Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world. —Jack Kerouac

  

Earth, seen from Saturn by NASA's Cassini

.

0nce you wipe the dust from your screen,

the remaining blue dot is … us

—Col. Chris Hadfield

 

 

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Consider that:

you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. 

As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 

90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” 

The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star.

Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. 

The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. 

So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. 

This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum. 


—NASA Lunar Science Institute

 

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there is a small space

  

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All reality is consciousness.

And the same consciousness is the life of all: thus we have the explanation for both the sanctity and the unity of life.

As far, verily, as this world-space extends, so far extends the space within the heart. 

Within it, indeed, are contained both heaven and earth, both fire and wind, both sun and moon, lightning and the stars, both what one possesses here and what one does not possess; everything here is contained within it.


—Chhandogya Upanishad 8.1.3

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You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. 

The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage to others.  

Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

—Buckminster Fuller

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There is a beautiful expression [...] in the Chandogya Upanishad: 'There is this City of Brahman, (that is the body), and in this city there is a shrine, and in that shrine there is a small lotus, and in that lotus there is a small space, (akasa).'

Now what exists within that small space, that is to be sought, that is to be understood. This is the great discovery of the Upanishads, this inner shrine, this guha, or cave of the heart, where the inner meaning of life, of all human existence, is to be found.


—Bede Griffiths

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always the beautiful answer

 

 

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You and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included. 

Miracles are to come. 

With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush 'tie it into my hand'—nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. 

Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making; only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening; only alive. 

Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong; never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom, greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have: only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.


—E. E. Cummings
introduction from Collected Poems, excerpts

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questions

 

 

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I did my best to notice

When the call came down the line

Up to the platform of surrender

I was brought, but I was kind

And sometimes I get nervous

When I see an open door

Close your eyes, clear your heart

Cut the cord

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

My sign is vital

My hands are cold

And I'm on my knees

Looking for the answer

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

 

Pay my respects to grace and virtue

Send my condolences to good

Give my regards to soul and romance

They always did the best they could

And so long to devotion

You taught me everything I know

Wave goodbye, wish me well

 

You've got to let me go

 

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

My sign is vital

My hands are cold

And I'm on my knees

Looking for the answer

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

 

Will your system be alright

When you dream of home tonight?

There is no message we're receiving

Let me know, is your heart still beating?

 

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

My sign is vital

My hands are cold

And I'm on my knees

Looking for the answer

thanks Roy

the stuff of reality

  

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Particle physics has taught us that every atom in the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles.

At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms.

Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. [It] presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be sceptical. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn’t seem that what we’re seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of immensely complicated chemical reaction. 

At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe.

There’s an older thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, had an impressive ship in which he had fought numerous battles. To honor him, the citizens of Athens preserved his ship in their port. Occasionally a plank or part of the mast would decay beyond repair and have to be replaced. We have a question of identity: is it the same ship after we’ve replaced one of the planks? If you think it is what about after we’ve replaced all of the planks, one by one? And (as Thomas Hobbes went on to ask) what if we then took all the old planks and built a ship out of them? Would that one then suddenly become the Ship of Theseus?

Narrowly speaking, these are all questions about identity. When is one thing “the same thing” as some other thing? But more broadly, they are questions about ontology, our basic view of what exists in the world. 

What kinds of things are there at all?

—Sean Carroll
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and The Universe Itself

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real(ly

  

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Explain quantum mechanics in 5 words or less.

"Don’t look : waves.
Look : particles."

(an answer to a challenge asked by Sean Carroll on Twitter, originally posed by physicist John Wheeler) 

.

There is a lot to say about quantum mechanics, perhaps the most mysterious idea ever to be contemplated by human beings, but all we need is one simple (but hard to accept) fact: 

How the world appears when we look at it is very different from how it really is.


—Sean Carroll
The Particle at the End of the Universe - The Hunt for the Higgs and the Discovery of a New World

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the overall number of minds is just one. —Erwin Schrödinger

 

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“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote as he bridged his young science with ancient Eastern philosophy to reckon with the ongoing mystery of what we are.

A century later — a century in the course of which we unraveled the double helix, detected the Higgs boson, decoded the human genome, heard a gravitational wave and saw a black hole for the first time, and discovered thousands of other possible worlds beyond our Solar System — the mystery has only deepened for us “atoms with consciousness, capable of music and of murder. Each day, we eat food that becomes us, its molecules metabolized into our own as we move through the world with the illusion of a self. Each day, we live with the puzzlement of what makes us and our childhood self the same person, even though most of our cells and our dreams have been replaced. Each day, we find ourselves restless miniatures of a vast universe we are only just beginning to fathom. 

In Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, the Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts “as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.

Theise defines the core scientific premise of his inquiry: Complexity theory is the study of how complex systems manifest in the world. Complexity in this context refers to a class of patterns of interactions: open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining, how life self-organizes from the substance of our universe, from interactions within the quantum foam to the formation of atoms and molecules, cells, human beings, social structures, ecosystems, and beyond.

Neither we nor our universe is machinelike. A machine doesn’t have the option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes overwhelming. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behaviors in the face of the unpredictable. That creativity is the essence of complexity.

A century after Schrödinger made his haunting assertion that "the overall number of minds is just one”, Theise considers the ultimate reward of this lens on reality: Complexity theory can foster an invaluable flexibility of perspectives and awaken us to our true, deep intimacy with the larger whole, so that we might return to what we once had: our birthright of being one with all.

Central to complexity theory is the notion of emergent phenomena like ant colonies, like crowds, like consciousness. Theise writes: A distinguishing feature of life’s complexity is that, in every single instance, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if one knows the characteristics and behaviors of all the individual elements of a living system (a cell, a body, an ecosystem), one cannot predict the extraordinary properties that emerge from their interactions. […] 

The emergent phenomena of ant colonies do not arise because some leader in the colony is planning things. While emergence often looks planned from the top down, it is not. A simple ant line provides a good example. Ants take food from wherever they find it and bring it back to the colony. Back and forth the ants go, so efficient and well ordered it seems as though someone must certainly have set it all up. But no one did. The queen ant doesn’t perform an administrative function; she does not monitor the status of the colony as a whole. She serves only a reproductive function. There is no single ant or group of ants at the top planning the food line or any other aspect of the colony. The organization arises only from the local interactions between each ant and any other ant it encounters.

Zooming out to the planetary scale, he argues that all living beings on Earth are a single organism animated by a single consciousness that permeates the universe. The challenge, of course, is how to reconcile this view with our overwhelming subjective experience as autonomous selves, distinct in space and time — an experience magnified by the vanity of the free will, which keeps on keeping us from seeing clearly our nature as particles in a self-organizing whole. 

To allay the paradox, Theise leans on a centerpiece of quantum theory: Neils Bohr’s notion of complementarity — the idea that because two different reads on reality can both be true but not at the same time, to describe reality we must choose between the two in order to keep the internal validity and coherence of one from interfering with that of the other. Inviting such a complementarity of perspectives, he writes: The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.

This is more than a metaphysical orientation to reality — it is a profoundly physical fact, of which cells themselves are the living proof. Furnishing the scientific affirmation of Whitman’s timeless poetic insistence that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" Theise writes: Most of the body’s cells are continually turning over. Some cells renew over a period of years, while other types of cells are replaced every few days. So, most of the molecules (and therefore atoms) of our bodies return to the planet as well, in an endless atomic recycling and replacement. From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?

This holds true across the scale of matter, on the molecular level above atoms and below cells: We breathe out molecules (carbon dioxide) and perspire molecules (water, pheromones) and excrete molecules (urine, feces) into the environments around us, and in turn, we eat food that we break down into absorbable molecules (proteins, carbohydrates, fats), breathe in oxygen molecules from the planetary plant mass, and absorb molecules through our skin… since every surface we touch potentially has absorbable molecules on it. 

While you might say that molecules are only your own when they are within your body, complementarily, there are no real distinctions between “our own” molecules and the molecules of the world around us. They move from us, outward, and come into us from the outside. At the molecular level, just as at the cellular level, each of us is in perpetual, direct continuity with the entire biomass of the planet.

An epoch after Max Planck discovered the minutest scales of existence — energy quanta — then contemplated the limits of science given the fact that “we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve,” Theise adds: At the smallest, Planck scales, the very smallest creations of all are wholes without parts that merely emanate from space-time and dissolve back into it like phantoms — there but not there, real but not real. Everything only looks like a thing from its own particular vantage point, the level of scale at which it can be seen as “itself,” as a whole. Above that level of scale, it is hidden from view by the higher-level emergent properties it gives rise to. Below that level, it disappears from view into the active phenomena from which it emerged.

It is difficult to consider this perspective without trembling with the question of what it even means to exist — and to cease existing. With his particular life-focused lens on mortality — as the child of two Holocaust survivors, as a gay man who survived the AIDS epidemic that killed many of his friends — Theise offers a redemptive answer: While we feel ourselves to be thinking, living beings with independent lives inside the universe, the complementary view is also true: we don’t live in the universe; we embody it. It’s just like how we habitually think of ourselves as living on the planet even as, in a complementary way, we are the planet. You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, Planck moment by Planck moment.

Throughout the rest of his lucid and luminous Notes on Complexity, Theise goes on to intertwine the discoveries of Western science — from particle physics to neuroscience to chaos theory — with Eastern metaphysical traditions and his own longtime Zen Buddhist practice. 


—Neil Theise
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being, excerpts 

—Maria Popova 
see at the essential marginalian
(treasure)

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Behind every atom hides an infinite universe. —Rumi

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cosmic music

  

Doug Dance

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String Theory says that all the notes on a vibrating string correspond to a particle. That to an electron is actually a rubber band; a very tiny rubber band. But if you twang this rubber band and the rubber band vibrates at a different frequency, it turns into a quark. And you twang it again and it turns into a neutrino. 

So, how many musical notes are there? An infinite number. How many musical notes are there on a string? An infinite number. And that may explain why we have so many subatomic particles. They are nothing but musical notes. 

So, physics are nothing but the laws of harmonies on a string. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on vibrating strings. And the mind of God, the mind of God that Einstein worked on for the last 30 years of his life, the mind of God would be cosmic music. Cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

—Micho Kaku

Theoretical Physicist

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questions

 

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Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone, who could make such music? 


—Chuang Tzu (369-286 BCE)

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Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve. —John Wheeler

    

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Consciousness is a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.

—David Bohm

.

 

Perhaps Tesla had in mind another thing altogether. 

It basically boiled down to energy/field/consciousness, which equates into electricity/magnetism/consciousness, that made up Trinity. 

Energy is your divine spark, and field is the area you exist within. 

The 2 things that allow consciousness to isolate itself is electricity and magnetism. NOTHING in the physical universe exists outside energy and field. Only then can you have consciousness reside inside a material existence. 

3:6:9. Perhaps these numbers were intentionally expressed by the pyramids of Giza? There are 9 pyramids on the Giza plateau: 3 large pyramids and 6 small “satellite” pyramids. Also, the design of the Second (Khafre) Pyramid of Giza is based on ratio 9:6. 

The Fibonacci series has a pattern that repeats every 24 numbers 

Numeric reduction is a technique used in analysis of numbers in which all the digits of a number are added together until only one digit remains. As an example, the numeric reduction of 256 is 4 because 2+5+6=13 and 1+3=4. 

Applying numeric reduction to the Fibonacci series produces an infinite series of 24 repeating digits:1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 4, 3, 7, 1, 8, 9, 8, 8, 7, 6, 4, 1, 5, 6, 2, 8, 1, 9. If you take the first 12 digits and add them to the second twelve digits and apply numeric reduction to the result, you find that they all have a value of 9. 


Marko Rodin and God’s Particle

Marko Rodin has indeed discovered natures secret about 3,6, and 9. “We have to cast out all 9’s.” 

What does that mean? It means that any number that is above the value 9 or one place value is going to be added together to get a single digit. So this means if we have a number 26, we add 2+6 to get 8, which is its “archetype”. If we do this for all numbers while doubling and halving, we get a pattern. 

The secret to the Universe is DOUBLING and HALVING. So, number 9 is the unchanging, unwavering number that never really loses its true identity, even though it is undergoing a constant state changing.

Marko Rodin found the math to the real “God Particle” or particle of Spirit, known as Brahman in the Vedas, and he has shown how it can be observed, but not with physical instruments.


—world-mysteries

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The tangible world is movement, say the Masters, not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are no objects "in movements", it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us: they are nothing but movement. 

What is observed is not a homogeneous and motionless block. It is a "universe" formed by a large number of particles in movement.

In every case (the sense of sight and its object) is a question of the meeting of two aggregates in motion, and also, in every case, it is a matter of a sensation followed by an interpretation which brings it into the realm of consciousness while distorting it.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects 

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3:6:9

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then 

you would have a key to the universe. 

 

—NikolaTesla 

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The entire universe is to be looked upon as the Lord. —The Isha Upanishad

 

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God is the underlying force, the energy and the consciousness of existence. If you cannot feel the divine within, you cannot feel him without.

The first step is to feel God within. Then prayer to a personal god becomes meaningless, and meditation becomes meaningful.

The second step is to realize the divine without, to realize that God is not the creator, he is creation. 

He is not separate from creation. 

He is the force and consciousness of creation.


—Swami Dhyan Giten

 

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Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be

what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

—Flannery O'Connor

 

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all matter is merely energy

 

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Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. 

Here’s Tom with the weather.

—Bill Hicks

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questions

  

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By a ‘dream’ we mean something which is not real. What is Reality? That which does not disappear at any time. 

Now, what is there in the waking state that does not disappear? Nothing. Therefore, everything objective, connected with the waking state, is unreal. 

But what we have just called the unreal appears all the while. Yes. When the unreal appears as real we call it a dream. Therefore, the waking state is all a dream.

But there is one thing that does not disappear in any state – pure Consciousness, the Atma (Self).


—Sri Atmananda
Krishna Menon

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One day she said, “Don’t you think rain is something that happens inside of us?” 

I didn’t understand, but I liked the thought. 

“If it’s raining for enough people, we see rain,” she explained. “Otherwise it’s not raining.”


—Amanda Michalopoulou
Light
I’d Like: Stories

 

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no(thing, every(thing

  

Emerald Nebula

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‘Nothing is me’ is the first step. 'Everything is me’ is the next. Both hang on the idea: 'there is a world’. 

When this too is given up, you remain what you are – the non-dual Self (Awareness). You are it here and now, but your vision is obstructed by your false ideas about your self.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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You create a dream-body for yourself in the dream and act with it. The same is falsified in the waking state. At present you think you are this body and not the dream-body. In your dream this body is falsified by the dream-body. So you see neither of these bodies is real because each of them is true for a time and false for other times. 

That which is real must be real always. 

The ‘I’-Consciousness is present all through the three states. That alone is real. The three states are false. They are only for the mind. It is the mind that obstructs your vision of your true nature, which is Infinite Spirit (Awareness) .

Why go to birth and death to understand what you daily experience in sleeping and waking? When you sleep, this body and world do not exist for you and these questions do not worry you, and yet you (Awareness) exist, the same you (Awareness) that exists now while waking. 

It is only when you wake up that you have a body and see the world. If you understand waking and sleep properly you will understand life and death. Only waking and sleeping happen daily so people don’t notice the wonder of it but only want to know about birth and death.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.


—The Tibetan Book of the Dead

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two tanka

Nordin Seruyan, central Borneo

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The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

—Joseph Campbell 

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From outside my house,

only the faint distant sound

of gentle breezes

wandering through bamboo leaves

in the long evening silence.

Late evening finally

comes: I unlatch the door

and quietly

await the one

who greets me in my dreams.


–Otomo No Yakamochi

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the self is time itself

.

The classical idea that objects and processes exist “in” space and time is now dead ... space and time should instead be seen as phenomena that somehow “emerge” from relationships.


—Alexander Wendt
Quantum Mind and Social Science

.

We must look on everything in this world as time. 

Each thing stands in unimpeded relation just as each moment stands unimpeded. Therefore, (from the standpoint of time) the desire for enlightenment arises spontaneously; (from the standpoint of mind) time arises with the same mind. This applies also to training and enlightenment. 

Thus we see by entering within: the self is time itself.

—Dogen

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Wherever you go, you carry with you the sense of here and now. This is what distinguishes any present experience from memory. It reveals that space and time are in you and not the other way around. 

Most people are not acquainted with the sense of their being but only with the knowledge of their doing.


—Wu Hsin

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