poem

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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

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wit(ness

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All we know is experience but there is no independent ‘we’ or ‘I’ that knows experience. There is just experience or experiencing.

And experiencing is not inherently divided into one part that experiences and another part that is experienced.

...

The idea that there is a mind independent of thinking, a body independent of sensing or a world independent of perceiving, is a belief.

The mind itself is limited so it can never know whether or not such a belief is true.

The mind, body and world are never experienced as they are normally conceived to be. Our only experience of them is thinking, sensing and perceiving. Thinking, sensing and perceiving are modes of knowing or experiencing and the only substance present in knowing or experiencing is our self, awareness.

...

In other words, the witness cannot stand alone.

If we truly take our stand as witnessing presence of awareness and look at the objects of the mind, body and world, we do not find any distance or separation between our self, this witnessing presence, and the objects of the mind, body or world that it witnesses. In fact, we do not find two entities there, a witnessing awareness and a body, mind or world.

We find only the seamlessness of experiencing utterly one with or pervaded by the intimacy of our own being. That is, it only finds itself.

...

In other words, we do not cease to be a separate self and become the witness and likewise we do not cease to be the witness and become pure awareness.

It is only thinking which seemingly reduces pure awareness to these apparently successive stages of limitation and localisation. And it is only for thinking that these layers of ignorance, or the ignoring of the true nature of experience, are removed. For our self, awareness, no such thing ever happens.

...

So, as we proceed back along this projected path, in the opposite direction from which it arose, it is understood that our only knowledge of the mind, body and world is thinking, sensing and perceiving.

And if we look more closely at the nature of thinking, sensing and perceiving, we find that there is no substance present there other than our self, awareness.


—Rupert Spira
Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

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unbroken

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If man thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

...

But let me emphasize that to have an approach of wholeness doesn’t mean that we are going to be able to capture the whole of existence within our concepts and knowledge. Rather it means first that we understand this totality as an unbroken and seamless whole in which relatively autonomous objects and forms emerge.

And secondly it means that in so far as wholeness is comprehended with the aid of the implicate order, the relationship between the various parts or sub wholes are ultimately internal. Wholeness is seen as primary while the parts are secondary, in the sense that what they are and what they do can be understood only in the light of the whole.

And perhaps I should also add here that in each sub whole there is a certain quality that does not come from the parts, but helps organize the parts. I could summarize this in the principle: The wholeness of the whole and the parts.
Each human being is therefore related to the totality, including nature and the whole of mankind. He is also therefore internally related to other human beings. How close that relationship is, has to be explored.

What I am further saying is that the quantum theory implies that ultimately the relationship of the parts and whole of matter in general is understood in a similar way. This approach of wholeness could help to end the far-reaching and pervasive fragmentation that arises out of the mechanistic world view.


–David Bohm

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keep walking. do your own time. —Neil Gaiman

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All we have to believe with is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

—Neil Gaiman
American Gods

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Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don’t forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs, but somewhere else…

—Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers

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Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased.

—Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities

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the medicine

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If there were a way for someone to be, at the same time, before and behind things, he would understand to what a degree time’s opening, that simply devours events, loses its meaning; exactly as in a poem.

—Odysseus Elytis
from “To Anoint the Repast [XXIV],” trans. Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris in The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis

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Every spiritual wisdom tradition from time immemorial has pointed out in its own creative way that grasping onto the idea of intrinsic, independent existence─both in the seemingly objective outer world and within the subjective domain of our own selves─is the fundamental mental affliction, the root cause of our self-created delusion with all of its concomitant suffering.

Clinging onto the idea that we exist in a way that we simply do not is a deeply entrenched unconscious disposition, a habitual pattern that at a certain point gains enough momentum to develop a seeming autonomy such that it re-generates itself, as we invest our life force into an illusory identity and unconsciously recreate it moment by moment.

These same spiritual wisdom traditions point out that the realization of what in Buddhism is called “emptiness”─the lack of intrinsic, independent objective existence of both the outer world as well as ourselves─is the fundamental cure for our psychic dis-ease.

…

In discovering that there is no objective world out there and no objective subject in here, quantum physics is discovering the medicine─the fundamental cure─for the psycho-spiritual illness that ails our species.


–Paul Levy

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quantummeta-physics
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March is the month of expectation —Emily Dickinson

 

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Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

—Yehuda Amichai


...

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


–W. S. Merwin
Still Morning

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

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

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

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

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying


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

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since time is distance in space

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Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

—William Gibson
Distrust That Particular Flavor

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Since time is distance in space, time is memory on the structure of space. Without memory, there is no time. Without time, there is no memory. It then follows that the energy that we perceive as the material world must be information, or energy on the structure of space.

—Nassim Haramein

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You have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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wait - what ?
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at the heart of time

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I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,

It's ancient tale of being apart or together,

As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount

At the heart of time, love of one for another.

We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same

Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-

Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,

The love of all man’s days both past and forever:

Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.

The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours
And the songs of every poet past and forever. 


–Rabindranath Tagore

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you know ...

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What is called the world is only thought.

–Ramana Maharshi

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You are not what you think yourself to be, I assure you.

The image you have of yourself is made up from memories and is purely accidental.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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it’s the season of spring

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It’s the season of spring, let us be cheek to cheek with the east wind
Let us be friends with the rose, and companions of its scent
It is the time of the wild tulip

With pure hearts let us take up the cup

Like the narcissus, let us be drunk without pretense


—Sheyhi
from The Gathering of Desire,
Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology

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Spring paints the countryside.

Cypress trees grow even more beautiful,

but let's stay inside.


Lock the door.

Come to me naked.

No one's here.


—Rumi

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ok
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O sweet spontaneous earth

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The branch might seem like the fruit’s origin:

In fact, the branch exists because of the fruit.

—Rumi

...

O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

, has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty , how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

–E. E. Cummings

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invitation

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Come to the orchard in Spring,

There is light and wine, and sweethearts

in the pomegranate flowers.


If you do not come, these do not matter.

If you do come, these do not matter.


—Rumi

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a sweet question

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The moon came to me last night

With a sweet question.

She said,

“The sun has been my faithful lover 

For millions of years.

Whenever I offer my body to him 

Brilliant light pours from his heart.

Thousands then notice my happiness 

And delight in pointing

toward my beauty.

Hafiz, 

Is it true that our destiny

Is to turn into Light

Itself?”

And I replied, 

"Dear moon, 

Now that your love is maturing,

We need to sit together

Close like this more often

So I might instruct you 

How to become

Who you

Are!"

–Hafiz

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on being perfectly alive

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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.

There is not any part 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 surfaces of the water.


–D. H. Lawrence

  
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answers from the elements

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A whole afternoon field inside me from one stem of reed.
The messenger comes running toward me, irritated:
Why be so hard to find?
 
Last night I asked the moon about the Moon, my one question for the visible world, Where is God?

The moon says, I am dust stirred up
when he passed by.
 
The sun, My face is pale yellow
from just now seeing him.
 
Water: I slide on my head and face
like a snake, from a spell, he said.

Fire: His lightning,
I want to be that restless.

Wind, why so light?
I would burn if I had a choice.

Earth, quiet and thoughtful?
Inside me I have a garden
and an underground spring.

This world hurts my head with its answers,
wine filling my hand, not my glass.
 
If I could wake completely, I would say without speaking
Why I’m ashamed of using words.


–Rumi

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questions

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It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant.

But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. 

In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.

–Freeman Dyson

...

Niels Bohr ... understood that the energy of electrons in atoms can take on only certain values, like the energy of light, and crucially that electrons can only jump between one atomic orbit and another with determined energies, emitting or absorbing a photon when they jump. These are the famous "quantum leaps." ...

Werner Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The "quantum leaps" from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being "real": an electron is a set of jumps of one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place. It is not in a "place" at all.

It's as if God had not designed reality with a line that was heavily scored but just dotted it with a faint outline.

–Carlo Rovelli 
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

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... in the final stages of his quest to find a new way of thinking the essence of being, Heidegger (came) to an understanding of awareness as the very ground of such a thinking - indeed of being itself - recognizing awareness itself as the open field or clearing which first gives or grants Being to beings ...

—Peter Wilberg

Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought

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So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quartz, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics? Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings. 

What is chemistry? Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings and then what is the mind of God? Its the cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace.

–Michio Kaku

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