Puzzle Analogy Quotes

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is enough to know that we are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes, “solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space itself is not expanding.” Rather, the galaxies are rushing apart. It is all something of a challenge to intuition. Or as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” The analogy that is usually given for explaining the curvature of space is to try to imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet’s surface, he would never find an edge. He might eventually return to the spot where he had started, and would of course be utterly confounded to explain how that had happened. Well, we are in the same position in space as our puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.

The various meanings of the tree—sun, tree of Paradise, mother, phallus—are explained by the fact that it is a libido-symbol and not an allegory of this or that concrete object. Thus a phallic symbol does not denote the sexual organ, but the libido, and however clearly it appears as such, it does not mean itself but is always a symbol of the libido. Symbols are not signs or allegories for something known; they seek rather to express something that is little known or completely unknown. The tertium comparationis for all these symbols is the libido, and the unity of meaning lies in the fact that they are all analogies of the same thing. In this realm the fixed meaning of things comes to an end. The sole reality is the libido, whose nature we can only experience through its effect on us. Thus it is not the real mother who is symbolized, but the libido of the son, whose object was once the mother. We take mythological symbols much too concretely and are puzzled at every turn by the endless contradictions of myths. But we always forget that it is the unconscious creative force which wraps itself in images. When, therefore, we read: “His mother was a wicked witch,” we must translate it as: the son is unable to detach his libido from the mother-imago, he suffers from resistances because he is tied to the mother.

ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY In Proust's Swann's Way a sip of tea and a bite of a small scallopshaped cake known as a petite madeleine cause the narrator to find himself suddenly flooded with memories from his past. At first he is puzzled, but then, slowly, after much effort on his part, he remembers that his aunt used to give him tea and madeleines when he was a little boy, and it is this association that has stirred his memory. We have all had similar experiences—a whiff of a particular food being prepared, or a glimpse of some long-forgotten object—that suddenly evoke some scene out of our past. The holographic idea offers a further analogy for the associative tendencies of memory. This is illustrated by yet another kind of holographic recording technique. First, the light of a single laser beam is bounced off two objects simultaneously, say an easy chair and a smoking pipe. The light bounced off each object is then allowed to collide, and the resulting interference pattern is captured on film. Then, whenever the easy chair is illuminated with laser light and the light that reflects off the easy chair is passed through the film, a three-dimensional image of the pipe will appear. Conversely, whenever the same is done with the pipe, a hologram of the easy chair appears. So, if our brains function holographically, a similar process may be responsible for the way certain objects evoke specific memories from our past

... if we are to see the order of nature as a kind of story, then there has to be some kind of intelligence, some kind of wisdom, some kind of storyteller that makes it a story. There must be some kind of singer that sings this song. Not, of course, with our particular human, linguistic kind of intelligence and wisdom and singing, but with something analogous to these ... I want to appropriate the word "God" ... and use it to refer to the wisdom by which the world is a story, the singer by which nature is not just sound and fury but music. What I refer to as God is not any character in the drama of the universe but the author of the universe, the mystery of wisdom which we know of but cannot begin to understand, the wisdom that is the reason why there is a harmony called the universe which we can just stumblingly begin to understand. Our lives are a subplot in the story of the universe, but that story is not one we can comprehend, and it is one that often puzzles us and troubles us and sometimes outrages us. But it is a story. And I say this not because I have FAITH, or BELIEVE it, but simply because I cannot believe that existence is a tale told by an idiot. If I were to tell you what I believe, I would tell you much more. I would tell you that by the gift of faith I believe ... that the wisdom which made this drama so loved his human characters that he become one himself to share their lives; he chose to be a character in the story, to share their hopes and fears and suffering and death.

Susan Haack make a similar point with her crossword-puzzle analogy. She develops the analogy and offers many other insights in a book I recommend to the reader with no reservations, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003

wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience…. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him.

I am torn because I realize that you, dear reader, may very well be reading this after 2019 and view the focus on this time frame in your past as misguided nonsense.  But I would not be intellectually honest if I gloss over all the clues that do seem to point to December 2019.  Perhaps I will be lucky enough to look back at these years from now and make an analogy to jigsaw puzzle pieces that, although their shapes fit together perfectly, did not combine to form a relevant image.  You can understand the hesitation to take such pieces back apart when they fit together so perfectly.  With such thoughts in mind, I have decided to include my reasoning for thinking that a pole shift could be due in December 2019, even though it is less than two years away and that timing will, hopefully, seem silly by the time you read this.

after years of continuously working in front of screens. Although he used his phone to capture precious moments with his children, stay connected with family, and engage with social media, he couldn't shake the feeling that screens had become an outsized part of his parenting. "One of the biggest mistakes I made during the pandemic was buying an iPad," he admitted. "It became a crutch when I didn't feel like being present or when one of my younger ones became difficult to handle. I kept using the screen as a pacifier, rather than introducing proper ways to deal with boredom and their high energy levels." Growing up, Jason had fond memories of playing catch with his dad, creating scrap albums, and watching photos develop in his father's darkroom studio. "It taught me patience, curiosity, and precision,” he recalled. "It helped me become very careful when writing code and trying to get it right the first time." Inspired by these cherished memories, Jason resolved to reintroduce more analog activities into his family's daily life. He purchased a film camera, set up a darkroom in their home, and acquired puzzles for his younger children. Over the next two years, Jason noticed a significant improvement in his connection with his children as they bonded over these analog pastimes. As his children prepared for high school, he felt ready

But it doesn’t happen that way usually,” puzzled the comely ecstatica. “They like to haunt stationary places, houses, churchyards—but moving trains? notional rail lines? hardly ever. If at all.” “Something’s afoot,” groaned the Cohen, with an inflection almost of gastric distress. “And did somebody just blow up a train line?” Lew feeling somewhat out of his depth here, “or . . .” “Tried to,” she said, “thought about it, dreamed it, or saw something—analogous to an explosion. Death is a region of metaphor, it often seems.” “Not always decipherable,” added the Cohen, “but in this case Eastern-Questionable, beyond a doubt. More Renfrew and Werfner melodrama. Queer Street for the Tiresome Twins, I’d say. Not immediately clear which will murder the other, but the crime itself is as certain as the full moon.

An analogy of a psychological masterpiece, piecing together the puzzle becoming mind master of theology. What matters the creed? We all came from the One True Living Deity, a billions upon billions of seeds sown from his likeness & imagery. Instead of philanthropy, brothers of brothers and sisters hate each other; the envy, lust and greed. Oppressional slavery against our fellow posterity.