#higher laws

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

from Walden by Henry David Thoreau 

[irrevocably-chaotic]

"I love the wild not less than the good"

WALDEN - Henry David Thoreau

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

from Walden by Henry David Thoreau 

[hannamarni]

All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Walden, chapter on higher laws by Henry David Thoreau.

[the-color-of-roseblood]

Higher Laws

Not a new WIP but a new tag about a television series I’m working on with my roommate, it’s about science and religion and the supernatural and the intersection of the three. 

As my roommate put it: “two dumbass girls trying to find ways to prove they’re not scared of the dark”

[prepxn]

The merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism, higher laws, etc., crying, 'None of your moonshine,' as if they were anchored to something not only definite, but sure and permanent. If there was any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid and secure basis, and more than any other represented this boasted common sense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank; and now those very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind. Scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. It would seem as if you only need live forty years in any age of this world, to see its most promising government become the government of Kansas, and banks nowhere. Not merely the Brook Farm and Fourierite communities, but now the community generally has failed. But there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent, and unchanged. Hard times, I say, have this value, among others, that they show us what such promises are worth, - where the sure banks are.

Henry David Thoreau in a letter to Harrison G. O. Blake.

Excerpt pulled from Letters to a Spiritual Seeker compiled by Bradley P. Dean.

[fritfilter]

But there is one field of human thought in which the highest idea of genius still seems to some to make sense. That is mathematics. In the popular imagination mathematical genius now seems to be the dominant model and it is not hard to see why. Not only do mathematical achievements require extraordinary intellectual abilities, unimaginable to nonmathematicians, they also have certainty and permanence. The fallible human mind participates in the beauty of an infallible abstract realm that, in the view of many mathematicians, exists independently of the mental and physical worlds. Kurt Gödel, Einstein’s friend and colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, took this kind of mathematical Platonism to be a consequence of his First Incompleteness Theorem. He proved that for any finitely specifiable, consistent formal system of sufficient complexity to express arithmetic, there will exist truths of arithmetic that are not provable within that system. Gödel inferred from this that it was impossible to think of mathematics as a human construction.

[ldsdiary]

Obedience in the small things creates a spirit of obedience in all things.

Kim B. Clark, BYU-I President