Category: Quotes
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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…
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Notes on Goethe’s Aphorisms
Daniel Christian Wahl has translated Goethe’s collected aphorisms in ‘The Tip of the Iceberg’ Goethe’s Aphorisms on the theory of Nature and Science. I appreciate that Wahl has attempted to stay as close as possible to the literal meaning of Goethe’s writings in order to avoid unnecessary interpretations. Here are my own brief notes, which…
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Charles Chapin on Airborne Infection
The unwillingness to acknowledge the likelihood that aerosols are a major means of COVID-19 transmission can be traced to Charles Chapin (1856-1941), an American public health researcher. Charles Chapin writes in The Sources and Modes of Infection that: In reviewing the subject of air infection it becomes evident that our knowledge is still far too…
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Henri Bortoft on seeing life itself
Seeing is the thing! Simon Robinson shares Henri Bortoft’s 2009 Schumacher College lectures on his blog Transition Consciousness: Making the transition to a better world. The following is a transcript of Henri Bortoft’s Lecture Four, Part Three, from 12:20 to 16:05, where Bortoft talks about seeing life itself, comparing Darwin with Goethe. I have edited…
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Why we need a hug?
There’s a reason why, when my son who’s six is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love. He needs a boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed and it won’t be limiting his whole being. He gets a hug…
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Masanobu Fukuoka in his own words
This post is a compilation of my tweets from reading of Masanobu Fukuoka’s two books The One-Straw Revolution and Sowing Seeds in the Desert. Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008) was a Japanese farmer and philosopher. He was an outspoken advocate of the value of observing nature’s principles. IntroductionThe One-Straw Revolution is Masanobu Fukuoka’s first book which became a…