Blood Meridian, excerpt

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The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


—Cormac McCarthy

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the energy of the blood

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The foundation of the body is the heart, which is the residence of essence... By assembling essence in its residence, it will by and by enter into the blood ... 

—Dong Zhongshu
董仲舒 Han Dynasty Chinese scholar, 179 BC - 104 BC
Chunqui Fanlu 春秋繁露 

Explanations of the Spring and Autumn Annals

. . .

This description of essence as being first assembled in the heart and then passed on into the body allows the concrete understanding of the blood as energy and of the mind as energy in ancient Chinese thought. The mind is consequently thought of as fluid residing in one or the other organ and circulating freely around the body—carried, perhaps, by the energy of the blood.

—Hidemi Ishida
Body and Mind: The Chinese Perspective

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The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.


—Joseph Campbell 

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this is the body

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Every day the body works in the fields of the world
Mending a stone wall
Or swinging a sickle through the tall grass -
The grass of civics, the grass of money -
And every night the body curls around itself
And listens for the soft bells of sleep. 
But the heart is restless and rises
From the body in the middle of the night,
Leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
With its thick, pictureless walls
To sit by herself at the kitchen table
And heat some milk in a pan. 
And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
And goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
And opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
And roams from room to room in the dark,
Darting away from every mirror like a strange fish. 
And the soul is up on the roof
In her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
Singing a song about the wildness of the sea
Until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
The way a flock of birds settles back into a tree, 
Resuming their daily colloquy,
Talking to each other or themselves
Even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body - the house of voices -
Sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
To stare into the distance, 
To listen to all its names being called
Before bending again to its labor.

–Billy Collins

The Night House

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My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa and it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Virgil who burn up the whole room, the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment, this is the body, so beautifully carved inside, with the curves of the inner ear, and the husk so rough, knuckle-brown.

As we walk, we enter the fields of other bodies, and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see, and a being inside leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. When we come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling smells . . . slowly circling energies . . . The protozoa know there are odors the shape of oranges, of tornadoes, of octopses . . .

The sunlight lays itself down before every protozoa, 

the night opens itself out behind it, 

and inside its own energy it lives!

So the space between two people diminishes, it grows less and less, no one to weep, they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the body, and beings unknown to us start out in a pilgrimage to their Saviour, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small black stone, that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door . . . and it was after that they found their friends, who helped them to digest the hard grains of this world . . . The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms . . . the beings dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them . . . to them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the voice of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says, “Now do you still say that you cannot choose the road?”

–Robert Bly

for Lewis Thomas, and his The Lives of the Cell

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the summons

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Listen.

In the silence
between your heartbeats
bides a summons.
Do you hear it?

Name it if you must,
or leave it forever nameless,
but why pretend it is not there?

Leave that which is not,
but appears to be.
Seek that which is,
but is not apparent.


—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

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at this moment

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Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience. 

...

At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.

—Deepak Chopra

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The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.


—Joseph Campbell 

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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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that which abides

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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

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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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With their round dance the electrons spin
chrysalises of that which abides,

the inmost cocoons
which do not open of their own accord
but are of that which abides.
 
There it is not a matter of hatching out.

There it is a matter of tending and protecting
the metamorphoses of the inmost
deeper-down swaying,

the innermost playing of women in dance.


—Harry Martinson

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holographic language

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"Researchers have captured the first image of what dolphins see using echolocation. 

When a dolphin scans an object with its high frequency sound beam, each short click captures a still image, similar to a camera taking photographs,” Reid said. “Each dolphin click is a pulse of pure sound that becomes modulated by the shape of the object."


—John Stuart Reid

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more
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5%

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... We perceive only a negligible portion of the vibrating ocean in which we are immersed.

We fail to detect the infrared and the ultraviolet, infrasound and ultrasound, and in general the very high and very low frequencies; we can’t even detect the X rays, gamma rays, radioactivity, and cosmic rays, which all still affect our bodies. And so many frequencies are still unknown.

The senses are therefore incomplete; our neural circuits can’t process the majority of inputs in order to translate them into images. According to some, our senses comprehend only 5 percent of the signals from the world, which means that we miss 95 percent of our environment.


–Citro Massimo, M.D. 
The Basic Code of the Universe:
The Science of the Invisible in Physics, Medicine, and Spirituality

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listen

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This is the first thing
I have understood:

Time is the echo of an axe

Within a wood.


—Philip Larkin
The North Ship

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Power of Mantras, Frequencies that Heal and Transcend

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Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language that is based on sounds and vibrations. Each alphabet with its pronunciation has a specific meaning; like ku denotes earth, khE is sky etc.

OM is the first and foremost of all mantras. It is the sound of cosmic energy housing all the sounds. The spiritual efficacy of OM is heard, not by the ears but by the heart. It surcharges the innermost being of man with vibrations of the highest reality.

All galaxies (including ours) are believed to rotate around the sound frequency resonating with OM.

Frequency of OM is 7.83 Hz, which is inaudible to the human ear with its double strand DNA that cannot discern sounds of frequency less than 20 hertz. Birds, dogs and a few other animals can hear it however.

OM has been adapted into other religions as AMEN, the numerical- 786 (OM symbol shown in mirror), SHALOM, OMKAR/ONKAR etc, but they do NOT work like the original OM. While OM releases Nitric Oxide, Amen and Shalom only emit a sound.

Frequencies of various Beej Mantras are -
 

OM – 7.83 Hz

Gam – 14 Hz

Hleem – 20 Hz

Hreem – 26 Hz

Kleem – 33 Hz

Krowm – 39 Hz

Sreem – 45 Hz


These cosmic sounds were heard by 12 strand DNA maharishis in their spiritual trances which broadened their sense spectrums. However, our brain can register only the vibrations.


—K. Nagori

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Om (also spelled Aum) is a Hindu Sacred Sound that is considered the greatest of all Mantras. The syllable Om is composed of the three sounds a-u-m (in Sanskrit, the vowels a and u combine to become o) and the symbol’s threefold Nature is central to its meaning. It represent several important triads:

The Three Worlds - Earth, Atmosphere, and Heaven
The Three Major Hindu Gods - Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva
The Three Sacred Vedic Scriptures - Rg, Yajur, and Sama

Om Mystically embodies the Essence of the entire Universe. This meaning is further deepened by the Indian Philosophical belief that God first created Sound and the Universe arose from it. As the most Sacred Sound, Om is the Root of the Universe and everything that exists and it continues to hold everything together.

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oceanoflove

meditativemind

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you are that

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The cosmos that you and I are experiencing right now, with trees, plants, peoples, houses, cars, stars and galaxies, is just consciousness expressing itself at one particular frequency.

—Deepak Chopra

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We can appreciate that the colors we experience are just appearing in the mind—the light itself is not colored, it is simply energy of varying frequencies, the color we experience coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind—but it is more difficult to appreciate the same is true of the solidity we experience around us. It not only looks solid, we can touch it and feel its solidity, and experience how it impedes our movement. 

We seem to be experiencing the world directly—overlooking the fact that all we experiencing, including this solidity, is a representation of the world “out there” that appears in our field of knowing.

Even more challenging is the fact that the space in which these forms exist, from right in front of my nose to the distant skyline, is also an appearance in the mind. Our knowing has taken on the appearance of space, and within this space are placed the images we have made of the world around—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations that have been constructed. 

The space we see around us is in fact the space of awareness in which all experiences appear. But now it has various substantial forms distributed throughout, confirming the assumption that we are directly experiencing an independent reality “out there.” 

...

What we thought of as solid matter turns out to be largely empty space, and even so-called elementary particles turn out to have no real substance. As the German physicist Hans-Peter Durr put it, “Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter.” Matter as we conceive of it, exists only in the mind. Matter-stuff is just another concept, another form of mind-stuff. Another modulation of the field of knowing.

Moreover, anything we may say about the world “out there” is another form appearing in the mind. All our ideas about the world—our scientific theories and mathematical equations, our concepts of matter, energy,  quarks, strings, particles, waves—they are all appearing in our field of knowing. They are no more substantial than our thoughts.

In the final analysis, it is all mind-stuff appearing as matter-stuff. 

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Everything I know is an appearance that “I” have taken on. “I” am, appearing as this thought, these feelings, the sounds I hear, the world I see before me. It is all arising from and within my own being.

This is very different from the claim that I am one with everything, which assumes an external reality with which I am identifying, or feel a oneness with. It is not so much that I am one with the world—the physical world I imagine around me—but that the world of my experience is one with me. This is all me!

—Peter Russel 

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assurance

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You will never be alone, you hear so deep

a sound when autumn comes. Yellow

pulls across the hills and thrums,

or in the silence after lightning before it says

its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed

apologies. You were aimed from birth:

you will never be alone. Rain

will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,

long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,

moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —

that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.

—William Stafford

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this is the tale the world tells

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Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.

There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.


—Meister Eckhart

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Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you'd been reading.


—Chuck Palahniuk

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The world is a magic book, and we its sentences.

We read it and read ourselves.

We close it and turn the page down

And never come back,

Returned to what we once were before we became what we are.

This is the tale the world tells, this is the way it ends.


—Charles Wright

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pray without ceasing

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Meditation must be unceasing even when one is engaged in work. 

Particular time for it is meant for novices.

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.


—Henry David Thoreau
Walden: Where I lived and What I lived for

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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer. —Terence McKenna

  

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Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.

–Jorge Luis Borges

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Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself. —William Blake

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Somebody has remarked, “Everything without tells the individual that they are nothing, while everything within persuades them that they are everything.” This is a remarkable saying, for it is the feeling everyone of us has when they sit quietly and deeply look into the inmost chamber of their being. Something is moving there and would whisper to them in a still small voice that they are not born in vain. I read somewhere again: “You are tried alone; alone you pass into the desert; alone you are sifted by the world.” But let a person once look within in all sincerity and they will then realize that they are not lonely, forlorn, and deserted; there is within a person, a certain feeling of a royally magnificent aloneness, standing all by themselves and yet not separated from the rest of existence.

—D.T. Suzuki
Lectures on Zen Buddhism

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"The things we see,” Pistorius said softly, “are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. You can be happy that way. But once you know the other interpretation you no longer have the choice of following the crowd. Sinclair, the majority’s path is an easy one, ours is difficult."

—Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf

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The description is not the described;
I can describe the mountain,
but the description is not the mountain,
and if you are caught up in the description,
as most people are, then you will
never see the mountain…

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

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You must learn to stop being yourself. That's where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That's how it's done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.

—Paul Auster
Mr. Vertigo

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There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity — yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre,) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.

The quality of being, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.


—Walt Whitman

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wait - what ?

strangerain

whiskeyriver

oceanoflove
brainpickings 

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