning by weighing and measuring the material limbs of Nature, confining itself strictly within the four corners of material Nature. But the one thing which, if not manifest even at the outset, has gradually blossomed and taken hold of the Scientist, that has from the beginning existed as a hidden inspiration behind the veil, is the sense of a profound mystery, the touch of an infinite eternity, something inexpressible, something to be wondered at, an unmanifest that cannot be defined yet can be felt, a glimpse of a conscious existence: that has been called the supreme unity by some; others have called it the Pure Reason, yet others have called it the highest law or dispensation while there are people who prefer to call it consciousness or awareness. Such a sense and perception and. experience does not fall under the strict field of scientific research, but the Scientist is surrounded, as it were, by a subtle atmosphere, a halo wherefrom proceeds his inspiration for research, for clues, for the vision of truth. Do we not see that all great scientists possess this turn of temperament, an opening, as it were, into other subtle realms? Perhaps many are merely compilers, cataloguers, but those who have discovered something genuine and have been able to unveil some secrets of Nature emanate the fragrance and radiance I speak of, beyond the reasoning faculty. When Kepler looked at the sky through his telescope to observe the course of the stars and the planets, he was deeply absorbed in the experience of something vast, infinite, strange and mysterious. Was it not then at this golden moment that it flashed like lightning through his mind that the orbits of the planets were elliptical and the Sun is at one focus of these apparent ellipses? Is not this incident as strikingly wonderful as the discovery of the law of gravitation made by Newton when he noticed an apple fall to the ground?
In fact, it is merely a notion or a mental complex that the scientific knowledge is solely or chiefly the outcome of the reasoning process. Many of the Scientists are perhaps of the opinion that it must be so, but the fact is otherwise. Discovery means the removal of a veil and that too all on a sudden. Reasoning steps in later to establish the discovery on a firm footing, at the most it makes slight alterations here and there, adds or subtracts a few necessaries, clarifies the discovery and gives precision to it. In the matter of all true knowledge and ultimate certitude the inner perception and intuition come first and what provides the major premiss to the logical syllogism is beyond reasoning.
Nevertheless it must be admitted that however subtle and high or even theistic and religious may be this scientific faculty it has not come up to the level of genuine integral spirituality. Many philosophers must have had easily and naturally some realisation of this kind. The intuition of infinity in. the philosopher Spinoza and in the Scientist Einstein is of the same quality and status - impersonal, abstract, a mathematical infinitude, an x as it were. the Scientist has reached the acme of his specific faculty as a result of the sublimation of his sense-perception, the philosopher by the sublimation of his conceptual ideation. But both are unable to surpass the boundary of the brain and the intellect. The true spirituality lies in exceeding this limit - in piercing through the six centres, as the Tantras would say. The amor intellectualis Deiof Spinoza may signify the theism of the Scientist, but it has not reached the status of spirituality.
We do not know how many have given due regard to this remarkable fact that the rational mind of modern times, inspired by the spirit of science which has turned towards spirituality for whatever reason, is often attracted to the pure Vedanta or the Buddhistic philosophy of India. The chief reason for this appears to me to be this that the truth and the essence of religion are looked upon as anthropomorphic by the Scientist. the Scientist can hardly accept this position. For, the very speciality of the scientific procedure is to keep aside the human factor from human knowledge. A particular knowledge bears the stamp of the knower, but science aims at knowledge independent of its knower. Now the scientific attitude from its summit declares, I do not know the unknown and the unknowable that is beyond. This learned ignorance which is called agnosticism, and is, in a little altered form, known as scepticism - that is the legitimate consummation of scientific rationalism. But when one looks upon this unknown and unknowable with religious reverence, one says, "Therefrom speech returns baffled along with the mind." This is verily the Brahman, beyond speech and mind; and its other name is then Nihil.. Mind can understand mind or its absence or disintegration. It is extremely difficult for it to comprehend anything that is apart from these two extreme terms. It is not so difficult for the rational mind to accept the spiritual doctrine of 'not this, not this'; but the other aspects of spirituality - the truth about divine Forms and Incarnations, about Purushottama, the supreme Being, even the transmigration of the soul, - all these are senseless enigmas to reason-bound mind. The triune principle of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss of the Vedanta is such a general, neutral and indefinite principle that it seems to be intuited and felt by the pure intellect when it climbs up to its acme. In other words, at the highest level of the brain, as it were, there takes place the first revelation of spirituality, a glow and reflection amounting to the perception of a formless infinite, whose true nature is separately or simultaneously an existence, consciousness and bliss or a non-Being pregnant with all the essence of Being.
The scientific intellect has thus reached a certain theism and the poet and the artist also have reached similar levels through different ways of approach. The aesthetic taste of the artist, the sense of intense delight in the beauty of the cosmic creation is not born of the intellect but is allied to it, and falls within the category of the mind - it is a thing that belongs to this side of the boundary of consciousness, which we have to cross to attain to the true spiritual world. The twilight consciousness is, as it were, on the border-line; it belongs in its rhythm, gesture, gait and expression still to this shore-land rather than the other, howsoever may the artist aspire for the shore beyond. No doubt, I speak of the creations of artists in general. There are rare artists whose creation embodies genuine spiritual experience and realisation. But that is a different matter - it concerns the purely spiritual art. Ordinary works of art do not belong to that category and derive their inspiration from a different source. With regard to philosophy something similar might be said. Most of the Indian philosophies, such as the philosophies of Shankara, Ramanuja, the sage Kapila and Patanjali are but intellectual expressions of different spiritual visions and realisations. If it be so, then is it not possible for science also to become a vehicle or expression of spiritual realisations? This may not have materialised up till now; generally or to a large degree perhaps an attempt of the kind was made in the line that is known as occultism, and which was called alchemy by the ancients, but the effort ended in a spurious system of rites and ceremonies. No doubt this knowledge, even at its best, falls short of the Higher Knowledge, Para Vidya; still there was a time when the Inferior Knowledge, Apara Vidya, was accepted as a stepping-stone to the Higher. "Exceeding death by Avidya (Ignorance) one has to enjoy immortality through Vidya (Knowledge)" - "Avidyaya mrtyum tirtva vidyaya amrtam asnute."
But whatever may have been the past, is there any possibility for the most materialistic science of to-day - the ultramundane knowledge - to become directly and integrally united with the supreme spiritual Knowledge? If there is any possibility, then wherein does it lie? We have elsewhere said that it will be possible only when we shall learn to collect data for scientific discoveries and to search after truth not only with our physical senses but also with subtler and inner senses, and those subtler and inner senses will wake up and become a part and parcel of our nature only when the outlook of the Scientist will get liberated from its materialistic bias and allow itself to be widened, deepened and heightened and transformed on the way to its being finally established in the pure consciousness of the Soul and the Self.
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32.08 - Fit and Unfit (A Letter), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The God of the Scientist On Karmayoga (A Letter)
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta On SpiritualityFit and Unfit (A Letter)
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The God of the Scientist On Karmayoga (A Letter)
3.3.1 - Illness and Health, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What is the difficulty [in understanding how the subtle forces of illness attack the body using bacilli and viruses for their purpose]? You are like the Scientists who say or used to say that there is no such thing as mind or thought independent of the physical brain. Mind and thought are only names for brain quiverings. Or that there is no such thing as vital Force because all the movements of life depend upon chemicals, glands and what not. These things and the germs also are only a minor physical instrumentation for something supraphysical.
They [the forces of illness] first weaken or break through the nervous envelope, the aura. If that is strong and whole, a thousand million germs will not be able to do anything to you. The envelope pierced, they attack the subconscient mind in the body, sometimes also the vital mind or mind properprepare the illness by fear or thought of illness. The doctors themselves said that in influenza or cholera in the Far East 90 per cent got ill through fear. Nothing to take away the resistance like fear. But still the subconscient is the main thing.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Sir Francis Bacon and his disciples were correct in shattering the spurious seventeenth century Circle, for many of the parts comprising that assembly of knowledge have proved demonstrably wrong. the Scientists were also correct in patiently and tenaciously discovering the future Circle's empirically valid component parts, one by one, in spite of the deadly, excruciating irrelevance and meaninglessness of the resulting storehouse of unassembled parts, the multiversity.
In overcoming the dangerous medieval haziness of thinking--in carrying out the 18th century's response to that challenge, fatuously called the Enlightenment--these scientists created the twentieth century's far more dangerous challenge: our deep Ensombrement, which Lippmann calls The Eclipse of the Public Philosophy19 (Chapter VIII). This was not due to viciousness or stupidity, but to the structure of evolution, inherent in the Systems-hierarchy, which poets have called the darkness before the dawn.32
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Two biology departments, being markedly different from the rest, are underlined: ecology and paleontology. They deal with whole s stems of the most important kind, natural empires. They are outstanding because, as Ulrich Sonnemann points out, A whole [system], whether encountered by the physicist or the social scientist [or the ecologist], is a lawful context which gives significance to each particular part-phenomenon that articulates itself within it; what makes its inner lawfulness understandable, however, is its own overall significance which it derives from the broader [systemic] context in which it is embedded and to which it refers." Sonnemann, who is writing on The Specialist as a Psychological Problem, then goes on to anticipate our discussion of what may be called the organized specialist and the generalist: "The true academician's [the generalist's] subject matter, in principle, becomes the universe: whatever he encounters--and it may lie in exceedingly small sectors of fieldsoccurs to him in such ways as to represent a universal order. Such a universal order, since it already determines the phenomenal structure under the Scientist's observation, is inseparable from the structure."
Sonnemann then characterizes the rest of the departments shown and implied in Figures IV-9 and 10 as follows: "To the extent, then, to which it [the whole system] drops out of sight, to the extent to which his [the specialist's] preconceived procedure interferes with the self articulation of any subject under his attack, phenomenal structure will escape, first his eye, ultimately his theories."50 These people's departments deal with sections of systems. And, as Sonnemann points out, "Implicit in all sectional science, the arbitrariness of primary determination of subj ect matters which of their own natures are universes [systems] does not, apparently, make a science any more analytical; the typical specialistic approach . . . is characterized at least as much by his blindness for relevant detail as for wholes."
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The profound difference between these two groups--between what Sonnemann calls legitimate and illegitimate specialisms--will shortly be diagrammed. "No wrong attaches to any specialization, any concentration on a particular subject matter, or realm of subject matters," he points out, "which, in setting its method of analytic attack, closely follows the given structure of the subject. If the subject happens to be a whole [system], such as the whole subject matter of entomology, or of its self articulated subdivisions [which is ecology], the wholeness of the subject implies at once the universality of good order constituent of nature throughout, and a distinct separateness from other subject matters of nature: a separateness which, in favoring the concentration of the Scientists' focus upon it, legitimizes, at the same time, its specialistic restriction.
"It is different," he points out, "for such subject matters of one science as are inseparable from other subject matters lying within a different science which in actuality form one [system] with them. Specialistic narrowing of focus here cannot but fail to perceive the order of the whole and cannot help replacing what it misses by a mechanical order which it imposes on the subject by means of procedure." He then goes on to point out:
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I gave the most pointed example of this [traditional] lack of communication in the shape of two groups of people, representing what I have christened `the two cultures.' One of these contained the Scientists, whose weight, achievement and influence did not need stressing. The other contained the literary intellectuals. I did not mean that literary intellectuals act as the main decision-makers of the western world. I mean that literary intellectuals represent, vocalize and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture: they do not make the decisions, but their words seep into the minds of those who do. p. 59.10
These minds comprise our system's controllers, the management people represented by the long brace farthest left in. Figure IV-11. In the next sentence C. P. Snow returns to his two categories; but he has clearly shown them to be three, with the decision-making managers of industry, government and academe closer to the Literates than to the Scientists, as indicated in our figure: "Between these two groups," Snow concludes, "the [pre-unified] scientists and the literary intellectuals--there is little communication and, instead of fellow-feeling, something like hostility." p. 59.10 This is, of course, the case in the disintegrating multiversity, Figure IV-9.
A few pages later, however, Snow goes on to "Observe the development of what, in the terms of our formulae, is becoming [in America] something like a third culture" p. 67.10 This third culture comprizes the center of Figure IV-11, PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY, the actual subject of the present book; far greater than the sum of its parts, shown at the left.
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The Periodic Law is so constructed that only after vast knowledge of some given kind of system's properties (say the atoms') has been amassed, can it be seen that they are a function of anything, let alone of such an elusive, subtle thing as coaction, the moral relation between the system's work component and controller.--Because of this necessary sequence of events, even the finest human beings--which almost all the Scientists I know most surely are--have first to become "giants" of cognitive intellect (Lower Industrialists) while long remaining moral "dwarfs"; that is, without scientific moral orientation.
It was Mendeleev's completion of the Periodic Law a century ago in chemistry (and only Mendeleev intuited its cosmic or philosophical implications) which prematurely organized the physical sciences. And it will be the extension of this organization to the social and biological sciences which will complete this basically moral orientation, transmuting Koestler's "moral dwarfs" into (computer-assisted) moral giants, and giving our society's controller moral direction, and thus balance and stabilitv.
36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
As there is evolution in Nature, it is quite natural that there should be evolution in man as well. But the notion of the Scientists that evolution proceeds in a straight line and is discernible within a short period has crumbled .to dust. We have now begun to understand that evolution proceeds in a zigzag spiral movement, through rises and falls, in progressions and retrogressions. And the extent of that slow movement can, hardly be conceived. We are going to recognise in effect the Indian conception of time, namely, ages, cycles presided over by some great creators (Manus). As a result, we have been discovering things not commensurate with the undeveloped, immature and ancient minds of our conception. So some scientists and philosophers are of the opinion that the ancients we know of were on the downward curve of a higher civilisation of the past unknown to us,
If we consider man to be a sufficiently old creature on earth and that his evolution runs in a spiral movement, then the statement that the Aryans of the Vedic age were not highly advanced cannot be regarded as an axiomatic truth. Of course, there is no hard and fast rule that the education, culture and realisation of the Vedic age should have been similar to those of modern times. But their widely differing outlook and activities need not be inferior to ours. True, Valmiki and Rabindranath are not peers of the same grain. On that account we cannot definitely assign a higher status to Rabindranath. To consider the Vedic seers inferior to the modern scientists simply because they do not resemble there is nothing but a stark superstition.
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Katha, 11.1.10. (Whatever is there in the inner world is to be found here as well). In ancient times, not only in India, but in all countries of the world, symbolism was in vogue. We cannot read through those symbols. That is why we consider them black magic or rustic customs of the uncivilised. We can partly appreciate the political and artistic genius of Egypt. So at times we consider it equal or superior to ours. But we are unable to grasp her spiritual genius. Hence we do not hesitate to relegate it to the level of barbarism. We have hardly any spiritual realisation. What we understand is at best morality. We highly admire the art and literature of Greece. But in respect of Greek spirituality our knowledge is confined to Socrates. In the earlier period of Greek civilisation there was a current of deep spiritual culture, and what they used to call the Mysteries were only mysteries of spiritual yogic discipline. We fail to understand that the water-worship of Thales and the fire-worship of Heraclitus were not merely different aspects of Nature-worship. We do not like to believe that these terms "water" and "fire" can ever be the symbols of spiritual truths. We study the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. But we do not delve into the spiritual culture or esoteric aspect of which their philosophies are but outer expressions. Behind the mythologies of China, Japan, old-world America and Australia there lies a science of spiritual discipline which may not be recognised by the Scientists, but those practising spirituality will not find it difficult to discover it.
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3.7.1.01 - Rebirth, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When we go into details, the uncertainty increases. Rebirth accounts, for example, for the phenomenon of genius, inborn faculty and so many other psychological mysteries. But then Science comes in with its all-sufficient explanation by heredity,though, like that of rebirth, all-sufficient only to those who already believe in it. Without doubt, the claims of heredity have been absurdly exaggerated. It has succeeded in accounting for much, not all, in our physical make-up, our temperament, our vital peculiarities. Its attempt to account for genius, inborn faculty and other psychological phenomena of a higher kind is a pretentious failure. But this may be because Science knows nothing at all that is fundamental about our psychology,no more than primitive astronomers knew of the constitution and law of the stars whose movements they yet observed with a sufficient accuracy. I do not think that even when Science knows more and better, it will be able to explain these things by heredity; but the Scientist may well argue that he is only at the beginning of his researches, that the generalisation which has explained so much may well explain all, and that at any rate his hypothesis has had a better start in its equipment of provable facts than the theory of reincarnation.
Nevertheless, the argument of the reincarnationist is so far a good argument and respect-worthy, though not conclusive. But there is another more clamorously advanced which seems to me to be on a par with the hostile reasoning from absence of memory, at least in the form in which it is usually advanced to attract unripe minds. This is the ethical argument by which it is sought to justify Gods ways with the world or the worlds ways with itself. There must, it is thought, be a moral governance for the world; or at least some sanction of reward in the cosmos for virtue, some sanction of punishment for sin. But upon our perplexed and chaotic earth no such sanction appears. We see the good man thrust down into the press of miseries and the wicked flourishing like a green bay-tree and not cut down miserably in his end Now this is intolerable. It is a cruel anomaly, it is a reflection on Gods wisdom and justice, almost a proof that God is not; we must remedy that. Or if God is not, we must have some other sanction for righteousness.
3.7.1.07 - Involution and Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For evolution, as is the habit with the human reason's accounts and solutions of the deep and unfathomable way of the spirit in things, raises more questions than it solves; it does not do away with the problem of creation, for all its appearance of solid orderly fact, any more than the religious affirmation of an external omnipotent Creator could do it or the illusionist's mystic Maya, aghat.ana-ghat.ana-pat.yas, very skilful in bringing about the impossible, some strange existent non-existent Power with an idea in That which is beyond and without ideas, selfempowered to create an existent non-existent world, existent because it very evidently is, non-existent because it is a patched up consistency of dreamful unreal transiences. The problem is only prolonged, put farther back, given a subtle and orderly, but all the more challengingly complex appearance. But, even when our questioning is confined to the one issue of evolution alone, the difficulty still arises of the essential significance of the bare outward facts observed, what is meant by evolution, what is it that evolves, from what and by what force of necessity? the Scientist is content to affirm an original matter or substance, atomic, electric, etheric or whatever it may finally turn out to be, which by the very nature of its own inherent energy or of an
Involution and Evolution
3.7.2.04 - The Higher Lines of Karma, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is in the third movement of highest mind when it is preparing to disengage itself, its pure self of will and intelligence, the radiant head of its endeavour from subjection to the vital motive that this imperative of nature, this intrinsic need that creates in the mind of man the urge towards knowledge, becomes something much greater, becomes instead more and more plainly the ideal absolute imperative of the soul emerging from the husks and sheaths of ignorance and pushing towards the truth, towards the light as the condition of its fulfilment and the very call of the Divine upon its being. The lure of an external utility ceases to be at all needed as an incentive towards knowledge, just as the lure of a vital reward offered now or hereafter ceases on the same high level of our ascent to be needed as an incentive to virtue, and to attach importance to it under whatever specious colour is even felt to be a degradation of the disinterestedness, a fall from the high purity of the soul motive. Already even in the more outward forms of intellectual seeking something of this absoluteness begins to be felt and to reign. the Scientist pursues his discoveries in order that he may know the law and truth of the process of the universe and their practical results are only a secondary motive of the enquiring mind and no motive at all to the higher scientific intelligence. The philosopher is driven from within to search for the ultimate truth of things for the one sake of Truth only and all else but to see the very face of Truth becomes to him, to his absorbing mind and soul of knowledge, secondary or of no importance; nothing can be allowed to interfere with that one imperative. And there is the tendency to the same kind of exclusiveness in the interest and the process of this absolute. The thinker is concerned to seek out and enforce the truth on himself and the world regardless of any effect it may have in disturbing the established bases of life, religion, ethics, society, regardless of any other consideration whatsoever: he must express the word of the Truth whatever its dynamic results on life. And this absolute becomes most absolute, this imperative most imperative when the inner action surpasses the strong coldness of intellectual search and becomes a fiery striving for truth experience, a luminous inner truth living, a birth into a new truth consciousness. The enamoured of light, the sage, the Yogin of knowledge, the seer, the Rishi live for knowledge and in knowledge, because it is the absolute of light and truth that they seek after and its claim on them is single and absolute.
At the same time this also is a line of the world energy,for the world Shakti is a Shakti of consciousness and knowledge and not only a Power of force and action, and the output of the energy of knowledge brings its results as surely as the energy of the will seeking after success in action or after right ethical conduct. But the result that it brings on this higher plane of the seeking in mind is simply and purely the upward growth of the soul in light and truth; that and whatever happiness it brings is the one supreme reward demanded by the soul of knowledge and the darkening of the light within, the pain of the fall from truth, the pain of the imperfection of not living only by its law and wholly in the light is its one penalty of suffering. The outward rewards and the sufferings of life are small things to the higher soul of knowledge in man: even his high mind of knowledge will often face all that the world can do to afflict it, just as it is ready to make all manner of sacrifices in the pursuit and the affirmation of the truth it knows and lives for. Bruno burning in the Roman fire, the martyrs of all religions suffering and welcoming as witnesses to the light within them torture and persecution, Buddha leaving all to discover the dark cause of universal suffering in this world of the impermanence and the way of escape into the supreme Permanence, the ascetic casting away as an illusion life in the world and its activities, enjoyments, attractions with the one will to enter into the absolute truth and the supreme consciousness are witnesses to this imperative of knowledge, its extreme examples and exponents.
4.04 - Conclusion, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
anatomy of its corpse in the manner of the Scientist, or the
archaeology of its ruins in the manner of the historian. Natu-
4.1 - Jnana, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
151. A man came to a scientist and wished to be instructed; this instructor showed him the revelations of the microscope & telescope, but the man laughed and said, "These are obviously hallucinations inflicted on the eye by the glass which you use as a medium; I will not believe till you show these wonders to my naked seeing." Then the Scientist proved to him by many collateral facts & experiments the reliability of his knowledge but the man laughed again & said, "What you term proofs, I term coincidences, the number of coincidences does not constitute proof; as for your experiments, they are obviously effected under abnormal conditions & constitute a sort of insanity of Nature."
When confronted with the results of mathematics, he was angry
& cried out, "This is obviously imposture, gibberish & superstition; will you try to make me believe that these absurd cabalistic figures have any real force & meaning?" Then the Scientist drove him out as a hopeless imbecile; for he did not recognise his own system of denials and his own method of negative reasoning.
If we wish to refuse an impartial & openminded enquiry, we can always find the most respectable polysyllables to cover our refusal or impose tests & conditions which stultify the enquiry.
5.4.01 - Occult Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But they seem so to all who live in the outward vision only. "Coincidence the Scientists do them call." But anyone with some intelligence and power of observation who lives more in an inward consciousness can see the play of invisible forces at every step which act on men and bring about events without their knowing about the instrumentation. The difference created by Yoga or by an inner consciousness - for there are people like Socrates who develop or have some inner awareness without Yoga - is that one becomes conscious of these invisible forces and can also consciously profit by them or use and direct them. That is all.
I have not said [in the preceding letter] that everything is rigidly predetermined. Play of forces does not mean that. What I said was that behind visible events in the world there is always a mass of invisible forces at work unknown to the outward minds of men and by Yoga (by going inward and establishing a conscious connection with the cosmic Self and Force and forces) one can become conscious of these forces, intervene consciously in the play, to some extent at least determine things in the result of the play. All that has nothing to do with predetermination. On the
7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
If the Scientist had again to go over all the experiments
that have been done, all what others have found in the
--
for anything else. the Scientist just opens instead a
book or consults another person who is conversant with
--
Only the Scientist did not know one thing an ele-
ment of occult knowledge escaped him. The physical
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
However, the Scientists in their anti-clerical enthusiasm and despair of any alternative theory to
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd2-3-01.htm (2 von 12) [06.05.2003 03:37:25]
--
Now we would ask who among the Scientists is ready to prove that there was no man in existence in
the early Tertiary period? What is it that prevented his presence? Hardly thirty years ago his existence
--
adept astronomers were the Scientists of the earliest races of the Aryan stock, that they seem to have
known far more about the races of Mars and Venus than the modern Anthropologist knows of those of
--
that the Scientists object most decidedly to the claim that man preceded the animals, for instance; or
that civilization dates from the earliest Eocene period, or, again, that there have ever existed giants,
--
the Palaeolithic age, as they are now represented by the Scientists. All they say is mere arbitrary
speculative guess-work, invented by them to answer to and fit in with their own fanciful theories.
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
of the Scientists. He declared it "a Gnostic work," in which "the age of giants who devour " men -- is
given . . . hence it is another "Apocalypsis." Giants! another fairy-tale.
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
assumption is false even on the Scientists' own admission. For as Professor Newcomb points out
(Popular Astronomy, pp. 506-508), "by losing heat, a gaseous body contracts, and the heat generated
--
gigantic Lemuro-Atlantean. To search for the "Missing Link" is useless. To the Scientists of the
closing sixth Root-race, millions and millions of years hence, our modern races, or rather their fossils,
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
determine it, and after him all the Scientists who have been occupied with calorimetry have followed
his example. All have believed themselves successful, and have formulated their results with great
--
demanded in the present modes of Science by the Scientists themselves -- as was done by Sir W.
Grove, F.R.S. Till that day there is nothing to be done. For if gravitation
--
were dethroned to-morrow, the day after the Scientists would discover some other new mode of
mechanical motion.* Rough and up-hill is the path of true Science, and its days are full of vexation of
--
honeycombed with metaphysical conceptions, but the Scientists will not admit the charge and fight
desperately to put atomo-mechanical masks on purely incorporeal and spiritual laws in nature, on our
--
physicists, the Occultists maintain that all the "Forces" of the Scientists have their origin in the Vital
Principle, the ONE LIFE collectively of our Solar system -- that "life" being a portion, or rather one
--
misunderstood and ostracised it may be at present. And they maintain that this failure of the Scientists
to discover the truth is entirely due to their materialism and contempt for transcendental sciences. Yet
--
indeed, that which made the Scientists win the day over Theology in the Great "Conflict between
Religion and Science," was precisely the argument that neither the identity of that substance, nor the
Conversations with Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Mother: Yes. This is something that has always been known, this possibility of transformation. But their vision was very partial. They were rather the Scientists of the age.
What did you see yesterday?
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
SRI AUROBINDO: Anger, the Scientists say, is due to secretions of the glands.
Even love, according to them, is merely due to a secretion. (Half smiling)
--
use them. the Scientists don't know what to do with them and the discover67
ies have been used for the purpose of destruction. Now they are trying to kill
--
The same principle works out in science. the Scientists at one time reduced all the multiplicity of elements to the ether and described the ether in
the most contradictory terms. Now they have found the electron as the basis
--
PURANI: Again, in regard to the rainbow, the Scientist study the wave-lengths
of light while the poets make a play imagination over it. We have no means
of saying that the real rainbow exists for the Scientist and not for the poet.
SRI AUROBINDO: I should say it exists for neither. Only the Scientists get excited over the process and the poets over the result.
PURANI: Eddington also admits that we have no ground to say that non-scientific knowledge and experience are less real than physical science.
--
SATYENDRA: I wonder how the Scientists will explain all this. Somewhere they
were invited to a demonstration, but they refused to go.
--
NIRODBARAN: Dilip's friend, the Scientist. I think it is your terminology that he
finds difficult to graspmental, vital, physical.
--
theory and the Scientists will have to begin work on a new basis.
EVENING
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
(Laughter) the Scientists have a special term for it.
SATYENDRA: But a most momentous period for us.
--
cussion Sri Aurobindo refused to accept Time as a dimension of Space. Purani noted, in connection with the complicated mathematical formulas involved, that scientists had first thought Science would be understood by everybody. Now only the Scientists can understand anything about Science.
SRI AUROBINDO: They are becoming metaphysical physicists. It is like
--
Indian Vayu theory without the Scientists knowing it. About the deflection of
starlight towards the sun, he asked:
--
SRI AUROBINDO: It is for the Scientists to say.
DR. MANILAL: Perhaps it is the underlying principle of the evolution of
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
simile has a touch of aggressiveness; the Scientist's reasoning by
analogy is emotionally detached, i.e. neutral; the poetic image is sym-
--
perish or a sparrow fall*. the Scientist's attitude is basically similar in
situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a
--
artist and caricaturist but is equally indispensable to the Scientist. The
motivations of each of the three differ, of course, and with them their
--
artist's participatory, the Scientist's exploratory. the Scientist's criteria
of relevance are 'objective' in the sense of being emotionally neutral,
--
and 'cttsmtejrested' character the Scientists' self-transcending absorption
hi the riddles of nature is, of course, often combined with ambition,
--
caricature and in the Scientist's diagrams and schemata; when Clavdia in
the Magic Mountain offers her lover an X-ray portrait of her chest as a
--
service to the fashionable image of the Scientist collecting facts with an
unprejudiced mind', without permitting himself, God forbid, to
--
that the Scientist can at least rely on the verification of his intuitions by
experiment, whereas the artist has no such objective tests to decide
--
for the Scientist to keep his eyes open unless he has an idea of what he is
looking for.
--
minds of the Scientists themselves. ... Of all forms of mental activity,
the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may
--
is the belief that the Scientist, unlike the artist, is in a position to attain
to 'objective truth* by submitting theories to experimental tests. In
--
approximation. Nor is the Scientist in a much better position to as-
certain the correctness of his course. He, too, must ultimately rely on
--
Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. the Scientist's discoveries
impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes
--
mental test can provide the Scientist with absolute certainty; and the
difference in the verifiability' between various types of scientific and
--
symbols of the Scientist's blasphemous presumption and cruelty. The
Mad Professor either a sadist or obsessed with power looms large
--
be an archetypal symbol of the self-assertive element in the Scientist's
aspirations. In mythology, this element is represented by the Pro-
--
righteousness in the Scientist's complex motivational drive. 'Without
ambition and without vanity', wrote the biologist Charles Nicolle,
--
ing element in the Scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-
up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the
--
not mean that the Scientist operates 'dispassionately' as the cliche goes;
but on the contrary, that he is motivated by a particular blend of
--
rewards. In his private life, the Scientist can indulge his ego; but in his
SCIENCE AND EMOTION
--
ness and orderliness. Kepler, inaugurating the Scientist's quest for a
mechanistic universe in the seventeenth century, is significant here
--
to the Scientist. Though Eddington may have been justified in saying
that the dials, in the present state of physics, have no more bearing on
--
the creative act and into the beliefs or superstitions of the Scientist.
As Dubos said, 'the alchemist never entirely ceased to live and function
--
footed creature, the Scientist.
The Boredom of Science
--
his audience are at a disadvantage. In contrast to the artist, the Scientist
is not supposed to appeal to emotions, and the student of science not
--
The creative achievements of the Scientist lack the 'audience appeal*
of the artist's for several reasons briefly mentioned technical jargon,
--
are a suspect category of pseudo-emotions unworthy of the Scientist's
attention. This is probably a hangover of the great ideological currents
--
human condition as the Scientist resolves a problem by showing that
a particular phenomenon is an instance of a general law. It may dis-
--
scious of thinking. the Scientist takes a 'bi-focaT view of life; and so
does the reader whose attention is focussed simultaneously both on the
--
ness between the Scientist seeing an analogy where nobody saw one
before, and the poet's discovery of an original metaphor or simile.
--
analogy. In the Scientist's Eureka process two previously unconnected
frames of reference are made to intersect, but the same description may
--
ing capacity of mother earth'. the Scientist attains catharsis through
the reduction of phenomena to their primary causes; a disturbing par-
--
emotionally as satisfying as that of the Scientist's explanations; both
mediate the 'earthing' of particular experiences into a universal frame;
--
his creative processes, the Scientist to irrationalize them, so to speak. But
this fact in itself is significant. the Scientist feels the urge to confess his
indebtedness to unconscious intuitions which guide his theorizing; the
--
between the Tragic or Absolute, and the Trivial Plane. the Scientist
discovers the working of eternal laws in the ephemeral grain of sand, or
--
chaos. "We have seen it at work in the Scientist's search for universal
law; and when we see it reflected in a work of art, or in any corner of
--
to its bare essentials, to the Scientist's technique of representing a
process by a diagram, schema, map, or model. In the third panel of our
--
the level of human creativity: the Scientist, faced by a perplexing situa-
tion Kepler's discrepant eight minutes' arc, Einstein's light-traveller
--
stump, or the unsolved problem in the Scientist's mind which tortures
and obsesses him. We have seen that such regressions are mostly patho-
--
integration that baffle the Scientist in his study of behaviour as a whole.
482
--
We have thus established a broader base for the Scientist's motiva-
tion as discussed earlier on (Book One, XI). The exploratory drive may
--
this respect the artist gets a better deal than the Scientist. The changes
of style in the representative arts, the discoveries which altered our
--
century. In Book One, XI, I have discussed the Scientist's motivational
drive, and the emotions to which it gives rise: the present appendix is
--
and how the two are inextricably mixed up in the Scientist's mind and
motives. One of the landmarks of science is the publication, in 1877,
--
Here, I believe, is the clue to the Scientist's ultimate motivation
the equivalent of the meeting of the tragic and the trivial planes in the
--
credulity) in the Scientist's make-up: the coexistence of abstract and
concrete moulds of thought, the faculty of combining high flights of
--
one's feet firmly on the ground. the Scientist, as the artist, must live
on several planes at once look at eternity through the window of
The Coming Race Contents, #The Coming Race, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
fulfilling others. the Scientists have begun
to discover other instincts in man than those
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
time, a very tenacious prejudice, attributed the invention of the wheelbarrow to the Scientist
Pascal. And even though the falsity of this attri bution has today been demonstrated, the great
--
therefore it is the Scientists who attri bute opinions to it. But when, deeply immersed in the
smallest details, these gentlemen come to bring to the microscope the smallest grain or the
--
destiny that the Scientist possessed.
Could we possibly be facing the dwelling of some affiliate of the sets of the Illuminati or of
--
alchemical work and of its result. But, whatever the opinion of the Scientists of our time may
be about this figure, we can nevertheless be certain that all the attri butes of Dampierre placed
--
"I believe it is possible", said the Scientist, "though its realization is rather doubtful".
"And, if some sincere witness certified that he had seen it, and if he brought you a categorical
Wikipedia - Mariah the Scientist -- American singer-songwriter
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Wikipedia - The Scientists (book) -- Book by W. Andrew Robinson
Wikipedia - The Scientists of Modern Music -- Electronic music group from Hobart, Australia
Wikipedia - The Scientist (song) -- 2002 single by Coldplay
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selforum - the scientist and mystic were
Muteking, The Dashing Warrior (1980 - 1981) - Tondemo Senshi Muteking) is a science fiction comedy anime series by Tatsunoko Productions,created in 1980. It ran from September 7, 1980, to September 27, 1981, on Fuji TV.[3] Twelve-year-old Rin Yuki loyally supported his father when the world laughed at the scientist for saying that Earth was abo...
Shinzo (2000 - 2000) - Shinzo is based in the future. Humanity has been exterminated by a genetic race they created to fight a deadly DNA virus that was wiping out the human race. One of the scientist had placed his young daughter in a cryogenic sleep within a multi-purpose vehicle called Hakuba, hoping that she would awa...
Xtro 2: The Second Encounter(1991) - When an experiment to send three volunteers to another dimension fails, only one comatose survivor is brought back. However, when the scientists discover that the volunteer carried a deadly creature back with her, they must struggle to destroy the creature before it destroys them.
Zombie 4: After Death(1988) - On a isolated island a group of scientist try to find a cure for cancer but they accidentally the raise the dead when they anger a voodoo priest. The priest raises the dead and kills all the scientist but one couples daughter survives and escapes while they were eaten alive by the undead. The daught...
Gamera(1966) - A nuclear explosion in the far north unleashes Gamera, the legendary flying turtle, from his sleep under the ice. In his search for energy, Gamera wreaks havoc over the entire world, and it's up to the scientists, assisted by a young boy with a strange sympathic link to the monster, to put a stop to...
Frankenstein Conquers the World(1965) - The heart from the scientist's experiment gets exposed to the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and mutates into the giant humanoid monster, Frankenstein! Meanwhile, another giant monster is running rampant, Baragon! It is a duel of the monsters in this sister production to KING KONG VS. GODZILLA
Voodoo Woman(1957) - Deep in the jungles a mad scientist is using the natives' voodoo for his experiments to create an indestructible being to serve his will. When a party of gold seekers stumbles upon his village, the scientist realizes that Marilyn the expedition's evil leader is the perfect subject for his work.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) ::: 6.4/10 -- PG | 1h 33min | Adventure, Comedy, Family | 23 June 1989 (USA) -- The scientist father of a teenage girl and boy accidentally shrinks his and two other neighborhood teens to the size of insects. Now the teens must fight diminutive dangers as the father searches for them. Director: Joe Johnston Writers: Stuart Gordon (story), Brian Yuzna (story) | 3 more credits Stars:
https://arrow.fandom.com/wiki/The_Scientist
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Arrow_(TV_Series)_Episode:_The_Scientist
https://glee.fandom.com/wiki/The_Scientist
https://glee.fandom.com/wiki/The_Scientist?
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Dog Days -- -- Seven Arcs -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Adventure Fantasy Magic -- Dog Days Dog Days -- Dog Days takes place in the world of Flonyard, an alternate Earth inhabited by beings who resemble humans, but also have the ears and tails of specific animals. The Republic of Biscotti, a union of dog-like citizens, has come under attack by the feline forces of the Galette Leo Knights. In an effort to save Biscotti, Princess Millhiore summons a champion from another world in order to defend her people. That champion is Cinque Izumi, a normal junior high student from Earth. -- -- Agreeing to assist Biscotti, Cinque retrieves a sacred weapon called the Palladion and prepares for war. In Flonyard, wars are fought with no casualties and are more akin to sports competitions with the goal of raising money for the participating kingdoms. Cinque is successful in his role as Biscotti’s champion, but learns that a summoned champion cannot be returned to their home world. The scientists of Biscotti will endeavor to find a way for Cinque to return home, but until they figure something out, he must serve Princess Millhiore by continuing to fight as Biscotti’s hero. -- TV - Apr 2, 2011 -- 166,546 6.94
Gekijou Tanpen Macross Frontier: Toki no Meikyuu -- -- Satelight -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Music Space Romance Mecha -- Gekijou Tanpen Macross Frontier: Toki no Meikyuu Gekijou Tanpen Macross Frontier: Toki no Meikyuu -- Short screened with Macross Δ Movie 2: Zettai Live!!!. -- Movie - ??? ??, 2021 -- 728 N/A -- -- Aoki Uru: Overture -- -- Gainax -- 1 ep -- - -- Military Sci-Fi -- Aoki Uru: Overture Aoki Uru: Overture -- A short special created by a newly launched Uru in Blue LLP (Limited Liability Partnership) in Singapore that was pre-streamed in 2015. Aoki Uru: Overture is a lead up/preview to the full film. -- Special - ??? ??, 2015 -- 712 N/A -- -- Gasshin Sentai Mechander Robo -- -- - -- 35 eps -- - -- Space Mecha Military Mystery Sci-Fi -- Gasshin Sentai Mechander Robo Gasshin Sentai Mechander Robo -- The Doron Empire from the Ganymede System discovered Earth as an ideal world for them to conquer. The interest of expanding the empire came as a result of the power-hungry General Ozmel who overthrew the current reigning Queen Medusa of the Ganymede System as a start of their universal conquest. -- -- Almost completely succumbed to the empire, Earth is at its last days, and one scientist, Dr. Shikishima, had only one hope in restoring Earth from its alien conquerors--- a massive mecha known as the Mechander Robo, specially programmed and designed to battle these invading aliens from complete takeover of Earth. Along with this awesome fighter machine, Dr. Shikishima also recruited three pilots to be placed behind the Mechander Robo's controls--- the mysterious Jimmy Orion, the scientist's son Ryosuke Shikishima, and Kojiro Hachijima. -- -- Although the primary storyline is Earth battling the Doron Empire, there is something within lead pliot Jimmy Orion's past that was somewhat connected towards the entire storyline. -- TV - Mar 3, 1977 -- 699 5.83
Metropolis -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Adventure Drama Police Romance Sci-Fi Shounen -- Metropolis Metropolis -- In the great city of Metropolis, severe community structures and prejudice dominate a world where humans and robots live together. Unrest and violence increase with each new day. -- -- Searching for the scientist Dr. Laughton, suspected to violate human rights by trading organs, the Japanese detective Shunsaku Ban and his nephew Kenichi arrive at Metropolis. In the scientist's laboratory, Kenichi discovers a girl without any memory of her past life. He decides to help her, so they run away together. His uncle follows him and penetrates the dark secrets of the city to find Duke Red, the man ruling from the shadows. Meanwhile, Kenichi desperately tries to protect the mysterious girl from the people hunting her. However, Duke Red and his adoptive son have their own deep reasons for chasing the girl. These reasons are connected to her true identity and the struggle for the domination of Metropolis... -- -- Movie - May 26, 2001 -- 80,567 7.54
Pokemon Movie 01: Mewtwo no Gyakushuu -- -- OLM -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Adventure Comedy Kids Drama Fantasy -- Pokemon Movie 01: Mewtwo no Gyakushuu Pokemon Movie 01: Mewtwo no Gyakushuu -- It was a successful science experiment gone horribly wrong. When a team of scientists discovers the DNA of the ancient Pokémon Mew, they harnessed the potential within it in an attempt to create the ultimate living weapon. With advanced cloning techniques and resources provided to them by Team Rocket crime syndicate leader Giovanni, the scientists succeed in creating the powerful psychic Pokémon, Mewtwo. -- -- Pokemon: Mewtwo no Gyakushuu reveals the terrifying power of Mewtwo as he learns that not only was he created to be an experiment, but also to be a tool for Giovanni’s sinister dealings. Breaking free of his control, Mewtwo creates his own island fortress and reconstructs the cloning technology that gave life to him. -- -- Under the guise of being a master Pokémon trainer, Mewtwo lures the best trainers in the world to his base. Among these trainers are Ash Ketchum, his loyal Pokémon Pikachu, and their friends Brock and Misty. United together, human and Pokémon alike, they must not only discover the hidden secret of Mewtwo's plans, but stand against his terrifying might. If they fail, Mewtwo’s vengeance will not only lead to tyranny over all the Pokemon, but also the extinction of the human race. -- -- Licensor: -- 4Kids Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures -- Movie - Jul 18, 1998 -- 203,992 7.63
Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan -- -- Remic -- 12 eps -- Original -- Comedy Ecchi Magic Parody Vampire -- Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan -- Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan follows the daily lives of four young girls. There is just one catch: they are anything but normal. This group of friends—the energetic werewolf Liru, the joyful witch-in-training Uma, the motherly android Aiko, and the seductive vampire Pachira—are actually princesses from the netherworld who have traveled to the human world in search of a new home. Unfortunately, their naivety and severe lack of knowledge make living peacefully among earthlings much more difficult than they imagined. -- -- As they attempt to adapt to their brand new lifestyle, they cause all sorts of trouble, and end up attracting the unwanted attention of a woman by the name of Dr. K-Ko. The scientist believes that these new residents of Earth are up to no good and attempts to capture the girls to prove the existence of the supernatural and gain credibility with the scientific community. Every day brings a new adventure as the girls deal with the insanity of her antics and all that the human realm has to offer. -- -- TV - Apr 4, 2006 -- 27,408 6.98
Shin Getter Robo -- -- Brain's Base -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Adventure Mecha Sci-Fi Demons Horror Shounen -- Shin Getter Robo Shin Getter Robo -- Humanity is under attack by demonic creatures called Oni. Unable to fight back by any other means, the scientist Dr. Saotome creates a series of giant robots that harness the mysterious power of Getter Rays, giving them the strength necessary to fight the Oni. The strongest of these is Getter Robo, and Saotome must enlist three very different men to pilot it - martial artist Ryoma Nagare, criminal leader Hayato Jin, and monk Benkei Musashibou. Together, the Getter Team fights to end the Oni menace forever. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media, Geneon Entertainment USA -- OVA - Apr 9, 2004 -- 8,174 7.35
Texhnolyze -- -- Madhouse -- 22 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Psychological Drama -- Texhnolyze Texhnolyze -- Texhnolyze takes place in the city of Lux, a man-made underground city that has crumbled after years of neglect and lack of repairs. Citizens of Lux have come to refer to their home as simply "The City" and treat it as though it has a mind and will of its own. Three major factions battle to control Lux: Organo, a group of "professionals" who collaborate with the criminal underworld that controls Texhnolyze (prosthetics), the Salvation Union, a populist group that seeks to disrupt Organo's business, and Racan, a collection of young individuals with Texhnolyzes that use their abilities for personal gain. -- -- Ichise was once an orphan who has made a place for himself in Lux as a prize fighter. One day, a fight promoter grows angry with him and the altercation that follows results in Ichise losing an arm and a leg. Before death can take him, Ichise is found by the scientist Eriko Kamata, who uses him as a test subject for her newly designed Texhnolyze. With these powerful new limbs at his disposal, Ichise begins to work for Oonishi, the leader of Organo. He soon meets a mysterious young girl, Ran, who has the power to see possible futures. Together, they soon realize that Lux is on the brink of war and collapse, and that they may be the only ones who can save The City. -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation, Geneon Entertainment USA -- 187,926 7.76
The Animatrix -- -- Madhouse, Studio 4°C -- 9 eps -- Other -- Action Drama Sci-Fi -- The Animatrix The Animatrix -- 1. Final Flight of the Osiris -- The crew of the Osiris discover an army preparing to invade Zion. While one crew member races inside the Matrix to get the message to Zion, the others try desperately to buy her enough time while fighting off an onslaught of Sentinels they can't possibly defeat. -- -- 2-3. The Second Renaissance Part 1 and 2 -- Humans have created the ultimate AI, which is just as smart as they are. But complications arise when these robots and the humans try to exist peacefully, and eventually all-out war breaks out. The humans ultimately lose the war, and become trapped in the Matrix as seen in the live-action films. -- -- 4. Kid's Story -- A young man discovers that his world isn't real, that it's a computer-generated fantasy land created by robots using humans for energy. He escapes with the help of the hacker Neo. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- 5. Program -- Cis and Duo engage in battle in a virtual recreation of Feudal Japan. -- -- 6. World Record -- While running the fastest race in his life, a champion track star breaks free of his computer-generated world for a small period of time. When he goes back to the real world, he has no memories and is placed in a nursing home. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- 7. Beyond -- While looking for her lost pet, a young woman meets up with some kids in Tokyo to play in a "haunted house," which is really a glitch in their computer world. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- 8. Detective Story -- A detective named Ash is called upon by a mysterious organization to hunt down the notorious hacker Trinity. -- -- 9. Matriculated -- A group of scientists capture a robot and place it in a surreal fantasy world. When the robot's friends come in and kill most of the scientists; however, the robot and the last scientist remaining face isolation in the computer-generated world. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Warner Bros. Japan -- OVA - Jun 3, 2003 -- 66,027 7.30
The Animatrix -- -- Madhouse, Studio 4°C -- 9 eps -- Other -- Action Drama Sci-Fi -- The Animatrix The Animatrix -- 1. Final Flight of the Osiris -- The crew of the Osiris discover an army preparing to invade Zion. While one crew member races inside the Matrix to get the message to Zion, the others try desperately to buy her enough time while fighting off an onslaught of Sentinels they can't possibly defeat. -- -- 2-3. The Second Renaissance Part 1 and 2 -- Humans have created the ultimate AI, which is just as smart as they are. But complications arise when these robots and the humans try to exist peacefully, and eventually all-out war breaks out. The humans ultimately lose the war, and become trapped in the Matrix as seen in the live-action films. -- -- 4. Kid's Story -- A young man discovers that his world isn't real, that it's a computer-generated fantasy land created by robots using humans for energy. He escapes with the help of the hacker Neo. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- 5. Program -- Cis and Duo engage in battle in a virtual recreation of Feudal Japan. -- -- 6. World Record -- While running the fastest race in his life, a champion track star breaks free of his computer-generated world for a small period of time. When he goes back to the real world, he has no memories and is placed in a nursing home. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- 7. Beyond -- While looking for her lost pet, a young woman meets up with some kids in Tokyo to play in a "haunted house," which is really a glitch in their computer world. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- 8. Detective Story -- A detective named Ash is called upon by a mysterious organization to hunt down the notorious hacker Trinity. -- -- 9. Matriculated -- A group of scientists capture a robot and place it in a surreal fantasy world. When the robot's friends come in and kill most of the scientists; however, the robot and the last scientist remaining face isolation in the computer-generated world. Based on the Matrix trilogy. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- OVA - Jun 3, 2003 -- 66,027 7.30
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