[Image: screen capture from the video game Monument Valley: Princess Ida (in white) explores what the game calls its “sacred geometry” as she tries to move around in — and eventually escape from — each successive level.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment is really very common in our experience. All the light in this room comes in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each part. If your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded by your eye and brain. As you look through a telescope or a camera, the whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part, and that is unfolded to the eye. With an old-fashioned television set that’s not adjusted properly, the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded by adjustment…

When you are talking to somebody, your whole intention to speak enfolds a large number of words. You don’t choose them one by one. There are any number of examples of the implicate order in our experience of consciousness. Any one word has behind it a whole range of meaning enfolded in thought.

Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly, it’s shared between people as they look at one object and verify that it’s the same. So any high level of consciousness is a social process. There may be some level of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but any abstract level depends on language, which is social. The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is inside each person.

Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means “assailant,” your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it’s only a shadow, there’s an abrupt change again…

Meaning enfolds the whole world into me, and vice versa – that enfolded meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then through the world.

(David Bohm [source])

…and:

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

(Jean Cocteau [source])

…and:

Self-Knowledge

And a man said, Speak to us of Self- Knowledge.
   And he answered, saying:
   Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
   But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
   You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
   You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
   The hidden well-spring of your soul must rise and run murmuring to the sea;
   And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
   But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
   And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
   For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’
   Say not, ‘I have found the path of the soul.’ Say rather, ‘I have met the soul walking upon my path.’
   For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
   The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

(Khalil Gibran [source])

From elsewhere:

Think back to your layered outfit and the whole range of possibilities that are available for each layer. For instance, the warmth layer (with its constraining protocol: must trap body heat) has all types of garments as inputs and many possible output outfits. It could be a bearskin cape and wool pants, a merino wool coat with a cashmere sweater and sheepskin pants, or a polypropylene fleece jacket with a mink vest and rubber wet-suit pants. It can be zippered or a pullover, overalls or a separate top and bottom. It can have a turtleneck collar and elasticated wrists and ankles, or not. It can be any color or size. Though the warmth layer has a protocol that constrains it (must trap body heat), the protocol also deconstrains it in any number of ways, which allows a huge variety of choices. In Darwinian terms, we have selection from variation. We can see that this flexibility allowed the layer to evolve from an animal-skin cape to a polypropylene fleece, zip-fronted, size L magenta jacket with a hood. And pockets. This illustrates what could be the most important feature of layered architecture [such as that of human consciousness]: it enables change over large timescales, from the outfits of Fred and Wilma Flintstone to an Armani suit and a Valentino gown.

(Michael S. Gazzaniga [source])

…and:

What I Believe

after Michael Blumenthal

I believe the weave of cotton
will support my father’s knees,
but no indulgences will change hands.

I believe nothing folds easily,
but that time will crease—
retrain the mind.

I believe in the arrowheads of words
and I believe in silence.

I believe the rattle of birch leaves
can shake sorrow from my bones,
but that we all become bare at our own pace.

I believe the songs of childhood
follow us into the kettles of age,
but the echoes will not disturb the land.

I believe the reach of the kayak paddle
can part the blue corridor of aloneness,
and that eyes we see in water are never our own.

(Kimberly Blaeser [source])