7 Quotes Tagged: biophilia

They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.

If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, experiencer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense either of an active subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffers it. The thinker would be no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings.

[W]hen I leave the Church and the city behind and go out under the sky, when I am with the birds, [...] with the clouds, [...] and with the oceans, [...] I cannot feel Christianity because I am in a world which grows from within. I am simply incapable of feeling its life as coming from above[.] More exactly, I cannot feel that its life comes from Another, from one who is qualitatively and spiritually external to all that lives and grows. On the contrary, I feel this whole world to be moved from the inside, and from an inside so deep that it is my inside as well, more truly I than my surface consciousness.

[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but a consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires.

My sense of kinship with this world is not only with its obviously sympathetic and and beautiful aspects, but also with the horrendous and strange. For I have found that the monstrous and inhuman aspects of fish and insects and reptiles are not so much in them as in me. They are external embodiments of my natural creeps and shudders at the thought of pain and death.

[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires.

The natural world seems a marvel of complexity, requiring a vastly intricate intelligence to create and govern it, just because we have represented it to ourselves in the clumsy 'notation' of thought.
[...] Understanding nature by means of thought is like trying to make out the contours of an enormous cave with the aid of a small flashlight casting a bright but very thin beam. The path of the light and the series of 'spots' over which it has passed must be retained in memory, and from this record the general appearance of the cave must laboriously be reconstructed.