If we were on a star, what would we see of that which exists on the earth?

.

If we found ourselves on a star, and if, from there we could see the life on our planet, we should not see modern civilization. We should for example see the events occurring in Egypt in the time of the Paraohs.


—Alexander Ananoff

.

Although the interval of time that elapses between the moment when we perceive the image of an object and that at which it "left" may be infinitely short, the principle involved is the same as that which relates to the thousands of years taken by the image of the star to reach us. In both cases the conclusion is: "those things we see are images of the past".

Is there any reason for lingering to discuss problems of this kind? The Masters who inculcate the Secret Teachings do not think so. The objects providing the subject on which our cleverness is exercised have no real existence. What has to be understood is that theories and doctrines of all kinds are the fabrication of our mind.


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

.

per(spective

.

Clouds form over North Africa. As the International Space Station orbited 259 miles above North Africa, swirls of clouds covered the sky. To the bottom right of the image, one of the station’s roll-out solar arrays peeks through.

Astronauts aboard the space station see 16 sunrises and sunsets per day due to their high orbital velocity—17,500 miles per hour. 

In the more than 20 years that people have been living aboard the station, it has circumnavigated Earth tens of thousands of times.
 

Nasa 2023

.

Here is what the sea smells like. It is more texture than scent, because the sea is primarily made of two substances that have no smell of their own: water and salt. Salt has no smell, but makes the air sting, and so all of the other smells of the sea are layered upon the pang of salt. 

Water has no smell but instead a comfort. We feel moisture as life and so the smells of the ocean are layered upon the contentment of the water. Salt is treble and water is bass. I don’t know how I know this is true, but I know it is true. 

The sea smells like old wood and wet leaves. Like cold mud and warm stone. Like every creature who has ever lived in it, a churning graveyard and nursery. Like winds from the inland carrying the hot circulation of life and winds from the ocean carrying the distant froth of waves against ships and islands. Like gray, only more so. Like blue, only less so.

—Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. 

Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

—Marcus Aurelius

.

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

.

With only simple tools at their disposal, Ladakhis spend a long time accomplishing each task. Producing wool for clothes involves the time-consuming work of looking after the sheep while they graze, shearing them with hand tools, and working the wool from beginning to end—cleaning, spinning, and finally weaving it. Yet I found that the Ladakhis had an abundance of time. They worked at a gentle pace and had a surprising amount of leisure.

Time is measured loosely; there is never a need to count minutes. "I'll come to see you toward midday, toward evening," they will say, giving themselves several hours' leeway. Ladakhi has many lovely words to depict time, all broad and generous. Gongrot means "from after dark till bedtime"; nyitse means literally "sun on the mountain peaks"; and chips-chirrit, "bird song," describes that time of the morning before the sun has risen, when the birds sing.

Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between word and play is not rigidly defined.

—Helena Elena Norberg Hodge

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

.

Take me to the other side of this night,

where I am you, we are us,

the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined

… and the sea sang with the murmur of light.

 
—Octavio Paz 

.

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

 

Tim Ingersoll

.

My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind. In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion.

Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new.

The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.


―Ovid
Metamorphoses, 8 CE

.

By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written
by the time you forget
by the time you are water through fingers
by the time you are taken for granted
by the time it hurts
by the time it goes on hurting
by the time there are no words for you
by the time you remember
but without names
by the time you are in the papers
and on the telephone
passing unnoticed there too

who is it
to whom you come
before whose very eyes
you are disappearing
without making yourself known


—W. S. Merwin
to the present tense

.

wait

.

there is nothing new under the sun –Ecclesiastes 1:9

.

There is nothing new you will find here.

The work we are doing is timeless.

It was the same ten thousand years ago.

Centuries roll on.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

inheritance

  

.

Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again.


—Finn Butler

.

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains. —Sri Ramana Maharshi

Shatial Glyphs high up in Pakistan's Indus Valley cover boulders stretching for more than 100 kilometers. The writings and designs cover various languages, religions and the symbolism of peoples dating back 10,000 years.

.

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies.

You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects.


—Vladimir Nabokov

 

.

We all start from “naive realism,” i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold.

But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but something very different.


—Bertrand Russell

 

.

the brilliance of matter

.

Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change his direction in life.


—Sam Keen

.

To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of time, I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity—not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. 

Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.


—Isamu Noguchi
Listening to Stone

.

everywhere the same

.

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there.

There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same.

This is it: this hum is the silence.

Nature does not utter a peep - just this one.

The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. 

The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it is all there is.


—Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk, excerpt

.

questions

   

.

A visitor: Should I give up my business and take to reading books on Vedanta?

Bhagavan: If the objects have an independent existence, i.e., if they exist anywhere apart from you, then it may be possible for you to go away from them.
But they don’t exist apart from you; they owe their existence to you, your thought. 

So, where can you go, to escape them?

As for reading books on Vedanta, you may go on reading any number of them. They can only tell you, ‘Realise the Self within you’. The Self cannot be found in books. You have to find it out for yourself, in yourself.

.

The question ‘Who am I?’ is not really meant to get an answer. 

The question ‘Who am I?’ is meant to dissolve the questioner.

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

real(ly

 

.

Just live your life as it comes.
Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself.
Perception is based on memory and is only imagination.
The world can be said to appear but not to be.
Only that which makes perception possible is real.

You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown. Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you.

Know yourself as you are. Distrust your mind and go beyond. Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness.
It is utterly beyond both.
It gives birth to consciousness.
All else is in consciousness.

Nothing you can see, feel or think is so. 

Go beyond the personal and see. Stop imagining that you were born. You are utterly beyond all existence and non-existence, utterly beyond all that the mind conceives.

Question yourself: Who am I?
What is behind and beyond all this?
Soon you will see that thinking yourself to be a person is mere habit built on memory. Inquire ceaselessly.

Just be aware of your being here and now.
There is nothing more to it.
In reality you are not a thing nor separate.

You are the infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility.
Because you are, all can be.
The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become. You are neither consciousness nor its content. You are the timeless Source.

Disassociate yourself from mind and consciousness.
Find a foothold beyond and all will be clear and easy.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I am That

.

The question ‘Who am I?’ is not really meant to get an answer.

The question ‘Who am I?’ is meant to dissolve the questioner.


—Ramana Maharshi

. 

When past and future dissolve there is only You

—Rumi

.

hallo

  

.

 

 

You look at the world and it may seem whole or it may seem broken, but then the world looks back and some sort of reciprocity that is not of any school of poetry or any single denomination happens, and in our absolute attention we feel attended to: for here there is no place that does not see you.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

 

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.


—William Stafford
being a person

 

.

 

“Hallo, Rabbit,’ he said, ‘is that you?’

'Let's pretend it isn't,' said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.'”

—A. A. Milne

 

.

 

 

sing gently

.

May we sing together, always
May our voice be soft
May our singing be music for others
And may it keep others aloft

Sing, sing gently, always
Sing, sing as one (as one)
May we stand (may we stand) together, always
May our voice be strong

May we hear the singing and
May we always sing along (along)
Sing, sing gently, always
Sing, sing as one (as one)
Singing gently as one


—Eric Whitacre

.

It is I who must begin. 

Once I begin, once I try --
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
-- to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself

-- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

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


—Vaclav Havel

Teaching With Fire 

.

questions

.

By a ‘dream’ we mean something which is not real. What is Reality? That which does not disappear at any time.

Now, what is there in the waking state that does not disappear? Nothing. Therefore, everything objective, connected with the waking state, is unreal.

But what we have just called the unreal appears all the while. Yes. When the unreal appears as real we call it a dream. Therefore, the waking state is all a dream.

But there is one thing that does not disappear in any state – pure Consciousness, the Atma (Self).


—Sri Atmananda
Krishna Menon

.

One day she said, “Don’t you think rain is something that happens inside of us?”

I didn’t understand, but I liked the thought.

“If it’s raining for enough people, we see rain,” she explained. “Otherwise it’s not raining.”


—Amanda Michalopoulou
Light
I’d Like: Stories

.

 

actually

.

There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real.

It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.


—G. K. Chesterton

.

other(wise

.

Where there is a duality, as it were, there one sees another; there one sees, hears, touches or speaks to another ...

But where everything has become just one's own self, then whereby and whom would one see, hear, touch, think of or speak to? 

Then whereby and whom would one understand?


—Brihadaranyaka Upabishad (2.4.14)

.

The beginning of the spiritual journey is the realization - not just the information, but the real interior conviction - that there is a higher power, or God. I would make it as easy as possible for everyone, that there is an Other - capital “O”.

Second step, is to try and become the Other - capital “O”.

And finally, the realization that there is no other. 

You and the other are one. Always have been and always will be.
You just think that you aren’t and then, as the spiritual journey unfolds, one lets go of these false beliefs that there is separation from God.

One begins to perceive in events and in all other people the same presence of God, more and more aware of it, once found at the deepest level. And thus, the words of Paul become something which makes sense, that God is all in all - in other words, in a sense, we not only become God but are God.


—Father Thomas Keating

.

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.

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

.

 

 

conduct(ion

.

God dwells in you, as you, and you don't have to 'do' anything to be God-realized or Self-realized, it is already your true and natural state.

Just drop all seeking, turn your attention inward, and sacrifice your mind to the One Self radiating in the Heart of your very being. For this to be your own presently lived experience, Self-Inquiry is the one direct and immediate way.


—Sri Ramana

.

Love is not a sentimental attachment to a human being; 

love is a mode of conduct that comes from the heart.


—Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati 

.

tru(ly

.

Do not go about worshipping deities and religious institutions as the source of the subtle truth. To do so is to place intermediaries between yourself and the divine, and to make of yourself a beggar who looks outside for a treasure that is hidden inside his own breast. 

If you want to worship the Tao, first discover it in your own heart.
Then your worship will be meaningful.

—Hua Hu Ching

.

Moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations—no sooner have they come into existence than they fall to pieces. Life? There’s no such thing; I see lines, planes, and bodies, and they’re transformations in time.

Time, meanwhile, seems a simple instrument for the measurement of tiny changes, a school ruler with a simplified scale—it’s just three points: was, is, and will be.


—Olga Tokarczuk
Flights

.

There is no alternative for you but to accept the world as unreal, 

if you are seeking the Truth and the Truth alone.

—Ramana Maharshi 

.

It’s your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy this thing! —Alan Watts

.

All that you are attached to, all that you Love,
all that you know, someday will be gone.

Knowing this, and that the world is your mind
which you create, play in, and suffer from,
is known as discrimination.

Discriminate between the real and the unreal.

The known is unreal and will come and go
so stay with the Unknown, the Unchanging Truth.

All which appears and disappears is not real,
and no nectar will come from it so do not cling to it.


—Papaji

.

There are always moments when one feels empty, estranged and afraid.

You are detaching, the old is over and the new has not yet come. The soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places.

Remember the instruction: whatever you come across
- go beyond.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

.

 

 

.

you cannot see what you are looking for

.

Look into yourself and you will become conscious of nothing but a vicious circle, for the very reason that the act of introspection is viciously circular: you cannot see what you are looking for, because what you are looking for is the thing that looks.

Every self-conscious attempt to know oneself, to improve oneself, to save oneself, to unite oneself with God, must come to this exasperating and impossible conclusion.


—Alan Watts

 

.

 

The entire universe is to be looked upon as the Lord. —The Isha Upanishad

.

God is the underlying force, the energy and the consciousness of existence. If you cannot feel the divine within, you cannot feel him without.

The first step is to feel God within. Then prayer to a personal god becomes meaningless, and meditation becomes meaningful.

The second step is to realize the divine without, to realize that God is not the creator, he is creation. He is not separate from creation.

He is the force and consciousness of creation.


—Swami Dhyan Giten

.

con(ditions

.

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

.

friends

.

Wherever and whenever

You hear this

You hear

What was meant for you
Since before
Time began.

This is the moment
Of our meeting
Mind, heart, body

That was written
In your stars
When your soul began

Its long journey back
To your own house.

So, friends,
Open the door
And see Kabir

Waiting for you
Sitting on
Your favorite chair.

Let's talk
Or better
Let's not.


—Kabir

 

.

thank you, Kevin

.

 

 

the perfect 0ne

.

The moon is most happy
When it is full.

And the sun always looks
Like a perfectly minted gold coin
That was just Polished
And placed in flight
By God's playful Kiss.

And so many varieties of fruit
Hang plump and round
From branches that seem like a Sculptor's hands.

I see the beautiful curve of a pregnant belly
Shaped by a soul within,
And the Earth itself,
And the planets and the Spheres.

I have gotten the hint:
There is something about circles
The Beloved likes.

Hafiz,
Within the Circle of a Perfect One
There is an Infinite Community
Of Light.


—Hafiz
something about circles

.

When we understand, 

we are at the centre of the circle 

and there we sit 

while Yes and No 

chase each other 

around the circumference.


—Chuang Tzu

.

living on the plains

.

That winter when this thought came -- how the river
held still every midnight and flowed
backward a minute -- we studied algebra
late in our room fixed up in the barn,
and I would feel the curved relation,
the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life
holding the earth round and ready
to meet itself again when morning came.

At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal
she said, "You're studying too hard,"
and I would include her face and hands in my glance
and then look past my father's gaze as
he told again our great race through the stars
and how the world can't keep up with our dreams.


—William Stafford
The Way It Is

.

dronephoto Two Moo

Luke Maximo Bell

.

time statue

.

... in the case of trees and certain other forms of plant life, they already have a structure that expresses perfectly a timeless life in more than three dimensions. Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images.

The tree's shape is its history, each bough the curve of a magnificent time statue which I can assure you that we folk Upstairs appreciate just as enthusiastically as do you humans.


—Alan Moore
Jerusalem

.

Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of grey
the same,
its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.


—Jane Hirshfield

.

all things change, no(thing perishes

.

Everything must change
Nothing remains the same
Everyone must change
No one and nothing remains the same

The young becomes the old
Oh, mysteries unfold
Cause that's the way of time
Nothing and no one remains the same

There is so little in life you can be sure of
Except the rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And, Hummingbirds do fly

The young becomes the old
And, mysteries do unfold
That's the way of time
Nothing, no one remains unchanged

There are so little things,
so few things in life you can be sure of
Except
Rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And Hummingbirds do fly

Everything must change
Everything
Everything must change


—Bernard Ighner

 

.

Souls never die, but always on quitting one abode pass to another. All things change, nothing perishes.

The soul passes hither and thither, occupying now this body, now that … As a wax is stamped with certain figures, then melted, then stamped anew with others, yet it is always the same wax. So, the Soul being always the same, yet wears at different times different forms.


―Pythagoras

.

um ...

.

If you do not change direction, 

you may end up where you are heading. 

 

—Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching

.

questions

.

The picture of names and forms, the one who sees, the cohesive screen, and the pervading light – all these are he, who is oneself.

If oneself is a form, the world and God will be likewise; if oneself is not a form, who can see their forms? How?

Can the seen be otherwise than the eye?

The eye is oneself, the infinite eye.

Without a body, is there a world?

Leaving the body, is there anyone who has seen a world?

The world is a form of five sense-impressions, not anything else. Those five sense-impressions are impressions to the five sense organs. Since the mind alone perceives the world by way of the five sense organs, is there a world besides the mind?


—Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

wait

.