The Physics of Transfigured Light Quotes

“My vertigral examination of the
influence of the Hermetic imaginary suggests that while contemporary science has
availed itself of certain persistent figurations provided by this imaginary, it has so
far refused to accept the logical import of the worldview Hermeticism proposes. In
this regard, Antoine Faivre has recognized that the Gnostics and Hermeticists
asked perhaps the most fundamental of all scientific questions: What is the rela-
tionship between mind and nature? He adds, “When microphysicists and astro-
physicists pose this same question, they seem to take up and rediscover, in a dif-
ferent language, the hypotheses or ideas that previously belonged to some reli-
gious traditions.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“As in his
analogy, the reason that apparently different particles, separated in space and with
no possible proximate influence, can seem nonetheless to be causally related is be-
cause they are in reality the same object “projected” by a higher-dimensional
space.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“If two vortices come close together, they will interfere with each other, creating
a different pattern, and if they come too close they will eventually become a single
vortex. From this Bohm concludes that “there is an inherent interaction of these
patterns, but the basic reality is unbroken wholeness in flowing movement. Sepa-
rate entities such as vortices, are relatively constant and independently behaving
forms abstracted by the mind from the whole in perception and thought.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“René Thom more recently proposed a further modification of the concept of
the field organization of matter. In a manner that I propose is not that far removed
from Einstein’s project of finding a unified field theory, Thom considers that “we
might look upon all living phenomena as manifestations of a geometric object, the
life field (champ vital), similar to the gravitational or electromagnetic field; living
beings would then be particles or structurally stable singularities of this field.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“The fact that similar figurations and the relationships they
serve to articulate are found within the Kabbalistic, Gnostic, and Hermetic imagi-
naries would only have confirmed in Leibniz’s mind that he was “on the right
track” in delineating a rational reconstruction of the phenomenal world that was
undergirded by figurations derived from a metaphysical imaginary.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“Now, if logos means “pattern”—which is the meaning
René Thom asserts Heraclitus assigned it—then it is not difficult to see that the
Zohar ascribes to the figure of Adam Kadmon, and consequently the form of hu-
mankind, the Protagorean conclusion that “Man is the measure of all things.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“In what may imaginatively be described as an act of marvelous prescience,
Leibniz foresees not only the application of fractal algorithms to produce (simu-
late) the subtle bifurcations observed in the leaves and branches of plants, but also
the more recent theories of cosmologist Andrei Linde who proposes that we live in
a “multiverse” of embedded fractal universes.⁷² While in his own times Leibniz’s
monadological philosophy was regarded as rather odd, his fractalic conception of
the monad—where each monad is a fragment that contains the whole—is not at all
difficult to assimilate in today’s scientific culture.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“Yet the idea that there exists an order behind the
seemingly diverse phenomena of the turbulent flow of water and clouds,
of the striations in the bark of a tree as well as the fluctuations in the stock
market is what is now called “deterministic chaos.” Leibniz no doubt
apprehended in the Chinese concept of li a principle that could stand for
the sort of complex preestablished harmony he saw as systematically
ordering his universe of monads. That this natural order is so complex
that it mirrors the complexities of organisms rather than machines is an
idea that Needham apprehends as being the leitmotif of the “philosophy
of organism” as first promoted by Leibniz.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“The
neo-Confucian project, then, exactly parallels Leibniz’s own philosophical
project of including the “subjectivity” of psyches within the overall pattern
of nature. Consequently it should come as no surprise to find that he con-
sidered the Chinese concepts of li and chi to be further confirmation that
he was “on the right track” in forming his monadological system.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“According to Joseph Needham, li is not a mechanical order or “a
pattern thought of as something dead . . . it is dynamic pattern as embod-
ied in living things, and in human relationships and in the highest human
values.”⁵⁸ This idea is closely aligned with the notion of logos or “pattern”
in the West, yet it derives from ideas found in the appendices of the an-
cient divinatory text, the Yi Jing (I Ching) or Book of Changes.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“The sense of monas/monad as being the perspective of a single indi-
vidual still inheres in its modern derivatives: monk, monastery. The proto-
Indo-European root holds the sense of “solitary”: in the Buddhist text the
Suttanipata (3.11.40) we find the words, ekattam monam akkhatam, “soli-
tude is called wisdom.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“Leibniz notes that an “elect” few monads (souls) can rise above their
kind to a “greater theatre,” but the greater number do not.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“White-
head proceeds to contrast Leibniz’s work with that of Newton and Lu-
cretius, both of whom attempted to excise the thinking subject from an
objective description of the world, thus “explicitly asking the question, What does the world of atoms look like to an intellect surveying it?”⁴ Leib-
niz was concerned, however, to answer a completely different question:
“What is it like to be an atom?”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“The “notion of Law” in Whitehead’s examinations, I would say, bears
a homologous relationship to that of the logos-code in the work of Fludd,
Thom, and others: the idea that there is a “patterning” to the phenomenal
world.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“The difference between the Hermetic and Newtonian
views hangs on the notion of the “law” of gravitation. Newtonian laws are
deterministic, irreversible, and mechanistic (in fact all of these qualifi-
cations amount to saying the same thing), whereas the laws of the Her-
metic world were determined by a transcosmic Legislator and were per-
haps as periodically mutable as was his will.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“For Kepler and Robert Fludd, science was a revelation of the
logos-code of the world.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“It is no exaggeration to say that all phenomena are considered by con-
temporary science to be examples of amplitude positions within a radi-
ation continuum.
One of the most interesting aspects of late twentieth-
century science was the reappearance of the Pythagorean doctrine of the
vibratory harmony of matter, that all things are the result of harmonic ratios. “Superstring” theory proposes that all fun-damental particles (elec-
trons, quarks, leptons, muons, etc.) are but differing vibratory frequencies
of a single filamentous string. According to this latest development in
theoretical physics the entities that are the ultimate constituents of atoms
are but differing vibratory levels of a single substratum imagined as a
string or line. Matter, then, actualizes the form of an image observed in an
oscilloscope: a single line forms on the screen (its lowest vibratory state),
which, when “energized,” begins to change shape into a wave (an electron
perhaps) that eventually becomes a chaotic, spaghetti-like image observed
at its highest vibratory level. In superstring theory each level of vibration,
from undisturbed filament to violent spaghetti-chaos (and all states in be-
tween), represents some fundamental particle.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“Geometry is primarily a set of invariant rela-
tionships between rays, points, and curvatures. It was Fludd’s conviction,
just as it became for a thinker like René Thom, that this set of relation-
ships, reified within the fundamental pneumatic realm, both proved and
provided the rational undergirding of phenomena.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“In Fludd’s imaginary the nature of
mind or psyche is light, and as everything is composed of rays of light,
then everything is mind, at least to some degree.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“If an individual “awakes” to the fact of his divine origin, he has
the chance (through gnosis) to survive bodily decomposition and return
to the celestial spheres through the agency of this same subtle vehicle.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“In fact it is no exaggeration to say that it
is al-Kindi’s “radiation theory” of matter that provided the central figural
conception that would much later develop into the concept of the “lu-
miniferous aether,” then the “lines of magnetic force” of Faraday and fi-
nally the field theory of Einstein, an idea pursued at length in the final
chapter of this book.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“According to al-Kindi every single thing in the universe was
the site for the production of, and was subject to the influences of, fiery
stellar rays: “It is manifest that everything in this world, whether it be sub-
stance or accident, produces rays in its own manner like a star. . . . Every-
thing that has actual existence in the world of the elements emits rays in
every direction, which fill the whole world.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“Dawkins’s memes are relatively trivial patterns with a lim-
ited “life span”; an attractor, in its very definition, is possessed of a profound
(deep) geometry that lies outside of temporal considerations.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“According to Thom “coherent systems of catastrophes” (i.e., chreods) con-
stellate into structures that become “abstract algebraic entities independent of any
substrate.” He furthermore posits that the transformations of our space-time may
be directed or “programed” by another “algebraic structure” that is itself outside
our space-time entirely (refer to quotation above).”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“A chreod (creode) is Waddington’s term for
what he calls the “canalization of development” of a zygote, where its histogenesis
is governed by “a restricted number of end states among which there are few if any
intermediates.”⁵⁵ A chreod then is a “pathway of developmental change” involving
the actions of a “considerable number of . . . systems, and these are interrelated by
some feedback connection in such a way that the developing system, if diverted to
a minor extent from the creode, has a tendency to return to it.”⁵⁶ For Thom a chre-
od differs from a morphogenetic field only in the “privileged role allotted to time,”
that is, it is the term for a developmental description of the field.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“What is important though, is that these catastrophes can be described inde-
pendently of the physical substrate that may instantiate them: “One of the basic
postulates of my model is that there are coherent systems of catastrophes (chre-
ods) organized in archetypes and that these structures exist as abstract algebraic entities independent of any substrate.”⁵³
This allows Thom to make some surprising claims for his studies in morpho-
genesis. He insists that we must “accept the idea that a sequence of stable trans-
formations of our space-time could be directed or programmed by an organizing
center consisting of an algebraic structure outside space-time itself.”⁵⁴”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“Morphogenesis, the creation and
mutation of forms, is “described by the disappearance of the attractors repre-
senting the initial forms, and their replacement by capture*63 by the attractors
representing the final forms.”⁴⁷ Concerning “attractors,” Thom admits, “little is
known of the topological structure of structurally stable attractors. . . . It seems to
me, however, that this is the essential geometric phenomenon intervening in a
large number of morphogenetic processes, such as changes of phase in physics
and the phenomenon of induction in embryology.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“A catastrophe is Thom’s name for a major change in a system (described
topologically) that occurs following a minor change in the external variables used
to describe that system. His theory of catastrophes, however, is much more than
an exercise in applied topology. Despite his—admittedly not very strong—
protestations to the contrary, catastrophe theory makes a very strong metaphysical
claim. Everything in the phenomenal world is a type of dynamical system that can be described by one of seven “catastrophe sets” (i.e., the parameters describing
the system that indicate governance by one of the seven catastrophes). The ge-
ometrical shapes of the seven “elementary catastrophes” bear an iconic rela-
tionship to their names: the “cusp,” the “fold,” the “swallowtail,” the “wave”
(hyperbolic umbilic), the “hair” (elliptic umbilic), the “mushroom” (parabolic
umbillic), and the “butterfly” catastrophe set. Each of these is a recognizable
“shape” imaging the topological distortions that the system undergoes when one
or more of its variables are “tweaked.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“And Ein-
stein, of course, regarded the universe as a closed system in the shape of a hyper-
sphere.”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science

“The Sanskrit word loka (our
“locus”) literally means “world”—and what is a world but a delimited set of things?”
― Leon Marvell, The Physics of Transfigured Light: The Imaginal Realm and the Hermetic Foundations of Science