Category: Communing

To Tao all under heaven will come as streams and torrents flow into a great river or sea.

— Tao te ching 32 (Waley)

Say: All things are of God.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Book of the Covenant

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

— Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

(from each equinoxious points of view, the one fellow’s fetch being the other follow’s person)

— Finnegans Wake, 85

Science consists in actually drawing the bow upon truth with intentness in the eye, with energy in the arm.

— Peirce, CP 1.235 (1902)

The more the bow is bent, the straighter the flight of the arrow.

A healthy social structure, like a language, has to be massively redundant in its representations of meaning. Otherwise the loss of a single element in the social fabric would be disastrous. This redundancy is maintained by mentoring, which uses quite a lot of our energy.

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable. Perhaps this is merely to point out that life is expensive. Just to keep itself going, life makes demands on energy, supplied from inside and outside a living being, that are voracious compared with the undemanding thriftiness of death and decay. A culture, just to keep itself going, makes voracious demands on the energies of many people for hands-on mentoring.

— Jane Jacobs (2004, 159)

Heraclitus complained that although the Logos is common, the many live as though they had a private understanding. This has its counterpart in a scene from the vision of the Oglala Lakota prophet Black Elk: ‘all the animals and fowls that were the people ran here and there, for each one seemed to have his own little vision that he followed and his own rules; and all over the universe I could hear the winds at war like wild beasts fighting’ (Neihardt 1932, 29). Meanwhile the sacred tree at the center of the nation’s hoop had disappeared from the vision.