1) ''In Zen, too, we can see this preoccupation with the concept of transcending the system. For instance, the koan in which Tozan tells his monks that ''the higher Buddhism is not Buddha''. Perhaps, self-transcendence is even the central theme of Zen. A Zen person is always trying to understand more deeply what he is, by stepping more and more out of what he sees himself to be, by breaking every rule and convention which he perceives himself to be chained by # needless to say, including those of Zen itself. Somewhere along this elusive path may come enlightenment. In any case (as I see it), the hope is that by gradually deepening one's self-awareness, by gradually widening the scope of ''the system'', one will in the end come to a feeling of being at one with the entire universe.''

2) ''[...] This suggests a distinction that could be drawn between two senses of ''form'' in patterns which we analyze. First, there are qualities such as well-formedness, which can be detected by predictably terminating tests, as in BlooP programs. This I propose to call syntactic qualities of form. One intuitively feels about the syntactic aspects of form that they lie close to the surface, and therefore they do not provoke the creation of multidimensional cognitive sructures.
By contrast, the semantic aspects of form are those which cannot be tested for in predictable lengths of time: they require open-ended tests. Such an aspect is theoremhood of TNT-strings, as we have seen. You cannot just apply some standard test to a string and find out if it is a theorem. Somehow, the fact that its meaning is involved is crucially related to the difficulty of telling whether or not a string is a TNT-theorem. The act of pulling out a string's meaning involves, in essence, establishing all the implications of its connections to all other strings, and this leads, to be sure, down an open-ended trail. So ''semantic'' properties are connected to open-ended searches because, in an important sense, an object's meaning is not localized within the object itself. This is not to say that no understanding of any object's meaning is possible until the end of time, for as time passes, more and more of the meaning unfolds. However, there are always aspects of its meaning which will remain hidden arbitrarily long.''

3) ''In his book J.S. Bach's Musical Offering, Hans Theodore David writes: ''Throughout the Musical Offering, the reader, performer, or listener is to search for the Royal theme in all its forms. The entire work, therefore, is a ricercar in the original, literal sense of the word.'' I think this is true; one cannot look deeply enough into the Musical Offering. There is always more after one thinks one knows everything. For instance, towards the very end of the Six-Part Ricercar, the one he declined to improvise, Bach slyly hid his own name, split between two of the upper voices. Things are going on on many levels in the Musical Offering. There are tricks with notes and letters; there are ingenious variations on the King's Theme; there are original kinds of canons; there are extraordinarily complex fugues; there is beauty and extreme depth of emotion; even an exultation in the many-leveledness of the work comes through. The Musical Offering is a fugue of fugues, a Tangled Hierarchy like those of Escher and Gödel, an intellectual construction which reminds me, in ways I cannot express, of the beautiful many-voiced fugue of the human mind. And that is why in my book the three strands of Gödel, Escher and Bach are woven into an Eternal Golden Braid.''