questions

 

.

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)

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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

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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

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I and this mystery here we stand. —Walt Whitman

   

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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

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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

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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

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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

 

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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

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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

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the true nature of things

 

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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!

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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

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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

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deep beauty

 

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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

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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

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the uni(verse, one substance and one soul

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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

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a mystical geography

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please also see the splendid essay by Fred Bahnson,

The Church Forests of Ethiopia, at Emergence Magazine

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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

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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.”

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more magic

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how to live on earth

  

The Kummakivi (Strange Rock)

Ruokolahti, Finland

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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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gathering life out of the rain

  

 

 

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There's a tree walking around in the rain,
it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
It has an errand. It gathers life
out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear nights
waiting as we do for the moment
when the snowflakes blossom in space.


—Tomas Tranströmer
the tree and the sky

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If the eye of the heart is open, in each atom there will be one hundred secrets. —Farid ud-Din Attar

 

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There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. It was not and is not in the power of this Being—any more than it is in your own—to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his Existence; but just as it is in your power to expand or to concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. 

What you call The Universe is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures—the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself. 

All these creatures—all—those which you term animate, as well as those to whom you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation—all these creatures have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain:—but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself. 

These creatures are all, too, more or less conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One. 

Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.

—Edgar Allan Poe 1809 - 1849
Eureka: A Prose Poem

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Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. 

Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.


—Chuang Tzu
Kuang-Ming Wu version

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love is a mystery

 

.

All things feel.

—Pythagoras

.

I revere [trees] when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. 

[…] A tree says: The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.


—Herman Hesse
Notes and Sketches

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Respect the mind that stirs in every creature: love is a mystery known by metals too; every flower opens its soul to Nature; everything is sentient, and works on you.

Beware! From the blind wall one watches you: even matter has a logos all its own . . . do not put it to some impious use. Often in humble life a god works, hidden; and like a new-born eye veiled by its lids, pure spirit grows beneath the surface of stones.


—Gerard de Nerval
1808 –1855

.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves —Nhat Hanh

 

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Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. 

And therein we err, and greatly err. 
For the animal shall not be measured by man. 

In a world older and more complete than ours they move 
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. 

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. 

—Henry Beston
The Outermost House 

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Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth.

I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;

while there is a criminal element, I am of it; 

while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.


—Eugene Debs
Statement to the Court, excerpt
Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act,
September 18, 1918

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living love

The Sami Yusuf Ensemble, The Scoring Orchestra of Paris, 

The Métaboles, and stellar soloists and specialist musicians 

CC/subtitles on

. 

Once the realization is accepted that
even between the closest human beings infinite
distances continue to exist, a wonderful living
side by side can grow up, 

if they succeed in loving the
distance between them which makes it
possible for each to see the other
whole against the sky.


—Rainer Maria Rilke 

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how beautiful we are

.

slow growth

   

 

.

 

The most living moment comes when
those who love each other meet each

other's eyes and in what flows

between them then. To see your face

in a crowd of others, or alone on a 

frightening street, I weep for that.

Our tears improve the earth. The

time you scolded me, your gratitude,

your laughing, always your qualities

increase the soul. Seeing you is a 

wine that does not muddle or numb.

We sit inside the cypress shadow

where amazement and clear thought

twine their slow growth into us.


—Rumi

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sweet question

 

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Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. […] 

Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal - always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything - all beings - including what we generally class as things, objects.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Deep in Admiration
(Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet)

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These days I can see us clinging to each other 

as we are swept along by the current 

I am clinging to you to keep you from 

being swept away and you are clinging to me 

we see the shores blurring past as we hold 

each other in the rushing current 

the daylight rushes unheard far above us 

how long will we be swept along in the daylight 

how long will we cling together in the night 

and where will it carry us together


—W.S. Merwin
Here Together
Garden Time

.

The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.

She said,
“The sun has been my faithful lover 
For millions of years.
Whenever I offer my body to him 
Brilliant light pours from his heart.
Thousands then notice my happiness 
And delight in pointing
toward my beauty.

Hafiz, 
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
Itself?”

And I replied, 
"Dear moon, 
Now that your love is maturing,
We need to sit together
Close like this more often

So I might instruct you 
How to become
Who you
Are!"


—Hafiz

.

questions

 

david sanger

.

I have been thinking of the difference between
water and the waves on it.

Rising, water's still water, falling back, it is water.
Will you give me a hint how to tell them apart? 

Because someone has made up the word "wave,"
do I have to distinguish it from water? 
There is a Secret One inside us; the planets in all the galaxies pass through his hands like beads. 

That is a string of beads one should look at 
with luminous eyes.


—Kabir

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the medicine

 

. 

If there were a way for someone to be, at the same time, before and behind things, he would understand to what a degree time's opening, that simply devours events, loses its meaning; exactly as in a poem.


—Odysseus Elytis
To Anoint the Repast XXIV, excerpt
Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris version

.

Every spiritual wisdom tradition from time immemorial has pointed out in its own creative way that grasping onto the idea of intrinsic, independent existence─both in the seemingly objective outer world and within the subjective domain of our own selves─is the fundamental mental affliction, the root cause of our self-created delusion with all of its concomitant suffering. 

Clinging onto the idea that we exist in a way that we simply do not is a deeply entrenched unconscious disposition, a habitual pattern that at a certain point gains enough momentum to develop a seeming autonomy such that it re-generates itself, as we invest our life force into an illusory identity and unconsciously recreate it moment by moment. 

These same spiritual wisdom traditions point out that the realization of what in Buddhism is called “emptiness”─the lack of intrinsic, independent objective existence of both the outer world as well as ourselves─is the fundamental cure for our psychic dis-ease.

[...] In discovering that there is no objective world out there and no objective subject in here, quantum physics is discovering the medicine─the fundamental cure─for the psycho-spiritual illness that ails our species.

—Paul Levy

.

When I come near the red peony flower
I tremble as water does near thunder,
As the well does when the plates of earth move,
Or the tree when fifty birds leave at once.

The peony says that we have been given a gift,
And it is not the gift of this world.
Behind the leaves of the peony
There is a world still darker, that feeds many.


—Robert Bly

.

as light pours like rain

 

.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

.

God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.


—Hafiz

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