Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. A. Eddington
"Wonder is retained by wise pondering." --Ravi Zacharias
The more I learn, the more I understand that life is amazing, sensitive, responsive, mysterious  and totally interconnected . -Rodger
It remains admitted that to this day we don't have a convincing notion of why there is something, why not merely nothing: What "spiritus rectot breathes fire into the equations and makes the universe for them to describe?"- raising the question, what do the laws of nature permit beyond what actually exists? H. Genz
Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind, and drink the universe in a glass of rain.--Ihab Hassan
We are mounds of quarks in trios, we are proton-and-electron families. ...There is but a single family on this planet, just one life-form stretching out its tendrils, testing possibilities as dust and stars did once upon a time. Face it, we are all in this together, microbes, seaweed, starfish, salamanders, humans, every strange extrusion of nucleic acid chains. We are the kin of yeast, the brothers of cockroaches, the sisters of sugar beets, and the cousins of maize. We share a common birthright born of ancient gene-and-membrane teams. All of us are children in the clan of DNA. Howard Bloom
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. --Albert Einstein
The religion of future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description... If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism. Albert Einstein
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the "Universe,"a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something seperate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of his consciouness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. Einstein
We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity. M.Wheatley
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.S.J.Gould
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. T. Carlye
What is the mind of ours? Last week's potatoes!...The atoms come into my brain, dance and dance and then go out-there are always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.  RP Feynman
"... all those who apprehend the single significant whole, or experience cosmic religious feeling, with or without the awareness of the existence of the principle of cosmic order, are engaged in similar acts of communion with the Whole. Yet any translation into conscious content of that experience , in scientific or religious thought, invokes reductionism where it cannot be applied. ...all knowledge in the conscious content is a differentiated system that cannot by definition articulate the universal principle of order. Just as there can be no one-to-one correspondence between physical theory and physical reality, there can be no such correspondence between religious descriptions of beings and Being itself."
and
" ... conceiving of a human being, as Einstein put it, as "part of the whole" is the leap of perspective that will prove most critical. It is only in making this leap that we can begin, as he suggests, to free ourselves of the 'optical illusions' of our present conception of self as a "part limited in time and space", and to widen "our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty". 
and
" The central problem... has been trying to "prove" the existence of Being when it can never be proven because of its inherent undivided wholeness. Being neither requires or permits "proof". It merely is, and accepting this abundantly obvious fact can provide a "foundation", as Einstein put it, 'for our inner security.' ...the description of the parts cannot disclose the existence or nature of the Whole. Yet one cannot, of course, merely reason or argue oneself into an acceptance of this proposition. One must have the capacity for what Einstein termed 'cosmic religious feeling.' Hopefully many of those who have the capacity will also communicate their awareness to others in metaphoric representations in ordinary language with enormous emotional appeal. ...As described by Jonas Salk:
'...By using the processes of Nature as metaphor, to describe the forces of the Cosmos by which it operates upon and within Man, we come as close to describing 'reality' as we can within the limits of our comprehension. Men will be very uneven in their capacity for such understanding, which, naturally, differs for different ages and cultures, and develops and changes over the course of time. For these reasons it will always be necessary to use metaphor and myth to provide 'comprehensible' guides to living. In this way, Man's imagination and intellect play vital roles in his survival and evolution'."
from The Conscious Universe
"The whole is something else than the sum of its parts" K. Koffka
                   TIME IS A MYSTERY
The usual conception of the world is that matter is "embedded in" space and time. ...this cannot be the case. There are many factors which indicate that reality is "projected onto" space and time. ... The picture and also its frame, space-time, are located in the mind of the observer....the fact that reality is not embedded in space-time but is rather projected onto space-time. ...space-time is not installed in the brain as a definate system but it is only "inserted" if there is actually something to be portrayed or represented, i.e., when our sense organs register objects and processes from the reality outside. W. Schommers
According to classical physics, the universe consists of bodies in space. We are tempted to assume, therefore, that we live in a physical world consisting of bodies in space and that what we percieve consists of objects in space. But this is very dubious. J.J.Gibson
Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects. time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. Robert Lanza and Bob Berman
The concept of time cannot actually be understood. We are accustomed to thinking that time is something which can be found or which one has. But it actually has no existence. The physicist says time is something that can be measured in one way or another by a clock. But what does the clock measure. Nothing but time!E. Dammann
Time is a dimension in the domain of descriptions, not a feature of the ambience. H.Maturana
"...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."Einstein
"Ultimately all moments are really one. Therefore, now is eternity." D. Bohm
"The world just does not happen, it simply is..."H.Weyl
"...As a result, all change must be gauged by correlations. Ultimately, everything must be correlated with the size of the Universe. Any vestige of a moving present has faded completely...Remember that Einstein spoke of an illusion...Might it be that our strong sense of the flow of time is an illusion akin to giddiness, perhaps connected with the way our memories operate?"P. Davies
"All these Nows,  just exist.  They do not appear and then vanish; they just are.   From a global perspective, there is no answer to the question, "What time is it?"  There are just different experiences at different Nows. From any given vantage point, you look back, and remember other times - so that the question, "Why is it this time right now, rather than some other time?" seems to make sense.  But there is no answer. When I came to this understanding, I forgot the meaning that Time had once held for me. Time has dissolved for me, has been reduced to something simpler that is not itself timeful. I can no longer conceive that there might really be a universal time, which is somehow "moving" from the past to the future.  This now seems like nonsense."E.Yudkowsky
One cannot though conclude how the variations are taking place, over what timescales they are taking place or even how old the universe is. The universe could be 10x10 years old or 5 x 10-44 sec (the Planck time)old, or any time in between. Time is strictly a parameter that can be introduced in the scale-invariant relationships. It has no meaning by itself. The universe appears to be evolving as the number of particles and ratios are varying. M Kafatos, S Roy and R Amoroso
"...the present moments of reality are now replacing one another, where if one had direct awareness of reality one would know reality as transcendental efficient moments (Stcherbatsky, F. Th. 1962 (1930). Buddhist Logic. Volume 1. Page 129: “[c]ause, efficiency or moment are but different names for the same thing”). From non-nirvanic awareness, one experiences imaginary causal connections between moments and thus fabricates the illusion of persistence and duration of objects. But when one experiences reality, one only experiences the efficient moments, rapidly replacing one another, like the flames of a fire. Buddha: “…the whole world is burning.” The non-nirvanic observer, unaware of the fiery, boiling nature of reality, is unaware that they will not exist beyond this present instant, and that any volition or hope is unneeded and illusory, and is based on the misery of unreality."J. Grupp
The Buddha said, "Even so was my past existence at that time real, but unreal the future and present existence; and my future existence will be at one time real but unreal the past and present existence; and my present existence is now real, but unreal the past and future existence. All these are merely popular designations and expressions, mere conventional term of speaking, mere popular notions" (Digha-nikaya). Hence the Buddha has only one time, that is "Eternal Present"."C.Hsiongcai
"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is." A.Watts
"Time, as self-determination of the eternal "Now", is essentially contained in this Now. There where time is, contained and extinquished, personality appears, as content of eternity." Nishida
The experience of present moment and historical time are complementary. Rodger
"So in summary, the universe we see is just a fragment nested in a timeless (everything) whole, rather than a single material world magically arisen above some primordial nothing. All universes exist without beginning or end in the ultimate arena of time, and each moment we experience exists forever."G.Giorbran
"Dogen writes, 'Entire being, the entire world, exists in the time of each and every now.' Thus the mind,body,being,world,and time form a unity. Not only are entities time, and not only is time in me, but activities are time. 'As the time now is all there is, each being-time is without exception entire time.' Dogen emphasizes the now momemt because there is never a time that has not been or a time that is coming. '...all is the immediate presencing here and now of being-time.' Thus time is a continuous occurrence of 'nows'. The Buddha-nature is a present actuality"C.Olson
"This means that because, in reality, there is no coming or going in time, when we cross the river or climb the mountain we exist in the eternal present of time; this time includes all past and present time." Dogen
"From the first time you meet a master, ....you should just sit wholeheartedly, and thus drop away body and mind."Dogen
"Zazen...is the front gate for Buddha-dharma. The great master Shakyamuni correctly transmitted this splendid method of attaining the way, and Tarthagatas of the past, future and present all attain the way by doing zazen. For this reason it has been transmitted as the front gate."Dogen
"The meaning of studying the sutras is that if you understand and follow the rules of practice for sudden or gradual realization taught by the Buddha, you will unmistakably attain enlightenment."Dogen
"Practise of the present moment is practice-realization, the beginner's mind is itself the entire original realization." Dogen
"Dogen frees himself from the representational mode of thinking without subverting time and remaining convinced that each moment is complete in itself and cannot be undermined."C.Olson
In talking about the No Boundry Proposal - "The universe would be completely self contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE." S.Hawking
"Whether or not reality has one universe or many, it had no beginning and was not created. It neither was nor will be. It just is." V.J.Stenger
"The Universe is a dynamic system in a permanent dynamic equilibrium, there is no beginning and no end of the universe."A.S.Sorli
...an order parameter isomorphism connects mind and body, will and brain, mental and neural events. Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain. Mind-body dualism is replaced by a single isomorphism, the heart of which is semantically meaningful pattern variables.... we sould take Sherrington's "enchanted loom" image of the brain very seriously indeed. 
       To provide a comprehensive online resource for those interested in learning about a sixth sense we call the squiggle sense. Why? Although all human beings possess the squiggle sense, most are unaware that they do.
JA Scott Kelso
Choice is the degree of freedom of potential action of a quantum coherent organism which is maximally spontaneous and free.  Rodger
The “self” is a representation of the autopoietic  life experience of the quantum coherent human organism. Rodger
The "mind" is not distinct from the body. There is no mind/body dualism. The mind is the embedded consciousness of the quantum coherent organism. Therefore, the "mind" is intimately responsive to the physical aspects of the body-at all levels. Rodger
Intention is the innate autopoietic matrix of the quantum coherent organism. Rodger
Can't have our cake and eat it too: The price we pay for living/activity is the arrow of time. Rodger
Consciousness emerges as a manifestation of the dissipative quantum dynamics of the brain. Professor Abrams
What does all this mean for consciousness? It simply means that reality, as empirically and mathematically demonstrated, does not exist in terms of a separately existing thing from which we take data. It means that reality is a question of a great number of configurations in which consciousness, the measuring device, and the thing measured exist in a configuration in which consciousness is an innate and intimate element. It means,... that consciousness is a necessary and original aspect of the universe as a whole and that consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon piled on top of some material complexity, but that it was always already there in some aspect yet to be determined; ... it means that the intuition of Nietzsche, the cosmic will to power, as described in Beyond Good and Evil, section 36, reflects a quantum mechanical view of the world. Nietzsche's BGE 36 does nothing less than raise the question, consistent with the cosmology of his cosmic will to power, of the inseparability of perception from the material-energetic universe, a world which is not really external anymore--... it is, I believe, the most astonishing page in the history of philosophy... This is an ontology in which the stuff of the universe, whatever we may call it, has the element of consciousness. You cannot understand this statement if you insist on adhering to the idea of local and pre-existing reality for which you have been prepared by 2500 years of Platonism. What does this have to do with the macroscopic world? Let us turn to the idea of "coarse-graining", a good introduction is found in Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar. And let us remember that reality exists as a series of configurations and not as pre-existing and absolute local reality on which we will exercise our unprejudiced, scientific method. To put it another way--there are a great number of parallel universes and no original created and absolutely existing universe to which we blithely apply the scientific method in order to find out the truth. William Plank
It is clear that in some way, human nature is nature observing itself. This involves a self-referential recursion that must somehow be drawn from the wellsprings of its own nature. Human beings can be thought of quite literally as the complementary nature observing itself. This indicates that nature must entail some kind of non trivial self-reference. JA Scott Kelso,DA Engstrom
The universe must be self-reflectively aware of itself as reality-in-itself to manifest the order that is a prior condition for all manifestation of being. Since consciousness in its most narrow formulation for human beings can be defined as self-reflective awareness founded upon a sense of internal consistency or order, we can safely argue that the universe is, in this sense, conscious.
Complementary constructs appear to be as fundamental to our conscious constructions of reality in ordinary and mathematical languages as they are to the unfolding of progressive stages of complexity in physical reality. The suggestion is that human consciousness infolds within itself the fundamental logical principle of the conscious universe, and is thereby enabled to construct a view of this universe in physical theory which describes the unfolding of the cosmic order at previous stages in the life of the cosmos.  M Kafatos, R Nadeau
Reality... is pictured as a limitless series of levels which extend to deeper and deeper subtleties and out of which the particular, explicate order of nature and the order of consciousness and life emerge. Synchronicities can therefore be thought of as an expression of this underlying movement, for they unfold as patterns of thoughts and arrangements of material processes which have a meaningful conjunction when taken together. F.D. Peat
In discussing singularity,"...the expansion is better envisaged as that of space itself, carrying the galaxies along for a ride. So when all the matter of the Universe was gathered together, that was because the space between galaxies was shrunk(or rather, not yet expanded). Space itself, and time, were created, like matter, in the big bang; there was no 'outside' into which the explosion expanded."Davies/Gribbin
"In physics, combination of space and time used in the theory of relativity. When developing relativity, Albert Einstein showed that time was in many respects like an extra dimension (or direction) to space. Space and time can thus be considered as entwined into a single entity, rather than two separate things." Dictionary
"Within other rhetorical contexts, Dogen goes to equate time with one's body and mind, ....These kinds of identification between time and the world suggests that space and time are inseparably interconnected and interpenetrate each other. In fact, Faure observes that Dogen's ontologization of time is simultaneously a spatialization of it."C.Olson
"The space/time continuum -A very simple definition: space and time considered together as one entity."D. Faige
“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” –Hermann Minkowski
"This being present, that arises; without this, that does not occur.  Everything is interconnected. If you were not, at this moment, and did not tie up or ever tie up all the aggregates or constituents that make you up, then those aggregates or constituents either might not have ever existed, or if they did, would be split up and used somewhere else, bumping everything from where it is to some other place...because if you were not, that is, never existed, then everything and every part that ever proceeded leading up to you being you would not have unfolded the way it has or be where it is or was or be impacted by what you are or have done or will do."
It (psychological phemomena)is, surely, an ecology(Gibson), a synergy( Haken), a Gestalt(koffka), a coalition (Shaw&Turvey), a communion(Buddhism) - a deep and inextricable interaction between organism and environment (if such a distinction is accepted, for reasons of scientific analysis.
P. Treffner
"The goal of Heidegger's thinking and teaching was to reawaken in human beings the awareness of the mystery of Being which is Nothing because it is No-thing. It is an ultimate, ungraspable, impersonal reality that reveals itself to human beings who are receptive to this revelation... By devoting himself to Being Heidegger hoped to overcome the emptiness and meaninglessness, the homelessness and anxiety of modernity." M. D. Henry
"The solution for the sense of nihilistic alienation in our culture is not to find a new ground; it is to find a disciplined and genuine means to pursue groundlessness, to go further into groundlessness….The mindfulness/awareness tradition points the way to a radically different resolution….when groundless is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion." F.j.varela e. Thompson
"The Augenblick-moment is not situated within the order of mathematical time, but rather in an emergence from it. Herein is attained the fullness and joy of the eternal present... Therein is the meaning and value of the experienced moment situated within it itself. With this is connected the Sacred within time, which is situated within the moment external to the temporal order." N.A. Berdyaev
"Hell-hades(suffering) cannot be thought of as eternal, rather only as an infinite endless time. Hell-hades is the impossibility of an emergence from this time."N.A. Berdyaev
All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green. Goethe
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality. Bergson
"Stace's investigation of the experience of pure consciousness/awareness lead him to conclude that thousands of mystics throughout the world unanimously assert that they attained a complete vacuum of particlar mental content and what emerges is a state of pure consciousness - 'pure' in the sense that it ... has no content except itself." Robert Brainbridge
"As the Christian mystics state,'God is no-thing', He is utterly other;He is VOID.'Eckhart proclaims,'Thou shalt love God as He is, a Non-Spirit, a Non-Person, a Non-Form.' Tauler describes God as 'The divine darkness, the nameless, formless nothing.' In the Jewish mysticism there are frequent references of God as No-thing. It is when these mystics make affirmative statements about the nature of God that misevaluation occurs. God cannot exist in the sense that we normally mean existence. As with things, whatever we say God is, he is not."Weinberg
"Mystical experiences... involve the apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither senses nor reason can penetrate. In other words, it entirely transcends our sensory-intellectual consciousness. Only fully developed experiences are necessarily apprehensive of the One." W.T.Stace
In pure experience there is "not the slightest interval between the intention and the act." Every action is a unity indivisible into temporal stages. Nishida
"By religious feeling, what I mean-altogether independently of any dogma, credo, organization of the Church, Holy Scripture, hope of personal salvation, etc.- the simple and direct fact of a feeling of the 'eternal'. This feeling is in truth subjective in nature. It is a contact."R.Rolland
Bare attention yeilds no experiencer seperable from experience, and the Buddha's teaching about the self becomes more than a theory. The absence of a permanent, seperable self erupts as a realty that changes the face of life. J. Macy
In pure experience there is no prior or posterior, no inner or outer; no experiencer precedes or generates experience. Nishida
We experience immortality in the unfrettered Now. Rodger
Were a man to say: I shall show the coming, the going, the passing away, the arising, the growth, the increase or development of consciousness apart from the body, sensation, perception and volitional formulations, he would be speaking about something which does not exist. Buddha