Today we are blessed with, and can appreciate, millions of colors. Before the cones of our retina could distinguish between #EFFing blue and pink #FEE, who could say those colors existed at all?
We are organs of a larger organism. It knows us, although we do not know it. I’m a vessel of whatever that larger organism is, its instrument, rather than the source of the scenes. So a lot of what I do is try to get out of the way. That’s the way I work on my writing.
Life’s Work by David Milch (2022)
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
Tree of life on Earth is in the forest of our Milky Way, one of many large forests in the Universe. Volumes of Fruit are ripening.”
@130story
Your brain can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder.
V.S. Ramachandran
At its most inclusive, mind is seen as inhering in the structure of myth, institutions & cultures. Culture consists of the sharing of mythic patterns. Culture is then mind writ large which shapes us unawares unless we develop the understanding to shape culture.
Charles Hampden-Turner
Heaven hovers over. It has lofty qualities, a divine atmosphere. It’s a spiritual shelter of continual security, a state above humanity’s most exalted hopes & desires. But the celestial firmament is not a place of rest. Even the angels work. They have their God given assignments.
THE WORD (1958) by Edna Sarah Beardsley (re: heaven)
We’re going,” he said excitedly, and shivered with energy.
“Where? How?” said Arthur.
“I don’t know,” said Ford, “but I just feel that the time is right.
Things are going to happen. We’re on our way.”He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have detected,” he said, “disturbances in the wash.”
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING, Chapter 2 – by Douglas Adams
Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup and looking up I noticed I was late. Found my coat and grabbed my hat, made the bus in seconds flat. Found my way upstairs and had a smoke, and somebody spoke and I went into a dream.
A Day in the Life by The Beatles
On this night in 1846,following the marvellous calculations of Le Verrier of Paris and Adams of Cambridge concerning the celestial phenomenon known as the perturbations of Uranus, Herr Gaulle of Berlin discovered the existence of a new planet, one of the greatest triumps of theoretical astronomy. The planet was named Neptune“
Book of Days by Elizabeth & Gerald Donaldson
