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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notes to self

  

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Once you have recognized that there are other realities, other than the one you have been familiar with, your life starts to change. I don't care whether you got it from a joint; whether you got it from trauma; whether you got it from surfing; whether you got it from temple or church. 

Whatever thing you did that took you beyond yourself. Whatever it was, if you acknowledged it as real, as what you have started from, you are on the way. That is what is known as awakening.

—Ram Dass

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I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. 

But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.

—Niels Bohr

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Be conscious of yourself, watch your mind, give it your full attention. Don’t look for quick results; there may be none within your noticing. 

Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change; there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behavior. 

You need not aim at these - you will witness the change all the same. For, what you are now is the result of inattention and what you become will be the fruit of attention.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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put thoughts to rest

  

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Wherever you are can be considered the center, because all directions from you are infinite; and, therefore, if you wish to put it this way, they are all the same distance. 

No one spot really is any more ‘The’ center than any other spot; no one spot is really more the end, or the edge, than any other spot. No one reality is actually any more or less ‘real’ than any other reality. 

Everything is the same one thing; the same one thing manifesting in all the simultaneous, multidimensional ways that it can manifest.

—Bashar

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Put thoughts to rest.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

—Lin Chi

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on every act the balance of the whole depends

 

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Do you see how an act is not like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it? When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. 

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

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We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero.


—Deleuze and Guattari 

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inner architecture

 

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Every thought reorders the universe.

—William Stafford

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A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.


—Italo Calvino 

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We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium.

It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecule at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant.

Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.


—James Gleick 
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

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You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.


—Walter Evans-Wentz
The Tibetan Book of The Dead

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beautyway

 

The Alien Throne, Bisti Badlands (in Diné bizaad: Bistahí Dééł Náázíní)

Valley of Dreams, inside the Dinétah, New Mexico.

Photo Joe Witkowski 

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Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order.

Each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.

Among the various sung ceremonies of this people - Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway - there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).


―Barry López
Crossing Open Ground (excerpts)

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the soul of the whole

   

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We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One. 

And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are One.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

[...] All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest —- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.


—Albert Einstein

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Everything you see has its roots

In the unseen world.

The forms may change

Yet the essence remains the same.

Every wondrous sight will vanish,

Every sweet word will fade,

But do not be disheartened.

The Source they come from is Eternal,

Growing, branching out,

Giving new life and new joy.

Why do you weep?

That Source is within you

And this whole world

Is springing up from it.

The Source is full,

Its waters are ever-flowing;

Do not grieve,

Drink your fill!

Don’t think it will ever run dry,

This is the endless Ocean.

—Rumi

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whales sleeping

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be(loved

 

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Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.

Help some soul heal.

Walk out of your house like a shepherd.


—Rumi

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Exhale only love.

—Rumi 

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extraordinary worlds

   

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The sadness I have caused any face

by letting a stray word

strike it,

any pain 

I have caused you,

what can I do to make us even?

Demand a hundred fold of me - I'll pay it.

During the day I hold my feet accountable

to watch out for wondrous insects and their friends.

Why would I want to bring horror

into their extraordinary

world?

Magnetic fields draw us to Light; 
they move our limbs and thoughts.

But it is still dark; 
if our hearts do not hold a lantern,

we will stumble over each other,

huddled beneath the sky
as we are.

—Rumi

I hold my feet accountable

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all shapes speak

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The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a consulate artist, is the precondition of all visual art, and indeed, as we shall see, of an important amount of poetry. We take pleasure in the immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. But even when this dream reality is presented to us with the greatest intensity, we know it is just an illusion. 

Men of philosophy even have a sense that beneath the reality in which we live there is hidden a second, quite different world, and that our own world therefore is an illusion; and Schopenhauer actually says that the gift of being at times able to see men and objects as mere phantoms or dream images is the mark of the philosophical capacity. 

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

—Nietzche
The Birth of Tragedy

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Give up all.

The correct understanding will be when you realize that whatever you have understood so far, is invalid.

Give up all and you gain all. Then life becomes what it was meant to be: pure radiation from an inexhaustible source.

In that light the world appears dimly, like a dream.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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As stars, a lamp, a fault of vision,

As dewdrops or a bubble,

A dream, a lightning flash, a cloud,

So one should see conditioned things.

—Diamond Sutra

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Nils Udo

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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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(Costing not less than everything) —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

   

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

—Albert Einstein

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We are like the spider. 

We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. 

This is true for the entire universe.


—The Upanishads

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Start seeing everything as God,

But keep it a secret.

—Hafiz

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the days we live

  

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From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the joy 

at the bend in the road where we turned toward 

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands, 

from sweet fellowship in the bins, 

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, 

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside, 

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into 

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live 

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy 

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to 

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

—Li-Young Lee

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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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We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually.

The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone.

Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind.


—Red Pine
The Heart Sutra

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wait

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sit, be still, and listen

  

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There is in Celtic mythology the notion of ‘thin places’ in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good — and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal. 

Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.


—Peter Gomes

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In one sense the Reality is creatures; in another sense, It is not. ... Whether you assert that It is undivided or divided, the Self is alone. The manifold [universe] exists and yet it does not exist. 


—Ibn ‘Arabi 

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You and I are just swinging doors.

This kind of understanding is necessary.


—Shunryu Suzuki

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Listen.

Sit, be still, and listen,

because you’re drunk and
we’re at the edge of the roof.


—Rumi

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this is how all animals see

 

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Dogs and other animals detect smells using proteins called odorant receptors, chemical sensors. They sit on the surface of cells, grabbing specific molecules that float past. 

[…] 

The process is temporary: after the [receptors] are done, they either release or destroy the molecules that they’ve grabbed. But one group of them bucks this trend: opsins. 

They are special because they keep hold of their target molecules, and because those molecules absorb light. This is the entire basis of vision. This is how all animals see—using light-sensitive proteins that are actually modified chemical sensors. 

In a way, we see by smelling light. 

—Ed Yong

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
(small edits for brevity)

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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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