the seed never sees the flower —Zen Proverb

.

A famous thorny issue in philosophy is the so-called infinite regress problem. For example, if we say that the properties of a diamond can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its carbon atoms, that the properties of a carbon atom can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its protons, neutrons and electrons, that the properties of a proton can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its quarks, and so on, then it seems that we're doomed to go on forever trying to explain the properties of the constituent parts. 

The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis offers a radical solution to this problem: at the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all! In other words, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not from properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks. 

The external physical reality is therefore more than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it can have many interesting properties while its parts have no intrinsic properties at all.

 

—Max Tegmark (1967 - )
Our Mathematical Univere

.

You're water.
We're the millstone.

You're wind.
We're dust blown up into shapes.

You're spirit.
We're the opening and closing of our hands.

You're the clarity.
We're the language that tries to say it.

You're joy.
We're all the different kinds of laughing!


—Rumi (1207 - 1273)

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every form is an experiencing form

the observable universe

.

The sensibility in perceiving all things as a sign of the Mystery 

is the tranquil truth of the human being.

—Fr. Giussani

.

 

Magic, in its most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form that one perceives—from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are different from our very own.

—David Abram

.

We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.


—Wendell Berry

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every(thing is necessary

 

.

Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way. 

Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God.


—Søren Kierkegaard
Works of Love (1847)

.

There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson.

Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling.

Of the telling there is no end. And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all, all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing

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two orders of reality & the light of consciousness (always a finer constitution)

 

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[Physicist David] Bohm suggested that the explicate order is extracted from the implicate order in a similar way in which a holographic image is extracted from a series of swirls and shadings into a three-dimensional image when illuminated by laser light. 

The illumination that extracts the physical universe from the implicate order is the light of consciousness. 

In this model the act of observation draws ‘in-formation’ out of the implicate order and manifests it in the explicate order. Bohm was keen to use the term in-formation rather than information. By this he meant a process that actually ‘forms’ the recipient.


—Anthony Peake
Infinite Mindfield

.

 

 

We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle 'nature'. We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.


—Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
The Critique of Pure Reason 

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the nature of things

Sweden, 1925

.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.


—Henry David Thoreau
from Economy, 1854

.

Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of “things” that are in this or that state but in terms of “processes” instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another.  

The properties of “things” manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction—that is to say, at the edges of the processes—and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one. 

This is the vertiginous dive taken by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Dirac—into the depth of the nature of things.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

.

do you hear the footsteps in the other room?

 

.

We are all made of bits moving in complicated quantum motions, but when we look closely at those bits, we find that they are located out at the farthest boundaries of space. I don’t know anything less intuitive about the world than this.

Getting our collective head around the Holographic Principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics.


—Leonard Susskind
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

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I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. 

What is there then that can be taken as true? 

Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. 


—René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

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Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light steps, soft drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is just leaving,
the night yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
are just around the corner,
figurations of time
at the turn of this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward,
asleep with all five senses awake,
rain, light steps, a murmuring of syllables,
air and water, words without weight:
what we were and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time, great grief,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the wet asphalt sparkles,
the steam rises and walks,
the night unfolds and beholds me,
you are you and your waist of fog,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, slow lightning,
you cross the street and come in through my forehead,
footsteps of water upon both my eyelids,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt sparkles, you cross the street,
the fog wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the wave of your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn both of my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a welling up of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
years go by, moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the other room?
neither here nor there: you hear them
in another time that is also this time,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight or location,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the garden,
lightning has nested there among the leaves,
a restless garden lazily drifting
— come in, your shadow covers this page.


—Octavio Paz
As One Listens To The Rain
Paul Weinfeld version

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the mind has no existence by itself

.

.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance - by your sufferance. 

See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

.

The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. 

And it is entirely private. 

Take it to be a dream and be done with it.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

The vast marvel is to be alive… 

The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. 

Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul.

There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

—D.H. Lawrence

The Apocalypse

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wait

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every beating heart

lotus pod
Karen Lindquist

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A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. 

A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

—Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

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largerloves

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the good secret

   

Gregory Colbert

.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Then when you see what is around you as not other-than-you, and all and everything as the existence of the One; when you do not see anything else with Him or in him; but see Him in everything as yourself and at the same time as the nonexistence of yourself; then what you see is the truth.


—Ibn al-Arabi

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Love all.

Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand.

Love every leaf and every ray of light.

Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment.

If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.


—Dostoevsky

.

this is how love catches up and wants to be our friend, as we hold 

each other, and the good secret inside slides forth continuous

—Rumi

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questions

 

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You want somehow or other to maintain that the world is real. 

What is the standard of reality? 

That alone is real which exists by itself, which reveals itself by itself and which is eternal and unchanging. Does the world exist by itself? Was it ever seen without the aid of the mind? In deep sleep there is neither mind nor world. 

When awake, there is the mind and there is the world. What does invariable concomitance mean? You are familiar with the principles of inductive logic which are considered the very basis of scientific investigation. Why do you not decide this question of the reality of the world in the light of those accepted principles of logic?

Of yourself, you can say “I exist”. That is, your existence is not mere existence; it is existence of which you are conscious. Really, it is existence identical with consciousness. 

Consciousness is always Self-consciousness. If you are conscious of anything you are essentially conscious of yourself. Unselfconscious existence is a contradiction in terms. It is no existence at all. It is merely attributed existence, whereas true existence, the SAT, is not an attribute, it is the substance itself. It is the Vastu (Reality). 

Reality is therefore known as SAT-CHIT, being consciousness, and never merely the one to the exclusion of the other. The world neither exists by itself, nor is it conscious of its existence. 

How can you say that such a world is real?

And what is the nature of the world? It is perpetual change, a continuous, interminable flux. A dependent, unselfconscious, ever-changing world cannot be real.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi 

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appear(ances

  

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The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.
 

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

 

The appearance of water in a mirage persists after the fact that it is a mirage has  dawned on us. So it is with the world. 

Though knowing it to be unreal, it continues to manifest - but we do not try to satisfy our thirst with the water of the mirage. 

As soon as one knows that it is a mirage, one gives it up as useless and does not run after it to get water.


—Ramana Maharshi

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if you pray, if you love

 

.

You might quiet the whole 

world for a second if you pray.

And if you love, if you really love,

our guns will wilt.


—St. John of the Cross

.

 

 

 

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift. —Albert Einstein

.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.


—Douglas Adams
from a Speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, (1998)

.

Since the wave function is thought to be a complete description of physical reality and since that which the wave function describes is idea-like as well as matter-like, then physical reality must be both idea-like and matter-like. In other words, the world cannot be as it appears. 

Incredible as it sounds, this is the conclusion of the orthodox view of quantum mechanics.


—Gary Zukov
The Dancing Wu Li Masters

.

We should face up to something that’s rarely if ever voiced in modern cosmology: the possibility that the true nature of the universe as a whole has nothing to do with the way its parts work, that it indeed lies outside the very characteristics of its components.


—Robert Lanza
Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space

.

I and this mystery here we stand. —Walt Whitman

   

.

Like modern string theorists, the Dogon say that, conceptually, prior to existing as particles, matter exists as primordial threads, which are effectively woven into matter. Each thread is said to pass through a series of 7 vibrations inside a tiny egg, which the Dogon call The Po Pilu and which we take as a likely counterpart to the tiny, wrapped-up bundles of seven dimensions in string theory or torsion theory called the Calabi-Yau Space. 

It is this component of matter that the Dogon Priests call the egg of the world and describe as a pivotal component of matter to be found in the world just 'below' ours. The vibrations inside this egg are conceived of as seven rays of a star of increasing length and are represented by yet another Dogon drawing. The figures of this drawing are read from right to left, like Egyptian glyphs as they are arranged in some inscriptions or like the letters of a traditional Hebrew text.


—Laird Scranton
The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol

.

We can never directly see what is true, that is, identical with what is divine: we look at it only in reflection, in example, in the symbol, in individual and related phenomena. We perceive it as a life beyond our grasp, yet we cannot deny our need to grasp it.

[...] The highest achievement of the human being as a thinking being is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.


—Johann Wolfgang von Goeth

.

Science of nature has one goal: 
To find both manyness and whole. 

Nothing 'inside' or 'Out There,' 
The 'outer' world is all 'In Here.' 

This mystery grasp without delay, 
This secret always on display. 

The true illusion celebrate, 
Be joyful in the serious game! 

No living thing lives separate: 
One and Many are the same.


—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749 - 1832)

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the four immeasurables — leave nothing untouched

   

 

.

 

The fourteenth-century Tibetan master Longchenpa said there are five characteristics we should cultivate in order to practice the four immeasurables — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity: 

(1) a fundamental attitude as vast as space;
(2) a mind as constant as the depths of the ocean;
(3) seeing all occurrences, inner and outer, as mist floating in the sky;
(4) a compassionate attitude as even as the rays of the sun 
(5) sensing negativities to be like specks of dust in our eyes.

—Longchenpa

.

Return to the most human, nothing less will nourish the torn spirit, the bewildered heart, the angry mind: and from the ultimate duress, pierced with the breath of anguish, speak of love.

Return, return to the deep sources, nothing less will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve, to carve into our lives the forms of tenderness and still that ancient necessary pain preserve.

Return to the most human, nothing less will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart; the torn mind, to accept the whole of its duress, and pierced with anguish… at last, act for love.

—May Sarton
Unison Benediction

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Whatever experience is present
you clearly see right there,
right there—not taken in,
unshaken: that’s how you develop the heart.


—Shakyamuni Buddha
View of an Auspicious Day

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part(ners

 

.

The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.


—James Lovelock

.

For (Heraclitus), reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes. The fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not material substance but volatile flux, namely 'fire,’ and all things are versions thereof. 

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). 

Not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.

—Nicholas Rescher

.

 

the true nature of things

 

.

Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. 

Once again, there is only the dance. 

At the unimaginable heart of the atom, the compact nucleus, we have found no solid object, but rather a dynamic pattern of tightly confined energy vibrating perhaps 1022 times a second: a dance …


—George Leonard
Wake up and Laugh!

.

It is plausible that what seems like matter to our senses is nothing more than the effect of whirling dances of particles.

In holography, the reality of an object is its interference pattern, which the laser beam then translates into a three-dimensional image. In the same way the true nature of things is the rhythms of the basic code that the senses translate into three-dimensional images. Things are all essentially the same. What changes is the rhythm. 

If the rhythm of iron changed to that of wood, we would perceive it as wood and not as iron anymore. 


—Massimo Citro
The Basic Code of the Universe: The Science of the Invisible in Physics, Medicine, and Spirituality 

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listen

 

.

If you want what visible reality
can give, you're an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,
but you'll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love's confusing joy.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

.

listen

hiding in this cage
of visible matter

is the invisible
lifebird

pay attention
to her

she is singing
your song


—Kabir
Sushil Rao version

.

deep beauty

 

.

Do you think that you can clear your mind by sitting constantly in silent meditation? This makes your mind narrow, not clear. 

Integral awareness is fluid and adaptable, present in all places and at all times. 

That is true meditation. … The Tao is clear and simple, and it doesn’t avoid the world.


—Laozi

.

In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. 

One starts to feel that everything in existence—whether people or things—breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. 

The world’s truth is impalpable.


—Clarice Lispector
Selected Crônicas

.

the uni(verse, one substance and one soul

.

All things are little, changeable, perishable. 

All things come from thence, from that universal ruling power either directly proceeding or by way of sequence. 

And accordingly the lion’s gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every harmful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. 

Do not then imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.

[...] Think always of the universe as one living creature, made of one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.


—Marcus Aurelius
April 26, 121 — March 17, 180, Rome
Meditations

.

 

There are many great voices but not all are human. —Native American proverb

 

 .

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. 

You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. 

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

—Ram Dass

. 

a mystical geography

.

please also see the splendid essay by Fred Bahnson,

The Church Forests of Ethiopia, at Emergence Magazine

.

excerpts:

This land was once completely forested, Dr. Alemayehu Wassie began—sweeping his arms across the surrounding countryside—so much so that nobody would have seen the church. It was all trees. Now almost all the old forests have been cut down. The only place where they are still protected are in church forests like this one. When the people here at Zajor decided to build their wall, he said, they were not bureaucratic, they just built a wall. He motioned to the elderly priest with the carved wooden staff and thanked him for initiating the project. Alemayehu hoped other priests would be inspired by this community’s example.

As we stood beside the wall, a stream of local parishioners came and went through the gate. This is what Alemayehu meant when he described the wall as “porous.” 

A group of children hopped on the wall and ran down its length to the west until they rounded the corner and were lost to sight. An elderly woman approached. She stopped beside the wall, crossed herself three times, then bowed low at the waist and began to fan her face with both hands, cupping the air and pulling it toward her, as if partaking of some invisible goodness that lay inside the wall. Then she rose and walked solemnly up the forest path. Clearly this was no mere border fence; it was an entrance into the sanctuary.

“Humans can come here any hour of the day to 

contemplateor pray or collect seeds.”

click to enlarge

.

During the centuries when most people were illiterate, icons served to teach the biblical stories. The paintings, most from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, were made from natural dyes taken from local plants. Other than the tin roof and solar panels, all the materials for the church came from this place. In these icons was a forest transformed, the trees and roots and pollen all having passed through the fires of human imagination, while still retaining their sylvan imprint.

Perhaps I was witnessing more than gestures of devotion, important as they were. Maybe they were also the secret to conserving the forest, small acts that together with hundreds of other gestures like them formed an invisible shield around the forests of Zajor. As I would come to learn, this shield was embedded deep within the structures of belief that had survived here since the fourth century. Our Western conceptions of belief are almost entirely inward and private. Here, and at other points on my journey into these forests, I was witnessing the performance of a mystical geography, the soul’s journey to God made visible in the landscape.

“In our tradition, the church is like an ark. 

A shelter for every kind of creature and plant.”

.

more magic

.

how to live on earth

  

The Kummakivi (Strange Rock)

Ruokolahti, Finland

.

We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense America is dying, from within, because they forgot the instructions of how to live on earth.

It is the Hopi belief, it is our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth, and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, it is likely that you will not make it.

Everything is spiritual, everything has a spirit, everything was brought here by the creator, the one creator. Some people call him God, some people call him Buddha, some people call him Allah, some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila... Grandfather.

We are here on earth only a few winters, then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real then most of us believe. The spirit world is everything. Over 95% of our body is water. In order to stay healthy you've got to drink good water. ... Water is sacred, air is sacred. 

Our DNA is made out of the same DNA as the tree, the tree breaths what we exhale, we need what the tree exhales. So we have a common destiny with the tree. We are all from the earth, and when earth, the water, the atmosphere is corrupted then it will create its own reaction. The mother is reacting.

In the Hopi prophecy they say the storms and floods will become greater. To me its not a negative thing to know that there will be great changes. Its not negative, its evolution. When you look at it as evolution, it's time, nothing stays the same.

You should learn how to plant something. That is the first connection. You should treat all things as spirit, realize that we are one family. It is never something like the end. It is like life, there is no end to life.


—Floyd Red Crow Westerman

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