Tuesday, April 8, 2025

wherever you are on the way




Stephane Granzotto








They set out with him inside the dream,
while he is actually sleeping beside a river of pure water.

Sleep deeply wherever you are on the way.
Maybe some traveler will wake you.

Give up subtle thinking, the twofold, threefold
multiplication of mistakes.

Listen to the sound of waves within you.


—Rumi




You are sitting in a wagon being
drawn by a horse whose
reins you 
hold.

There are two inside of you
who can steer.

Most never hand the reins to Me
so they go from place to place the
best they can, though
rarely happy.

And rarely does their whole body laugh
feeling God's poke 
in the 
ribs.

If you feel tired, dear,
my shoulder is soft,
I'd be glad to
steer a
while.


—Kabir

.



When whales need a nap, they take a deep breath, dive around 15 meters, and position themselves in a perfectly vertical pattern. They sleep peacefully for between 10 and 15 minutes, in groups of 5 or 6 whales, possibly for protection.

Nobody knew that whales slept vertically until a 2020 study documented the behavior. And nobody captured such stunning photos in the wild until 2023. French photographer Stephane Granzotto was documenting whales in the Mediterranean for his book on the creatures when he stumbled upon these sleeping whales.
ian sanders


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you are that which has the infinite potential to love, yet, you cling to your imagined personality

  


whale breath




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There is no such thing as a person. 
There are only restrictions and limitations. 
The sum total of these defines the person. 

You think you know yourself when you know what you are. 
But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. 

See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. 
Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. 

You are not. 

Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that.
There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. 

Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation. 


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



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You cannot fight pain and pleasure on the level of consciousness.  

To go beyond them you must go beyond consciousness, which is possible only when you look at consciousness as something that happens to you and not in you, as something external, alien, superimposed. Then, suddenly you are free of consciousness, really alone, with nothing to intrude. 

And that is your true state.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



.



The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.


—Billy Collins
Directions (excerpt)
The Art of Drowning



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Is it the body that is thinking, or is it thought that is bodying? —Ahmed Salman

  





.



You see what the eye does teach; and yet it would never of itself have afforded this insight, without something that looks through the eyes and uses the data of the senses as mere guides to penetrate from the apparent to the unseen. 

It is needless to add the methods of geometry that lead us step by step through visible delineations to truths that lie out of sight, and countless other instances which all prove that apprehension is the work of an intellectual essence deeply seated in our nature, acting through the operation of our bodily senses.


—St. Gregory of Nyssa (335 – 395)



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close your eyes. 

fall in love. 

stay there. 


—Rumi



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Monday, April 7, 2025

questions

  


David Sanger





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I have been thinking of the difference between
water and the waves on it.

Rising, water's still water, falling back, it is water.
Will you give me a hint how to tell them apart? 

Because someone has made up the word "wave,"
do I have to distinguish it from water? 
There is a Secret One inside us; the planets in all the galaxies pass through his hands like beads. 

That is a string of beads one should look at 
with luminous eyes.


—Kabir

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The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart. —Rumi






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To the ignorant, the “I” is the self limited to the body; to the wise, the “I” is the Infinite Self. One who turns inward with an untroubled mind to search where the consciousness “I” arises, realizes the Self, and rests in “That” like a river when it joins the ocean.

Call it by any name, God, Self, Source, the Heart or the seat of Consciousness, it is all the same. The point to be grasped is this, that Heart means the very core of one’s being, the centre without which there is nothing whatsoever… Take no notice of the ego and its activities, but see only the light behind.


—Ramana Maharshi


.



In intuition, the single pulsates with the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life of the single. Every genuine artistic representation is itself and is the universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individual form as the universe. 
In every utterance, every fanciful [imaginative] creation, of the poet, there lies the whole of human destiny, all human hope, illusions, griefs, joys, human grandeurs and miseries, the whole drama of reality perpetually evolving and growing out of itself in suffering and joy.


—Benedetto Croce
The Totality of Artistic Expression (1917)



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sorrow arrow

    





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You sit in your body, quietly making blood 
Wild blood 
Bird of the world


—Emily Kendal Frey



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Sunday, April 6, 2025

souls of song

  




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Remember when our songs were just like prayers.
Like gospel hymns that you called in the air.
Come down come down sweet reverence,
Unto my simple house and ring...
And ring

Ring like silver, ring like gold
Ring out those ghosts on the Ohio
Ring like clear day wedding bells
Were we the belly of the beast or the sword that fell...
We’ll never tell

Come to me clear and cold on some sea
Watch the world spinning waves, like that machine

Now I’ve been crazy couldn’t you tell
I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
Now I’m covered up in straw, belly up on the table
Well I drank and sang, and passed in the stable.

That tall grass grows high and brown,
Well I dragged you straight in the muddy ground
And you sent me back to where I roam
Well I cursed and I cried, but now i know...
now I know

And I ran back to that hollow again
The moon was just a sliver back then
And I ached for my heart like some tin man
When it came oh it beat and it boiled and it rang...
oh it's ringing

Ring like crazy, ring like hell
Turn me back into that wild haired gale
Ring like silver, ring like gold
Turn these diamonds straight back into coal

—Gregory Alan Isakov
The Stable Song 


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Of what is the body made?
It is made of emptiness and rhythm.

At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again, there is only the dance. At the unimaginable heart of the atom, the compact nucleus, we have found no solid object, but rather a dynamic pattern of tightly confined energy vibrating perhaps 1022 times a second: a dance …


—George Leonard
Wake Up and Laugh!


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Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, night, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song.


—Ezra Pound
Cino, Personae: The Shorter Poems



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always meaningful, never abiding

 






.




In the great head-end which has been mostly darkness springs up myriads of twinkling stationary lights and myriads of trains of moving lights of many different directions. It is as though activity from one of those local places which continued restless in the darkened main-mass suddenly spread far and wide and invaded all.  

The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. 

It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns. 

Now as the waking body rouses, sub-patterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down into the unlit tracks of the stalk-piece of the scheme. Strings of flashing and travelling sparks engage the lengths of it. This means that the body is up and rises to meet its waking day.


—Sir Charles Sherrington
, English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s 
Man on His Nature (1942)



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Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredrome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag. The neocortex has ridges, valleys, and folds because the brain kept remodeling itself though space was tight. We take for granted the ridiculous-sounding yet undeniable fact that each person carries around atop the body a complete universe in which trillions of sensations, thoughts, and desires stream. They mix privately, silently, while agitating on many levels, some of which we’re not aware of, thank heavens. 

If we needed to remember how to work the bellows of the lungs or the writhing python of digestion, we’d be swamped by formed and forming memories, and there’d be no time left for buying cute socks. My brain likes cute socks. But it also likes kisses. And asparagus. And watching boat-tailed grackles. And biking. And drinking Japanese green tea in a rose garden. There’s the nub of it — the brain is personality’s whereabouts. It’s also a stern warden, and, at times, a self-tormentor. It’s where catchy tunes snag, and cravings keep tugging. Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations. It’s also an impersonal landscape where minute bolts of lightning prowl and strike. A hall of mirrors, it can contemplate existentialism, the delicate hooves of a goat, and its own birth and death in a matter of seconds. It’s blunt as a skunk, and a real gossip hound, but also voluptuous, clever, playful, and forgiving.

The brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death. That monologue often seems like a barrier between us and our neighbors and loved ones, but actually it unites us at a fundamental level, as nothing else can. It takes many forms: our finding similarities among seemingly unrelated things, wadding up worries into tangled balls of obsession difficult to pierce even with the spike of logic, painting elaborate status or romance fantasies in which we star, picturing ourselves elsewhere and elsewhen. Happily storing information outside our bodies, the brain extends itself through time and space by creating extensions to the senses such as telescopes and telephones. How evocation becomes sound in Ravel’s nostalgic “Pour une Infante Défunte,” a plaintive-sounding dance for a princess from a faraway time, is an art of the brain. So is the vast gallantry of imagining how other people, and even other animals, experience life.

The brain is not completely hardwired, though at times it may seem so. Someone once wisely observed that if one’s only tool is a key, then every problem will seem to be a lock. Thus the brain analyzes as a way of life in Western cultures, abhors contradiction, honors formal logic, and abides by many rules. Reasoning we call it, as if it were a spice. Cuisine may be a good metaphor for the modishness and malleability of the thinking brain. In some non-Western cultures the brain doesn’t reason through logic but by relating things to the environment, in a process that includes contradiction, conflict, and the sudden appearance of random forces and events. The biologist Alexander Luria was struck by this when he interviewed Russian nomads in 1931. “All the bears up north are white,” he said. “I have a friend up there who saw a bear. What color was the bear?” A nomad stared at him, puzzled: “How am I supposed to know? Ask your friend!” These are but two styles in the art of the brain. All people are alike enough to be recognizable, even predictable at times, yet everyone has a slightly different flavor of mind. Whole cultures do. Just different enough to keep things interesting, or, depending on your point of view, frightening.

The brain analyzes, the brain loves, the brain detects a whiff of pine and is transported to a childhood summer spent at Girl Scout camp in the Poconos, the brain tingles under the caress of a feather. But the brain is silent, dark, and dumb. It feels nothing. It sees nothing. The art of the brain is to transcend those daunting limitations and canvass the world. The brain can hurl itself across mountains or into outer space. The brain can imagine an apple and experience it as real. Indeed, the brain barely knows the difference between an imagined apple and an observed one. Hence the success of athletes visualizing perfect performances, and authors luring readers into their picturesque empires. In one instant, the brain can rule the world as a self-styled god, and the next succumb to helplessness and despair.

Until now, using the slang we take for granted, I’ve been saying the “brain” when what I really mean is that fantasia of self-regard we call the “mind.” The brain is not the mind, the mind inhabits the brain. Like a ghost in a machine, some say. Mind is the comforting mirage of the physical brain. An experience, not an entity. Another way to think of mind may be as Saint Augustine thought of God, as an emanation that’s not located in one place, or one form, but exists throughout the universe. An essence, not just a substance. 

And, of course, the mind isn’t located only in the brain. The mind reflects what the body senses and feels, it’s influenced by a caravan of hormones and enzymes. Each mind inhabits a private universe of its own devising that changes daily, depending on the vagaries of medication, intense emotions, pollution, genes, or countless other personal-size cataclysms. In Kafka’s fiction, a character finds the question “How are you?” impossible to answer. We slur over the sensory details of each day. Otherwise life would be too exhausting to live. The brain knows how to idle when necessary and yet be ready to rev up at the sound of a bear claw scratching over rock, or a math teacher calling out one’s name.

Among the bad jokes evolution has played on us are these: (1) we have brains that can conceive of states of perfection they can’t achieve; (2) we have brains that compare our insides to other people’s outsides; (3) we have brains desperate to stay alive, yet we are finite beings who perish. There are many more, of course.

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the art and beauty of the brain, because it seems too abstract and hidden an empire, a dense jungle of neurons. The idea that a surgeon might reach into it to revise its career seems as dangerous as taking the lid off a time bomb and discovering thousands of wires. Which one controls the timing mechanism? Getting it wrong may be deadly. Still, there are bomb squads and there are brain surgeons. The art of the brain is to liken and learn, never resist a mystery, and question everything, even itself.


—Diane Ackerman
The Enchanted Loom
An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain



.

 



 


Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. —Carl Jung

  






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There are three states only, the waking, dream and sleep. Turiya is not a fourth one; it is what underlies these three. But people do not readily understand it. Therefore it is said that this is the fourth state and the only Reality. In fact it is not apart from anything, for it forms the substratum of all happenings; it is the only Truth; it is your very Being. The three states appear as fleeting phenomena on it and then sink into it alone. Therefore they are unreal.


—Ramana Maharishi
Talks with Ramana


.



So what can they tell us,
the writers of dreambooks,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors
with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times
even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.


—Wisława Szymborska
Dreams, excerpt
Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version



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We have seen so much.

Reality has almost used us up ...


—Tomas Tranströmer
Windows and Stones



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Saturday, April 5, 2025

path(ways





 

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i walk with confidence

i do not get lost, 

my footing is sure, 

my legs are strong, 

i do not tire, 

my feet are comfortable, 

i go where i need to.


—shoe sigil blessings 



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In 19th century Suffolk small sickles called ‘hooks’ were hung on stiles and posts at the start of certain well-used paths: those running between villages, for example. A walker would pick up a hook and use it to lop off branches that were starting to impede passage. The hook would then be left at the other end of the path, for a walker coming in the opposite direction. In this manner the path was collectively maintained for general use.


—Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot


.


One does not stand still looking for a path. 

One walks; and as one walks,
a path comes into being.


—Mas Kodani

 .



 


palm







.



Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Palm

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Walker, your footsteps 
are the road, and nothing more. 

Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking. 

Walking you make the road, 
and turning to look behind 
you see the path you never 
again will step upon. 

Walker, there is no road, 
only foam trails on the sea.


—Antonio Machado
proverbs and songs #29


.







gathering life out of the rain

   



 
 
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There's a tree walking around in the rain,
it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
It has an errand. It gathers life
out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear nights
waiting as we do for the moment
when the snowflakes blossom in space.


—Tomas Tranströmer
the tree and the sky


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Friday, April 4, 2025

you’re looking at you


  




.


Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. 
All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.


Tony Hillerman
The Ghostway

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heart in place

  






.



Paradise is having a connection — roots in the garden, stem from the branch, current to the light. To be unaware of the connection is to have one’s heart in the wrong place — far out in the fruit instead of within, in the tree.


—Alan Watts
The Body Journal


.


Civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. 

If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words “I” and “myself ” must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many “growing communities” are as disastrous as cancer.


—Alan Watts
Does it Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality



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I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray…


—Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable


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we must be very strong

and love each other

in order to go on living.


—Audre Lorde 
Equinox (Undersong) 


 
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between i am and you are

    



  



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By itself nothing has existence. 
Everything needs its own absence. 

To be is to be distinguishable, to be here and not there,
to be now and not then, to be thus and not otherwise. 

Like water is shaped by the container, so is everything 
determined by conditions (gunas).


—Nisargadatta Maharaj



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Between now and now
between I am and you are
the word bridge

Entering it
you enter yourself;
the world connects and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another
there is always a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I'll sleep between its arches.


—Octavio Paz



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bless, Kevin

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Thursday, April 3, 2025

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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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


.


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


—Nisargadatta



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Wednesday, April 2, 2025

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

   






.



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.

Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them.


—Nikola Tesla


.



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


.




If you want to find the secrets of the universe, 

think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.


—Nikola Tesla




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