looking too closely

.

This is a song about somebody else
So don't worry yourself, worry yourself
The devil's right there right there in the details
And you don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
Looking too closely
Looking too closely
Oh, no, no, no!

Put your arms around somebody else
Don't punish yourself, punish yourself
Truth is like blood underneath your fingernails
And you don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
Looking too closely
Looking too closely
Oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!

You don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
You don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
Oh, no, no, no!
And I could be wrong about anybody else

So don't kid yourself, kid yourself
It's you…


—Fin Greenall

...

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.


—Wallace Stevens
Of the Surface of Things, excerpt

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largerloves
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this being human is a guesthouse —Rumi

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From "the incessant workings of his mind and the physical activity displayed by the body... nothing of all that is from him, is him."
He, physically and mentally, is the multitude of others.

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. ... 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 a swarming throng.

To a Westerner, Plato, Zeno, Jesus, Saint Paul, Calvin, Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Napoleon, and many others constitute a diversified crowd,...

These names are only examples. The guests, whom X shelters in his particular guest-house, are not at all the same as those who live with Y.

"that which is compound", which is constituted by the combination of elements as a house is made up of stones, wood, etc., is only a collection, a group and in no way a real "ego". Thus the individual is empty, everything is empty, because one can find nothing in it except the parts which constitute it.


—Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden
The Secret oral teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

...

They come singly, the little streams,
Out of their solitude. They bear
In their rough fall a spate of gleams
That glance and dance in morning air.

They come singly, and coming go
Ever downward toward the river
Into whose dark abiding flow
They come, now quieted, together.

In dark they mingle and are made
At one with light in highest flood
Embodied and inhabited,
The budded branch as red as blood.


—Wendell Berry
This Day

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beautywelove
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say i am

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Outwardly, I am one apple among many.

Inwardly, I am the Tree.

—Alan Watts



...

That which is above is like that which is below

and that which is below is like that which is above,

to achieve the wonders of the one thing.


—Hermes Trismegistus

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the one and the many

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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 Universe

...

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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tao-of-digital-photography
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whoever you are

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You have long been bound thinking:
‘I am a person’.

Let the knowledge: ‘I am Awareness alone’
be the sword that frees you.


—Ashtavakra Gita

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Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.

With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.

And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…


—Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Images

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being(ness

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You are neither the body nor in the body — there is no such thing as body. You have grievously misunderstood yourself; to understand rightly — investigate.

...

You must come to a firm decision. You must forget the thought that you are the body and be only the knowledge ‘I am’, which has no form, no name. Just be.

When you stabilize in that beingness, it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you, and when the secrets are given to you, you transcend the beingness, and you, the Absolute will know that you are also not the consciousness.

Having gained all this knowledge, having understood what is what, a kind of quietude prevails, a tranquility.

Beingness is transcended, but beingness is available.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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if we look

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If we look at a stone, it stays still. But if we could see its atoms, we would observe them to be always now here and now there, in ceaseless vibration. Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting micro events.

...

As the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote in the 1950's, with a beautiful phrase: "An object is a monotonous process." A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while, before melting again into the sea.

What is a wave, which moves on water without carrying with it any drop of water? A wave is not an object, in the sense that it is not made of matter that travels with it. The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous.

Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of "things" that are in this or that state but in terms of "processes" instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another. The properties of "things" manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction—that is to say, at the edges of the processes—and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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locat(ion

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We are all made of bits moving in complicated quantum motions, but when we look closely at those bits, we find that they are located out at the farthest boundaries of space.

I don’t know anything less intuitive about the world than this.

Getting our collective head around the Holographic Principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics.


—Leonard Susskind
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to
Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

...

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.

—René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

...

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light steps, soft drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is just leaving,
the night yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
are just around the corner,
figurations of time
at the turn of this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward,
asleep with all five senses awake,
rain, light steps, a murmuring of syllables,
air and water, words without weight:
what we were and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time, great grief,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the wet asphalt sparkles,
the steam rises and walks,
the night unfolds and beholds me,
you are you and your waist of fog,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, slow lightning,
you cross the street and come in through my forehead,
footsteps of water upon both my eyelids,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt sparkles, you cross the street,
the fog wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the wave of your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn both of my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a welling up of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
years go by, moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the other room?
neither here nor there: you hear them
in another time that is also this time,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight or location,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the garden,
lightning has nested there among the leaves,
a restless garden lazily drifting
— come in, your shadow covers this page.

—Octavio Paz
As One Listens To The Rain
Paul Weinfeld translation

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view with a grain of sand

.

We call it a grain of sand
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.

It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.

And that it fell on the windowsill

is only our experience, not its.

For it it's no different than falling on anything else

with no assurance that it's finished falling

or that it's falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake

but the view doesn't view itself.

It exists in this world

colorless, shapeless,

soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly

and its shore exists shorelessly.

Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry

and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural,

They splash deaf to their own noise

on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless

in which the sun sets without setting at all

and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.

The wind ruffles it, its only reason being

that it blows.

A second passes

A second second.

A third.

But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.

But that's just our simile.

The character's invented, his haste is make-believe,

his news inhuman.


—Wislawa Szymborska
Stanislaw Baraniczak and Clara Cavanagh translation

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not no(thing

.

It is impossible for us to know the reactions of beings constituted in a different way. It is, however, reasonable to think that in the same world ... different worlds are perceived by different beings according to the nature of their respective organs of perception.

... Does that mean that in absolute truth our senses have made contact with a real horse, a real apricot, etc.? There is no proof of this, for the only existing proof depends on the evidence of the senses ...

... We cannot presume any thing more than the existence of a stimulus which has caused the sensation that we have felt, a sensation which we have interpreted in our own way, adding to it images of our own invention.

Should we then believe that we have been taken in by a pure mirage? Not entirely. Probably the stimulus corresponds to something, but this something, that is to say the object of some kind with which one of our senses has made contact, remains unknown to us.


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

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streaming

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When the path ignites a soul,
there's no remaining in place.
The foot touches ground,
but not for long.
The way where love tells its secret
stays always in motion,
and there is no you there, and no reason.

The rider urges his horse to gallop,
and so doing, throws himself
under the flying hooves.
In love-unity there's no old or new.
Everything is nothing.
God alone is.

For lovers the phenomena-veil is very transparent,
and the delicate tracings on it cannot
be explained with language.
Clouds burn off as the sun rises,
and the love-world floods with light.
But cloud-water can be obscuring,
as well as useful.
There is an affection that covers the glory,
rather than dissolving into it.

It's a subtle difference,
like the change in Persian
from the word "friendship"
to the word "work."
That happens with just a dot
above or below the third letter.

There is a seeing of the beauty
of union that doesn't actively work
for the inner conversation.
Your hand and feet must move,
as a stream streams, working
as its Self, to get to the ocean.

Then there's no more mention
of the search.
Being famous, or being a disgrace,
who's ahead or behind, these considerations
are rocks and clogged places
that slow you. Be as naked as a wheat grain
out of its husk and sleek as Adam.
Don't ask for anything other
than the presence.

Don't speak of a "you"
apart from That.
A full container cannot be more full.
Be whole, and nothing.

—Hakim Sanai (1044? - 1150?)
Coleman Barks version

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the secrets of living

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may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile


—E. E. Cummings

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question

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You must always keep in mind that a path is only a path.
Each path is only one of a million paths.
If you feel that you must now follow it,
you need not stay with it under any circumstances.
Any path is only a path. 

There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping a path
if that is what your heart tells you to do. 

But your decision to keep on a path or to leave it 

must be free of fear and ambition. 

I caution you: look at every path closely and deliberately. 

Try it as many times as you think necessary.
Then ask yourself and yourself alone this one question.
Does this path have a heart? 

All paths are the same. They lead nowhere.
They are paths going through the brush or into the brush
or under the brush of the Universe. 

The only question is: Does this path have a heart? 

If it does, then it is a good path.
If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.


—Carlos Castaneda

...

The body is not you, the name is not you.

The body is the food you have consumed;
the taste of the food is the knowledge ‘I am’.

That is Self, the feeling ‘I am’,
that is the love to be. 

How amazing, how incredible, it has no name, but you give many names to it. 

It is the Self, the love to be. 
That love to be is all pervading. 

Before you conceptualize anything, you are. 

Even before the knowingness, you are.


—Nisargadatta

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this is the time

.

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time
For you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.


—Hafiz

...

You have been telling the people that this is 
the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.

And there are things to be considered:
Where are you living?
What are you doing? 
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?

Where is your water?
Know your garden.

It is time to speak your Truth. 
Create your community. 
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those 
who will be afraid.

They will try to hold onto the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart 
and they will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.

The elders say we must let go of the shore, 
push off into the middle of the river, 
keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.
Least of all, ourselves.
For the moment that we do, 
our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves!
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner 
and in celebration.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.


—The Hopi Nation Elders 
of Oraibi, Arizona

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