The Witness

en.subtitles

: feynman
And so,
by a backhanded, upside-down argument,
was predicted that there is in carbon
a level at 7.82 million volts;

and then experiments in the laboratory with carbon
show indeed that there is.
And therefore the existence in the world of all these other elements
is very closely related to the fact
that there is this particular level in carbon.
But the position of this particular level in carbon seems to us,
after knowing the physical laws,
to be a very complicated accident
of twelve complicated particles interacting.
So I use to illustrate, by this example,
that an understanding of the physical laws
doesn’t give an understanding in a sense of a —
understanding significance of the world in any way.
The details of real experience are very far, often,
from the fundamental laws.
There are, in a way of speaking in the world —
We have a way of discussing the world,
which you could call a,
we discuss it at various hierarchies, or levels.
Now I don’t mean to be very precise,
there’s a level, there’s another level, and another level,
but I will indicate, by describing a set of ideas to you,
just one after the other,
what I mean by hierarchies of ideas.
For example, at one end, we have the fundamental laws of physics.
Then we invent other terms for concepts which are approximate,
who have, we believe, their ultimate explanation
in terms of the fundamental laws.
For instance, ‘heat’. Heat is supposed to be the jiggling,
and it’s just a word for — a hot thing is just a word
for a mass of atoms which are jiggling.
Thought out fundamentally, we should think of the atoms jiggling.
But for a while, if we’re talking about heat,
we sometimes forget about the atoms jiggling —
just like when we talk about the glacier
we don’t always think of the hexagonal ice
snowflakes which originally fell.
Another example of the same thing is a salt crystal.
Looked at fundamentally,
it’s a lot of protons, neutrons, and electrons;
but we have this concept ’salt crystal’,
which carries a whole pattern, already,
of fundamental interactions.
Or an idea like pressure.
Now if we go higher up from this,
in another level, we have properties of substances —
like ’refractive index’,
how light is bent when it goes through something;
or ’surface tension’,
the fact that the water tends to pull itself together,
is described by a number.
I remind you that we have to go through several laws down
to find out that it’s the pull of the atoms, and so on.
But we still say it’s ’surface tension’, and don’t worry,
when we’re discussing surface tension, of the inner workings —
always — sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.
Go on — up — in the hierarchy.
With the water we have the waves
and we have a thing like a storm,
we have a word ’storm’ which represents
an enormous mass of phenomena,
or ’sunspot’ or ’star’, which is an accumulation of things.
And it’s not worthwhile always to think of it way back.
In fact we can’t, because the higher up we go,
we have too many steps in between,
each one of which is a little weak,
and we haven’t thought them all through yet.
As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity,
we get to things like frog, or nerve impulse,
which, you see, is an enormously complicated thing
in the physical world, involving an organization of matter
in a very elaborate complexity.
And then we go on, we come to things, words and concepts
like ’man’, and ’history’, or ’political expediency’,
and so forth,
which is a series of concepts
that we use to understand things at an ever-higher level.
And going on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope...
Now which end is nearer to the ultimate creator, or the ultimate?
So if I make a religious metaphor, which end is nearer to God?
Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws?
I think that the right way, of course, is to say
the whole structural interconnections of the thing
is the thing that we have to look at,
and that the sequence of hierar —
that all the sciences and all the efforts,
not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds,
are to see the connections of the hierarchies,
to connect beauty to history,
to connect history to man’s psychology,
man’s psychology to the working of the brain,
the brain to the neural impulse,
the neural impulse to the chemistry,
and so forth, up and down, both ways.
And today we cannot,
and there’s no use making believe we can,
draw carefully a line all the way
from one end of this thing to the other,
in fact we’ve just begun to see
that there is this relative hierarchy.
And so I don’t think either end is nearer to God’s.
And that to stand at either end,
and to walk out off the end of the pier only,
hoping out in that direction is the complete understanding,
is a mistake.
And to stand with evil and beauty and hope,
or to stand with the fundamental laws,
hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world,
with that aspect alone, is a mistake.
And it is not sensible either,
for the ones who specialize at one end,
and the ones who specialize at the other end,
to have such disregard for each other.
(They don’t actually, but the people say they do. Sorry.)
But that actually,
the great mass of workers in between,
connecting one step to another,
are improving all the time our understanding of the world,
both from working at the ends and working in the middle.
And in that way
we are gradually understanding this connection,
this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies.
If you expected science to give all the answers
to the wonderful questions about what we are,
where we’re going,
what the meaning of the universe is and so on,
then I think you could easily become disillusioned
and then look for some mystic answer to these problems.
How a scientist can take a mystic answer I don’t know
because the whole spirit is to understand —
well, never mind that. Anyhow, I don’t understand that,
but anyhow if you think of it,
the way I think of what we’re doing is we’re exploring,
we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world.
People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?"
No, I’m not, I’m just looking to find out more about the world
and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law
that explains everything,
so be it, that would be very nice to discover.
If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers
and we’re just sick and tired of looking at the layers,
then that’s the way it is,
but whatever way it comes out its nature is there
and she’s going to come out the way she is,
and therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn’t pre-decide
what it is we’re trying to do
except to find out more about it.
If you said your problem is,
why do you find out more about it,
if you thought you were trying to find out more about it
because you’re going to get an answer
to some deep philosophical question,
you may be wrong.
It may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question
by finding out more about the character of nature,
but I don’t look at it —
My interest in science is to simply find out about the world,
and the more I find out the better it is.
I like to find out.
There are very remarkable mysteries
about the fact that we’re able to do so many more things
than apparently animals can do, and other questions like that,
but those are mysteries I want to investigate
without knowing the answer to them.
And so altogether I can’t believe the special stories
that have been made up
about our relationship to the universe at large
because —
they seem to be —
too simple, too connected to —
Too local! Too provincial!
The earth, he came to the earth!
One of the aspects of God came to the earth, mind you,
and look at what’s out there. How can you —
It isn’t in proportion.
Anyway, it’s no use arguing, I can’t argue it,
I’m just trying to tell you why the scientific views that I have
do have some effect on my beliefs. And also another thing
has to do with the question
of how you find out if something’s true,
and if you have all these theories,
the different religions
have all different theories about the thing,
then you begin to wonder. Once you start doubting,
just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me is the science true.
We say no no, we don’t know what’s true,
we’re trying to find out, everything is possibly wrong.
Start out understanding religion by saying
everything is possibly wrong; let us see.
As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge
which is hard to recover from.
And so with the scientific view, well, my father’s view,
that we should look to see what’s true
and what may not be true,
once you start doubting, which I think to me
is a very fundamental part of my soul,
is to doubt and to ask,
and when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.
You see, one thing is,
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing.
I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing
than to have answers which might be wrong.
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs
and different degrees of certainty about different things,
but I’m not absolutely sure of anything
and there are many things I don’t know anything about,
such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here,
and what the question might mean.
I might think about it a little bit,
if I can’t figure it out, then I go to something else,
but I don’t have to know an answer.
I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things,
by being lost in the mysterious universe
without having any purpose,
which is the way it really is so far as I can tell.
Possibly.
It doesn’t frighten me.


: burke
Well, that’s no better a solution than any of the others, is it?
So, in the end, have we learned anything
from this look at why the world turned out the way it did
that’s of any use to us in our future?
Something, I think.
That the key to why things change is the key to everything.
How easy is it for knowledge to spread?
And that, in the past, the people who made change happen
were the people who had that knowledge,
whether they were craftsmen or kings.
Today, the people who make things change,
the people who have that knowledge,
are the scientists and the technologists
who are the true driving force of humanity.
And before you say,
"What about the Beethovens and the Michelangeloes,"
let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently:
that at best the products of human emotion:
art — philosophy — politics — music — literature,
are interpretations of the world,
that tell you more about the guy who’s talking
than about the world he’s talking about.
Secondhand views of the world
made thirdhand by your interpretation of them.
Things like that:
As opposed to
this:
Know what it is?
It’s a bunch of amino acids,
the stuff that goes to build up a —
a worm,
or a geranium,
or you.
This stuff’s easier to take, isn’t it?
Understandable; got people in it.
This, scientific knowledge,
is hard to take
because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology,
and leaves only what is demonstrably true about the world.
And the reason why so many people
may be thinking about throwing away those crutches
is because, thanks to science and technology,
they have begun to know that they don’t know so much
and that if they’re to have
more say in what happens to their lives,
more freedom to develop their abilities to the full,
they have to be helped towards that knowledge
that they know exists and that they don’t possess.
And by "helped towards that knowledge", I don’t mean
give everybody a computer and say "help yourself!"
Where would you even start?
No, I mean,
trying to find ways to translate the knowledge,
to teach us to ask the right questions.
See, we’re on the edge of a revolution
in communications technology
that is going to make that more possible than ever before.
Or, if that’s not done,
to cause an explosion of knowledge
that will leave those of us who don’t have access to it
as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb and blind.
And I don’t think most people want that.
So what do we do about it?
I don’t know.
But maybe a good start
would be to recognize, within yourself,
the ability to understand anything
because that ability’s there,
as long as it’s explained clearly enough.
And then go and ask for explanations.
And if you’re thinking right now, "What do I ask for?"
Ask yourself if there’s anything in your life
that you want changed.
That’s where to start.



: psalm46
How many of you here have personally witnessed
a total eclipse of the sun?
To stand one day in the shadow of the moon
is one of my humble goals in life.
The closest I ever came was over thirty years ago.
On February 26, 1979,
a solar eclipse passed directly over the city of Portland.
I bought my bus tickets and found a place to stay.
But in the end, I couldn’t get the time off work.
Well, anyone who lives in Portland can tell you
that the chances of catching the sun in February
are pretty slim.
And sure enough, the skies over the city that day
were completely overcast. I wouldn’t have seen a thing.
That work I couldn’t get out of
was my first job out of college:
A sales clerk at an old Radio Shack store
in beautiful downtown Worcester, Massachusetts.
On my very first day behind the counter,
a delivery truck pulled up to the front of the store.
They carried in a big carton,
upon which was printed the legend TRS-80.
It was our floor sample
of the world’s first mass-market microcomputer.
The TRS-80 Model I
had a Z80 processor clocked at 1.7 megahertz,
4,096 bytes of memory,
and a 64-character black-and-white text display.
The only storage was a cassette recorder.
All this could be yours for the low, low price of $599.
This store I was working in had seen better days.
At one time, it had been near the center
of a thriving commercial district.
But like so many other New England cities,
the advent of shopping malls had, by the early ‘70s,
turned it into a ghost town.
Worcester’s solution to this problem was decisive,
to say the least.
The city’s elders apparently decided
that if they couldn’t beat them, they would join them.
And so several square blocks at the heart of the city
were bulldozed into oblivion,
destroying dozens of family businesses,
including the site of a pharmacy
once operated by my great-grandfather.
In their place was erected
a vast three-level shopping complex,
with cinemas and a food court.
When the dust settled,
only a few forlorn blocks of the old Worcester remained standing.
My Radio Shack store was in one of those blocks.
Then, to add insult to injury,
Radio Shack opened a brand-new location inside the shopping center,
less than 500 feet from my store.
So now patrons has a choice between a clean,
well-lighted establishment with uniformed security
and acres of convenient parking,
or a shadowy hole in a seedy old office building
next to an adult movie theater.
Consequently, I had plenty of time to fool around
with the new computer.
I taught myself BASIC programming.
Then I learned Z80 assembly.
Both, of course, so that I could write games.
I also created self-running animated demos
which ran all night in the store window
for the edification of the winos who peed in our doorway.
Strangely enough, the few customers we had
didn’t seem to be interested in our new computer,
even after the 16K memory upgrade.
In fact, most of the people who set off the buzzer
on their way through the front door
weren’t there to buy anything at all.
They were there to exploit a free promotion
which was the bane of Radio Shack employees for over forty years:
The Battery of the Month Club.
The idea of this promotion was simple.
Customers got a little red card
upon which was printed a square for each month.
Twelve times a year, the lucky sales clerk
got to punch out a square and give the customer
one brand new triple-A, double-A, C, D or 9-volt battery.
Of course, customers weren’t allowed to choose
just any grade of battery.
At the time of my employment,
Radio Shack offered three different levels of battery excellence.
First were the alkalines, powerful, long-lasting and expensive,
hanging behind the counter like prescription medication
in gold-embossed blister packs.
These were most certainly not available
through the Battery of the Month Club.
Next were the high-end lead batteries,
sturdy, dependable batteries, moderately priced,
and prominently displayed near the front of the store.
These were also not available
through the Battery of the Month Club.
Finally, at the bottom of the barrel,
were the standard lead batteries.
These were literally piled in barrels,
cunningly located way at the back of the store,
in a dark corner near the TV antennas.
Remember TV antennas?
Customers who came in looking
for their free Battery of the Month
had to walk the entire length of the premises,
past the CB radios and stereo headphones
and remote-controlled racing cars.
Nothing would stop them.
On the first day of every month, like clockwork,
those customers come in waving their little red cards.
I would look up from my programming
and wave them to the back of the store.
It didn’t matter that the batteries
were only worth twenty-nine cents.
It didn’t matter that most of them
were already half dead.
They came. They grabbed.
And, as far as I can remember,
not one of them ever paid for a damned thing.
I was such a crappy salesman. I was young and foolish.
I thought my education in game design
was happening at the keyboard.
I almost missed the lesson coming through the front door.
Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person
fooling around with games on micros.
All over the country, people like me were experimenting.
Scott Adams was coding what would soon become
the world’s first commercial adventure game.
Remember adventure games?
My future employer, Infocom, was being founded,
along with other legendary companies
like On-Line Systems, Sirius, Personal Software and SSI.
Those were exciting times.
Teenagers were making fortunes.
Games were cheap and easy to build.
The slate was clean.
But in 1979, the biggest news in gaming had nothing to do with computers.
On the morning of the autumn equinox, September 20th,
a new children’s picture book appeared in the stores of Great Britain.
This picture book was rather peculiar.
It consisted of 15 meticulously detailed color paintings,
illustrating a slight, whimsical tale
about a rabbit delivering a jewel to the moon.
On the back jacket of the book was a color photograph
of a real jewel shaped like a running rabbit, five inches long,
fashioned of 18-karat gold, suspended with ornaments and bells,
together with a sun and moon of blue quartz.
According to the blurb underneath,
this very jewel had been buried somewhere in England.
Clues pointing to its location were concealed in the text
and in the pictures of the book.
The treasure would belong to whoever found it first.
The book was called Masquerade.
It was created by an eccentric little man with divergent eyes
and a talent for mischief named Kit Williams.
Within days, the first printing was sold out.
And the Empire That Never Sleeps
found itself in the grip of Rabbit Fever.
Excited readers attacked the paintings with rulers,
compasses and protractors.
Magazine articles and TV specials dissected the clues,
floated theories, and followed with keen delight
the reckless exploits of the fanatics.
One obscure park, unfortunately known by the nickname Rabbit Hill,
was so riddled with holes excavated by misguided treasure seekers
that the authorities had to erect signs assuring the public
that no gold rabbits were to be found there.
Some hunters ended up seeking psychological counseling for their obsession.
The craze lept over the Atlantic Ocean and invaded
America, France, Italy and Germany.
It sold over a million copies in a few months,
a record unrivalled by any children’s title
until the advent of Harry Potter.
Over 150,000 copies were sold in foreign translations,
including 80,000 copies in Japanese,
despite the fact that the puzzle was only solvable in English.
It didn’t matter that the Masquerade jewel
was only worth a few thousand dollars.
Many seekers spent far more than that
in their months of exploration and travel.
It was the thrill of the chase.
The possibility of being The One.
Treasure hunts, secret messages and hidden things
seem to exert an irresistible appeal.
They’re fun to look for, and to talk about.
And this fact of human psychology
has been exploited in computer games since the earliest days.
It finds expression in the hidden surprises we call Easter eggs.
Atari’s Steven Wright is credited with coining this term
in the first issue of Electronic Games magazine.
The first Easter egg in a commercial computer game
appeared in an early Atari 2600 cartridge
called, simply enough, Adventure.
By a sequence of unlikely movements and obscure manipulations,
players could discover a secret room where the words
“Created by Warren Robinet” appeared in flashing letters.
Over the decades, Easter eggs and their evil twin, cheat codes,
have become an industry within an industry.
Entire magazines and Web sites are now devoted
to their carefully orchestrated discovery and dissemination.
They’re part of our toolkit, our basic vocabulary,
the language of computer game design.
Computer gamers may have been the first to refer
to hidden surprises as Easter eggs,
but we certainly weren’t the first to use them.
Painters, composers and artists of every discipline
have been hiding stuff in their works for centuries.
The recent advent of VCRs
and laserdisc players with freeze-frame capability
exposed decades of secret Disney erotica.
Thomas Kinkade, the self-appointed “Painter of Light,”
amuses himself by hiding the letter N in his works.
A number beside his signature indicates how many Ns
are hidden in each painting.
Picasso, Dali, Raphael, Poussin and dozens of other painters
concealed all kinds of stuff in their paintings.
A favorite trick was hiding portraits of themselves,
their families, friends and fellow artists in crowd scenes.
El Greco loved dogs. But the Catholic Church forbid him
from including any in his sacred paintings.
So he hid them, usually within the outlines of celestial clouds.
Composer Dmitri Shostakovich chafed under the political censorship
imposed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture.
His symphonies and chamber works are loaded with hidden signatures
and subversive subtexts which, had they been recognized,
would have sent him to Siberia.
Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is filled with musical allusions
to the rituals of the Freemasons, the ancient secret society
of which he and his mentor Haydn were members.
But the most famous purveyor of Easter eggs is that champion
of the late Baroque, the ultimate musical nerd, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach was a student of gematria, the art of assigning numeric values
to letters of the alphabet: A=1, B=2, C=3, et cetera.
By comparing, sequencing or otherwise manipulating these numbers,
secret messages can be concealed.
Bach took particular delight in the gematriacal numbers 14 and 41.
14 is the sum of the initials of his last name: B=2, A=1, C=3 and H=8.
41 is the sum of his expanded initials, J S BACH.
These two numbers show up over and over again in Bach’s compositions.
One of the better-known examples is his setting
of the chorale “Vor deinen Thron.”
The first line of the melody contains exactly 14 notes,
and the entire melody from start to finish contains 41.
Another of Bach’s favorite games was the puzzle canon.
A canon is a melody that sounds good when you play it
on top of itself, a little bit out of sync.
“Frère Jacques” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”
are familiar examples of simple, two-voice canons.
But a canon can employ any number of voices.
And you don’t have to play each voice the same way, either.
You can change the octave, transpose the key,
invert the pitch, play it backwards, or any combination.
Finding melodies that make good multi-voice canons
is a fussy and difficult art, of which Bach was an undisputed master.
Now, in a puzzle canon,
the composer specifies the basic melody and the number of voices,
but not the relationship of the voices.
The student has to figure out the position and key of each voice,
and whether to perform them inverted and/or backwards.
Bach wrote quite a number of puzzle canons.
The most famous, BWV 1076, is part of a fascinating story.
One of Bach’s students was a fellow by the name of Lorenz Mizler,
founder of The Society of Musical Science.
This elite, invitation-only institution
devoted itself to the study of Pythagorean philosophy,
and the union of music and mathematics.
Its distinguished membership reads like a Who’s Who of German composers,
including Handel, Telemann and eventually Mozart.
Applicants for membership in the Society
were required to submit an oil portrait of themselves,
along with a specimen of original music.
With nerdly efficiency, society member number 14 decided
to combine these admission requirements into a single work.
He sat for a portrait with Elias Haussmann,
official artist at the court of Dresden.
This portrait, which now hangs in the gallery
of the Town Hall in Leipzig,
is the only indisputably authentic image of Bach in existence.
The Haussman portrait shows Bach dressed in a formal coat
with exactly 14 buttons. In his hand is a sheet of music paper
upon which is written a puzzle canon for six simultaneous voices.
In 1974, a manuscript was discovered which proved
that this canon was the thirteenth in a series of exactly 14 canons
based on the ground theme of the famous Goldberg Variations.
As if these musical gymnastics weren’t enough,
Bach liked to hide messages in his compositions
by assigning notes to the letters.
His initials B-A-C-H correspond to the pitch sequence
B-flat, A, C and B-natural in German letter notation.
This theme makes its most memorable appearance
in the last bars of his final composition,
The Art of Fugue, published soon after his death in 1750.
The word “fugue” comes from the Latin fuga,
which means flight (as in running away).
So the art of fugue is the art of flight,
the art of taking a theme and running with it.
Bach wrote hundreds of fugues,
but none as sublime as this sequence of 14.
In the last and most complicated fugue in the series,
the first and second sections develop normally.
This is followed by the B-A-C-H signature,
and then suddenly, without any warning or structural justification,
the fugue stops dead in its tracks.
One of the composer’s 20 children,
his son Carl Philipp Emanuel,
claimed that Bach died moments after those last few notes were written.
This story is probably apocryphal.
The Easter eggs in Bach’s music are a pleasant obscurity,
known chiefly to professors and students of Baroque music.
But in March of 2002, when this lecture was first delivered,
those Easter eggs were the talk of the entire classical music industry.
Sitting near the top of the classical music charts that month
was a compact disc on the ECM label called Morimur.
It is performed by the Hilliard choral ensemble
together with a talented but, until then,
little-known violinist, Christoph Poppen.
The music on Morimur is based on a gematriacal analysis
of Bach’s Partita in D Minor for solo violin.
This analysis, by German professor Helga Thoene,
assigns numeric values to the duration of notes,
the number of bars, and the German letter notation of the Partita.
In doing so, she claims to have discovered the complete text
of several liturgical ceremonies encoded in the notes.
The CD presents these hidden texts,
superimposed over the original music.
The result was strangely melancholy,
dark, haunting, and very, very popular.
Quite a few music critics attacked this disc.
They didn’t buy Professor Thoene’s analysis,
dismissing it as a combination of numerology and canny marketing.
Their caution was not without basis.
Numerology is a slippery slope
down which many a fine mind has slid to its doom.
Allow me to offer an amusing anecdote from my own experience.
Back in the early ‘90s, before the Internet took off,
one of the more popular online bulletin board systems
was a service called Prodigy.
I bought an account on Prodigy
so I could join a fraternal interest group,
and gossip with fellow members around the country.
One day, a stranger appeared on our bulletin board.
Right away, I knew we were in trouble.
This fellow, whose name was Gary,
began spouting all kinds of apocalyptic nonsense
about worldwide conspiracies, secret societies and devil worship.
At first we tried to be polite.
We questioned his sources, corrected his histories,
logically refuted his claims, and tried to behave in a civilized manner.
But instead of soothing him, our attention only made him worse.
His conspiratorial warnings became urgent, approaching hysteria.
He began to threaten people who disagreed with him.
To coin a phrase, Gary went All Upper Case.
But his most urgent warnings weren’t about the gays,
the Jews, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati.
According to Gary, the greatest enemy of mankind was Santa Claus.
Gary claimed to possess a secret numerical formula
that “proved” beyond a shadow of a doubt
that Santa Claus was an avatar of the Antichrist.
Intrigued, we pressed Gary to reveal his formula.
In doing so, we walked right into his trap.
We should have known he had a book to sell.
I fell for it. I sent him the fifteen bucks.
Less than a week later the book arrived.
Above an ominous photograph of the Washington monument
was emblazoned the title: 666: The Final Warning!
Inside this privately printed 494-page monster,
Gary reveals a simple gematriacal formula
which he claims was developed by the ancient Sumerians.
This formula assigns successive products of 6
to each letter of the alphabet: A=6, B=12, C=18, etc.
Imagine my dismay when I applied this ancient formula
to the name “Santa Claus,” and obtained the blasphemous sum of 666,
the Biblical Number of the Beast!
I went on Prodigy and reported
to the stunned members of our interest group
that Gary was right, after all.
There could be no doubt that,
according to the unimpeachable wisdom of ancient Sumeria,
Santa Claus was the AntiChrist.
I then went on to point out several other names which,
when submitted to Gary’s formula, also produced the sum 666.
Names like “Saint James,” “New York” and “New Mexico.”
Soon the bulletin board was filled with discoveries
like “computer,” “Boston tea” and, most sinister of all, “sing karaoke.”
Gary left us alone after that. I got my $15 worth.
But Gary is hardly the first person
to connect secret codes to the Bible.
People have been looking for Easter eggs in the Bible
for hundreds of years.
The Hebrew mystical tradition of kabbalah
can be described as a gematriacal meditation on the Pentateuch,
the first five books of the Old Testament.
The advent of computers
has made the application of numerology to the Bible
fast and efficient.
The latest spate of Bible-searching
was instigated by a book published in 1998 by Michael Drosnin,
a former Wall Street Journal reporter.
His book, The Bible Code, applied a skip-cypher,
in which every nth character in a text is combined to form a message.
By applying his skip-cypher to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament,
Drosnin claimed to have discovered predictions of World War II,
the Holocaust, Hiroshima,
the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and both Kennedys,
the moon landing, Watergate, the Oklahoma City bombing,
the election of Bill Clinton, the death of Princess Di
and the comet that collided with Jupiter.
He also found predictions of a giant earthquake in LA,
a meteor hitting the earth, and nuclear armageddon,
all scheduled to occur before the end of the last decade.
The Bible Code spent many weeks on the bestseller lists,
spawning several sequels and dozens of imitators.
The Bible has certainly attracted its share of crackpots.
But for the real hardcore egg hunters,
nothing can rival the ingenuity, the tenacious scholarship,
the stubborn zeal of those who seek the answer
to the ultimate literary puzzle.
A poisonous conundrum that has squandered fortunes,
destroyed careers, and driven healthy,
intelligent scholars to the brink of madness, and beyond.
Who wrote Shakespeare?
The essays and books devoted to the Shakespeare authorship problem
are sufficient to fill a large library.
Several such libraries actually exist.
Not even a day-long tutorial, much less an hour lecture,
can begin to do justice to this complex,
bizarre and dangerously tantalizing story.
Nevertheless, for the unacquainted,
I will attempt to summarize the issue in a few paragraphs.
The undisputed facts of Shakespeare’s life and career
could be scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin.
We know for a fact that a man named William Shakespeare
was born in 1564 in or around the village of Stratford-upon-Avon.
We know that he had a wife and at least three children.
We know he bought property in Stratford,
was involved in several lawsuits with his neighbors,
and died there in 1616, aged 52.
We also know that during those same years,
a man with a last name similar to Shakespeare
worked as an actor on the London stage,
eventually becoming co-owner of some of the theaters there.
We also know that, about the same time,
a number of most excellent poems and plays
were published in London under the name Shakespeare.
We do not know for a fact
that the landowner in Stratford
and the actor in London with a similar last name
were one and the same man.
We do not know for a fact
that either man had anything to do
with the poems and the plays.
All we know is that those poems and plays have,
in the four hundred years since their composition,
come to be regarded as a pinnacle of Western culture.
The works attributed to Shakespeare
appear to have been written by a man or woman
who knew something about just about everything.
They’re filled with references to mythology and
classic literature, games and sports, war and weapons of war,
ships and sailing, the law and legal terminology,
court etiquette, statesmanship, horticulture,
music, astronomy, medicine, falconry and, of course, theater.
Therein lies the problem.
How could a farmer’s son of uncertain schooling
from a mostly illiterate country village,
a man of practically no account at all,
wield such encyclopedic learning
with so much eloquence and wit,
so much wisdom and human understanding?
For the first 150 years,
nobody questioned the traditional history of the Bard.
Then, in the late eighteenth century, Reverend James Wilmot,
a distinguished scholar who lived just a few miles north of Stratford,
decided to write a biography of the famous playwright.
Dr. Wilmot believed that a man as well-educated as Shakespeare
must have owned a fairly extensive library,
despite the fact that not a single book or manuscript is mentioned in his will.
Over the years, he speculated,
some of those books must have found their way into local collections.
And so the good Reverend Doctor scoured the British countryside,
taking inventory of literally every bookshelf within 50 miles of Stratford.
Not a single book from the library of William Shakespeare was discovered.
Neither were there found any letters to, from or about Shakespeare.
Furthermore, no references to the folklore,
local sayings or distinctive dialect of the Stratford area
could be found in any of Shakespeare’s writings.
After four years of painstaking research,
Dr. Wilmot concluded, to his own dismay,
that only one person contemporary with Shakespeare of Stratford
had ever demonstrated the wide-ranging education and expressive talent
needed to compose those poems and plays.
That man was the multilingual author, philosopher and statesman,
inventor of the Scientific Method, Chancellor to the Courts
of Queen Elizabeth and King James, Sir Francis Bacon.
Dr. Wilmot never dared to publish his theory.
But before he died he confided it to a friend, James Cowell,
who, in 1805, repeated it to a meeting of the Ipswich Philosophical Society.
The members of the society were suitably outraged,
and the scandalous matter was quickly forgotten.
Then in 1857, a lady from Stratford — Stratford, Connecticut —
published a book called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded.
In this book, Miss Delia Bacon, no relation to Francis,
claimed that the works of Shakespeare were written
by a secret cabal of British nobility
including Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney
as well as Sir Francis Bacon.
Delia Bacon’s book electrified the world of letters.
Battle lines were drawn
between the orthodox Stratfordians and the heretical Baconians.
Literary societies and scholarly journals were formed to debate the evidence.
Hundreds of pamphlets, newspaper articles and essays
were published defending each side,
and ridiculing the opposition with that self-aggrandizing viciousness
peculiar to tenured academics.
Armed with her explosive book,
Delia Bacon journeyed to Stratford-upon-Avon and, unbelievably,
obtained official permission to open Shakespeare’s grave.
However, when the moment came to actually lift the stone,
Delia’s self-doubt precipitated a catastrophic nervous breakdown.
She later died penniless in a madhouse.
Around 1888, things began to get a bit out of hand.
U.S. Congressman Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota
became interested in the Shakespeare controversy.
One day, browsing through his facsimile copy of the First Folio of 1623,
he noted that the word “bacon” appeared on page 53 of the Histories
and also on page 53 of the Comedies.
He also noted that Sir Francis Bacon
had written extensively on the subject of cryptography.
Donnelly began counting line and page numbers,
adding and subtracting letters,
drawing lines over sentences,
circling words and crossing them out.
The result was a complex and virtually incomprehensible algorithm
which he claimed was invented by Bacon
to hide secret messages inside the First Folio.
The greatest Easter egg hunt in the history of Western civilization had begun.
Here are just a couple of the sillier highlights.
A doctor named Orville Owen of Detroit
constructed a bizarre research tool he called the Wheel of Fortune.
This wheel consisted of two giant wooden spools
wrapped with a strip of canvas two feet wide and a thousand feet long.
Onto this canvas he glued the separate pages of the complete works
of Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Greene, Peele and Spenser,
together with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
By cranking the spools back and forth,
Dr. Owen could quickly zip across the pages
in search of clues and cross-references.
Employing a large team of secretaries and stenographers,
Owen claimed to have uncovered
a complete alternative history of Elizabethan England,
as well as several entirely new Shakespeare plays and sonnets.
Listen to this hidden verse,
supposedly penned by the mighty Bard himself,
which inspired Dr. Owen to build his Wheel of Fortune.
Take your knife and cut all our books asunder
And set the leaves on a great firm wheel
Which rolls and rolls, and turning the fickle rolling wheel
Throw your eyes upon Fortune
That goddess blind, that stands upon a spherical stone
that, turning and inconstant, rolls
in restless variation.
After publishing five thick volumes of this rubbish,
Owen announced the discovery of an anagram indicating
that Bacon’s original manuscripts were buried
near Chepstow Castle on the river Wye.
Owen spent the next fifteen years and thousands of dollars
excavating the bed of the river with boat crews and high explosives.
He died before anything was found.
A fellow named Arensburg wrote an entire book
based on the analysis of the significance of a suspicious crack
in the tomb of Bacon’s mother.
A ray of sanity finally appeared in 1957.
To those familiar with the science of cryptology,
the name William Friedman needs little introduction.
During World War II, Colonel Friedman was the head
of the US Army’s cryptoanalytic bureau.
He is credited with cracking the Japanese Empire’s
most sensitive cipher.
After the war, the Colonel decided to apply his expertise to the study
of the Shakespeare ciphers.
He interviewed several of the experts in the field,
and prepared a detailed scientific analysis,
which he published under the title The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined.
His conclusion? In a word, bunk.
According to the standards of cryptologic science,
not one of the hidden messages purportedly discovered in Shakespeare’s works
was plausible.
The rules used to extract these messages from the texts were non-rigorous,
wildly subjective, and unrepeatable by anyone except the original decypherer.
The people involved were not being dishonest.
They were channeling their preconceptions.
They were trapped in a labyrinth of delusion, mining order from chaos,
“Angler[s] in a lake of darkness.” Lear III.6.
You would think that Friedman’s cold and ruthless exposure
would be enough to silence the heretics once and for all.
Not a chance. The books and TV specials and Web sites
and conferences and doctoral dissertations keep right on coming.
I should point out that the Shakespeare authorship issue
is not only the preoccupation of cranks and weirdos.
A substantial number of respected authors and Shakespeareans
have expressed serious doubts about the traditional origin of the plays.
The list includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sam Clemens, Sigmund Freud,
Orson Welles and Sir John Gielgud.
Living skeptics include the artistic director of the New Globe Theater,
Mark Rylance; Michael York, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh,
and even that most revered and scholarly
of contemporary Shakespearean actors, Keanu Reeves.
The current leading candidate for the authorship is Edward de Vere,
the seventeenth Earl of Oxford,
a theory first proposed in 1920 by an English schoolmaster
with the unfortunate name J. Thomas Looney.
What is it about Bach, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare
that inspires this intense scrutiny?
Nobody’s looking for acrostics in Chaucer or Keats.
There are no hit CDs of the secret chorales of Wagner or Beethoven.
For the answer, we need to recognize the unique roles
which the Bible and Shakespeare have played
in the development of Western culture.
No other single work of literature
has influenced Modern English
more than the translation of the Holy Bible published in 1611
under the auspices of King James I.
The King James Bible exemplifies the meaning of the word classic.
It has been called the noblest monument of English prose,
the very greatest achievement of the English language.
It has served as an inspiration for generations
of poets, dramatists, musicians, politicians and orators.
Countless people have learned to read by repeating the phrases in this,
the only book their family possessed.
Our constitutions and our laws have been profoundly shaped
by its cadences and imagery.
But even the glory of the King James Bible,
compiled by a committee of 46 editors over the course of a decade,
pales before the dazzling legacy of the Swan of Avon.
The lowest estimate of Shakespeare’s working vocabulary
is 15,000 words, more than three times that of the King James Bible,
and twice the size of his nearest competitor, John Milton.
His poems and plays were written without the aid of a dictionary
or a thesaurus. They didn’t exist yet. It was all in his head.
When Shakespeare had a thought for which Elizabethan English had no word,
he invented one.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists hundreds of everyday words and phrases
which made their first appearance in the pages of the Bard.
Addiction. Alligator. Assassination. Bedroom. Critic. Dawn. Design.
Dialogue. Employer. Film. Glow. Gloomy. Gossip. Hint. Hurry.
Investment. Lonely. Luggage. Manager. Switch. Torture.
Transcendence. Wormhole. Zany.
Hamlet alone contains nearly forty of these neologisms.
Who today would have this audacity, this giddy exuberance of invention?
Only one other English author even approaches Shakespeare’s facility
for coining new words: Sir Francis Bacon.
In the modern era, the record holder is Charles Dodgson,
better known as Lewis Carroll, who, interestingly,
also happens to be the second most quoted author in English, after Shakespeare.
Everyone has been profoundly molded
by the influences of the King James Bible and Shakespeare.
Like it or not, all of us peer at the world
through the lenses of these great works.
They are the primary source documents of modern English thought,
the style guides of our minds.
Contemplating these dazzling jewels of wisdom and eloquence
gives rise to an extraordinary feeling.
A potent, rare and precious emotion
with the potential to completely upset your life.
An emotion powerful enough to make a man abandon his wife and children,
forfeit career and reputation,
lay down his possessions and follow his heart without questioning.
That sweet, sweet fusion of wonder and fear,
irresistible attraction and soul-numbing dread known as awe.
Awe is the Grail of artistic achievement.
No other human emotion possesses such raw transformative power,
and none is more difficult to evoke.
Few and far between are the works of man
that qualify as truly awesome.
It is awe that convinces a rabbi
to spend a lifetime decoding Yahweh from the Pentateuch.
Awe that sends millions of visitors each year
to the Pyramids of Giza, Guadalupe and Mecca.
It was awe that drove poor Delia Bacon to her doom.
Now, please don’t come away from this lecture thinking
that the key to awesome game design is the installation of Easter eggs!
Ordinary games, with their contrived Easter eggs and cheat codes,
are like the Battery of the Month club.
You have to trudge down to the back of the store
to get what you really came for.
If super power is what people really want, why not just give it to them?
Is our imagination so impoverished
that we have to resort to marketing gimmicks
to keep players interested in our games?
Awesome things don’t hold anything back.
Awesome things are rich and generous.
The treasure is right there.
One afternoon, I was sitting alone behind the counter
at that old Radio Shack store.
My boss had stepped out for some reason.
An elderly woman walked through the front door.
Like most of our customers, she was shabbily dressed.
Probably on a fixed income.

I assumed she was there for her free battery.
But instead, she placed a portable radio on the counter.
This radio came from the days when they boasted
about the number of transitors inside on the case.
It was completely wrapped in dirty white medical tape.
The woman looked at me, and asked, “Can you fix this?”
Slowly I unwrapped the medical tape,
peeling away the layers until the back cover of the radio fell off,
accompanied by a cloud of red dust.
The interior of the radio was half eaten away by battery leakage and corrosion.
I looked at the radio. I looked at the old woman.
I looked back at the radio.
I reached behind me, where the expensive alkaline batteries
were hanging like prescription medication,
and removed a gleaming nine-volt cell from its gold blister pack.
Then I pulled a brand-new transistor radio from a box,
installed the alkaline and helped the lady find her favorite station.
No money changed hands. She left the store without saying a word.
Awesome things are kind of like that.
Bach offered his students very specific insight into the source of awe.
In addition to B-A-C-H, two other sets of initials
are also associated with Bach’s music.
These initials are not hidden in the notes.
Instead, they’re scrawled right across the top of his manuscripts
for the whole world to see.
The initials are SDG and JJ.
SDG stands for the Latin phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “To the glory of God alone.”
JJ stands for Jesu Juva, “Help me, Jesus.”
Bach wrote all of his great masterpieces sub specie aeternitatis,
“under the aspect of eternity.”
He did not compose only to please his sponsors,
or to win the approval of an audience.
His work was his worship.
Bach once wrote,
“Music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God
and the recreation of the soul.
Where this is not kept in mind there is no true music,
but only an infernal clamour and ranting.”
The name of the power that moves you is not important.
What is important is that you are moved.
Awe is the foundation of religion.
No other motivation can free you from the limits of personal achievement.
Nothing else can teach you the Art of Flight.
Computer games are barely forty years old.
Only a few words in our basic vocabulary have been established.
A whole dictionary is waiting to be coined.
The slate is clean.
Someday soon, perhaps even in our lifetime,
a game design will appear
that will flash across our culture like lightning.
It will be easy to recognize.
It will be generous, giddy with exuberant inventiveness.
Scholars will pick it apart for decades, perhaps centuries.
It will be something wonderful.
Something terrifying.
Something awe-full.
A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference in London.
My wife joined me, and we took a day off for some sightseeing.
We decided to visit England’s second-biggest tourist attraction,
Stratford-upon-Avon.
It was cold and rainy when our train arrived.
Luckily, most of the attractions are just a short walk from the station.
We visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, a charming old house
along the main street which attracts millions of pilgrims every year,
despite the complete lack of any evidence that Shakespeare was born there,
or even lived anywhere near it.
We went past the school where Shakespeare learned to read and write,
although no documents exist to prove his attendance.
We visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage,
the rustic country farm where his wife spent her childhood,
although no record shows anyone by that name ever having lived there.
Finally we came to the one location undeniably associated with Shakespeare:
Trinity Parish church, on the banks of the river Avon,
where a man by that name is buried.
This beautiful church is approached by a long walkway,
between rows of ancient gravestones, shaded by tall trees.
The entrance door is surprisingly tiny.
No cameras are allowed inside.
The interior is dark and quiet.
Despite the presence of busloads of tourists,
the atmosphere is hushed and respectful.
A few people are seated in the pews, deep in prayer.
An aisle leads up the center of the church.
The left side of the altar is brightly illuminated.
On the wall above is a famous bust of the Bard,
quill in hand, gazing serenely at the crowd of pilgrims.
On the floor beneath, surrounded by bouquets of flowers,
at the very spot where Delia Bacon lost her mind,
the gravestone of William Shakespeare bears this dire warning:
Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here
Blest be the man who spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones.
Every year, three million pilgrims arrive from every nation on Earth
to approach this stone and consider the likeness of a man
whose body of work can only be described as awesome.
By contrast, the right side of the altar is dark and featureless.
Nobody of any consequence is buried there.
The only point of interest is a wooden case, of simple design,
carved of dark oak.
Inside the case, sealed beneath a thick sheet of glass,
lies a large open book.
A plaque on the case identifies this book
as a first edition of the King James Bible,
published in 1611, when Shakespeare was forty-six.
Not many pilgrims visit this side of the altar.
Most of those that do simply glance at the book,
read the plaque and move along.
A few, more observant, note that the Bible happens to be opened
to a page in the Old Testament: the Book of Psalms, chapter 46.
No explanation is given for this particular choice of pages.
For the initiated, none is necessary.
If you are of inquisitive bent,
if you are intrigued by English history and literature,
if you value your peace of mind, cover your ears, now.
In the year 1900, a scholar noticed something
about the King James translation of Psalm 46.
Something terrifying. Something wonderful.
The 46th word from the beginning of Psalm 46 is “shake.”
The 46th word from the end is “spear.”
There are only two possibilities here.
Either this is the finest coincidence ever recorded
in the history of world literature.
Or, it is not.
The Earth revolves around only one sun, and has only one moon.
The moon happens to be four hundred times smaller than the sun.
The sun happens to be four hundred times farther away.
And the apparent paths of the moon and sun in our sky
happen to intersect exactly twice every month.
Which means that every now and then,
at long yet precisely predictable intervals,
the lunar disc slips across the face of the sun
and just barely conceals it for a few wonderful, terrible minutes.
A fine coincidence, no?
In June of 1977, a little man with divergent eyes and a talent for mischief
ascended a hilltop in the British village of Ampthill.
At the summit of this hill is a tall, slender cross,
a memorial to Catherine of Aragorn, the first wife of Henry VIII.
The sun, high in the south,
cast the shadow of the cross upon the grassy hillside.
At exactly 12 noon, the man removed from his pocket a bar magnet.
He turned the magnet so its north pole was facing south,
and buried it under the shadow of the cross.
Two years later, a few hours before the publication of his first book,
the man returned to that hillside, this time in the dead of night.
He used a compass to locate the magnet he had buried.
In that same place, he dug a hole in the ground
and placed inside a ceramic container inscribed with the following words:
“I am the Keeper of the Jewel of MASQUERADE,
which lies waiting safe inside me
for You or Eternity.”


: rupert
Know yourself as the open, empty, luminous presence of awareness
Open because you say yes
unconditionally and indiscriminately
to all appearances of the mind, body, and world.
Like empty space, you have no mechanism inherent within you
that can resist any appearance.
We don’t have to make this the case;
it is already the case
Empty because although you, I, this aware presence
is aware of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions
it is not made out of a thought, a sensation, or a perception.
It is made out of pure knowing or awareness
And luminous because just like the sun, relatively speaking,
that renders all objects seeable
so you, I, this open empty presence
renders all experience knowable
In fact we don’t really see objects, relatively speaking,
illumined by the sun;
we just see reflections or modulations of the sun’s light
appearing as a multiplicity and diversity of color.
In the same way, we don’t really know
the objects of the mind, body, and the world;
we just know our knowing of them
All we know, all that is known, is the knowing of experience,
and you are that knowing
All that is ever known is a modulation of our own knowing presence,
modulating itself in the form of thinking, sensing and perceiving,
and seeming to become a mind, a body, and a world.
But we never actually know a mind, a body, and a world
as they are normally conceived.
We just know our knowing of them.
And this knowing, this substance of our experience,
the only substance of our experience,
is our self. In other words, we know ourself alone.
Awareness knows nothing other than itself.
Be knowingly this open, empty, luminous presence of awareness.
We don’t need to do anything special to make this happen.
Above all, we don’t have to manipulate the mind
in any way whatsoever
to be this presence of awareness
This presence of awareness which is simply our self, what we refer to
when we say "I", is ever-present
Just check this in your own experience.
Nothing that I am saying this evening,
there is nothing that cannot be checked
in your own direct experience right now.
I bring no special knowledge to this meeting.
I don’t have a store of knowledge
which I am disseminating.
I’m just, within the limits of language, trying to describe
the current experience.
Ask yourself, do I know anything other than now
Try to experience the not-now.
Try first to experience the past
It’s easy to experience a thought about the past.
But what about the actual past
to which this thought refers?
Try to experience that
Can you step into the past,
can you go one second into the past?
Or one second into the future?
Thought can go there,
but what about you
Really try to go there, to make sure that this is
not just an interesting philosophical conversation,
but that it is actually your experience
that the past and the future are never experienced
And if the past and the future are never actually experienced,
they are only thought about, and that thought
about the past and the future is always now,
if this past and future are never experienced,
what does that say about time
Time is a movement between a nonexistent past
towards a nonexistent future.
It’s a theory. A necessary and valid theory,
but a theory that doesn’t refer to the reality of our experience.
Nobody has ever or could ever experience time.
When I say "nobody" I mean yourself, awareness,
the only one that knows or is aware
When I arrived off the plane from London
in Washington D.C. last weekend before coming here
the friend who picked me up asked me how the flight was,
and she said, "How long did it take?"
and I experienced thought being cranked up like an old motor,
a little resistant to get going
And for a moment I could feel the cogs of thought almost moving,
trying to work out how much time the flight had taken.
Because in my experience it had been now all the way
I had never left London.
London had left me.
I had never got onto an aeroplane.
A flow of sensations and perceptions that thought abstracts,
and calls a body in an aeroplane,
flowed through me.
And I never arrived in Washington D.C.
Washington D.C. arrived in me.
Or at least the cluster of perceptions
that thought calls Washington D.C.
arrived in me.
In the same way
nobody ever walked into this room
and nobody is sitting on a chair
and nobody is listening to a talk.
A colorful flow of sensations and perceptions appears in awareness,
but awareness never goes anywhere or does anything.
It is always here and now.
Not here a place and now a time. Here, this dimensionless,
now, this timeless presence of our own being.
That is our experience whether we recognise it or not
Now the mind may feel a little rebellious when it hears this.
It may say yes, yes, yes, that’s true, but there is an undeniable
continuity to my experience.
And this undeniable continuity would seem to be evidence of time
Where does this felt sense of continuity come from?
All we know of the mind is the current thought or image.
And thoughts and images are intermittent.
The body is known through sensation.
And all sensations are intermittent.
All we know of the world is perception,
that is sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells;
in fact nobody has ever experienced a world as such,
a world as it is normally conceived to be,
we just know the current perception.
And all perception is intermittent.
So if the so-called mind, body, are intermittent,
from where does this felt sense of continuity come from?
It comes from the only thing, if we can call it a thing,
that is truly continuous, or in fact not continuous but
ever-present now in our experience,
and that is our own being, the presence of awareness.
The presence of awareness is the only thing
that is known to be ever-present.
Now the mind knows nothing of awareness
because the mind only knows apparent objects.
So when the mind looks at experience to find
what it is that accounts for continuity,
it cannot see awareness,
and so it manufactures a substance called "time"
to account for the continuity of experience.
In other words, continuity in time is what eternity looks like
when viewed through the narrow slit of the mind
Permanence in space
is what the infinite, unlimited nature of awareness looks like
when viewed through the narrow slit of the mind.
Continuity and permanence are pale reflections
at the level of the mind
of the true eternal and infinite nature of awareness,
that is, of our self
What else can we say about our self from our actual experience?
Which means right now, what can we know for certain about our self?
Not what thought may tell us about our self,
but what we actually know, in this moment,
derived only from our experience of our self?
Ask yourself, "Can I, this open, empty, knowing presence,
can I be agitated?
Thought can be agitated. Sensations, or the body, can be agitated.
The world can be agitated. But what about you, the one that knows
the apparent mind, body and world?
Can you, this open empty presence, be agitated
See, in your experience right now, that you are —
and this of course is just an image —
are like an open, empty space such as the space of this room.
Nothing that appears within this room
can agitate it.
We are all sitting peacefully now, but if we were to stand up
and start dancing, or fighting,
would the space of this room become agitated?
You are like that.
You, I, the presence of awareness, are undisturbable, imperturbable
We don’t need to become imperturbable
and this undisturbability of ourself
is not dependant upon the condition of the mind.
Right now you, awareness, are utterly imperturbable,
and for this reason another name for our self is "peace".
Peace is not a quality that our self has,
it is what our self is.
Not peace of mind. Minds are more or less agitated.
This "peace that passeth understanding", that is not of the mind,
it doesn’t have to be sought,
it is not hiding the background of experience,
This very awareness that is seeing, hearing, knowing,
is pure peace itself shining in all experience,
however apparently agitated that experience may be
Ask yourself,
"Can I, this presence of awareness, ever lack something?"
Thoughts can say that something is missing; feelings can say that
something is missing, but what about you
Without referring to thought or feeling,
is there the slightest motive in you to avoid the now
and replace it with the not-now
See that in yourself, this presence of awareness,
there is not the slightest impulse or possibility to avoid the now
And what do we call this absolute absence
of resistance to the now?
The absolute absence of resisting what is and seeking what is not?
What is the common name we give to this
It is called happiness.
We all know that when we are happy we are, by definition,
not resisting the now and seeking in the past or the future.
By "happiness", of course, I do not mean
a pleasant state of the mind or the body.
I mean this absolute impossibility of our self ever to resist or seek.
To resist what is and to seek what is not.
So happiness, like peace, is just another name for our self.
It is not a quality that our self has; it is what our self is
What else can we say for certain
based on this current experience about our self
When I was driving here, or being driven here,
the day before yesterday, from the airport in San Francisco,
I was looking in the wing mirror of the passenger’s seat,
and I noticed the words inscribed at the bottom of the wing mirror,
and they said:
"OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK."
A statement of pure nonduality
Objects that appear in the mirror of consciousness
are closer than we think.
How close to a mirror are the objects that appear in it
Are there in fact two things,
one, the objects that appear in the mirror,
and two, the mirror?
Or is it all just mirror
All we know of the apparent mind
is the experience of thinking,
and thinking is just a modulation of your self,
a modulation of knowing or awareness.
All we know of the apparent body
is the experience of sensing,
and sensing is a modulation of your self, awareness.
All we know of the apparent world
is the experience of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.
These are all modulations of knowing,
modulations of our self.
In other words,
we never truly know a mind, or a body, or a world.
These labels are just abstractions that thought superimposes
on the intimacy of our experience.
From the point of view of experience,
which is the only real point of view,
experience is much closer, much more intimate.
So close as to not admit the possibility of two things,
one, myself, awareness,
and two, the object that I know.
Even that is an abstraction.
It may be a useful stepping-stone, a halfway understanding
to conceive of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions
arising in awareness, but nothing arises in awareness.
The only substance of all experience, the only substance
of thinking, sensing, and perceiving, is already awareness
What do we call this absolute absence of two things?
A subject that knows and an object that is known
Take now the experience of hearing.
Go to the sound of the air conditioning.
Forget about the labels "sound" and "air conditioning".
Our only knowledge of the apparent air conditioning
is the experience of hearing.
How close does hearing take place to you?
Five meters away? Ten meters away?
Refer only to your experience,
not to what thought tells you about sound.
Where is hearing
Is it close? Intimate?
And in the experience of hearing,
can you find two parts,
one part that hears,
and another part that is heard?
Or is it just one seamless, intimate substance called my self
And what about this room?
Thought says I, the inside self in here,
sees the room, the outside world, out there.
But what does experience say?
All we know of the apparent room is the experience of seeing.
Remove seeing and the room vanishes.
In other words, we don’t know a room.
We just know the experience of seeing.
Does seeing take place five, ten, fifteen meters away from your self?
Or is seeing utterly intimate
And can you find two parts to the experience of seeing,
one part that sees, and another part that is seen?
Or is it just one seamless, intimate substance
And what is the name, the common name we give to the absolute
intimacy of all experience? It is called love.
Love is the most familiar experience that we all know,
the collapse or dissolution of the sense of a self in here
and an object, other, or world out there.
The collapse of this sense of separateness, distance, otherness,
not-me-ness, is what we call love
Love is just another name for nonduality.
If we call it nonduality, there’s just a few thousand of us in the world
that are interested in it.
But if we call it love, or peace, or happiness,
then all seven billion of us are interested in it
So why is it, if love, peace, happiness are the natural condition
of all experience, the substance out of which all experience is made,
how is it that it seems not to be experienced
It is because of a single thought that rises in awareness,
made only of awareness,
which imagines that awareness shares the limits
of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that appear within it.
It is like imagining that a mirror shares the limits
of the objects that appear in it.
With that thought alone,
the ever-present, unlimited awareness, which is what we are,
seems, seems, to aquire or take on the apparent limits
of the body and the mind,
just as the screen seems to take on the limits of an image
when a film begins.
As a result of this imaginary collapse or contraction of our self,
unlimited, eternal awareness, into a body and a mind,
these qualities of love, peace and happiness are seemingly veiled,
and it is for this reason that the self,
the separate self that thought imagines us to be,
is always by definition on a search
in the imaginary outside world
for the apparently lost love, peace, and happiness
However, this imaginary inside self cannot, by definition,
find the love that it seeks because its very presence,
its apparent presence, is the veiling of that love.
All the separate self seeks is love; in fact, the separate self
is not an entity that searches, it is the activity
of resisting the now and seeking the not-now.
All this seeking ever wants is love,
but love is the dissolution of this seeking,
the dissolution of this imaginary self.
In other words, the separate self that seeks love
is like a moth that seeks a flame.
The flame is all the moth wants,
but it is the only thing it cannot have,
because as the moth touches the flame, it dies.
That is its way of knowing the flame
It becomes the flame as it touches it.
That is the separate self’s way of finding love,
by dying in it.
The death or dissolution of the separate self
is the experience of love
So, simply be knowingly
this open, empty, luminous presence of awareness
whose nature, whose inherent nature, is love, peace, and happiness.
Not a love, peace, and happiness
that is in the background of experience,
that has to be sought,
but that is shining in full view at the heart of all experience.
In fact experience is made out of
this substance called peace or happiness.


: gangaji
So it’s absolutely simple
what I have to say to you.
It’s what my teacher said to me.
And I’m still deeply discovering the reverberation of that.
And it’s simply, "Stop looking for what you want."
Not cynically stop looking for what you want,
because there’s a way of stopping looking for what you want
in resignation and cynicism and closing down.
But innocently, openly, stop looking for what you want,
in this moment, not tomorrow when you have it;
but in this moment, to take one moment,
whatever it is you want, however mundane or profound,
and just stop looking for it.
And you will find more than what you could ever want.
Because more than what can be wanted is already who you are.
Too simple to be grasped,
but absolutely, completely realizable
If, and it is a huge ’if’ of course,
you are willing to give up your hope
that what you want will be found
in the next thought, or the next activity, or the next day,
or the next man, or the next woman,
or the next teaching, or the next experience.
So that’s huge. That’s the challenge
And I’ve blessedly travelled to Australia to challenge you
in that direction. That directionless direction
It’s so simple that it has to be said over and over
because it just slips right by the mind
and if it’s said over and over and in enough ways
and then not said ...
it can just be revealed.
Not as something new, but as something absolutely fresh.
Not new but fresh
Who you are is not new,
but it is always fresh
Who you think you are is old and dead.
We just keep trying to think, think it a little better,
squeeze some life
Is that clear
It is?
Because that’s really the basis of what I have to say
It’s not a teaching.
It’s not a belief system.
It’s not a way to live your life.
It’s not a ’should stop’.
It’s not an "if you stop, you will
be rich and famous and universally loved
and never have a sad moment."
None of that, I promise
If you’re willing to investigate for yourself
without believing it, or learning it, 
or hoping to get something from it,
just a pure investigation
out of the natural curiosity of the human mind,
just to investigate for yourself,
"What is here when I stop trying to get anything?"
"And how much of that is here?
And where does that begin and where does that end?
And then the question, "Am I willing to trust that?"
Then the challenges get very big.
But we’ll get to that later
Any questions about what I just said?
Want me to say it again
You already are everything you want,
only maybe not in the way you imagine what you want.
And it’s that imagination itself
that keeps you from discovering that you already are
everything you want.
So if you just take this evening as an experiment
to give up any imagination, any image of what you need
to be totally fulfilled —
just give it up!
It’s just an image, just a thought.
Maybe a spiritual thought, maybe a worldly thought,
a relationship thought, a career thought, just give it up
And directly discover what’s here unthought, unimagined.
How’s that?
Good. Good.


: cusa_clock
The concept of a clock enfolds all succession in time.
In the concept the sixth hour is not earlier
than the seventh or eighth,
although the clock never strikes the hour,
save when the concept biddeth.
Nicholas of Cusa, 1450


: abbad_wine
The glass is transparent,
the wine transparent —
the two are similar,
the affair confused.
There seems to be wine
and no glass,
or glass
and no wine
Sahib bin Abbad, circa 990



: einstein_cosmic_religious_feeling
I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling
is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
Only those who realize the immense efforts
and, above all, the devotion
without which pioneer work in theoretical science
cannot be achieved
are able to grasp the strength of the emotion
out of which alone such work,
remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue.
What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe
and what a yearning to understand,
were it but a feeble reflection
of the mind revealed in this world,
Kepler and Newton must have had
to enable them to spend years of solitary labor
in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!
Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived
chiefly from its practical results
easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality
of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world,
have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide
through the world and through the centuries.
Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends
can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men
and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose
in spite of countless failures.
It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength.
A contemporary has said, not unjustly,
that in this materialistic age of ours
the serious scientific workers
are the only profoundly religious people.
Albert Einstein, 1930



: augustine_silence
Imagine if all the tumult of the body were to quiet down,
along with all our busy thoughts about earth, sea, and air;
if the very world should stop, and the mind cease thinking about itself,
go beyond itself, and be quite still;
if all the fantasies that appear in dreams and imagination should cease,
and there be no speech, no sign:
Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still –
for if we listen they are saying,
We did not make ourselves; he made us who abides forever –
imagine, then, that they should say this and fall silent,
listening to the very voice of him who made them
and not to that of his creation;
so that we should hear not his word through the tongues of men,
nor the voice of angels,
nor the clouds’ thunder,
nor any symbol,
but the very Self which in these things we love,
and go beyond ourselves to attain a flash
of that eternal wisdom which abides above all things:
And imagine if that moment were to go on and on,
leaving behind all other sights and sounds
but this one vision which ravishes and absorbs
and fixes the beholder in joy;
so that the rest of eternal life
were like that moment of illumination
which leaves us breathless:
Would this not be what is bidden in scripture,
Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?
Augustine of Hippo, circa 400



: tashih_gate
One nature, perfect and pervading,
circulates in all natures;
One reality, all-comprehensive,
contains within itself all realities.
The one Moon reflects itself
wherever there is a sheet of water,
And all the moons in the waters
are embraced within the one Moon.
The Absolute of all the Buddhas
enters into my own being,
And my own being is found
in union with theirs....
The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame;
Like space it knows no boundaries,
Yet it is even here, within us,
ever retaining its serenity and fullness.
It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it;
You cannot take hold of it,
but equally you cannot get rid of it,
And while you can do neither,
it goes on its own way.
You remain silent and it speaks;
you speak, and it is dumb.
The great gate of charity is wide open,
with no obstacles before it.
Yung-chia Ta-shih, circa 700




: ryonen_autumn
Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing
scene of autumn
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no
wind stirs.
Ryonen, 1711



: dhamma_153
Through many births
I have wandered on and on,
Searching for, but never finding,
The builder of this house.



: einstein_library
Your question is the most difficult in the world.
It is not a question I can answer
simply with yes or no.
I am not an Atheist.
I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist.
The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.
May I not reply with a parable?
The human mind, no matter how highly trained,
cannot grasp the universe.
We are in the position of a little child
entering a huge library filled with books
in many languages.
The child knows someone must have written those books.
It does not know how.
It does not understand
the languages in which they are written.
The child dimly suspects a mysterious order
in the arrangement of the books
but doesn’t know what that is.
That, it seems to me,
is the attitude of the most intelligent human
toward God.
Albert Einstein, 1930




: einstein_mystical
The most beautiful experience we can have 
is the mysterious. 
It is the fundamental emotion 
that stands at the cradle 
of true art and true science.
Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, 
no longer marvel,
is as good as dead, 
and his eyes are dimmed. 
It was the experience of mystery — 
even if mixed with fear — 
that engendered religion. 
A knowledge of the existence 
of something we cannot penetrate, 
our perceptions of the profoundest reason 
and the most radiant beauty, 
which only in their most primitive forms 
are accessible to our minds — 
it is this knowledge and this emotion 
that constitute true religiosity; 
in this sense, and in this alone, 
I am a deeply religious man. 
I cannot conceive of a God 
who rewards and punishes his creatures, 
or has a will of the kind 
that we experience in ourselves. 
Neither can I nor would I want to conceive 
of an individual that survives 
his physical death; 
let feeble souls, 
from fear or absurd egoism, 
cherish such thoughts. 
I am satisfied with the mystery 
of the eternity of life 
and with the awareness 
and a glimpse of the marvelous structure 
of the existing world, 
together with the devoted striving 
to comprehend a portion, 
be it ever so tiny, 
of the Reason
that manifests itself in nature.

Albert Einstein, 1931





: jeans_eos_1
Looked at on the astronomical time-scale,
humanity is at the very beginning of its existence —
a new-born babe,
with all the unexplored potentialities of babyhood;
and until the last few moments 
its interest has been centred,
absolutely and exclusively,
on its cradle and feeding-bottle.
It has just become conscious of the vast world
existing outside itself and its cradle;
it is learning to focus its eyes on distant objects,
and its awakening brain is beginning to wonder,
in a vague, dreamy way, what they are
and what purpose they serve.
Its interest in this external world
is not much developed yet,
so that the main part of its faculties
is still engrossed with the cradle and feeding-bottle,
but a little corner of its 
brain is beginning to wonder.       
James Jeans, 1928


: jeans_eos_2
In any case, our three-days-old infant 
cannot be very confident of any interpretation
it puts on a universe which it only 
discovered a minute or two ago.
We have said it has seventy years of life before it, 
but in truth its expectation of life
would seem to be nearer to 70,000 years.
It may be puzzled, distressed, and often irritated
at the apparent meaninglessness 
and incomprehensibility of the world
to which it has suddenly wakened up.
But it is still very young;
it might travel half the world over
before finding another baby
as young and inexperienced as itself. 
It has before it time enough and to spare 
in which it may understand everything.
Sooner or later the pieces of the puzzle 
must begin to fit together,
although it may reasonably be doubted
whether the whole picture can ever be comprehensible 
to one small, and apparently quite 
insignificant, part of the picture.
James Jeans, 1928



: niffari_sea
God bade me behold the sea,
and I saw the ships sinking
and the planks floating;
then the planks too were submerged.
And God said to me,
“Those who voyage are not saved.”
And He said to me, “Those who, instead of voyaging, 
cast themselves into the sea, take a risk.”
And He said to me, 
“Those who voyage and take no risk shall perish.”
And He said to me, 
“In taking the risk there is a part of salvation.”
And the wave came 
and lifted those beneath it 
and overran the shore.
And He said to me,
“The surface of the sea is a gleam that cannot be reached. 
“And the bottom is a darkness impenetrable. And between
the two are great fishes, which are to be feared.”
Niffari, circa 970

What?


: sandwich
God bade me behold the sea,
and I saw the ships sinking
and the planks floating;
then the planks too were submerged.
And God said to me,
“Those who voyage are not saved.”
And He said to me, “Those who, instead of voyaging, 
cast themselves into the sea, take a risk.”
And He said to me, 
“Those who voyage and take no risk shall perish.”
And He said to me, 
“In taking the risk there is a part of salvation.”
And the wave came 
and lifted those beneath it 
and overran the shore.
And He said to me,
“The surface of the sea is a gleam that cannot be reached. 
“And the bottom is a darkness impenetrable. And between
the two are great fishes, which are to be feared.”
Niffari, circa 970

What?
I'm going to the store, do you want a sandwich or something?
You've been standing there for like an hour.
I didn't want to interrupt.
And I don't like sandwiches. Have you ever seen me with a sandwich? 
Why would you think I'd want a sandwich?
Sorry.

I need some sleep.
It's okay, we're all working hard.
I just want to read it right.  
We're going to be hearing this _a lot_ of times. 
Every little thing matters because it gets so multiplied.
It's good. It's already good.
Thanks. Yeah. But we've kind of picked high goal posts. 
Every little bit matters.
Can you get me a coffee?




: arabi_veils
There is nothing in existence but veils hung down. 
Acts of perception attach themselves 
only to veils, 
which leave traces in the owner 
of the eye that perceives them.
ibn Arabi, 1231



: tagore_voyage
I thought my voyage had come to its end
at the last limit of my power — 
that the path before me was closed,
the provisions exhausted,
and the time come to take shelter in silent obscurity.
But I find that thy will knows no end in me
And when words die out on the tongue,
new melodies break forth from the heart;
And where old tracks are lost,
New country is revealed with its wonders.



: tagore_end
Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs.
It was they who led me from door to door,
and with them I have felt about me,
searching and touching my world.
It was my songs that taught me
all the lessons I ever learnt;
they showed me secret paths,
they brought before my sight many a star
on the horizon of my heart.
They guided me all the day long
to the mysteries of the country of pleasure and pain
and, at last,
to what palace gate have they brought me
in the evening at the end of my journey?


: tagore_boast
I boasted among men that I had known you.
They see your pictures in all works of mine.
They come and ask me, "Who is he?"
I know not how to answer them.
I say, "Indeed, I cannot tell."
They blame me and they go away in scorn.
And you sit there smiling.
I put my tales of you into lasting songs.
The secret gushes out from my heart.
They come and ask me, 
"Tell me all your meanings."
I know not how to answer them.
I say, "Ah, who knows what they mean!"
They smile and go away in utter scorn.
And you sit there smiling.
- Rabindranath Tagore, 1910



: endgame
a star at dawn

: bubble_in_stream

a bubble in a stream

: flash_of_lightning
a flash of lightning in a summer cloud

: flickering_lamp

a flickering lamp

: a_phantom

a phantom

: and_a_dream

and a dream.




: hofstadter_activation
Our hangnails are incredibly real to us;
whereas to most of us, the English village of Nether Wallop 
and the high Himalayan country of Bhutan, 
not to mention the slowly swirling spiral galaxy in Andromeda, 
are considerably less real, 
even though our intellectual selves might wish to insist 
that since the latter are much bigger and longer-lasting 
than our hangnails, 
they ought therefore to be far realer to us 
than our hangnails are.
We can say this to ourselves till we’re blue in the face, 
but few of us act as if we really believed it.  
A slight slippage of subterranean stone 
that obliterates 20,000 people in some far-off land, 
the ceaseless plundering of virgin jungles in the Amazon basin, 
a swarm of helpless stars being swallowed up 
one after another by a ravenous black hole, 
even an ongoing collision between two huge galaxies 
each of which contains a hundred billion stars —
such colossal events are so abstract to someone like me 
that they can’t even touch the sense of urgency and importance, 
and thus the reality, of some measly little hangnail 
on my left hand’s pinky.
We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the
end, is ourself.  
The realest things of all are 
my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, 
my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy,
my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth.
What all these things have in common, what binds them together, 
is the concept of "my", 
which comes out of the concept of "I" or "me", 
and therefore, 
although it is less concrete than a nose or even a toothache, 
this "I" thing is what ultimately seems to each of us 
to constitute the most solid rock of undeniability of all.  
Could it possibly be an illusion?  
Or if not a total illusion, could it possibly be less real 
and less solid than we think it is?  
Could an "I" be more like an elusive, receding, 
shimmering rainbow 
than like a tangible, heftable, transportable pot of gold?
Douglas Hofstadter, 2007



: heisenberg_on_pauli
The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once spoke
of two limiting conceptions, 
both of which have been extraordinarily fruitful 
in the history of human thought, 
although no genuine reality corresponds to them. 
At one extreme is the idea of an objective world, 
pursuing its regular course in space and time, 
independently of any kind of observing subject;
this has been the guiding image of modern science.  
At the other extreme is the idea of a subject, 
mystically experiencing the unity of the world 
and no longer confronted by an object 
or by any objective world; 
this has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism.  
Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle, 
between these two limiting conceptions; 
we should maintain the tension resulting 
from these two opposites.
Werner Heisenberg, 1974



: zen_points_beyond_language
In a sense, what modern physics is to the history of Western thought,
Zen is to the development of the Eastern worldview: 
the ultimate refinement of more than two thousand years 
of incisive debate, discussion, and critical development. 
Yet the difference between the two could hardly be more marked. 
Whereas physics is interested above all 
in theories, concepts, and formulas, 
Zen values only the concrete and the simple. 
Zen wants facts — not in the Western sense of things 
that are measurable and numerical (which are, in fact, abstractions!) 
but as living, immediate, and tangible. 
Its approach to understanding is not to theorize 
because it recognizes that previously accumulated ideas and knowledge — 
in other words, memories of all kinds — 
block the direct perception of reality. 
Therefore, Zen adopts an unusual approach. 
Its buildup involves language — which is unavoidable. 
Any method, even if it turns out to be an antimethod, 
has first to convey some background in order to be effective. 
But the way Zen uses language is always to point 
beyond language, beyond concepts to the concrete.
David Darling, 1996




: zen_physics_intellectual_catastrophe 
Two major schools of Zen exist in Japan: 
the Rinzai and the Soto. 
Both have the same goal, of seeing the world unmediated, 
but their approaches are different. 
In the Soto school, the emphasis is on quiet contemplation 
in a seated position without a particular focus for thought. 
The method in the Rinzai school, however, 
is to put the intellect to work on problems 
that have no logical resolution. 
Such problems are known as koans, 
from the Chinese kung-an meaning “public announcement.”
Some are mere questions, for example:
“When your mind is not dwelling 
on the dualism of good and evil, 
what is your original face before you were born?”
Others are set in a question-and-answer form, like:
“What is the Buddha?” 
Answer: “Three pounds of flax” 
or “The cypress tree in the courtyard” 
(to name but two of the classic responses). 
According to tradition 
there are seventeen hundred such conundrums 
in the Zen repertoire. 
And their common aim is 
to induce a kind of intellectual catastrophe, 
a sudden jump 
which lifts the individual out of the domain of words and reason 
into a direct, nonmediated experience known as satori.
Zen differs from other meditative forms, 
including other schools of Buddhism, 
in that it does not start from where we are 
and gradually lead us to a clear view 
of the true way of the world. 
It is not a progressive system in this respect. 
The sole purpose of studying Zen is to have Zen experiences —
sudden moments, like flashes of lightning, 
when the intellect is short-circuited 
and there is no longer a barrier 
between the experiencer and reality. 
David Darling, 1996



: feynman_wine
A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." 
We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, 
for poets do not write to be understood. 
But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine 
closely enough we see the entire universe. 
There are the things of physics: 
the twisting liquid which evaporates 
depending on the wind and weather, 
the reflections in the glass, 
and our imagination adds the atoms. 
The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, 
and in its composition we see the secrets of the
universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. 
What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? 
How did they come to be? 
There are the ferments, the enzymes, 
the substrates, and the products. 
There in wine is found the great generalization: 
all life is fermentation.
Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, 
as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. 
How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence 
into the consciousness that watches it! 
If our small minds, for some convenience, 
divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts —
physics, biology, geology, astronomy, 
psychology, and so on — 
remember that nature does not know it! 
So let us put it all back together, 
not forgetting ultimately what it is for. 
Let it give us one more final pleasure:
drink it and forget it all!
Richard Feynman, 1963



: feynman_uncertainty_of_science
If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction,
if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, 
we would not get any new ideas.  
There would be nothing worth checking, 
because we would know what is true.  
So what we call scientific knowledge today
is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty.  
Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; 
but none is absolutely certain.  Scientists are used to this.  
We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know.  
Some people say,
“How can you _live_ without knowing?” I do not know what they mean.
I always live without knowing.  That is easy.  
How you get to know is what I want to know.
This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences 
and, I believe, in other fields.  
It was born of a struggle.  
It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure.
And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle 
and, by default, to let the thing fall away.  
I feel a responsibility as a scientist 
who knows the great value 
of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, 
and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, 
progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought.  
I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom 
and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, 
but that it is to be welcomed 
as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.
If you know that you are not sure, 
you have a chance to improve the situation.  
I want to demand this freedom for future generations.
Richard Feynman, 1963



: feynman_atoms_with_curiosity
It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, 
to contemplate what it would be like without man, 
as it was in a great part of its long history 
and as it is in a great majority of places.
When this objective view is finally attained, 
and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, 
to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, 
to view life as part of this universal mystery 
of the greatest depth, 
is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting.  
It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility 
of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, 
this thing — atoms with curiosity — 
that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders.
Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, 
lost at the edge in uncertainty, 
but they appear to be so deep and so impressive 
that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch
man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
Some will tell me 
that I have just described a religious experience. 
Very well, you may call it what you will. 
Then, in that language I would say 
that the young man’s religious experience is of such a kind 
that he finds the religion of his church inadequate to describe, 
to encompass that kind of experience. 
The God of the church isn’t big enough.
Richard Feynman, 1963



: einstein_searchers
Of all the communities available to us, 
there is not one I would want to devote myself to, 
except for the society of true searchers 
which has very few living members at any time.
Albert Einstein, 1924



: cezanne_motif
“You see, a motif is this...”
(He put his hands together, drew them apart, the ten fingers open, 
then slowly, very slowly brought them together again, clasped them, 
squeezed them tightly, meshing them.)
“That’s what one should try to achieve. 
If one hand is held too high or too low, it won’t work. 
Not a single link should be too slack, leaving a hole through which the emotion, 
the light, the truth can escape. 
You must understand that I work on the whole canvas, 
on everything at once. 
With one impulse, with undivided faith, 
I approach all the scattered bits and pieces. 
Everything we see falls apart, vanishes, doesn’t it? 
Nature is always the same, but nothing in her that appears to us, lasts. 
Our art must render the thrill of her permanence 
along with her elements, 
the appearance of all her changes. 
It must give us a taste of her eternity. 
What is there underneath? Maybe nothing. 
Maybe everything. 
Everything, you understand! 
So I bring together her wandering hands. 
I take something at right, something at left, 
here, there, everywhere, 
her tones, her colors, her nuances, 
I set them down, I bring them together. 
They form lines. They become objects, 
rocks, trees, without my planning. 
They take on volume, value. 
If these volumes, these values, correspond on my canvas, 
in my sensibility, to the planes,
to the spots ... which are there before our eyes,
then my canvas has brought its hands together. 
It does not waver. 
The hands have been joined neither too high nor too low. 
My canvas is true, compact, full. 
But if there is the slightest distraction, 
if I fail just a little bit, above all if I interpret too much one day, 
if today I am carried away by a theory 
which runs counter to that of yesterday, 
if I think while I paint, if I meddle, 
whoosh! everything goes to pieces.
Paul Cezanne as related by Joachim Gasquet, 1921



: eddington_entering_a_room 
I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. 
It is a complicated business. 
In the first place, I must shove against an atmosphere 
pressing with a force of fourteen pounds 
on every square inch of my body. 
I must make sure of landing on a plank 
travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — 
a fraction of a second too early or too late, 
the plank would be miles away. 
I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet 
head outward into space, 
and with a wind of aether blowing 
at no one knows how many miles a second
through every interstice of my body. 
The plank has no solidity of substance. 
To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. 
Shall I not slip through? 
No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me 
and gives a boost up again; 
I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; 
and so on. 
I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady, 
but if, unfortunately, I should slip through the floor 
or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, 
the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, 
but a rare coincidence. These are some of the minor difficulties. 
I ought really to look at the problem four-dimensionally 
as concerning the intersection of my world-line 
with that of the plank. 
Then again, it is necessary to determine 
in which direction the entropy of the world is increasing 
in order to make sure that my passage over the threshold 
is an entrance, not an exit.
Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for a scientific man to pass through a door. 
And whether the door be barn door or church door 
it might be wiser 
that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in 
rather than wait till all the difficulties involved 
in a really scientific ingress 
are resolved.
Arthur Eddington, 1927



: eddington_eyes
As scientists, we realise that colour is merely a question 
of the wavelengths of aethereal vibrations, 
but that does not seem to have dispelled the feeling 
that eyes which reflect light near wavelength 4800 
are a subject for rhapsody 
whilst those which reflect wavelength 5300 
are left unsung. 
We have not yet reached the practice of the Laputans, who, 
“if they would, for example, praise the beauty of a
woman, or any other animal,
“they describe it by rhombs, circles,
parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms.” 
The materialist who is convinced that all phenomena 
arise from electrons and quanta and the like 
controlled by mathematical formulae, 
must presumably hold the belief 
that his wife is a rather elaborate differential equation, 
but he is probably tactful enough 
not to obtrude this opinion in domestic life. 
If this kind of scientific dissection 
is felt to be inadequate and irrelevant
in ordinary personal relationships, 
it is surely out of place 
in the most personal relationship of all — 
that of the human soul to a divine spirit.
Arthur Eddington, 1927




: eddington_humor
We have two kinds of knowledge which I call symbolic and intimate.
I do not know whether it would be correct to say 
that reasoning is only applicable to symbolic knowledge, 
but the more customary forms of reasoning 
have been developed for symbolic knowledge only. 
The intimate knowledge will not submit to codification and analysis, 
or, rather, when we attempt to analyse it 
the intimacy is lost and replaced by symbolism.
For an illustration let us consider Humour. 
I suppose that humour can be analysed to some extent 
and the essential ingredients 
of the different kinds of wit classified. 
Suppose that we are offered an alleged joke. 
We subject it to scientific analysis 
as we would a chemical salt of doubtful nature, 
and perhaps after careful consideration 
we are able to confirm 
that it really and truly is a joke. 
Logically, I suppose, our next procedure would be to laugh. 
But it may certainly be predicted 
that as the result of this scrutiny 
we shall have lost all inclination we ever had 
to laugh at it. 
It simply does not do to expose the workings of a joke. 
The classification concerns a symbolic knowledge of humour 
which preserves all the characteristics of a joke 
except its laughableness. 
The real appreciation must come spontaneously, 
not introspectively.
I think this is a not unfair analogy 
for our mystical feeling for Nature, 
and I would venture even to apply it 
to our mystical experience of God. 
There are some to whom the sense 
of a divine presence irradiating the soul 
is one of the most obvious things of experience. 
In their view, a man without this sense 
is to be regarded
as we regard a man without a sense of humour. 
The absence is a kind of mental deficiency. 
We may try to analyse the experience as we analyse humour, 
and construct a theology, 
or it may be an atheistic philosophy...
But let us not forget that the theology is symbolic knowledge, 
whereas the experience is intimate knowledge.
And as laughter cannot be compelled 
by the scientific exposition of the structure of a joke, 
so a philosophic discussion of the attributes of God 
(or an impersonal substitute) 
is likely to miss the intimate response of the spirit 
which is the central point of the religious experience.
Arthur Eddington, 1927


: eddington_generation_of_waves
One day I happened to be occupied with the subject of 
“Generation of Waves by Wind.”
I took down the standard treatise on hydrodynamics,
and under that heading I read —
If the external forces p’ yy, p’ xy be given
multiples of e ** (ikx + at), where k and a are prescribed,
the equations in question determine A and C, 
and thence, by (9) the value of eta....

And so on for two pages. At the end, it is made clear 
that a wind of less than half a mile an hour 
will leave the surface unruffled.
At a mile an hour the surface is covered 
with minute corrugations due to capillary waves 
which decay immediately if the disturbing cause ceases. 
At two miles an hour the gravity waves appear. 
As the author modestly concludes, 
“Our theoretical investigations give considerable
insight into the incipient stages of wave-formation.”
On another occasion the same subject 
of “Generation of Waves by Wind” 
was in my mind; 
but this time another book was more appropriate, 
and I read —
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter 
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance 
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, 
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
The magic words bring back the scene. 
Again we feel Nature drawing close to us, 
uniting with us, 
til we are filled with the gladness of the waves 
dancing in the sunshine, 
with the awe of the moonlight on the frozen lake. 
These were not moments when we fell below ourselves. 
We do not look back on them and say, 
“It was disgraceful for a man with six sober senses 
and a scientific understanding 
to let himself be deluded in that way. 
“I will take Lamb’s Hydrodynamics with me next time.” 
It is good that there should be such moments for us. 
Life would be stunted and narrow 
if we could feel no significance in the world around us 
beyond that which can be weighed and measured
with the tools of the physicist 
or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.
Of course, it was an illusion. 
We can easily expose the rather clumsy trick 
that was played on us. 
Aethereal vibrations of various wavelengths, 
reflected at different angles 
from the disturbed interface between air and water, 
reached our eyes, and by photoelectric action 
caused appropriate stimuli to travel along the optic nerves 
to a brain-centre. 
Here the mind set to work 
to weave an impression out of the stimuli. 
The incoming material was somewhat meagre, 
but the mind is a great storehouse of associations 
that could be used to clothe the skeleton. 
Having woven an impression, the mind 
surveyed all that it had made 
and decided that it was very good. 
The critical faculty was lulled. 
We ceased to analyse and were conscious 
only of the impression as a whole. 
The warmth of the air, the scent of the grass, 
the gentle stir of the breeze, 
combined with the visual scene 
in one transcendent impression, 
around us and within us. 
Associations emerging from their storehouse grew bolder. 
Perhaps we recalled the phrase “rippling laughter.” 
Waves—ripples—laughter—gladness—the ideas jostled one another. 
Quite illogically, we were glad, 
though what there can possibly be to be glad about 
in a set of aethereal vibrations 
no sensible person can explain. 
A mood of quiet joy suffused the whole impression. 
The gladness in ourselves was in Nature, 
in the waves, everywhere. 
That’s how it was.
It was an illusion. Then why toy with it longer? 
These airy fancies which the mind, 
when we do not keep it severely in order, 
projects into the external world 
should be of no concern to the earnest seeker after truth. 
Get back to the solid substance of things, 
to the material of the water moving 
under the pressure of the wind 
and the force of gravitation 
in obedience to the laws of hydrodynamics. 
But the solid substance of things is another illusion. 
It too is a fancy projected by the mind 
into the external world. 
We have chased the solid substance 
from the continuous liquid to the atom, 
from the atom to the electron, 
and there we have lost it. 
But at least, it will be said, 
we have reached something real at the end of the chase — 
the protons and electrons. 
Or, if the new quantum theory condemns these images 
as too concrete and leaves us with no coherent images at all,
at least we have symbolic coordinates and momenta and Hamiltonian
functions devoting themselves with single-minded purpose to ensuring
that qp-pq shall be equal to ih/2π.
I have tried to show that by following this course 
we reach a cyclic scheme which, from its very nature, 
can only be a partial expression of our environment. 
It is not reality but the skeleton of reality. 
“Actuality” has been lost in the exigencies of the chase. 
Having first rejected the mind as a worker of illusion 
we have in the end to return to the mind and say, 
“Here are worlds well and truly built 
on a basis more secure than your fanciful illusions. 
But there is nothing to make any one of them an actual world. 
“Please choose one and weave your fanciful images into it. 
That alone can make it actual.” 
We have torn away the mental fancies 
to get at the reality beneath, 
only to find that the reality of that which is beneath 
is bound up with its potentiality of awakening these fancies. 
It is because the mind, the weaver of illusion, 
is also the only guarantor of reality 
that reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion. 
Illusion is to reality as the smoke to the fire. 
I will not urge that hoary untruth “There is no smoke without fire”. 
But it is reasonable to inquire whether, 
in the mystical illusions of man, 
there is not a reflection of an underlying reality.
Arthur Eddington, 1927




: schweickart_eva
Up there you go around every hour and a half, 
time after time after time.  
You wake up usually in the mornings.  
And just the way that the track of your orbits go, 
you wake up over the Mid-East, over North Africa.
As you eat breakfast you look out the window as you’re going past
and there’s the Mediterranean area, 
and Greece, and Rome, and North Africa, 
and the Sinai, the whole area.  
And you realize that in one glance that
what you’re seeing is what was the whole history of man for years —
the cradle of civilization....
And you go around down across North Africa 
and out over the Indian Ocean, 
and look up at that great subcontinent of India 
pointed down toward you as you go past it.  
And Ceylon off to the side, Burma, Southeast Asia, 
out over the Philippines, 
and up across that monstrous Pacific Ocean, 
vast body of water — 
you’ve never realized how big that is before.
And you finally come up across the coast of California 
and look for those friendly things:   
Los Angeles, and Phoenix, and on across El Paso 
and there’s Houston, there’s home, 
and you look and sure enough there’s the Astrodome. 
And you identify with that, you know — 
it’s an attachment.
And down across New Orleans and then looking down to the south 
and there’s the whole peninsula of Florida laid out.  
And all the hundreds of hours 
you spent flying across that route, 
down in the atmosphere, 
all that is friendly again.  
And you go out across the Atlantic Ocean and back across Africa.
And you do it again and again and again.
And that identity - that you identify with Houston, 
and then you identify with Los Angeles, 
and Phoenix and New Orleans and everything.  
And the next thing you recognize in yourself, 
is you’re identifying with North Africa.  
You look forward to that, you anticipate it.  
And there it is. 
That whole process begins to shift 
of what it is you identify with. 
When you go around it in an hour and a half 
you begin to recognize 
that your identity is with that whole thing.  
And that makes a change.
You look down there and you can’t imagine 
how many borders and boundaries you crossed 
again and again and again. 
And you don’t even see ’em. 
At that wake-up scene — the Mid-East — 
you know there are hundreds of people killing each other 
over some imaginary line that you can’t see.  
From where you see it, the thing is a whole, 
and it’s so beautiful.  
And you wish you could take one from each side in hand 
and say, 
“Look at it from this perspective. 
Look at that. What’s important?”
And so a little later on, your friend, those same neighbors,
another astronaut, the person next to you goes out to the Moon.  
And now he looks back and sees the Earth not as something big, 
where he can see the beautiful details, 
but he sees the Earth as a small thing out there.  
And now that contrast between 
that bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament 
and that black sky, that infinite universe, 
really comes through.
The size of it, the significance of it — 
it becomes both things, 
it becomes so small and so fragile, 
and such a precious little spot in that universe, 
that you can block it out with your thumb, 
and you realize that on that small spot, 
that little blue and white thing  
is everything that means anything to you. 
All of history and music and poetry and art 
and war and death and birth and love, tears, joy, 
games, 
all of it is on that little spot out there 
that you can cover with your thumb.
And you realize that that perspective ... 
that you’ve changed, that there’s something new there. 
That relationship is no longer what it was. 
And then you look back on the time 
when you were outside on that EVA 
and those few moments that you had the time 
because the camera malfunctioned, 
that you had the time to think about what was happening.  
And you recall staring out there at the spectacle 
that went before your eyes. Because now 
you’re no longer inside something 
with a window looking out at a picture, 
but now you’re out there 
and what you’ve got around your head 
is a goldfish bowl and there are no limits here. 
There are no frames, there are no boundaries. 
You’re really out there, over it, floating, 
going 25,000 mph, ripping through space, 
a vacuum, and there’s not a sound. 
There’s a silence 
the depth of which you’ve never experienced before, 
and that silence contrasts so markedly with the scenery, 
and the speed with which you know you’re going. 
That contrast, the mix of those two things, 
really comes through.
And you think about what you’re experiencing and why.  
Do you deserve this? This fantastic experience? 
Have you earned this in some way? 
Are you separated out to be touched by God 
to have some special experience here 
that other men cannot have? 
You know the answer to that is No. 
There’s nothing that you’ve done that deserves that, 
that earned that. 
It’s not a special thing for you. 
You know very well at that moment,
and it comes through to you so powerfully, 
that you’re the sensing element for man.
You look down and see the surface of that globe 
that you’ve lived on all this time 
and you know all those people down there. 
They are like you, they are you, 
and somehow you represent them when you are up there —
a sensing element, that point out on the end, 
and that’s a humbling feeling. 
It’s a feeling that says you have a responsibility. 
It’s not for yourself.
The eye that doesn’t see does not do justice to the body. 
That’s why it’s there, that’s why you’re out there. 
And somehow you recognize that you’re a piece of this total life. 
You’re out on that forefront 
and you have to bring that back, somehow. 
And that becomes a rather special responsibility.   
It tells you something about your relationship 
with this thing we call life....
And when you come back, there’s a difference in that world now, 
there’s a difference in that relationship 
between you and that planet, 
and you and all those other forms of life on that planet, 
because you’ve had that kind of experience.  
It’s a difference,
and it’s so precious. 
And all through this I’ve used the word “you” 
because it’s not me, it’s not Dave Scott, 
it’s not Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad, John Glenn, 
it’s you, it’s us, it’s we, it’s life.  
It’s had that experience. 
And it’s not just my problem to integrate, 
it’s not my challenge to integrate, my joy to integrate — 
it’s yours, it’s everybody’s.
Russell Schweickart, 1975.




: skinner_autonomy
In the traditional view a person is free. 
He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused... 
That view, together with its associated practices, 
must be re-examined when a scientific analysis 
reveals unexpected controlling relations 
between behaviour and environment....
By questioning the control exercised by autonomous man 
and demonstrating the control exercised by the environment, 
a science of behavior also seems to question dignity or worth.  
A person is responsible for his behavior, 
not only in the sense that he may be 
justly blamed or punished when he behaves badly, 
but also in the sense that he is to be given credit 
and admired for his achievements.  
A scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame 
to the environment, 
and traditional practices can then no longer be justified.  
These are sweeping changes, 
and those who are committed to traditional theories and practices 
naturally resist them....
As the emphasis shifts to the environment, 
the individual seems to be exposed 
to a new kind of danger.  
Who is to construct the controlling environment 
and to what end?  
Autonomous man presumably controls himself 
in accordance with a built-in set of values; 
he works for what he finds good.  
But what will the putative controller find good, 
and will it be good for those he controls?
Answers to questions of this sort are said, of course, 
to call for value judgements.
B.F. Skinner, 1971




: skinner_reciprocal
The relation between the controller and the controlled 
is reciprocal. 
The scientist in the laboratory, 
studying the behavior of a pigeon, 
designs contingencies and observes their effects. 
His apparatus exerts a conspicuous control on the pigeon, 
but we must not overlook the control exerted by the pigeon. 
The behavior of the pigeon 
has determined the design of the apparatus 
and the procedures in which it is used. 
Some such reciprocal control is characteristic of all science. 
As Francis Bacon put it, 
nature to be commanded must be obeyed.  
The scientist who designs a cyclotron 
is under the control of the particles he is studying.  
The behavior with which a parent controls his child, 
either aversively or through positive reinforcement, 
is shaped and maintained by the child's responses. 
A psychotherapist changes the behavior of his patient 
in ways which have been shaped and maintained 
by his success in changing that behavior. 
A government or religion prescribes and imposes sanctions
selected by their effectiveness 
in controlling citizen or communicant. 
An employer induces his employees 
to work industriously and carefully 
with wage systems 
determined by their effects on behavior. 
The classroom practices of the teacher 
are shaped and maintained 
by the effects on his students. 
In a very real sense, then, 
the slave controls the slave driver, 
the child the parent, 
the patient the therapist, the citizen the government, 
the communicant the priest, the employee the employer, 
and the student the teacher.
B.F. Skinner, 1971



: gangaji_silence
When we choose silence, 
we choose to give up the reasons not to love, 
which are the reasons for going to war, or continuing war, 
or separating, or being a victim, or being right. 
In a moment of silence, 
in a moment of no thought, no mind, 
we choose to give those up. 
This is what my teacher invited me to.

Just choose silence. Don't even choose love. 
Choose silence, and love is apparent. 
If we choose love we already have an idea 
of what love is.

But if you choose silence, that is the end of ideas. 
You are willing to have no idea, 
to see what is present when there is no idea, 
past, present, future. 
No idea of love, no idea of truth, no idea of you,
no idea of me. Love is apparent.
Gangaji, 2009



: kingsmill
What is divine in man is elusive and impalpable, 
and he is easily tempted to embody it in a concrete form – 
a church, a country, a social system, a leader – 
so that he may realize it with less effort 
and serve it with more profit. 
Yet the attempt to externalize the kingdom of heaven 
in a temporal shape must end in disaster. 
It cannot be created by charters or constitutions 
nor established by arms. 
Those who seek for it alone will reach it together, 
and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.
Hugh Kingsmill, 1944





: denck_nobody_finds
O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world
that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee,
that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee,
that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee,
that Thou givest Thyself to everybody 
and nobody knows Thy name?
Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee;
they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee;
they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee.
Hans Denck, circa 1520


: chuang_tzu_boat
Suppose a boat is crossing a river, 
and another empty boat is about to collide with it. 
Even an irritable man would not lose his temper. 
But supposing there was some one in the second boat.
Then the occupant of the first 
would shout to him to keep clear.
And if the other did not hear the first time, 
nor even when called three times, 
bad language would inevitably follow. 
In the first case there was no anger, 
in the second there was; 
because in the first case the boat was empty, 
and in the second it was occupied. 
And so it is with man. 
If he could only roam empty through life,
who would be able to injure him?
Zhuangzi, 4th century B.C.



: mitchell_ttc_11
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
Lao Tzu, 6th century BC



: wordsworth_peak
                    Lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep, till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature, the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars. . . .
                     But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion.
William Wordsworth, 1888




: clifford_shipowner
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. 
He knew that she was old, 
and not well built at the first; 
that she had seen many seas and climes, 
and often had needed repairs. 
Doubts had been suggested to him 
that possibly she was not seaworthy. 
These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; 
he thought that perhaps he ought to have her 
thoroughly overhauled and refitted, 
even though this should put him at great expense. 
Before the ship sailed, however, 
he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections.
He said to himself that she had gone safely 
through so many voyages and weathered so many storms 
that it was idle to suppose 
she would not come safely home from this trip also. 
He would put his trust in Providence, 
which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families 
that were leaving their fatherland 
to seek for better times elsewhere. 
He would dismiss from his mind 
all ungenerous suspicions 
about the honesty of builders and contractors. 
In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction 
that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; 
he watched her departure with a light heart, 
and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles 
in their strange new home that was to be; 
and he got his insurance-money when she went down in
mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? 
Surely this, that he was verily guilty 
of the death of those families. 
It is admitted that he did sincerely believe 
in the soundness of his ship; 
but the sincerity of his conviction 
can in no wise help him, 
_because he had no right to believe
on such evidence as was before him_.
He had acquired his belief
not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, 
but by stifling his doubts. 
And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it 
that he could not think otherwise, 
yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly 
worked himself into that frame of mind, 
he must be held responsible for it.
William K. Clifford, 1874


: clifford_busy
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood 
or persuaded of afterwards, 
keeps down and pushes away any doubts 
which arise about it in his mind, 
purposely avoids the reading of books 
and the company of men 
that call into question or discuss it, 
and regards as impious 
those questions which cannot easily be asked 
without disturbing it — 
the life of that man is one long sin against
mankind....
“But,” says one, “I am a busy man; 
“I have no time for the long course of study 
which would be necessary to make me in any degree 
a competent judge of certain questions, 
“or even able to understand the nature of
the arguments.”
Then he should have no time to believe.
William K. Clifford, 1874


: brooke_the_dead
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a whit
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night
Rupert Brooke, 1914


: cusa_impossible
Therefore, I thank you, my God,
because you make clear to me
that there is no other way of approaching you
except that which to all humans,
even to the most learned philosophers,
seems wholly inaccessible and impossible.
For you have shown me that you cannot be seen
elsewhere than where impossibility confronts and obstructs me.
O Lord, you, who are the food of the mature,
have given me courage to do violence to myself,
for impossibility coincides with necessity,
and I have discovered that the place where you are found unveiled
is girded about with the coincidence of contradictories.
This is the wall of paradise,
and it is there in paradise that you reside.
The wall's gate is guarded by the highest spirit of reason,
and unless it is overpowered, the way in will not lie open.
Thus, it is on the other side
of the coincidence of contradictories
that you will be able to be seen
and nowhere on this side.
If, therefore,
impossibility is necessity in your sight, O Lord,
there is nothing which your sight does not see.
- Nicholas of Cusa, 1453


: cusa_invisible
Formerly you appeared to me, O Lord,
as invisible by every creature
because you are a hidden, infinite God.
Infinity, however, is incomprehensible
by every means of comprehending.
Later you appeared to me as visible by all,
for a thing exists only as you see it,
and it would not actually exist unless it saw you.
For your vision confers being,
since your vision is your essence.
Thus, my God, you are equally invisible and visible.
As you are, you are invisible;
as the creature is,
which exists only insofar as the creature sees you,
you are visible.
You, therefore, my invisible God, are seen by all,
and in all sight you are seen by everyone who sees.
You who are invisible,
who are both absolute from everything visible
and infinitely superexalted,
are seen in every visible thing
and in every act of vision.
Therefore, I must leap across this wall of invisible vision
to where you are to be found.
But this wall is both everything and nothing.
For you, who confront
as if you were both all things and nothing at all,
dwell inside that high wall
which no natural ability can scale by its own power.
- Nicholas of Cusa, 1453


: cusa_name
O Lord God, helper of those who seek you,
I see you in the garden of paradise,
and I do not know what I see,
because I see nothing visible.
I know this alone
that I know that I do not know what I see
and that I can never know.
I do not know how to name you,
because I do not know what you are.
Should anyone tell me
that you are named by this or that name,
by the fact that one gives a name
I know that it is not your name.
For the wall beyond which I see you
is the limit of every mode of signification by names.
Should anyone express any concept
by which you could be conceived,
I know that this concept is not a concept of you,
for every concept finds its boundary
at the wall of paradise.
Should anyone express any likeness
and say that you ought to be conceived according to it,
I know in the same way that this is not a likeness of you.
So too if anyone, wishing to furnish the means
by which you might be understood,
should set forth an understanding of you,
one is still far removed from you.
For the highest wall separates you from all these
and secludes you from everything that can be said or thought,
because you are absolute from all the things
that can fall within any concept.
- Nicholas of Cusa, 1453



: dirac
I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. 
If we are honest — and scientists have to be — 
we must admit that religion is a jumble
of false assertions, with no basis in reality. 
The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. 
It is quite understandable why primitive people, 
who were so much more exposed to the overpowering
forces of nature than we are today, 
should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. 
But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, 
we have no need for such solutions. 
I can't for the life of me 
see how the postulate of an Almighty God 
helps us in any way. 
What I do see is that this assumption 
leads to such unproductive questions 
as why God allows so much misery and injustice, 
the exploitation of the poor by the rich 
and all the other horrors He might have prevented. 
If religion is still being taught, 
it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, 
but simply because some of us 
want to keep the lower classes quiet. 
Quiet people are much easier to govern 
than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. 
They are also much easier to exploit. 
Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation 
to lull itself into wishful dreams 
and so forget the injustices that are
being perpetrated against the people.
Paul Dirac, 1927
as related by Werner Heisenberg
So you see what I'm saying here.
Yep. This one doesn't fit either.
How would you characterise the way in which it doesn't fit?
It's ... about arguing, and it's about being greatly disturbed
by issues that are relatively small. 
It's not aiming high,
it's not about ultimate truth, not really.
It's mostly about what some stupid people are doing
that is wrong, compared to what I am doing that is right.
But Paul Dirac was definitely a truth-seeker ... 
in the domain of physics at least.
Yeah but I don't feel that attitude in this piece at all.
If a belief is just formed in opposition to other beliefs,
... it can't be fundamental? It can't be that deep.
But you know, where he says the thing about natural processes, 
he starts to outline an actual philosophy.
Hmm, interesting. There's something that could stand on its own,
that isn't just rejection and opposition.
But then he drops it.
Well, this isn't the atheist manifesto we need.
I'll keep looking.
You know, at one point Dirac also wrote this:
"One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that 
God is a mathematician of a very high order,
and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe."
I think he meant God in an Einstein kind of way.
He said that? Same guy?
Same guy. Later in life though. 
People are strange. Scientists are stranger.
Yes they are.


: dreams
Then the occupant of the first 
would shout to keep him clear.
And if the other did not hear the first time, 
nor even when called three times, 
bad language would inevitably follow. 
In the first case there was no anger, 
and in the second there was; 
because in the first case the boat was empty, 
and in the second it was occupied. 
And so it is with man. 
If he could only roam empty through life,
who would be able to injure him?
Zhuangzi, 4th century B.C
So how'd it go?
I don't know
I don't remember.
What?
Oh, it's not — it's normal for me. 
I never remember my dreams.
If I try right when I wake up, I can just barely remember
fragments. Later in the day, even 20 minutes later, 
those fragments are gone. Unless I wrote them down — 
then if I read them later, it's like, 
_these are the ramblings of a crazy person_.
Yeah, but, then, how do we know there aren't side effects, 
I mean, do you remember everything else? About your life?
It's fine! We're just doing suppression, not —
lobotomies. Everything's still there. 
In dreams we often take on personalities 
that are a little different; 
we forget details of our waking life 
and 'remember' fictions in their place. 
How does that happen? 
Well ... we're just using the same pathways. It's fine.
But really, how should I know if something's missing? 
If you forget a few random little things, 
how would you remember that you forgot?
Nothing big is missing. I don't think.
Wait. Who are you, again?
Oh God, why did we let you go first.
First hasn't happened yet! 
I was just dipping my toes into the pool. 
_Real_ first happens when someone dives right in 
and gets to decide for themselves when to come out. 
Who's _that_ going to be?  You?
Ugh. I long for the days when we weren't so sure 
we'd be doing anything this scary.
It'll be fine! It's not scary. It'll be fun.
So fun you don't even remember.
Okay now. Shoo. I want to re-record this one before I go home.
I have some new ideas about it.
What, because of the test?
Yes, because of the test. Possibly.
I thought you didn't remember anything
Hmm. Interesting.
Yeah. Have a good night. I'll see you tomorrow.



: mine
The concept of a clock enfolds all succession in time.
In the concept the sixth hour is not earlier
than the seventh or eighth,
although the clock never strikes the hour,
save when the concept biddeth.
Nicholas of Cusa, 145
That's mine, you know.
Yeah. Well — I have some ideas about it. 
I just wanted to give it a try. See how it goes.
Next thing I know, you'll be taking over all the Cusa pieces.
What kind of ideas?
I don't know! Subconscious drives, right? 
Like with anything creative.
Did you feel this way before your trip to the island, 
or after?
Well ... I think ... after. Mostly after. 
I had a seed of it before, 
even back when I first heard the piece, 
when you first picked it out,
but I didn't really notice then. 
Now it's like the Princess and the Pea.
I don't mean to be stepping on your toes though. 
Really the drive is personal — 
I wanted to record this one, 
so I can hear it the way I want to hear it, 
just to set something right. For myself.

I'm going to file this under the category "Good Problems to Have".
So your attitude to the piece changed, or clarified, 
maybe based on the trip. That means it's working. 
Something's working. Maybe.
Back when we started, 
I would have counted us lucky to ever get this far.
But here we are.
Here we are. Record away, and I will take my leave, 
thanking you for this opportunity 
to introspect on my aversive feelings.
You're welcome!


: authenticity
... just reading these well, 
picking the right takes, placing them.
I don't think it pays to be too neat.
I want to leave some traces of us. 
For the intrepid to find.
What do you mean? Any visitor to that island 
is going to hear quite a lot of us, if they poke around.
Sure but I mean showing what's happening 
behind the scenes a little bit. 
To ensure we keep some authenticity.
Because if we get too concerned 
with saying a bunch of wise things 
in the least personally-revealing way,
then we're basically putting up a front, 
in danger of becoming a false front. 
It's a slippery slope, 
and you know how easily we could slide into pomposity.
Nobody wants that, but would we notice if it happened?
Or are we too close to the project?
If we include some of our interactions, 
show that we aren't transcendent perfect beings, 
that we get stuck sometimes, 
that we get into arguments, 
or get depressed,
then at least it's not a false front. 
At least we're not hiding.
Authenticity is good. Yes. 
But you can find human drama anywhere. 
We're drowning in it from day to day. 
We're supposed to be building a quiet environment, 
_away_ from drama, not ... celebrating it.
Look. These are objects of contemplation. 
These are about focus and clarity. 
We agreed at the outset.
I know, and I don't want to change any of that. 
Just a little added twist, tucked away deep.
It doesn't have to be drama. Just reality.
Reality? So, what? We should record a meeting and stick it in?
Maybe! But we already have some good stuff, for example, 
a little encounter the other week 
where you offered to buy a girl a sandwich.
Her mic was running, so it's in the archive. 
But look, it's fine. In context it's perfect. 
Because we're not lecturing from on high.
These recordings are part of an endeavor 
built by human beings,
and they aspire to Truth-with-a-capital-T 
but we must also remember that they cannot actually get there.
We should be clear to the intrepid that we know this.
It'll make it all better!
Okay, sure. We'll at least see how it feels.
On that island we are going to be in _very_ susceptible states.
Be careful with it.
It seems I get to be the pioneer of being mildly embarrassed.
Also, I should probably let you know, I am recording this conversation right now.
Oh, come on.
I'm serious.
It will make it better. Trust me.


: conference
... it's just the new teapot beeping. 
It boils fast but that beep bothers me. Moving on?
So next I want to raise this problem, 
which is that I think we don't have 
enough smart representation from materialist atheists,
physicalists, anything in that neighborhood of ideas. 
And I've been trying to do something about that but it's hard.
The problem is that most coherent atheist screeds 
are focused on defeating some specific idea of God 
or are angry about the historical activities 
of organized religions — 
rather than, say, from first principles, 
making a good case for the impossibility 
of any concept of God, 
which would be more like what we're after.
I'm having the same problem.  
So many justifications of atheism devolve 
into assertions of the implausibility of Bible stories. 
Someone like Bertrand Russell, a very advanced thinker, 
but his commentary on religion 
all seems to be like 'Why I am not a Christian', 
very limited in scope. 
It is way too small compared
to the vision of God in the pieces we're juxtaposing.
Can you 
Can you repeat that last part? You dropped out a bit.
Oh, just that it's a very provincial idea of God 
that's usually advanced in those arguments, 
sometimes even a straw-man God, 
and doesn't have much in common 
with the God visualized by Cusa or Spinoza 
or the great Sufis, or even Einstein, whoever.
So it just doesn't play on the same field.
When people are explicitly pushing materialism they're
usually philosophers or writers ... 
not physicists, not people who actually 
do the front-line work 
of understanding the physical world.
With the heavy hitters in physics, it's very hard.
It's hard to find good statements
that aren't just arguing against straw men. 
And it's strange because in the modern age 
a reasonable portion of working physicists are atheists, 
not all by any means, but a reasonable portion; 
but it's hard to get strong and articulate statements 
from that sector.
Yeah, the closest you get is somebody like Feynman, 
where science gives us a great degree of certainty 
about certain things, 
but outside those it's not a good idea to tell ourselves nice stories, 
and speculate, it is just best to realize we don't know yet
about the bigger questions, etc. 
But we have a lot of Feynman already.
Paul Dirac was at least a staunch atheist, at one point in his life,
but I don't know if he has direct statements on record. 
I'll keep an eye out.
Dirac was far from a materialist though — 
he believed the universe is made out of math. 
That's an oversimplification of course. 
He even mentioned God a few times, 
in an Einstein kind of way.
This is all so crazy because among scientifically-educated people
... it's the cultural default, right?
If you are a scientist 
or a computer programmer kind of person, 
materialism is supposed to be the basic belief — 
If you're not a materialist you're stupid. 
But if we can't find anyone who makes a good case for it,
how does that happen?
Well, it's easy to be convinced of the absurdity of stories in
common Christianity, Judaism, whatever ... 
so if that's your picture of spiritual beliefs, 
and you have an aversion to digging too hard 
into your own worldview, which most of us do,
then there you go — anything that seems religious 
is goofy bible stories, 
and materialism is anti-religious, 
and it's the general impression 
that smart people are materialist, 
and I want to be smart, so ... case closed!
Also, there are all those so-called spiritual people 
who will believe basically anything 
and try to convince everyone ...
In addition to goofy bible stories, did I forget to mention
ghost stories, astrologers, spoon benders 
and all kinds of frauds.
... it's a ton of noise, it makes it almost impossible
for an outsider looking in to see high-quality thought 
in the world of spirituality. 
If I can even generalize "spirituality" to one thing.
So it's easy if you're already leaning toward materialism
to see these flaky spiritual people, 
extrapolate that to _all_ spiritual people, 
and say all that stuff is garbage.
That's how it worked for me. For a while.
Okay. But despite all this 
there's a large contingent of present day real scientists 
who believe in some form of atheist materialism
and whose beliefs have been carefully considered. 
So we need to ensure we respect that viewpoint.
I remember there's —
It's so frustrating —
Sorry.
No, you go.
Oh, I was just going to say, 
Carl Sagan has a good piece in, umm, Demon-Haunted World?, 
where he talks about science 
as a profound source of spirituality. 
But he doesn't mean mystical spirituality, 
he means ... 
this pure dedication to truth, 
and the development of a wise perspective 
on our place in the world. 
It's nice. And it's a picture of atheism 
that isn't hostile or contemptuous.
Yeah, I read that, 
and what you're talking about is a beautiful piece,
and I tried to get it, 
but Sagan's people want too much money.
Can't we just pay more?
No, it would trigger a bunch 
of 'most-favored-nation' clauses, 
then we have to pay everyone a lot more, 
and we go broke. 
So no Sagan for us.
It's a shame since he was such a great thinker, 
and eloquent too.

: credits_ios
Additional iOS programming by
Amandine Coget


: credits_shield
Android/Shield port developed by NVIDIA:
Development:

Sheikh Abdul-Ajees
Denis Barkar
Ilya Bukalov
Shaveen Kumar
Peter Lapko
Alexander Potylitsin
John Ratcliff
Seth Williams
QA:

Joseph Astillero
David Bean
Amanda Bott
Eric Cameracci
Adam Chamberlain
Andre Faiman
Benjamin Feuerstein
Trevor Holm
Whitney Kitchur
Willy Lau
Lindsay Moore
Andrew Park
Harsh Patel
Jeremy Patterson
Joel Sansait
Sunny Thakkar
Zichen Wang
Yuvin Weerasinghe


: credits_xb1
Additional programming for the Xbox One
by Aaron Melcher