William Butler Yeats – Not One, Not Two

The part is not the whole…but it also isn’t *not* the thing of which it is a part. As Alan Watts is so often quoted in pantheist circles as saying, “A wave is a function of what the entire ocean is doing,” and so is the feather of a duck. If you point at a duck’s feather, you are also pointing at the duck that grew it as part of its body. Your ability to isolate your attention on the feather does not remove it from its natural context of duckness.