hold, now

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If they’re here—all females in a winter hive—they’re clustered together inside (an oak tree), queen at the heart of their sisterhood. The fine, transparent wings they beat hard in summer’s heat—a constant buzzing fan to keep the hive from cooking—they hold, now, folded and still. The tiny muscles to which those wings are attached shiver. One honey bee shivering her flight muscles does not make much heat.

But twenty thousand, huddled together, shivering, can keep the queen and the colony’s honey supply at their core at a tropical ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, even as blizzard winds, inches away, flail the trunk.


—Gayle Boss
All Creation Waits

wait - what ? (treasure

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the branch might seem like the fruit’s origin: in fact, the branch exists because of the fruit —Rumi

  

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Prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27), much more than anything you privately do. It is an allowing of the Big Self more than an assertion of the small self. Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, “Prayer happened, and I was there” more than “I prayed today.” All you know is that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through—and you are no longer in the driver’s seat.

God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world, and becomes at some level your own “I am.” You start knowing through, with, and in Somebody Else. 

Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.” 

Please trust me on this. It might be the most important thing I could tell you.


—Fr. Richard Rohr
The Naked Now

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To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the ‘other.’ 

The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same holds good from top to bottom. 

The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism.’ Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

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look at the unity of this

   

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look at love...

how it tangles

with the one fallen in love 

look at spirit

how it fuses with earth

giving it new life 

why are you so busy

with this or that or good or bad

pay attention to how things blend

why talk about all

the known and the unknown

see how the unknown merges into the known 

why think separately

of this life and the next

when one is born from the last 

look at your heart and tongue

one feels but deaf and dumb

the other speaks in words and signs 

look at water and fire

earth and wind

enemies and friends all at once 

the wolf and the lamb

the lion and the deer

far away yet together 

look at the unity of this

spring and winter

manifested in the equinox 

you too must mingle my friends

since the earth and the sky

are mingled just for you and me 

be like sugarcane

sweet yet silent

don't get mixed up with bitter words 

my beloved grows

right out of my own heart

how much more union can there be?


—Rumi
Nader Khalili version

 

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all or no(one

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The entire universe of my experience, including mind, body and world, is presented to I the Awareness all at once. 

Either I am all of it, or I am none of it. 

—Swami Sarvapriyananda

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Learn to see the wood, not the door or the table. See the substance, not the form. 

Make it a habit to see commonality in everything, not particulars.

—Sri Yellamraju Srinivasa Rao

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body(mind

    

starling murmuration

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The mind & body are not separate entities. The gross form of the mind is the body & the subtle form of the body is the mind. The practice of asana integrates & harmonizes the two. 

Both the body & the mind harbor tensions or knots. Every mental knot has a corresponding physical, muscular knot & vice versa. The aim of asana is to release these knots. 

Asana release mental tensions by dealing with them on the physical level, acting somato-psychically, through the body to the mind.
 

―Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Asana Pranayama Mudra Banda

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As you follow the "I" to the heart, you're going through the molecules and atoms, and the sub-atomic particles, going deeper, and deeper, going back, back to your source, to the energy waves, the void, and finally your whole body is totally dissolved and consciousness stands alone.

—Robert Adams

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the invisible next

  

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She lets the confused stay confused

if that is what they want
and is always available
to those with a passion for the truth.

In the welter of opinions,
she is content with not-knowing.

She makes distinctions
but doesn’t take them seriously.

She sees the world constantly breaking
apart, and stays centered in the whole.

She sees the world endlessly changing
and never wants it to be
different from what it is.

—Chuang-tzu

Stephen Mitchell version

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What we have, and all we will have, is here in the earthly paradise. How to wring music from it, how to squeeze light out of it, is, as it has always been, the only true question. 

I’d say that to love the visible things in the visible world is to love their apokatastatic outline in the invisible next.


—Charles Wright
from an interview by J.D. McClatchy
The Art of Poetry XLI

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Be mindful of your self-talk.

It is a conversation with the universe.

—David James Lees

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deep beauty

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What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is.

I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago.

I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. 

His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.


―Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers
wait - what ?

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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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you are that

    

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do you know what you are?

You are a manuscript of a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you.

Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that.


—Rumi 

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You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it

It’s too bad that you want to be someone else

You don’t see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.


—Rumi

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beauti(ful

   

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The small person
Builds cages for everyone
She
Sees.

Instead, the sage,
Who needs to duck her head,
When the moon is low,
Can be found dropping keys, all night long
For the beautiful,
Rowdy,
Prisoners.


—Hafiz

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frozen frequencies

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The physics of beauty requires math. The sunflower has spirals of 21, 34, 55, 89, and - in very large sunflowers - 144 seeds. Each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. This pattern seems to be everywhere: in pine needles and mollusk shells, in parrot beaks and spiral galaxies. After the fourteenth number, every number divided by the next highest number results in a sum that is the length-to-width ratio of what we call the golden mean, the basis for the Egyptian pyramids and the Greek Parthenon, for much of our art and even our music. In our own spiral-shaped inner ear’s cochlea, musical notes vibrate at a similar ratio.

The patterns of beauty repeat themselves, over and over. Yet the physics of beauty is enhanced by a self, a unique, self-organizing system. Scientists now know that a single flower is more responsive, more individual, than they had ever dreamed. Plants react to the world. Plants have ways of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing.

Rooted in soil, a flower is always on the move. Sunflowers are famous for turning toward the sun, east in the morning, west in the afternoon. Light-sensitive cells in the stem “see” sunlight, and the stem’s growth orients the flower. Certain cells in a plant see the red end of the spectrum. Other cells see blue and green. Plants even see wavelengths we cannot see, such as ultraviolet.

Most plants respond to touch. The Venus’s-flytrap snaps shut. Stroking the tendril of a climbing pea will cause it to coil. Brushed by the wind, a seedling will thicken and shorten its growth. Touching a plant in various ways, at various times, can cause it to close its leaf pores, delay flower reproduction, increase metabolism, or produce more chlorophyll.

Plants are touchy-feely. They taste the world around them. Sunflowers use their roots to “taste” the surrounding soil as they search for nutrients. The roots of a sunflower can reach down eight feet, nibbling, evaluating, growing toward the best sources of food. The leaves of some plants can taste a caterpillar’s saliva. They “sniff” the compounds sent out by nearby damaged plants. Research suggests that some seeds taste or smell smoke, which triggers germination.

The right sound wave may also trigger germination. Sunflowers, like pea plants, seem to increase their growth when they hear sounds similar to but louder than the human speaking voice.

In other ways, flowers and pollinators find each other through sound.
A tropical vine, pollinated by bats, uses a concave petal to reflect the bat’s sonar signal. 

The bat calls to the flower. The flower responds.


—Sharman Apt Russell
Anatomy of A Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers

.

 

Give your attention to the experience of seeing rather than to the object seen and you will find yourself everywhere. —Rupert Spira

 

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We’re only finding out recently that a lot of animals have colors and patterns that we cannot see because they’re outside of our visual range. It calls to attention how much of the world we can’t experience because our senses are limited.

When we shine UV lights on them, they glow pink or blue, but these are the colors that we can see…. they could be a bunch of different colors, which we see as all pink.

It’s also interesting to consider that most of these animals are not aware of having glowing patches on their bodies…. isn’t it also possible that we have skin or hair patterns that were not aware of?

(There is actually some research out there to support the idea that our own skin fluoresces as well and that there are gender differences in the pattern and glow.)


—anatomika.science

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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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note to self

 

.

If you do not change direction, 

you may end up where you are heading. 

 

—Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching

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you are divine

.

Your consciousness is not in your body.
Your body is in your consciousness.

You are not in your reality.
Your reality is in your consciousness.

You are not within time or space.
Space and time are ideas within your consciousness.

Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it.

My guru told me, "Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done."

If you have regard for me, remember my words. The knowledge "I Am” is the greatest God, the Guru; be one with that, be intimate with it. That itself will bless you with all the knowledge relevant for you.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind; the natural state of the universe unmanifest.

Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it.

It is your own true nature, it is home.


—Tibetan Book of the Dead

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seeing the seer

 

Keith Williams

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Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature—however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be—is never alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended. And they must at every moment be treated with proper respect. 

All things in nature have a special kind of life, something unknown to contemporary Euro-Americans, something powerful. The presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh.

—Richard K. Nelson
Make Prayers to the Raven

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I will explain to you a simple technique, which is called Dhyana Yoga [realization via meditation]:

Sit in the open air every day in the morning— at any convenient time, irrespective of any laws and regularities—on a simple asana [seat or posture], for 30-60 minutes. 

Keep your eyes half open and be aware of your nose-tip. This is only to withdraw your mind from external sense-organs.

Then try to be aware of the Seer. You have not to think about sense-organs. You have only to do nothing—no thoughts. Be only aware of the one who is sitting in Dhyana [meditation]. You have to focus on him only. Be aware of the One, who is beyond body, without body [videha].

Practice this slowly, slowly every day and all your problems will be solved. Have the feeling of Chaitanya Brahman [Divine Reality as Pure Consciousness]. Be aware of Purnam [wholeness, fullness]. If your eyes close during this, let it be. 

You will be aware of space. All forms of which you are aware of within are modifications or shapes of the One who is sitting.

Call him Krishna, Shiva, or any other divine Name. 
It is all darshan of the one who is sitting. 

Continue sitting in this sadhana [spiritual practice]. From within, That will give its message, guidance, and spontaneous insight. 

Remember: “I am not the body.” 

Be aware of the Seer.
I am beyond the body.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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song of my(self

   

.

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass 

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futurity (questions

     

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A memory may feel abstract or immaterial, but it is actually a biochemical process taking place in the brain. It involves neurons communicating with each other via the “wires” or synapses connecting them. The pathway an electrochemical signal follows as it continually travels from neuron to synapse to neuron constitutes a memory.  

Whenever you have that memory, the same pathway gets activated. And the more it’s activated, the more it becomes hardwired into the brain’s circuitry. Eventually, it becomes a long-term memory. 

Activation also requires enzymes, molecules that set off chemical reactions. The problem is that these enzymes don’t exist for longer than a week. If a memory is to endure, it would seem that the enzymes would have to remain functioning for years or even decades. 

Once the enzymes turn off, one would expect the memories to go with them. “This became a holy grail in neuroscience,” Lisman says. “How can a molecule in your brain serve as a memory? How does nature accomplish this?”

—John Lisman 

.

What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

—T.S. Eliot

The Cocktail Party

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

    

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Know the world from end to end is a mirror; 
in each atom a hundred suns are concealed. 
If you pierce the heart of a single drop of water, 
from it will flow a hundred clear oceans; 
if you look intently at each speck of dust, 
in it you will see a thousand beings. 

A gnat in its limbs is like an elephant; 
in name a drop of water resembles the Nile. 
In the heart of a barleycorn 
is stored a hundred harvests. 
Within a millet-seed a world exists. 
In an insects wing is an ocean of life. 

A heaven is concealed in the pupil of an eye. 
The core at the center of the heart is small, 
yet the Lord of both worlds will enter there.


—Mahmud Shabistari (1288 - 1340)

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Know that this troublesome body is like a coat of armor:
comfortable neither in winter or in summer.

Yet still this bad associate is good for you because of the patience you must show in overcoming its desires, for the exercise of patience expands the heart with spiritual peace.

The patience shown by the moon to the dark night keeps it illumined; the patience shown by the rose to the thorn keeps it fragrant.


—Rumi
Camille and Kabir Helminski version
Persion transliteration Yahyá Monastra

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beloved of the beloved

 

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Make everything in you an ear, each atom of your being, and you will hear at every moment what the Source is whispering to you. 

We are all the beloved of the beloved, and in every moment, in every event of your life, the Beloved is whispering to you exactly what you need to hear and know. 

Who can ever explain this miracle? It simply is.


—Rumi

.

As you follow the "I" to the heart, you're going through the molecules and atoms, and the sub-atomic particles, going deeper, and deeper, going back, back to your source, to the energy waves, the void, and finally your whole body is totally dissolved and consciousness stands alone.

—Robert Adams

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atom(ic

.

We have found that the atom is a living entity, a little vibrant world, and that within its sphere of influence other little lives are to be found, and this very much in the same sense as each of us is an entity, or positive nucleus of force or life, holding within our sphere of influence other lesser lives, i.e., the cells of our body.

What can be said of us can be said, in degree, of the atom.

atoms possess—as centres of force—a persistent soul ... 

every atom has sensation and power of movement.

We might extend the idea still further and consider a planet as an atom. Perhaps there is a life within the planet that holds the substance of the sphere and all forms of life upon it to itself as a coherent whole, and that has a specific extent of influence.

There may perhaps be within the planetary sphere an Entity Whose consciousness is as far removed from that of man as the consciousness of man is from that of the atom of chemistry.


—Alice C. Bailey (1880 - 1949)
The Consciousness of the Atom

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energy dances

  

.

Now the argument is, well, maybe my perceptions are inaccurate, but somewhere there is accuracy, scientists have it with their instruments. That’s how we can find out what’s really real. But relativity, quantum mechanics, have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. 

We think this is reality. But in philosophy, that’s called naïve realism: “What I perceive is reality.” And philosophers have refuted naïve realism every century for the last 2,500 years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and yet most people still act on the basis of naïve realism.

The notion that ‘reality’ is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like ‘things,’ probably as instant bio-survival cues.

Such ‘things,’ however, dissolve back into energy dances — processes or verbs — when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments.

In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that ‘things’ are constructed by our nervous systems and that ‘realities’ (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy functions.


—Robert Anton Wilson

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The vast marvel is to be alive… 

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

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

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

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

—D.H. Lawrence

The Apocalypse

 

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A thousand times I have ascertained and found it to be true: 

the affairs of this world are really nothing into nothing.

Still though, we should dance.

—Hafiz

 

 

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