question

Asahel Curtis - Two mountaineers (identified as Jack and Miss Nettleton) sit on rocks, 

with arms around each other and backs to camera, on (or near) the summit of Mt Rainier, 1909

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When Papaji met Ramana Maharshi, and asked him, "Have you seen God?" Maharshi replied, "Anything that you see cannot be God. 

Whatever you see must be an object of your senses. God is not an object of your senses. God is the one through whom all things are seen, tasted, touched, heard and smelt, but He himself cannot be seen because He is the seer, not an object of sight."

Name and form are past bondages. The fact is, that which IS, is only one. It is omnipresent and universal. We say ‘here is a table’, ‘there is a bird’, or ‘there is a man’. There is thus a difference in name and form only, but That which IS, is present everywhere and at all times. That is what is known as asti - Existence, omnipresent. 

To say that a thing is existent, there must be someone to see — a Seer. That intelligence to see is known as bhati - Consciousness. There must be someone to say, ‘I see it, I hear it, I want it’. That is priyam - Love. All these three are the attributes of nature — the natural Self. They are also called Existence, Consciousness, Bliss (Sat-Chit-Ananda).

Talk of the ‘witness’ should not lead to the idea that there is a witness and something else apart from him that he is witnessing. The ‘witness’ really means the light that illumines the seer, the seen and the process of seeing. Before, during and after the triads of seer, seen and seeing, the illumination exists. 

It alone exists always.


—Ramana Maharshi

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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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God lurks in the gaps. —Jorge Luis Borges

  

Asahel Curtis, Ms. Nettleton

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We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. 

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.


—Annie Dillard
on the meaning of life

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To be human we need to experience the end of the world.

We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.


—Hélène Cixous
from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

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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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She asked him, ′′Tell me something nice!“

   

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He answered her, ′′(∂ + m) ps = 0 ′′

This is the equation of Dirac, the most beautiful equation in physics. It describes the phenomenon of quantum connection, which alleges that if two separate systems interact with each other over a certain period of time and then separate, we can describe them as two different systems, but they will already exist as one unique system. 

What happens to one will continue to affect the other, regardless of the distance between them. It’s called quantum intertwining or quantum connection. Two particles that were at some point connected remain connected forever, even if they are light-years apart. This is what happens to two people when they are connected by what we humans call Love. 


—Unknown

 

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It’s that dream that we carry with us
that something wonderful will happen,
that it has to happen,
that time will open,
that the heart will open,
that doors will open,
that the mountains will open,
that wells will leap up,
that the dream will open,
that one morning we’ll slip in
to a harbor that we've never known.

—Olav H. Hauge
Robert Bly version

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The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, 
apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.


—Nisargadatta

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the seed never sees the flower —Zen Proverb

 

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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

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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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open secret

   

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Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.


—Nikola Tesla

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Directly opposite to the concept of a universe as machine built on law is the vision of a world self-synthesized. On this view, the notes struck out on a piano by the observer participants of all times and all places, bits though they are in and by themselves, constitute the great wide world of space and time and things. 


—John Wheeler

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If you want to find the secrets of the universe, 

think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

—Nikola Tesla

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everything is alright forever and forever and forever

  

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Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. 

So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. 

The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.


—Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

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I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. 

Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. 

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. 

It is all one vast awakened thing. 

I call it the golden eternity. 

It is perfect.

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. 

That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. 

Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.


—Jack Kerouac

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And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

—Julian of Norwich, 14th century

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you shall not lose your way

 

beautiful

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We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. 

Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we have to shatter that plate glass, we have to reach in there. 

So the old world observer simply has to be crossed off the books and we must put in the new term: participator. 

In this way we have come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.


—John Wheeler

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The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. 

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


—Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, excerpt

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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

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In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love. —Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall, Two Pigeons, 1925

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And

I say to you,
I have also decided
to stick to love. For I know
that love is ultimately the only
answer to mankind’s problems. And
I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go.
I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some
circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when
I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love.
And I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the
faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too
many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in
the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see
it, I know that it does something to their faces and their
personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great
a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are
seeking the highest good, I think you can find it
through love. And the beautiful thing is that
we are moving against wrong when we do
it, because John was right, God is love.
He who hates does not know God,
but he who has love has the
key that unlocks the door
to the meaning
of ultimate
reality.

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 August 1967

Where Do We Go From Here?
[alive on all channels]

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all the mountains are dancing

  

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yes is a pleasant country:

if's wintery

(my lovely)

let's open the year

both is the very weather

(not either)

my treasure,

when violets appear

love is a deeper season

than reason;

my sweet one

(and april's where we're)

—e.e. cummings

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when faces called flowers float out of the ground

and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-

but keeping is downward and doubting and never

-it’s april(yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!

yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly

yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be

(yes the mountains are dancing together)


when every leaf opens without any sound

and wishing is having and having is giving-

but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense

-alive;we’re alive,dear:it’s(kiss me now)spring!

now the pretty birds hover so she and so he

now the little fish quiver so you and so i

(now the mountains are dancing, the mountains)

when more than was lost has been found has been found

and having is giving and giving is living-

but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing

-it’s spring(all our night becomes day)o,it’s spring!

all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky

all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea

(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

—e.e. cummings

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a mystical geography

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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 

contemplate or pray or collect seeds.”

click for detail

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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.”

from the splendid essay by Fred Bahnson,

The Church Forests of Ethiopia, at Emergence Magazine

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more magic

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sweet(hearts

 

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A leaf says,
“Sweethearts—don’t pick me,
For I am busy doing
God’s work. 

I am lowering my veins and roots
Like ropes
With buckets tied to them
Into the earth’s deep
Lake.  

I am drawing water
That I offer like a rose to
The sky.  

I am a singing cleaning woman
Dusting all the shelves in
The air
With my elegant green
Rags.  

I have a heart.
I can know happiness like
You.


—Hafiz

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shanti, shanti, shanti

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All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. 

They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. 

Yet the promise is not of a monument. The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

 

—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
wait - what ?

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Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within.

Underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered.

—Huston Smith

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The Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; 

it is never heard but is the Hearer; 

it is never thought but is the Thinker; 

it is never known but is the Knower.

There is no other witness but This,

no other knower but This.

 

—The Upanishad

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the realm of the densely packed

  

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Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others. For the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.

Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.


—Albert Einstein

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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.


—Terence McKenna

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We trust that time is linear.
That it proceeds eternally, uniformly,
Into Infinity.

But the distinction between
past, present and future is
nothing but an illusion.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow
are not consecutive, they are connected
in a never-ending circle.


—Albert Einstein

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beauti(ful

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In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This shuddering before the beautiful, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.


—S. Chandrasekhar (1910 - 1995)

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there are an infinite number of worlds

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It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. 

Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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What do you have to do?

Pack your bags,

Go to the station without them,

Catch the train,

And leave your self behind.

 

—Wei Wu Wei

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questions

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Philosophers maintain that the future is similarly nothing more than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts. 

Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the “now”—where is time?

Does time exist on its own, apart from human concepts that are no more than conveniences for our formulas or for the description of motion and events? 

In this way, simple logic alone casts doubt on whether there exists anything outside of an “eternal now” that includes the human mind’s tendency to think and daydream. 

Physicists, for their part, find that all working models for reality—from Newton’s laws and Einstein’s field equations through quantum mechanics—have no need for time. They are all time-symmetrical.

—Robert Lanza M.D.

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Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. 

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream. 

And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.

—Khalil Gibran

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Grace is within you. If it were external, it would be useless. —Ramana Maharshi

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You think that you are the body or that you are the mind. But there are occasions when you are free from both.

For example in deep slumber, you create a body and a world in your dream. That represents your mental activities. In your waking state you think that you are the body and then the idea of forest and the rest arise.

Now, consider the situation. You are an unchanging and continuous being who remains in all these states which are constantly changing and therefore transient.
But you are always there.

It follows that these fleeting objects are mere phenomena which appear on your being like pictures which move across a screen. The screen does not move when the picture moves. Similarly, you do not move from where you are even when the body leaves the home and mixes in society.

Your body, the society, the forest and the ways are all in you; you are not in them. You are the body also but not this body only. If you remain as your pure Self, the body and its movements need not affect you.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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You are neck-deep in water and yet cry for water.

It is as good as saying that one neck-deep in water feels thirsty, or that a fish in water feels thirsty, or that water feels thirsty.

Grace is always there.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

   

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Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

—Yehuda Amichai

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It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight


—W. S. Merwin
Still Morning

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For all the features it hoards and displays
age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air
held between the hands like a stunned bird

while I stand remembering light in the trees
of another century on a continent long submerged
with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time
felt memory as they were touching the day

and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections
on the pond's surface that never were seen again

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying


—W. S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius, excerpt

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a brighter word than bright

   

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Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. 

The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see - thoughtfully.


—Dan Beachy-Quick

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A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges
This Craft of Verse

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In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: 

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out 

and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

—Czesław Miłosz
Ars Poetica

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In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

—Rumi

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