not till then

    

.

...  a man can know nothing by himself, save after a natural manner, which is only that which he attains by means of the senses. For this cause he must have the phantasms and the forms of objects present in themselves and in their likenesses; otherwise it cannot be, for, as philosophers say: Ab objecto et potentia paritur notitia. 

That is: From the object that is present and from the faculty, knowledge is born in the soul. 

Wherefore, if one should speak to a man of things which he has never been able to understand, and whose likeness he has never seen, he would have no more illumination from them whatever than if naught had been said of them to him.

—John of the Cross
(1542 - 1591)

 

.

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.  

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. 

But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. 

One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

.

Next to blood relationships, come water relationships. —Stanley Crawford

   

.

 

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction not a state of the soul. 

If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

—Simone Weil

The Love of God and Affliction, Waiting for God

.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood -

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks - is it a cave,

Or winding path? The edge is what I have. 

—Theodore Roethke

.

lights are all friends of each other

  

white aurora borealis over Finland

.

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. 

Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you've been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. 

Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? 

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' 

We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.


—C. S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain, excerpt

.

observ(ations

  

.

19. The Mind is not self-luminous, since it can be seen as an object.  

This is a further step toward overthrowing the tyranny of the “mind”: the psychic nature of emotion and mental measuring. This psychic self, the personality, claims to be absolute, asserting that life is for it and through it; it seeks to impose on the whole being of man its narrow, materialistic, faithless view of life and the universe; it would clip the wings of the soaring Soul. 

But the Soul dethrones the tyrant, by perceiving and steadily affirming that the psychic self is no true self at all, not self-luminous, but only an object of observation, watched by the serene eyes of the Spiritual Man.

—Patañjali

The Yoga Sutras of Patañjalii: 

The Book of the Spiritual Man

.

None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. 

When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze. 


—Frédéric Gros
A Philosophy of Walking

.

The Universe as we know it

is a joint product of the observer and the observed. 

—Teilhard de Chardin

.

common senses

  

.

Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science. 

It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and of all previous science – including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came along and contradicted them. 

And yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and everything we experience are part. There is no other.


—David Deutsch 

The Beginning of Infinity

.

shanti, shanti, shanti

.

Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven.

Do not worry about hell or dream about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment.

Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven.

Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell.


—Rumi

.

The day I am killed
my killer will find
tickets in my pockets:
One to peace,
one to fields and the rain,
and one
to humanity's conscience.

I beg you--please don't waste them.
I beg you, you who kill me: Go.


—Samih al-Qasim
tickets

.

not

.

A person is not earth, not water,
Not fire, not wind, not space.
not consciousness, and not all of them.
What person is there other than these?

Due to being set up in dependence upon an
aggregation of the six constituents
A person is not established as its own reality,

So due to being set up in dependence upon an aggregation
Each of the constituents also is not established as its own reality.


—Nagarjuna
The Precious Garland of Advise

.

Just as you have come to know the false
discrimination of yourself
Apply this mentally to all phenomena.

All phenomena are completely devoid
Of their own inherent existence, like space.

Through one all are known.

Through one all are also seen.

—Buddha
The King of Meditations Sutra

.

there is no closed figure in nature

.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.


—Alfred North Whitehead
Essays in Science and Philosophy

.

There is no closed figure in nature. 

Every shape participates with another. 

No one thing is independent of another,
and one thing rhymes with another,
and light gives them shape.


—Henri Cartier-Bresson

.

We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness 

and fish for fallen light with patience. 

—Pablo Neruda

.

note to self

 

.

The world only exists in your eyes … 

You can make it as big or as small as you want. 

—F. Scott Fitzgerald 

.

Strange, that.

Andy Ilachinski

.

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it. That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

―Richard Feynman (treasure)
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

.

 

When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? 

Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. 

Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. 

And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. 

But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. 

We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world.
 

—Christophe Galfard

The Universe in Your Hand

.

Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882
tao of photography

.

The beginning and the end are common on the circumference of a circle. —Heraclitus

 

.

Before the world was, consciousness was. In consciousness the world comes to be; in hard consciousness and in pure consciousness the world dissolves. At the root of everything, there is the feeling of ′I am’. 

The state of mind ′there is a world′ is secondary; to be me I don't need the world, the world needs me.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

A yogi has no particular path. 

He simply renounces imagining things. 

His mind then ceases out of its own accord, 

and the perfect state naturally occurs.

—Sri Dattatreya

.

You will experience realization like water being poured into water,

like liquid gold being poured into liquid gold. 

Everything will be equalized in One Suchness,

profoundly clear, real and pure.


—Yuanwu Keqin (1063 - 1135)

 

.

Your effort is the bondage. —Sri Ramana Maharshi

  

.

You create what you resist.

—Luis Alvarez
Nobel Prize/Physics

.

what you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.
 
–Carl Jung 

.

Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. 

It is the mind that brought you into bondage.

Go beyond it altogether.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

The sky

Is a suspended blue ocean.

The stars are the fish

That swim.

The planets are the white whales

I sometimes hitch a ride on,

And the sun and all light

Have forever fused themselves

Into my heart and upon

My skin.

There is only one rule

On this Wild Playground,

For every sign Hafiz has ever seen

Reads the same.

They all say,

"Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,

In the Beloved's Divine

Game,

O, in the Beloved's

Wonderful Game."

—Hafiz 

Daniel Ladinsky version

.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. —Niels Bohr

 

.

Rather than to ask what is the meaning of this universe, we would have to say that the universe is its meaning. As this changes, the universe changes along with all that is in it. What I mean by ‘the universe’ is ‘the whole of reality’ and what is beyond. And of course, we are referring not just to the meaning of the universe for us, but its meaning ‘for itself’, or the meaning of the whole for itself. 

Similarly there is no point in asking the meaning of life, as life too is its meaning, which is self-referential and capable of changing, basically, when this meaning changes through a creative perception of a new and more encompassing meaning. 

You could also ask another question: What is the meaning of creativity itself? As with all other fundamental questions we cannot give a final answer, but we have to constantly see afresh. For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate unfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite — that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.


—David Bohm
Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

.

We are the creators and creatures of each other, 

causing and bearing each other’s burden.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

come to the conclusion: I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn. —Sri Nisargadatta

   

.

 

Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself, independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. 

There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.

And yet it moved.

—Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger

. 

We live in illusion and the appearance of things. 

There is a reality. We are that reality. 

When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. 

That is all.


—Kalu Rinpoche

.

If thou but settest foot on this path, thou shalt see it everywhere. —Hermes Trismegistus

    

.

Leave it all behind you. Forget it.
Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs.

Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand. 

Suppose that your hand and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that I would find your blinded hand. 

Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would
find your hand. 

I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine and each of us
would find
the other’s hand. 

We know
that it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this
moment
and against all reason
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine –
And each of us would find a blinded hand.


—Tennessee Williams
Your Blinded Hand

.

 

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday,

separate, in the evening.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

Bumble Bees, Levitation and Earth’s Magnetic Grid

 

.

Aerodynamically (a bee) can’t fly. There’s a hollow cavity inside his system and when he beats his wings he starts to resonate with this energy that goes back and forth similar to a guitar strumming on one side of the room and hitting the same chord on the other side of the room, or somebody hitting a high C and breaking a crystal. It’s the same thing. It’s resonance. 

Eventually it reaches the resonance of the field around him (this resonance is the Earth’s rotational frequency due to its spin and is measured on today’s devices as 7.83Hz). 

Once the bumblebee hits that resonance, the frequency of his surroundings, he becomes a free agent. He creates a magnetic bubble around himself and he can go anywhere he wants. 

That’s not in any of the science books. We have a conventional way of doing things and we have a natural way of doing things and they’re totally different. They’re diametrically opposed in many many cases.


—Ralph Ring

 .

Move over, Schrödinger’s cat – birds may be the true quantum animals. 

The bath of cells in avian eyes could prolong a delicate quantum state that helps to explain how some birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field. 

It is thought that light reacts with receptors in the birds’ eyes to produce two molecules with unpaired electrons, whose spins are linked by a special state called quantum entanglement. 

If the relative alignment of the spins is affected by Earth’s magnetic field, the electron pair can cause chemical changes that the bird can sense. 

In 2009, researchers at the University of Oxford calculated that such entanglement must last for at least 100 microseconds for the internal compass to work. But how the sensitive state of quantum entanglement could survive that long in the eye was a mystery. 

Calculations by Zachary Walters of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, now show that interactions with cells in the bird’s eye allow the electron pairs to stay entangled for longer through a dampening effect. 

Rather like the way a car with stiff shock absorbers takes longer to stop bouncing after going over a bump, the signal from the electron pair dies away more slowly under strong interactions with the cellular bath. 

Predicting exactly how long entanglement is sustained won’t be possible until the  mechanism is better understood, says Walters. But he believes there’s a good chance his model could account for the 100 microseconds. 

Erik Gauger, part of the Oxford team, is intrigued by the findings. “It seems possible that this might be the mechanism allowing for the persistence of quantum coherence,” he says. “But it is probably too early to say for sure."

—Gilead Amit

NewScientist

.

Iron in the birds’ inner ears

helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.

In other words,

the birds carry within them a piece of the earth,

a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers

its knowledge back to the birds.

—Jarod K. Anderson

PACT

.

Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.

We can hold all these ideas at once and feel

both heavy and weightless

with the absurd beauty of it all.

—Jarod K. Anderson

THE IMPOSSIBLE

.

5%

   

.

We perceive only a negligible portion of the vibrating ocean in which we are immersed.

We fail to detect the infrared and the ultraviolet, infrasound and ultrasound, and in general the very high and very low frequencies; we can’t even detect the X rays, gamma rays, radioactivity, and cosmic rays, which all still affect our bodies. And so many frequencies are still unknown.

The senses are therefore incomplete; our neural circuits can’t process the majority of inputs in order to translate them into images. According to some, our senses comprehend only 5 percent of the signals from the world, which means that we miss 95 percent of our environment.


—Citro Massimo, M.D. 
The Basic Code of the Universe

.

First Light Edging Cirrus

    

.

1025 molecules
are enough
to call woodthrush or apple. 

A hummingbird, fewer.
A wristwatch: 1024. 

An alphabet's molecules, 
tasting of honey, iron and salt,
cannot be counted– 

as some strings, untouched,
sound when a near one is speaking. 

As it was when love slipped inside us.
It looked out to face in every direction. 

Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.


—Jane Hirshfield

.

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

.

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

.