the world is a phenomenon

 

.

You see various scenes passing on a cinema screen: fire seems to burn buildings to ashes; water seems to wreck ships; but the screen on which the pictures are projected remains unburnt and dry. Why? Because the pictures are unreal and the screen real.

Similarly, reflections pass through a mirror but it is not affected at all by their number or quality. In the same way, the world is a phenomenon upon the substratum of the single Reality which is not affected by it in any way. 

Reality is only One.

Talk of illusion is due only to the point of view. Change your viewpoint to that of Knowledge and you will perceive the Universe to be only Brahman. Being now immersed in the world, you see it as a real world; get beyond it and it will disappear and Reality alone will remain.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

In essence, the ideas of space and time are creations of the mind that serve as the screen upon which we project the contents of the depths of our mind, both conscious and unconscious. 

Being constructs of consciousness as well as the receptacles for its projections, space and time serve as consciousness’s own way of providing a context for its contents so that they can be revealed, brought to light, reflected upon, and contemplated by a consciousness that is forever getting to know itself in new ways.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

.

This is the pipe that pierces the dam
that holds back the universe,

that takes off some of the pressure,
keeping the weight of the unknown

from breaking through
and washing us all down the valley.

Because of this small tube,
through which a cold light rushes

from the bottom of time,
the depth of the stars stays always constant

and we are able to sleep, at least for now,
beneath the straining wall of darkness.


—Ted Kooser
telescope

.

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible. —Novalis (1772 - 1801)

 

.

 

Rather than the quantum realm being illusory, quantum physics points out that the appearance of the macroscopic, conventional world can be likened to a holographic optical illusion produced by the interaction of our sense faculties with quantum reality. 

[...] In essence, the ideas of space and time are creations of the mind that serve as the screen upon which we project the contents of the depths of our mind, both conscious and unconscious. 

Being constructs of consciousness as well as the receptacles for its projections, space and time serve as consciousness’s own way of providing a context for its contents so that they can be revealed, brought to light, reflected upon, and contemplated by a consciousness that is forever getting to know itself in new ways

—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation 

.

Science shows us that the visible world is neither matter nor spirit;

the visible world is the invisible organization of energy.

—Heinz Pagels

.

Let the waters settle 

and you will see the moon and the stars

mirrored in your own being. 


—Rumi

.

everything is connected and the web is holy —Marcus Aurelius

 

.

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

—John Muir

.

on being a Being

  

.

On the edge of the forest, a strange, old-fashioned animal still hesitated. His body was the body of a tree dweller, and though tough and knotty by human standards, he was, in terms of that world into which he gazed, a weakling. His teeth, though strong for chewing on the tough roots of the forest, or for crunching the occasional unwary bird caught with his prehensile hands, were not the tearing sabres of the great cats. He had a passion for lifting himself up to see about, in his restless, roving curiosity. He would run a little stiffly and uncertainly, perhaps, on his hind legs, but only in those rare moments when he ventured out upon the ground. All this was the legacy of his climbing days; he had a hand with flexible fingers and no fine specialized hoofs upon which to gallup like the wind.

If he had any idea of competing in that new world, he had better forget it; teeth or hooves, he was much too late for either. He was a ne’er-do-well, an in-betweener. Nature had not done well by him. it was as if she had hesitated and never quite made up her mind. Perhaps as a consequence he had a malicious gleam in his eye, the gleam of an outcast who has been left nothing and knows that he is going to have to take what he gets. One day a little band of these odd apes—for apes they were—stumbled out upon the grass; the human story had begun.

[] Apes were to become men, in the inscrutable wisdom of nature, because flowers had produced seeds and fruits in such tremendous quantities that a new and totally different store of energy had become available in concentrated form.

[] Down in the grass by a streamside, one of those apes with inquisitive fingers turned over a stone and hefted it vaguely. ... He liked the feel of it in his fingers. The attack on the animal world was about to begin.

—Loren Eiseley

The Immense Journey

How Flowers Changed the World

.

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

.

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

.

... 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

.

So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quarks, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics? Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings. 

What is chemistry? Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings, and then what is the mind of God? It's the cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace.


—Michio Kaku

.

regarding ma†erials

.

... as those who claim to know nothing about ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, “not-knowing”), the person who does claim to know such things is called gnostic (“knowing”). But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. 

The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis. As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny.
 

—Elaine Pagels
The Gnostic Gospels

.

There are materials that are out in the open and there are the things that are hidden. The real world has more to do with what is hidden. 

—Saul Leiter

 .

To see materials as static is an illusion. If the human life span were a day, flowers might seem as enduring as rocks, if we lived a thousand years, rock might seem mobile. 

—Anne Whiston Spirn
The Language of Landscape

.

song of my(self

  

.

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

.

day(light

 

.

When you are out walking in the sunlight,

see the love covering all.

—Rumi

.

 

Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.

Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,
"My Life Is Not Mine."

If someone were to play music, it would
have to be very sweet.
We're drinking wine, but not through lips.
We're sleeping it off, but not in bed.

Rub the cup across your forehead.
This day outside is living and dying.
Give up wanting what other people have.
That way you're safe.
"Where, where can I be safe?" you ask.

This is not a day for asking questions,
not a day on any calendar.

This day is conscious of itself.
This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness,
more manifest than saying can say.

Thoughts take form with words,
but this daylight is beyond and before
thinking and imagining. 

Those two, they are so thirsty, but this gives
smoothness to water. 
Their mouths are dry, and they are tired.

The rest of this poem is too blurry
for them to read.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

.

 

may what I do flow from me like a river

  

.

I have many brothers in the South
who move, handsome in their vestments,
through cloister gardens.
The Madonnas they make are so human,
and I dream often of their Titians,
where God becomes an ardent flame.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself –
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Monastic Life, I,3

.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving. 

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

.

invitation

.

Let us look for secret things

somewhere in the world

on the blue shores of silence.

.

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

—Pablo Neruda

.

the eye of practice

.

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you may assume it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. For example, when you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time.

All things are like this.

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety; whole worlds are there.

It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet, or in a drop of water.


—Dogen

.

this is the Hour

   

.

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

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

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


—Hafiz

.

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

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

Where is your water?
Know your garden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are the ones we have been waiting for.


—The Hopi Nation Elders 
of Oraibi, Arizona

.

 

other(wise

.

To be fully ourselves we must advance in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest—towards the ‘other.’ 

The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. 


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same 
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours 
And the songs of every poet past and forever. 


—Rabindranath Tagore
unending love

.

One eye sees, the other feels. —Paul Klee

 

.

Each house has a number of windows, which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as seen from the house. By no means does it seem like a section of a larger world. 

Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house— its [Umwelt] unique sensory bubble. The garden which appears to our eye is fundamentally different to that which presents itself to the inhabitants of the house.


—Jakob von Uexküll, 1909
from An Immense World, Ed Yong

.

 

Even when animals share the same senses with us, their Umwelten can be very different. There are animals that can hear sounds in what to us seems like perfect silence, see colours in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness. 

There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins see with their entire bodies. 


—Ed Yong (treasure)
An Immense World
treasure

.

To be conscious of oneself right to the core is to perceive, at the depths of the self, an Other. This is prayer: to be conscious of oneself to the very center, to the point of meeting an Other. Thus prayer is the only human gesture which totally realizes the human being’s stature.


—Luigi Giussani

.

The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within. 

The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.


—Louis Pasteur

     

.

 

If you want to know who someone is, what is flowing through or not flowing, stay in a listening posture. 

Close your eyes inside your companion’s shadow. 


—Rumi

.

Umwelt!

 

.

Umwelt — that lovely German word for the sensory bubble each creature inhabits, both limiting and defining its perceptual reality. 

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn't feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

[...]

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

The umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity... When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.

—Ed Yong
An Immense World

.

seeing the seer

Keith Williams

.

We can experience things—can touch, hear and taste things—only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive!

We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and the world is perceiving itself through us.

Walking in a forest, we peer into its green and shadowed depths, listening to the silence of the leaves, tasting the cool and fragrant air. Yet such is the transitivity of perception, the reversibility of the flesh, that we may suddenly feel that the trees are looking at us—we feel ourselves exposed, watched, observed from all sides.

We feel that our experience of the forest is nothing other than the forest experiencing itself.


—David Abram
The Spell of the Sensuous

.

Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature—however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be—is never alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended. And they must at every moment be treated with proper respect. 

All things in nature have a special kind of life, something unknown to contemporary Euro-Americans, something powerful. The presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh.

—Richard K. Nelson
Make Prayers to the Raven

. 

I will explain to you a simple technique, which is called Dhyana Yoga
[realization via meditation]:

Sit in the open air every day in the morning— at any convenient time, irrespective of any laws and regularities—on a simple asana [seat or posture], for 30-60 minutes.

Keep your eyes half open and [be aware of] your nose-tip. This is only to withdraw your mind from external sense-organs.

Then try to be aware of the Seer. You have not to think about sense-organs. You have only to do nothing—no thoughts. Be only aware of the one who is sitting in Dhyana [meditation]. You have to focus on him only. Be aware of the One, who is beyond body, without body [videha].

Practice this slowly, slowly every day and all your problems will be solved. Have the feeling of Chaitanya Brahman [Divine Reality as Pure Consciousness]. Be aware of Purnam [wholeness, fullness]. If your eyes close during this, let it be.

You will be aware of space. All forms of which you are aware of within are modifications or shapes of the One who is sitting.

Call him Krishna, Shiva, or any other divine Name.
It is all darshan of the one who is sitting.

Continue sitting in this sadhana [spiritual practice]. From within, That will give its message, guidance, and spontaneous insight.

Remember: “I am not the body.”

Be aware of the Seer.
I am beyond the body.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

atom(ic

 

.

We have found that the atom is a living entity, a little vibrant world, and that within its sphere of influence other little lives are to be found, and this very much in the same sense as each of us is an entity, or positive nucleus of force or life, holding within our sphere of influence other lesser lives, i.e., the cells of our body. 

What can be said of us can be said, in degree, of the atom.

.

atoms possess—as centres of force—a persistent soul ... 

every atom has sensation and power of movement.

.

We might extend the idea still further and consider a planet as an atom. Perhaps there is a life within the planet that holds the substance of the sphere and all forms of life upon it to itself as a coherent whole, and that has a specific extent of influence.

... There may perhaps be within the planetary sphere an Entity Whose consciousness is as far removed from that of man as the consciousness of man is from that of the atom of chemistry.


—Alice C. Bailey (1880 - 1949)
The Consciousness of the Atom

.

body(mind

   

starling murmuration

.

The mind & body are not separate entities. The gross form of the mind is the body & the subtle form of the body is the mind. The practice of asana integrates & harmonizes the two. 

Both the body & the mind harbor tensions or knots. Every mental knot has a corresponding physical, muscular knot & vice versa. The aim of asana is to release these knots. 

Asana release mental tensions by dealing with them on the physical level, acting somato-psychically, through the body to the mind.
 

―Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Asana Pranayama Mudra Banda

.

As you follow the "I" to the heart, you're going through the molecules and atoms, and the sub-atomic particles, going deeper, and deeper, going back, back to your source, to the energy waves, the void, and finally your whole body is totally dissolved and consciousness stands alone.

—Robert Adams

.

💗

 

 

.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, 
preparing her annual surprise!

 

—Wallace Stevens

.

when faces called flowers float out of the ground

    

.

when faces called flowers float out of the ground

and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-

but keeping is downward and doubting and never

-it’s april(yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!

yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly

yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be

(yes the mountains are dancing together)


when every leaf opens without any sound

and wishing is having and having is giving-

but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense

-alive;we’re alive,dear:it’s(kiss me now)spring!

now the pretty birds hover so she and so he

now the little fish quiver so you and so i

(now the mountains are dancing, the mountains)


when more than was lost has been found has been found

and having is giving and giving is living-

but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing

-it’s spring(all our night becomes day)o,it’s spring!

all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky

all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea

(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

—E. E. Cummings

.