Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

   

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Matter, which appears to be dense, according to physics actually is made up mostly of empty space, with a few very small particles moving around like planets. At high energy, other particles pass through what appears to be solid matter.

… As you probe more deeply into matter, it appears to have more and more subtle properties. In my view, the implications of physics seem to be that nature is so subtle that it could be almost alive or intelligent.

… The question is whether matter is rather crude and mechanical, or whether it gets more and more subtle, and becomes indistinguishable from what people have called mind.


—David Bohm
from Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity

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Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. 

—Albert Einstein

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the frightful reality of things

  

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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.

Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

―William S. Burroughs

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The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

I have written quite a number of poems
And may write many more, of course.
Each poem of mine explains it,
Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don’t begin thinking whether it feels.
I don’t force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
valuable.
The value is there, in my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
of mine.


—Fernando Pessoa

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common senses

 

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Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science. 

It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and of all previous science – including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came along and contradicted them. 

And yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and everything we experience are part. There is no other.


—David Deutsch 

The Beginning of Infinity

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He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.—César Aira, Varamo

 

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II The Primordial Purity and Cutting Through Hardness

 

If one condenses this meaning down in its entirety, the View, Meditation, Conduct, Fruit, Delusion, and Liberation, and so on, all phenomena comprising the appearances and arisings of Samsara-Nirvana, they are all within one’s own mind. 

If the mind, in its own basic nature, itself searches and tries to see whether it can discover its existence or non-existence, whether it is true or false, singular or differentiated, even at the level of the tiniest particle of conceptually elaborated dependent or conditioned phenomena, it won’t find anything. 

The cognizant awareness of the thinker who thinks ‘nothing has been found, there’s nothing that can be found or expressed’ reaches a point of refuting and undermining itself - having realized this, attachment to the basis of what has been realized disappears.  

The object of investigation is abandoned, the one who investigates is annihilated, one passes beyond the mind of philosophical tenets and conceptual elaborations entirely. All recollections and speculations, memories and thoughts are generally and wholly purified, appearances are clear and resplendent in their very essence, whatever arises dissolves into this clarity of the essence of awareness. All appears without any ground for appearing whatsoever, pure and clear, unobstructed by any mindful awareness. 

Being self-pure without any basis for arising at all, one realizes that one comes up empty-handed, that that which is sought after doesn’t exist. One realizes that one comes up empty-handed too in trying to find anyone who searches, and that the awareness that observes this ‘searcher’ is wholly undifferentiated, without any individual parts at all. 

Manifesting ineffably in an instant, it is self-radiant without any basis whatsoever. The object of cognition is clear and vivid, the cognizer or knower, realizing that it is without any graspable self, turns back on itself and is without any ‘home’ or location. Thus, being without any origin, it has no recognizable characteristics that can be perceived, nor can even this thought of its imperceptibility be perceived in any way either. 

Not even the slightest basis to hold onto can be found at all.

Remaining in a state of one’s own innate self-radiance, not grasping at or identifying anything, this discovery of non-discovery is vivid and clear like the vast expanse of the pure heavens. It is not limited in scope in any way at all, it is unbiased, has not fallen into any particular view or perspective. 

No essential quality of either centre or periphery exists for it at all. It is the mindfulness of self-cognizing awareness that is liberated in and of itself into insubstantiality, undistracted by the derailing of mindfulness or the break-down of concentration from the coming, going, and clearing away of thoughts.

—Nida Chenagtsang

Mirror of Light: A Commentary on Yuthok’s Ati Yoga, Volume 1

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It is a lie, any talk of God that does not comfort you.

—Meister Ekhart

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river run

 

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You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. 

If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. 

To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.


—Alan Watts

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the strange theory of light and matter

  

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What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school… It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it… That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

―Richard Feynman (treasure)
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

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hello

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Sawubona, a Zulu word for hello, literally translates to 
"I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being."


—Susan David

TED talk

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A Word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day. 

—Emily Dickinson

LXXXIX

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namaste

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a glossary of chickens

 

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There should be a word for the way

they look with just one eye, neck bent,

for beetle or worm or strewn grain.

“Gleaning,” maybe, between “gizzard”

and “grit.” 

And for the way they run toward
someone they trust, their skirts

hiked, their plump bodies wobbling:

“bobbling,” let’s call it, inserted

after “blowout” and before “bloom.”

There should be terms, too, for things

they do not do—like urinate or chew—

but perhaps there already are.

I’d want a word for the way they drink,

head thrown back, throat wriggling,

like an old woman swallowing

a pill; a word beginning with “S,”

coming after “sex feather” and before “shank.”

And one for the sweetness of hens

but not roosters.

We think that by naming we can understand,

as if the tongue were more than muscle.


—Gary Whitehead

 

 

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four words

  

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Every child has known god,

not the god of names,

not the god of don’t,

not the god who does anything
weird,

but the god who only knows four words

and keeps repeating them, saying:

“Come dance with Me."

Come
Dance.

—Hafiz

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not till then

   

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...  a man can know nothing by himself, save after a natural manner, which is only that which he attains by means of the senses. For this cause he must have the phantasms and the forms of objects present in themselves and in their likenesses; otherwise it cannot be, for, as philosophers say: Ab objecto et potentia paritur notitia. 

That is: From the object that is present and from the faculty, knowledge is born in the soul. 

Wherefore, if one should speak to a man of things which he has never been able to understand, and whose likeness he has never seen, he would have no more illumination from them whatever than if naught had been said of them to him.

—John of the Cross
(1542 - 1591)

 

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For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.  

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. 

But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. 

One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

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birth(right

 

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Your love should never be offered to the 
mouth of a stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife 
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.


—Hafiz

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To kiss a forehead is to erase worry.
I kiss your forehead.

To kiss the eyes is to lift sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

To kiss the lips is to drink water.
I kiss your lips.

To kiss a forehead is to erase memory.
I kiss your forehead.


—Marina Tsvetaeva
trans. Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine

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i drool all over :)

 

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Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling.

Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately.

If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love … we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. 

An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. 

Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling. 


—Robert Johnson
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden

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From Alto Cedro I go to Marcané,

Then to Cueto, I go to Mayarí

 

The love I have for you

I can't deny it

I drool all over

And I can't help it

 

When Juanica and Chan Chan

Sifted sand in the sea

The way she was shaking the "sieve"

was making Chan Chan embarrassed!

 

Clear the road of straws

'Cause I want to sit down

On this trunk that I see

And I can't arrive there that way

 

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always coming home

  

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Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things. 

Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms. 

Let there be deep snow in your inbreath
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses. 

Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

—Ursula Le Guin
Initiation Song from the Finders' Lodge

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listen

  

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Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me.

Be silent.

—Rumi

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Be still, my heart, these great trees are prayers. —Rabindranath Tagore

   

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Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely:
Imitate the magnificent trees
That speak no word of their rapture, but only
Breathe largely the luminous breeze. 


—D. H. Lawrence
Corot, Love Poems and Others

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journey of the breath

  

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Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red—
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years—who'd let me
hold my face to his own: the massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain
up the head to the eyes.

He'd let me stroke 
his coarse chin whiskers and take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man's carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping under half of one,

just so that I could smell
the long way his breath had come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the heart, 
from a world that meant no harm. 


—Robert Wrigley
Kissing a Horse

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The horse's mind

Blends

So swiftly

Into the hay's mind.


—Fazil Husnu Daglarca
Talat Sait Halman version

 

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you and i

  

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Some time when the river is ice

ask me mistakes I have made.

Ask me whether what I have done is my life.

Others have come

in their slow way

into my thought,

and some have tried to help or to hurt:

ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look 

at the silent river and wait.

We know the current is there, hidden;

and there are comings and goings from miles 

away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

—William Stafford
ask me 

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the bud stands for all things

  

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The bud stands for all things,  
even for those things that don't flower,  
for everything flowers, from within, 
of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary 
to reteach a thing its loveliness,  
to put a hand on its brow of the flower  
and retell it in words and in touch 
it is lovely  
until it flowers again from within, 
of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased 
forehead of the sow, 
and told her in words and in touch 
blessings of earth on the sow, 

and the sow began remembering 
all down her thick length, from the earthen snout 
all the way through the fodder and slops to the 
spiritual curl of the tail, 
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine 
down through the great broken heart 
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering 
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths 
sucking and blowing beneath them: 
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.


—Galway Kinnell
Saint Francis And The Sow

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sweet(hearts

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A leaf says,
“Sweethearts—don’t pick me,
For I am busy doing
God’s work. 

I am lowering my veins and roots
Like ropes
With buckets tied to them
Into the earth’s deep
Lake.  

I am drawing water
That I offer like a rose to
The sky.  

I am a singing cleaning woman
Dusting all the shelves in
The air
With my elegant green
Rags.  

I have a heart.
I can know happiness like
You.


—Hafiz

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