Category: Quotes
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Richard Tarnas on listening to the voice of nature
The following is from a session in the Mothership Earth Summit 2023 with Richard Tarnas on March 20, 2023. Richard says we seem to be living at the end of an era. He sees a striking resemblance between fundamental collective transformation and what takes place in individual initiatory rites of passage. Richard Tarnas talks about…
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Stephen Wolfram on Computational Irreducibility
…I strongly suspect…that in the vast majority of cases where the behavior that we see in nature and elsewhere appears to us complex it is in the end indeed associated with computational irreducibility. … In the past it has normally been assumed that there is no ultimate limit on what science can be expected to…
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Christopher Alexander on Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander made his first full-blown pattern language in 1967. After a long time, he realized that something was drastically wrong. Jenny Quillen talks about it here. The quotes below are from Christopher Alexander’s 1979 book The Timeless Way of Building.1 …at the very moment when you first relax,…you will begin to see how limited…
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Bill Plotkin on Purpose
The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as a human being. Bill Plotkin has the following perspective to share on purpose (my emphasis in italics): Our Soul purpose is categorically different…
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Bill Plotkin on Soul, Felt-sense, and Metaphor
The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as human beings. Bill Plotkin uses common words in uncommon ways. Soul is, for example, an ecological concept. Soul Bill Plotkin writes (my emphasis…
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Eugene Gendlin on Logic
Logic, math, and graph paper are quintessentially human creations—nothing natural comes in equal units that can be substituted in logical slots. Every leaf and cell is a little different. —Eugene Gendlin The actual order is supralogical. It is more than a given logic can represent, although a given logic can fit some given aspect or…
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Iain McGilchrist on Logic
The following quotes are from Iain McGilchrist’s books The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter with Things. McGilchrist points out the limits of sequential analytic logic, the building up of knowledge from parts, and the prioritising of detail over the bigger picture. An uncritical following of…
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F. David Peat on Logic
…any approach that is based upon a set of fixed rules, strategies or fixed rational forms can never fully come to terms with nature’s unlimited richness. —F. David Peat, New Science, New Vision Any level of introspection indicates to us the degree to which our thoughts and responses are conditioned and how the self orders…
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How to make living structure?
Christopher Alexander on how to make living structure: …success in making living structure…comes from the ability of the maker, at each step in the unfolding process, to do the thing which is required—at each instant to do the thing which is most consistent with wholeness. …and that, of course, depends on the extent to which…
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Are People Machines?
This is an imagined conversation between Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), George I. Gurdjieff (1866 to 1877–1949), and Norm Hirst (1932-2012). The conversation is based on quotes from Peter D. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, and the Autognomics website. PO: Once I was talking with Gurdjieff… I was speaking…about…