Pico's Oration attempted to remap the human landscape to center all attention on human capacity and human perspective. Arriving in a place near Florence, he taught the amazing capacity of human achievement. "Pico himself had a massive intellect and studied everything there was to be studied in the university curriculum of the Renaissance; the Oration in part is meant to be a preface to a massive compendium of all the intellectual achievements of humanity, a compendium that never appeared because of Pico's early death." [...] Pico's philosophies had a profound influence on the arts, helping to elevate writers and painters from their medieval role as mere artisans to the Renaissance ideal of the artist as genius.
...[Ficino] saw himself as one member of a venerable sequence of interpreters who added to a store of wisdom that God allowed progressively to unfold. Each of these “prisci theologi,” or “ancient theologians,” had his part to play in discovering, documenting, and elaborating the truth contained in the writings of Plato and other ancient sages, a truth to which these sages may not have been fully privy, acting as they were as vessels of divine truth.
The key point here is that at every level, the same variational, surprise-reducing dynamics must be in play to supply Markov blankets for the level above.
[Every element, down to the tiniest submolecular particles] are all trying to do something. And it is the same thing. They are all in action, forever moving, continuously vibrating — but not without purpose.
Their purpose is simply to BE. They realize that life is movement. If movement ever stops, that which you call life would not exist.
If you choose to be a thing, something or someone opposite to that has to show up somewhere in your universe to make that possible.
Life evolved through a series of steps in the blink of an eye that you now call billions of years. And in this holy instant came you, out of the sea, the water of life, onto the land and into the form you now hold.
Then the evolutionists are right!
I find it amusing — a source of continual amusement, actually — that you humans have such a need to break everything down into right and wrong. It never occurs to you that you’ve made those labels up to help you define the material — and your Self.
It never occurs to you (except to the finest minds among you) that a thing could be both right and wrong; that only in the relative world are things one or the other. In the world of the absolute, of time-no time, all things are everything.
There is no male and female, there is no before and after, there is no fast and slow, here and there, up and down, left and right — and no right and wrong.
Your astronauts and cosmonauts have gained a sense of this. They imagined themselves to be rocketing upward to get to outer space, only to find when they got there that they were looking up at the Earth. Or were they? Maybe they were looking down at the Earth! But then, where was the sun? Up? Down? No! Over there, to the left. So now, suddenly, a thing was neither up nor down — it was sideways… and all definitions thus disappeared.
So it is in My world — our world — our real realm. All definitions disappear, rendering it difficult to even talk about this realm in definitive terms. Religion is your attempt to speak of the unspeakable. It does not do a very good job.
No, My son, the evolutionists are not right. I created all of this — all of this — in the blink of an eye; in one holy instant — just as the creationists have said. And… it came about through a process of evolution taking billions and billions of what you call years, just as the evolutionists claim.
They are both “right.” As the cosmonauts discovered, it all depends on how you look at it.
The level of a society's advancement is reflected, inevitably, in the degree of its duality thinking. Social evolution is demonstrated by movement towards unity, not separatism.
Why? Why is unity such a yardstick?
Because unity is the truth. Separatism is the illusion. As long as society sees itself as separate units, it lives in the illusion.
Yet that makes me feel sad. That makes me feel as though women are somehow superior beings. That they have more of the “right stuff” than men.
Part of the glorious rhythm of life is the yin and the yang. One Aspect of “Being” is not “more perfect” or “better” than another. Both aspects are simply — and wonderfully — that: aspects.
Men, obviously, embody other reflections of Divinity, which women eye with equal envy.
Yet at a time when you say you can do nothing to stop 40,000 people a day from dying of hunger, you bring 50,000 people a day into your world to begin a new life. And this you call love. This you call God’s plan. It is a plan which totally lacks logic or reason, to say nothing of compassion.
Medicine, law, business, engineering — these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love — these are what we stay alive for.
None of this is really "real", is it?
No. You are living an illusion. This is a big magic show. And you are pretending that you don't know the tricks — even though you are the magician.
It is important to remember this, otherwise you will make everything very real.
The girl swallowed and came closer. The enchantress put her arm around her.
"Remember," she repeated, "magic is Chaos, Art and Science. It is a curse, a blessing and progress. It all depends on who uses magic, how they use it, and to what purpose. And magic is everywhere. All around us. Easily accessible. [...]
The earth which we tread. The fire which does not go out within it. The water from which all life is born and without which life is not possible. The air we breathe. It is enough to stretch out one's hand to master them, to subjugate them. Magic is everywhere. It is in air, in water, in earth and in fire. And it is behind the door which the Conjunction of the Spheres has closed on us. From there, from behind the closed door, magic sometimes extends its hand to us. For us. You know that, don't you? You have already felt the touch of that magic, the touch of the hand from behind that door. That touch filled you with fear. Such a touch fills everyone with fear. Because there is Chaos and Order, Good and Evil in all of us. But it is possible and necessary to control it. This has to be learnt. And you will learn it, Ciri."
Tis true without lying, certain and most true.
That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below
to do the miracle of one only thing
And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother,
the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse.
The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth.
Separate thou the earth from the fire,
the subtle from the gross
sweetly with great industry.
It ascends from the earth to the heaven and again it descends to the earth
and receives the force of things superior and inferior.
By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
Its force is above all force,
for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing.
So was the world created.
From this are and do come admirable adaptations where of the means is here in this.
Hence I am called Hermes Trismegist, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.
That which I have said of the operation of the Sun is accomplished and ended.
Tis true without lying, certain and most true.
That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below
to do the miracle of one only thing
And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother,
the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse.
The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth.
Separate thou the earth from the fire,
the subtle from the gross
sweetly with great industry.
It ascends from the earth to the heaven and again it descends to the earth
and receives the force of things superior and inferior.
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.
I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians [...].
Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty — just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.
He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely fore-ordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the riddle of health and of immortality. All would be revealed to him if only he could persevere to the end, uninterrupted, by himself, no one coming into the room, reading, copying, testing — all by himself, no interruption for God's sake, no disclosure, no discordant breakings in or criticism, with fear and shrinking as he assailed these half-ordained, half-forbidden things, creeping back into the bosom of the Godhead as into his mother's womb. 'Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone', not as Charles Lamb 'a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle'.
And so he continued for some twenty-five years. In 1687, when he was forty-five years old, the Principia was published.
My grandma handed me a book with a red steam train on the cover. It was 1998. I was 7 years old.
"The shopkeeper recommended this one for you," she said. "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone."
"Thanks, Nan!" I gave her a hug and waited for the appropriate time to remove myself from the table so I could leap through the portal of those pages. I wanted to tumble down rabbit holes and stumble through mazes and step into wardrobes with lions and witches.
When I was 7 years old, I dreamed of discovering a world full of magic.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Every heart which earnestly asks, Which is the path to God? is shown. Each is given a heartfelt Truth. Come to Me along the path of your heart, not through a journey of your mind. You will never find Me in your mind.
In order to truly know God, you have to be out of your mind.
"Zac!" I yelled as I burst through the door of my apartment in February 2019. "Zac! I've figured it out! This is huge!"
"That's what she said," Zac quipped as he emerged from the study. He'd been crashing with me for the past two months. It was our last summer in Sydney before Bryce and Pandora packed up their lives and moved to New York, marking the end of an era: our care-free twenties. Zac had flown over to spend the summer eating ice cream by the harbor together — just the four of us.
I rolled my eyes. "Ugh. You're such a man-child. Anyway..." My mind was racing at the speed of light.