Different Perspectives

A minister travelled for days by train, car and boat to one of the furthest islands in the nation. As he surveyed the bleak but inspiring landscape, he turned to a local villager and said: “You’re very remote here, aren’t you?” She responded: “Remote from what?”  Author Unknown       AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

― Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin (February 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental scientific concept. Wikipedia

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now. The astonishing thing is that even though we all have more or less the same perceptual apparatus, you and I can walk the same city block together and perceive entirely different pictures of reality, because what is salient to each of us is singular to each particular consciousness — a function of who we are and what we want, of the sum total of reference points that is our lived experience, beyond the locus of which we cannot reach. (This is what makes the Mary’s Room thought experiment so compelling and unnerving, and why the best we can do to understand each other is not explanation but translation.)

Perception, then, is not a door but a mirror, not an automated computation of raw input data but a creative act that marshals all that we are and reflects us back to ourselves. Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of being alive together is that none of us will ever know what another perceives.

René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

That is what Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) explores with his signature gift for bridging matter and meaning in the title essay of his altogether revelatory posthumous collection The River of Consciousness (public library), fusing his decades of medical practice as a neurologist studying how the brain works with a philosopher’s inquiry into what a mind is and a poet’s gift for rendering what it means to be alive.

Drawing on case studies of patients with peculiar neurological disorders and brain lesions that hurl them into “standstills” of consciousness — states in which time seems to freeze for them even though events and processes continue to unfold within and around them — he considers the temporal dimension of consciousness, most evident in our perception of motion — the change in spatial position over time.

Eadweard Muybridge: Running full speed (Animal Locomotion, Plate 62)

Drawing on Francis Crick and Christof Koch’s landmark work on qualia — those wholly subjective and deeply interior experiences of what it is like to be oneself — he writes:

We do not merely calculate movement as a robot might; we perceive it. We perceive motion, just as we perceive color or depth, as a unique qualitative experience that is vital to our visual awareness and consciousness. Something beyond our understanding occurs in the genesis of qualia, the transformation of an objective cerebral computation to a subjective experience. Philosophers argue endlessly over how these transformations occur and whether we will ever be capable of understanding them.

[…]

While the perception of a particular motion (for example) may be represented by neurons firing at a particular rate in the motion centers of the visual cortex, this is only the beginning of an elaborate process. To reach consciousness, this neuronal firing, or some higher representation of it, must cross a certain threshold of intensity and be maintained above it… To do that, this group of neurons must engage other parts of the brain (usually in the frontal lobes) and ally itself with millions of other neurons to form a “coalition.”

Such coalitions… can form and dissolve in a fraction of a second and involve reciprocal connections between the visual cortex and many other areas of the brain. These neural coalitions in different parts of the brain talk to one another in a continuous back-and-forth interaction. A single conscious visual percept may thus entail the parallel and mutually influencing activities of billions of nerve cells.

Finally, the activity of a coalition, or coalition of coalitions, if it is to reach consciousness, must not only cross a threshold of intensity but also be held there for a certain time — roughly a hundred milliseconds. This is the duration of a “perceptual moment.”

And yet it is because something immeasurable happens in those hundred milliseconds that we perceive the world not as it is but as we are.

Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.

Into the fourth wall he breaks a door to his qualia:

As I write, I am sitting at a café on Seventh Avenue, watching the world go by. My attention and focus dart to and fro: a girl in a red dress goes by, a man walking a funny dog, the sun (at last!) emerging from the clouds. But there are also other sensations that seem to come by themselves: the noise of a car backfiring, the smell of cigarette smoke as an upwind neighbor lights up. These are all events which catch my attention for a moment as they happen. Why, out of a thousand possible perceptions, are these the ones I seize upon? Reflections, memories, associations, lie behind them. For consciousness is always active and selective — charged with feelings and meanings uniquely our own, informing our choices and interfusing our perceptions. So it is not just Seventh Avenue that I see but my Seventh Avenue, marked by my own selfhood and identity.

To know this is to relinquish our habitual delusion of objective perception:

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making — but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.

But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity?

A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated the “moments of being” that make us who we are, he deepens the question and ventures an answer:

Our passing thoughts, as William James says (in an image that smacks of cowboy life in the 1880s), do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’s words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.” So it is not just perceptual moments, simple physiological moments — though these underlie everything else — but moments of an essentially personal kind that seem to constitute our very being… We consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

Complement with psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on attention as an instrument of love and cognitive philosopher Andy Clarke on the power of expectation in how the mind renders reality, then revisit Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, the healing power of gardens, and the three essential elements of creativity.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary chamber of the self, our experience a Möbius strip of consciousness folded unto itself, our becoming the most private, most significant work we have.

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) made public art of this private work, his poetry so eternal and universal precisely because it came from a place so personal. Animated at once by a profound existential loneliness and a deep feeling of connection to every atom, every person, and every blade of grass, he spent his life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass — the record of his becoming — always addressing the person in the reader, always owning the person in himself.

Walt Whitman circa 1854 (Library of Congress)

While on the other side of the Atlantic Nietzsche was admonishing that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Whitman was reckoning with the rapids of responsibility for your life. He writes in one of the poems:

No one can acquire for another — not one,
Not one can grow for another — not one.
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him — it cannot fail.

Echoing Hermann Hesse’s insistence that “no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within,” Whitman urges us to heed the singular call of our own becoming bellowing beneath the din of the world:

Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

He distills this first and final truth of life in the closing stanzas of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — one of the greatest poems ever written, and one of the most perspectival takes on time. Insisting that you must abide “no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself,” he observes that at the end of life, we all invariably face…

…the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

A generation later, another of the world’s most original poets would come to compose the best manifesto I know for the courage to be yourself.

Complement with Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul and Marion Milner’s superb field guide to self-possession inspired by Woolf, then revisit Whitman on what makes a great person and how to keep criticism from sinking your soul.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine.

“Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi — organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.

I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother — my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind — discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching — for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me — that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

An organism, of course, is not a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, both sovereign and interdependent. Although mushrooms have populated our myths and our medicine for millennia, they were only factored into our model of the living world less than a century ago. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.

Perhaps, then, it is not accidental that a marine biologist — Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology the year Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland entered the world — proposed Protista as a new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms that are neither plants nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. But it would be another century before, just after my mother was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their own kingdom of life.

Among the hundreds of thousands of species now known, and probably millions not yet named, there are ones that crumble at the lightest touch and ones that can survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer space. On the western edge of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. In the mountains of East Asia blooms a bright blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Across tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. In the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells an individual fungus spanning eighteen hundred football fields — Earth’s largest living organism.

Without fungi, we would never know Earth’s most beautiful flowers — orchid seeds have no energy reserve of their own and can only obtain their carbon through a fungal symbiont — or Earth’s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons to alchemize sunlight into sugar for life. Emily Dickinson considered the ghost pipe “the preferred flower of life.” A painting of it graced the cover of her posthumously published poems. She was not wrong to think it “almost supernatural,” for it subverts the ordinary laws of nature: rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down so that its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — can entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae, sapping nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

These mycorrhizal relationships permeate every ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the fabric of nature is woven. Perhaps this is why it was so hard for so long to classify them separately from other life-forms. Perhaps we never should have done so. Perhaps it was a mistake to segregate them into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms at all, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into countries bounded by borders that cut across ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath every battlefield in the history of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to turn death into life so that ghost pipes and orchids may rise from where the bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it is and they will inherit it. They are not a kingdom of life — life is their kingdom.

Almost exactly one year before Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters while boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by someone who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper under the heading “Darwin Among the Machines.” It would later be revealed as the work of twenty-seven-year-old English writer Samuel Butler. Epochs before the first modern computer and the golden age of algorithms, before we came to call the confluence of the two “artificial intelligence,” Butler prophesied the birth of a new “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation, which would take on a life of its own alongside the kingdoms of nature. “In these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race,” he wrote. “We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation… daily giving them greater power… self-acting power.” With an eye to the evolution of consciousness, he asked: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?” More than a century and a half before our modern worries about artificial intelligence, Butler worried that this new kingdom of life would be parasitic upon us. He worried that although the human mind has been “moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years,” the mechanical kingdom evolved in a blink of evolutionary time. “No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward,” he cautioned. “Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”

Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

* * *

For more inspiration and illumination at the intersection of nature and culture, science and spirit, the ecological and the existential, give yourself the gift of a lifetime that is a subscription to Orion.

By Adrienne Fong

KQED:

A car burns during a protest in Compton, Calif., Saturday, June 7, 2025, after federal immigration authorities conducted operations. The Department of Homeland Security said recent ICE operations in LA resulted in the arrest of 118 immigrants. (Eric Thayer/AP Photo)

Protesters and Immigration Authorities Face Off for a 2nd Day in LA Area After Arrests

https://www.kqed.org/news/12043221/protesters-and-immigration-authorities-face-off-for-a-2nd-day-in-la-area-after-arrests

Politico:

A man helps an injured woman during a protest in the Paramount section of Los Angeles, Saturday, June 7, 2025, after federal immigration authorities conducted operations. | Eric Thayer/AP

Newsom blasts deployment of National Guard to LA as ‘purposefully inflammatory’

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/07/newsom-national-guard-los-angeles-00393526

SF Chron:

Border Patrol personnel deploy tear gas during a demonstration over the dozens detained in an operation by federal immigration authorities a day earlier in Paramount section of Los Angeles Saturday, June 7, 2025. The Trump administration planned to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Eric Thayer/Associated Press

Newsom says Trump to send 2,000 National Guard Troops to LA

ICE protests: Trump to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles

Emergency alert

JUN 8, 2025

Edward Burne-Jones

I’m deeply concerned about what’s happening in Los Angeles. Trump is sending in the National Guard to quell what the administration is calling an “insurrection.” It’s hard to believe this is happening in America, though at this point it’s not really a surprise. ICE agents are in military gear, terrorizing whole communities. Who knew? We all knew. Now brave Americans are rising up in protest.

Consider this a kind of emergency prayer alert. There is so much volatility and potential for violence here. I love Los Angeles, I love my country, and like you I am sickened at what’s happening.

Let’s pray.

Dear God,

We need a miracle.

May Your Spirit be upon us,

on the city of Los Angeles,

and upon the circumstances

that have brought us here.

We pray for all the people

affected by this.

Please touch the heart of Donald Trump

and soften his view of everyone.

Send Your angels to quell the violence

in our hearts and on our streets.

Amen

For those of you in Los Angeles, please take care of yourselves and each other. My love is with you. So is the cosmic companionship that even now is guiding us all to our highest best use. This is our time and we will rise.

For those of you in Los Angeles, please be prayerful. Ask for guidance. Be very attentive to the voice within. Pray for the mantle of the Holy Spirit to be placed around your shoulders.

There are angels to your left, and angels to your right. There are angels in front of you and angels behind you. Go forth in confidence. Go forth in peace.

Let’s all of us send our love to Los Angeles – to the immigrants, to the protesters, and yes to the ICE agents, to the National Guard, to the police and to the President. Only love can cast out fear.

Praying for divine protection for everyone. God bless us all.

Amen

Providing a comprehensive exposition of the transactional interpretation (TI) of quantum mechanics, this book sheds new light on long-standing problems in quantum theory, such as the physical meaning of the ‘Born Rule’ for the probabilities of measurement results, and demonstrates the ability of TI to solve the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. It provides robust refutations of various objections and challenges to TI.

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Mark Boccuzzi offers a practical and inspiring roadmap to cultivate awareness, deepen intuition, and integrate these extraordinary skills into your daily life. Through mindfulness, openness, creativity, and love, you will learn to navigate the world with heightened clarity and purpose. This book demystifies psi, framing it as a natural extension of human consciousness, supported by modern research and timeless wisdom.

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Drawing on the work of scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians, Todd challenges the materialistic reductionism of our age and offers an alternative grounded in the visionary work taking place in a wide array of disciplines.

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Writers often draw on dreams for their inspiration, and those dreams are often precognitive, foreshadowing upheavals in the writer’s future. It means that literature may often be prophetic. Standard critical approaches focused solely on an author’s prior influences or present life context are inadequate to fully understand the miracle of literary creation.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

With these lines, from The Fly, William Blake posed a question of unusual prescience for a poet writing 200 years ago. At first glance, there seem to be few similarities between Homo sapiens and airborne insects. Yet Blake was not so sure. He could see connections. And in recent years, science has found that he was probably correct. Common fruit flies, or Drosophila, share 60 per cent of human DNA, making them perfect for research that has led to vital strides in treating cancer, autism, diabetes and many other ills. 

(New Thinking Allowed)

Shakespeare’s Tempest

Friday  27 June, 2023

4:30 PM – 7:00 PM Pacific Time.

Stage plays and movies have given us many versions of the story of The Tempest. Within our cultural history, and over the centuries we have received varied interpretations of this play.

Calvin is offering a fun-filled and insightful conversational evening to engage you in what otherwise is dry reading of Shakespeare.  But this participatory experiences of The Tempest will be anything but that.

Some of Shakespeare’s fundamental themes of this play have gotten lost, The video will present them a new and our subsequent discussion are always a fun, deeper dive into the material – that will have you come away with a personal connection to the material and perhaps the writer himself; to introduce ideas about the themes that you may not have thought about before.

We’ll discuss an archetypal understanding of the play’s characters, represented as three areas of Mind or Consciousness as they pertain to the characters Caliban, Prospero, and Ariel. Shakespeare seems to present us with much to discuss – magic, self-deception, betrayal, sex, revenge, and the ability to give for ( that goes beyond forgiveness), to redemption, and love.

This Zoom  Presentation of Shakespeare – ‘The Tempest’ – will introduce you to where the group, the Prosperos®, got its name.

Mark your calendar – Zoom Event

Friday, June 27, 2025

Time: 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time to 7:00 p.m.

Link and additional information to follow

And for those who have attended Calvin’s Salon events, you know it is going to be a good time…

See you there 

Calvin