what are the basic assumptions that underlie language and mathematics?

 

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We invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is.


—Carl Sagan
Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death

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There are nine different words for the color blue in the Spanish Maya dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six [blue] butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.

—Earl Shorris

The Last Word: Can the World’s Small Languages Be Saved?

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afdrif, the fate of somebody
afturganga, a ghost, “one who walks again”
álfadans, dance of the elves
átt, the direction of the wind
augabragð, the twinkling of an eye
álfatrú, belief in fairies
bíldóttur, having black spots around the eyes of animals
blámóða, blue mist
blika, a cover of clouds, often foreboding storm or rain
blær, soft, calm wind 

draugagangur, the walking of ghosts, a haunting
draumaland, land of dreams
dúnalogn, calm as death
dýjamosi, bright green moss growing in quagmires
fenna, to fill with snow 

fjallavættur, a mountain spirit
fjúka, carried away by the wind 

flygja, a ghost who accompanies a certain person
föl, a thick film of snow covering the ground
galdraöld, the age of magic
grængolandi, deep and dark green
gullbúinn, adorned with gold
hlakka, the cry of a bird of prey
hrafnagervi, the outward form of ravens 

huldurdalur, hidden valley
kaf, to plunge into deep water
kollgáta, the true answer to the riddle
kossleit, looking for kisses
leirskáld, a bad poet 

lumma, a pancake, or, the palm of a small hand
mói, ground covered with heather
morgungyðja, the goddess of the morning
mosavaxinn, overgrown with moss
náttúrufegurð, the beauty of nature
norðankaldi, a light breeze from the north
rammgöldróttur, full of witchcraft and wizardry 
rósóttur, with a design of roses
selslíki, the shape of a seal
sjódraugur, the ghost of a drowned man 

smáminnka, getting smaller and smaller
sólskin, sunshine
stirndur, set full of stars
sumarsól, the sun in the summer
sæbrattur, rising steeply out of the sea
sælurdalur, the valley of bliss
undirsæng, a soft feather mattress
veturnætur, a few days before the first day of winter

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kossleit

💗

words for love

  

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Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling.

Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately. If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. 

An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. 

Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling. 


—Robert Johnson
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden

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How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, 
and frightening that it does not quite. 

What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, 
cinnamon, horses and birds.


—Jack Gilbert
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart, excerpt 

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They can be like a sun, words.

They can do for the heart what light can for a field. 

—John of the Cross

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I heard a man say a poem once, he said, ‘All that lives is holy.’ —Steinbeck

 

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In daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” 

But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. 

Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. 

Not a single day and not a single night after it.


—Wisława Szymborska

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I would give all metaphors

in return for one word

drawn out of my breast like a rib

for one word

contained within the boundaries

of my skin


—Zbigniew Herbert
Czesław Miłosz version 

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behind the bodily world

   

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The Maitri Upanishad mentions two aspects of Brahman, the higher and the lower. The higher Brahman being the unmanifest Supreme Reality which is soundless and totally quiescent and restful, the lower being the Shabda-Brahman which manifests itself into the everchanging restless cosmos through the medium of sound vibrations. 

The Upanishad says that “Two Brahmans there are to be known: One as sound and the other as Brahman Supreme.” 

The process of manifestation is from soundless to sound, from noumenality to phenomenality, from perfect quiescence of "being” to the restlessness of “becoming”.

—Sudhakar S.D, 1988, p83

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It is I who must begin.

Once I begin, once I try --
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
-- to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
-- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.


—Vaclav Havel

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All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His Being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my
heart.

—Meister Eckhart

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what is the nature of the world?

    

Paris by night, from the International Space Station

click to see

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You are like a dewdrop, on a multidimensional spider's web in the morning. And if you look at that thing carefully, you will see in every dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops. So the way that dewdrop looks goes with the way all the other ones look, you see.

—Alan Watts

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This must be well grasped: the world hangs on the 

thread of consciousness.  No consciousness, no world. 

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts.  

Seeing the moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged, 
she went and wrote: 

‘If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.’

—D. H. Lawrence 
The Rainbow

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there are moments in moist love when heaven is jealous of what we on earth can do. —Hafiz

 

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A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here. 

Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion. 

He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

—Czesław Miłosz

This Only
Robert Hass version

 

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This world is just a little place, 

just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, 

so let us keep fast hold of hands, 

that when the birds begin, 

none of us be missing.

—Emily Dickinson

 

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You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love. —Rumi

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We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit. It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security...

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

—Sogyal Rinpoche

. 

Are you looking for me?

I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours. 

You will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables. 

When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time. 

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.

—Kabir

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All of you is holy. 

You are already more and less than whatever you can know. 

Breathe out, look in, let go. 

—John Welwood

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kind(red

 

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What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. 

The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. 

We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.

—Valarie Kaur
Sikh activist and human rights lawyer

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Your body is made of the same elements that lionesses are built from. Three quarters of you is the same kind of water that beats rocks to rubble, wears stones away. Your DNA translates into the same twenty amino acids that wolf genes code for. 

When you look in the mirror and feel weak, remember, the air you breathe in fuels forest fires capable of destroying everything they touch. On the days you feel ugly, remember: diamonds are only carbon. You are so much more.


—Curtis Ballard

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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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I, the Beloved, and Love

       

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We lay in the dark, breathing together. 

The deepest intimacy … 

—L. Gluck



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In those days before a trace of the two worlds,
no "other" yet imprinted on the Tablet of Existence,

I, the Beloved, and Love lived together
in the corner of an uninhabited cell.


—Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
Divine Flashes

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For this is the truth about our soul, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.


—Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway

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If a thing loves, it is infinite.


—William Blake

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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. —William S. Burroughs

 

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"Hopefully, this wakes us up a little bit.
We're vulnerable and we really need to learn to understand that we are part of the natural world, not separate from it.

And we rely on it for clean air, for clean water. We rely on the forest to regulate temperature and to regulate rainfall.

So, we've just got to start thinking differently."


—Jane Goodall

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the soul of the whole

    

whales sleeping

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We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One. 

And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are One.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

[...] All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.


—Albert Einstein

.

 

 

for the children

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I will walk to a place with a high cliff, and camp by the lake there at evening, and study the grand firs and the nobles reflected in the water made still by the evening. 

I will sit by the fire and consider, and lie down to count stars, and sleep, and in sleep dream dreams of green bones. 

When the morning arrives, grey and cold, I will rise and walk to the high place, bringing with me a drum I have made, and a song for my scattered people. 

There, on the rock, where no one will hear, I will sing the sun up, and name names, and the names will be holy to me.


—Richard Bear
Hoedad (reforestation)

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The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down. 

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it. 

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children: 

stay together
learn the flowers
go light 


—Gary Snyder 

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questions

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What is Real? 

We could define ‘real’ as something which never changes. In order to change, a thing has to cease to be what it is and become something else; i.e. it would have to become what it is not.

Therefore, anything that changes cannot be real, since the act of changing involves non-existence

What is Unreal? 

Unreal is the appearance of something in the place/location of its non-existence. Example the snake appears where it does not exist, ie the rope. The snake appears in the location of its own absence. This is the very definition of falsity or unreality. 

Where something is not, there it appears. 
Then it is false. 

Blue color appears in the sky where it does not exist. The blue color appears where there is no blue color. The sky is not blue. 

Similarly, the entire universe of experience (waking world, dream world, deep sleep blankness) continuously appears and disappears in the sky of Awareness. 

Awareness is the locus or location of the absence of the mind. Awareness is where the mind appears, plays it games and dissapears. Hence, the mind is unreal. 

The locus in which something appears and disappears, then in that locus, that thing is an appearance and unreal. The locus only is real.

You are that locus - Awareness.


—Swami Sarvapriyananda
Lectures on Mandukya Karika

 

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Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. 

If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. 


—Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893)

 

 

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Nature is a temple in which
living columns sometimes
emit confused words. 

Man approaches it through
forests of symbols, which
observe him with familiar glances.


—Charles Baudelaire 

(1821 - 1867)

 

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infinit(esimal

   

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(The student) ought to succeed in noting that 

nothing of all that is from him, is him.

He, physically and mentally, is a multitude of others.

.

This "multitude of others" includes the material – the ground, one might say – which he owes to his heredity, to his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his "I", form there a swarming throng.


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

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No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. 

When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought.


—Giacomo Leopardi 
(1798 - 1837)

 

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Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone 

—we find it with another.


—Thomas Merton

 

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revelation

 

.

Hidden in the heart of every creature
Exists the One Self, subtler than the subtlest,
Greater than the greatest. They go beyond
All sorrow who extinguish their self-will
And behold the glory of the Self
Through the grace of the One Heart.

Though one sits in meditation in a 
Particular place, the Self within
Can exercise its influence far away.
Though still, it moves everything everywhere.

When the wise realize the Self,
Formless in the midst of forms, changeless
In the midst of change, omnipresent
And supreme, they go beyond sorrow.

The Self cannot be known through study
Of the scriptures, nor through the intellect,
Nor through hearing discourses about it.
The Self can be attained only by those
Whom the Self chooses. Verily unto them
Does the Self reveal itself.


—The Katha Upanishad
from the Eknath Easwaran version

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No striving, no grasping at this or that, no entertaining any self-involved stories whatsoever. 

Instead, attention pivots toward a light in the heart in which the ‘field of boundless emptiness’ is revealed. All questions and doubts are put to rest.  


—Hongzhi

.

Air is anything but empty. If you’re a bat, it holds the sound of the shape of a hillside.

 

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When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. 

And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.


―Ingmar Bergman

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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 

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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

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