Food for Thought
An appendix to The Lizard of Oz
These are excerpts from works alluded to in The Lizard of Oz.
from The Upanishads (Indian religious text)
Yama said: “That word or place which all the Vedas record, which all penances proclaim, which men desire when they live as religious students, that word I tell thee briefly, it is Om.” …
The Self, whose symbol is Om, is the omniscient Lord. He is not born. He does not die. He is neither cause nor effect. This Ancient One is unborn, imperishable, eternal: though the body be destroyed, he is not killed. …
Smaller than the smallest, greater than the greatest, this Self forever dwells within the hearts of all. When a man is free from desire, his mind and senses purified, he beholds the glory of the Self and is without sorrow. …
As fire, though one, takes the shape of every object which it consumes, so the Self, though one, takes the shape of every object in which it dwells. …
But those who are devoted to the worship of the Self, by means of austerity, continence, faith, and knowledge, go by the northern path and attain the world of the sun. The sun, the light, is indeed the source of all energy. It is immortal, beyond fear; it is the supreme goal. For him who goes tot he sun there is no more birth nor death. The sun ends birth and death. …
Evil touches him not, troubles him not, for in the fire of his divine knowledge all evil is burnt away.
from Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
The fall (bababadalbharaghtakamminarronnkonbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later in lie down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fal of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointand place is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.
from Frogs by Aristophanes
CHARON: Now stop this silly clowning. Brace your legs and row… row like a good one.
DIONYSIS: Never learned — complete landlubber… most unnautical. How can I row?
CHARON: Easily. You will hear, once you have started, lovely songs…
DIONYSIS: By whom?
CHARON: Our minstrel frogs… wonderful!
from The Greeks and Their Gods by W.K.C. Guthrie
In his dealings with homicide, it was above all this question of miasma, or pollution, which concerned Apollo. As it was he who pronounced a city or an individual to lie under its cloud, so it was he who could grant the ritual purification that would set them free.
from Faust, Part II by Goethe
MEPHISTOPHELES: Loth am I now high mystery to unfold:
Goddesses dwell, in solitude, sublime,
Enthroned beyond the world of place or time;
Even to speak of them dismays the bold.
These are The Mothers.
FAUST: Mothers?
MEPHISTOPHELES: Stand you daunted?
FAUST: The Mothers! Mothers — sound with wonder haunted.
MEPHISTOPHELES: True, goddesses unknown to mortal mind,
And named indeed with dread among our kind.
To reach them, delve below earth’s deepest floors;
And that we need them, all the blame is yours
from The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch
We do not simply, through being rational and knowing ordinary language “know” the meaning of all necessary moral words. We may have to learn the meaning; and since we are human historical individuals the movement of understanding is onward into increasing privacy, in the direction of the ideal limit, and not back toward a genesis in the rulings of an impersonal public language. …
When Plato wants to explain Good, he uses the image of the sun. The moral pilgrim emerges from the cave and begins to see the real world in the light of the sun, and last of all is able to look at the sun itself.
from Idylls of the King by Tennyson
[description of the birth of King Arthur]
Shrunk like a fairy changeling lay the mage;
And when I enter’d told me that himself
And Merlin ever served about the King,
Uther, before he died; and on the night
When Uther in Tintagil past away
Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two
Left the still king, and passing forth to breathe,
Then from the castle gateway by the chasm
Descending thro’ the dismal night — a night
In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost —
Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps
It seem’d in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof
A dragon wing’d, and all from stem to stern
Bright with a shining people on the decks,
And gone as soon as seen. And then the two
Dropt to the dove, and watch’d the great sea fall,
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame;
And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried, ‘The King!
Here is an heir for Uther!’ And the fringe
Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand,
Lash’d at the wizard as he spake the word,
And all at once all round him rose in fire,
So that the child and he were clothed in fire.
And presently thereafter follow’d calm,
Free sky and stars. …
from Moby Dick by Herman Melville
[on “the whiteness of the whale”]
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those could of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature. …
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids, and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blackness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows — a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues — every stately or lovely emblazoning — the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yes, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, and with its own blank tinge — pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like the willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to war colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
from Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg
For instance, the great scientific contribution to theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication for a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory. It may be easier to adapt oneself to the quantum-theoretical concept of reality when one has not gone through the naive materialistic way of thinking that still prevailed in Europe in the first decades of this century. …
A clear distinction between matter and force can no longer be made in this part of physics, since each elementary particle not only is producing some forces and is acted upon by forces, but it is at the same time representing a certain field of force. The quantum-theoretical dualism of waves and particles makes the same entity appear both as matter and as force. …
But the problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms and not only about the “facts” — the latter being, for instance, the black spots on a photographic plate or the water droplets in a cloud chamber. but we cannot speak about the atoms in ordinary language. …
In answer to the first question, one may say that the concept of complementarity introduced by Bohr into the interpretation of quantum theory has encouraged the physicists to use an ambiguous rather than an unambiguous language, to use the classical concepts in a somewhat vague manner in conformity with the principle of uncertainty, to apply alternatively different classical concepts which would lead to contradictions if used simultaneously. In this way, one speaks about electronic orbits, about matter waves and charge density, about energy and momentum, etc., always conscious of the fact that these concepts have only a limited range of applicability. when this vague and unsystematic use of language leads into difficulties, the physicist has to withdraw into the mathematical scheme and its unambiguous correlation with the experimental facts.
from The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
The following chapters will show that the basic elements of the Eastern world view are also those of the world view emerging from modern physics. They are intended to suggest that Eastern thought — and, more generally, mystical though — provides a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science; a conception of the world in which man’s scientific discoveries can be in perfect harmony with his spiritual aims and religious beliefs. The two basic themes of this conception are the unity and interrelation of all phenomena and the intrinsically dynamic nature of the universe. The further we penetrate into the submicroscopic world, the more we shall realize how the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting, and ever-moving components, with man as an integral part of this system. …
At the atomic level, matter has a dual aspect: it appears as particles and as waves. Which aspect it shows depends on the situation. … It has taken physicists a long time to accept the fact that matter manifests itself in ways that seem to be mutually exclusive; that particles are also waves, waves also particles. …
Faced with a reality which lies beyond opposite concepts, physicists and mystics have to adopt a special way of thinking, where the mind is not fixed in the rigid framework of classical logic, but keeps moving and changing its viewpoint.
from Blindness and Insight by Paul de Man
The unity of appearance (sign) and idea (meaning) — to use the terminology that one finds indeed among the theoreticians of romanticism when they speak of Schein and Idee — is said to be a romantic myth embodied in the recurrent topos of the “Beautiful Soul.” The schone Seele, a predominant theme of pietistic origin in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, functions indeed as the figura of a privileged kind of language. Its outward appearance receives its beauty from an inner glow (or feu sacre) to which it is so finely attuned that, far from hiding it from sight, it gives it just the right balance of opacity and transparency, thus allowing the holy fire to shine without burning.
from The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell
It is of the nature of mind and language together, that they form an instrument capable of an indefinite number of developments. it matters very little whether the particular devisors or users of the instrument saw, at the point in time when they flourished its full implications. …
We always say more than we know. this is one of the reasons for language’s apparent imprecision. It is no reason for refusing language our confidence.
from Valerius Terminus by Bacon
So as whatsoever is not God but parcel of the world, he hath fitted it to comprehension of man’s mind, if man will open and dilate the powers of his understanding as he may.
from Of Studies by Bacon
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few chewed and digested; and that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
from Revelation
Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth and his angels were thrown down with him. …
Then I saw another beast which rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed. It works great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sigh of men; …
This calls for wisdom: let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six.
The entire book is here at Medium, one chapter per posting. It is also available as paperback and ebook at Amazon.
Links to other chapters and the story of how this story was written.
