Thought has altitude. Thought has velocity.
Thought has acceleration. Thought has dimension.
Thought has edges and vertices.
Thought has a radius and a circumference.
Thought dances in front of a thoughtless mirror.—Ahmed Salman
On land off an ice covered sea the traveler can ... detect the presence of open water, simply because it reflects less light than land or ice.
The open sea’s telltale sign is thus a darkness on the underside of the clouds.
—Harold Gatty
finding your way without map or compass
Biology is discovering subjectivity as a fundamental principle throughout nature. It finds that even the most simple living things —bacterial cells, fertilized eggs, nematodes in tidal flats—act according to values.Organisms value everything they encounter according to its meaning for the further coherence of their embodied self. Even the cell’s self-production, the continuous maintenance of a highly structured order, can only be understood if we perceive the cell as an actor that persistently follows a goal. Life always has an inside, which is the result of how its matter, its outside, is organized.—Andreas WeberThe Biology of Wonder
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The conscious self is not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives.
—Northrop Frye
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We invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is.—Carl SaganBillions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death
And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:
Where shall you seek beauty, and how
shall you find her unless she herself be your
way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except
she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and injured say,
"Beauty is kind and gentle."
The tired and weary say,
"Beauty is of soft whisperings
She speaks in our spirit."
In winter say the snow-bound,
"She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."
All these things have you said of beauty,
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see, though you
close your eyes and a song you hear, though
you shut your ears.
People of Orphalese,
beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
—Kahlil Gibran
from The Prophet
If anyone asks youhow the perfect satisfactionof all our longingwill look, lift your faceand say,Like this.
When someone mentions the gracefulnessof the night sky, climb up on the roofand dance and say,Like this?
If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,or what "God's fragrance" means,lean your head toward him or her.Keep your face there close,Like this.
When someone quotes the old adageabout clouds gradually uncovering the moon,slowly loosen knot by knot the stringsof your robe,Like this?
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,don't try to explain the miracle.Kiss me on the lips,Like this. Like this.
When someone asks what it meansto "die for love," pointhere.
If someone asks how tall I am, frownand measure with your fingers the spacebetween the creases on your forehead.This tall.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.When someone doesn't believe that,walk back into my house.Like this.
I am a sky where spirits live.Stare into this deepening blue,While the breeze says a secret.Like this.
When someone asks what there is to do,light the candle in his hand.Like this.
—Rumi
Coleman Barks version, excerpt
Here, even the various mind-pleasing blossoming flowers
And attractive shining supreme golden houses
Have no inherently existent maker at all.
They are set up through the power of thought.
Through the power of conceptuality the world is established.
—Buddha
.When Buddha said "Whatever depends on conditions
Is empty of its own inherent existence,"
What is more amazing
Than this marvellous advise!
—Tsonghkapa.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he is much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
—Czesław Miłosz
You sit in your body, quietly making blood
Wild blood
Bird of the world—Emily Kendal Frey
Start with little things.Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands --
Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.
Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.
Tomorrow the world.
—William Stafford
The Way It Is.
A famous thorny issue in philosophy is the so-called infinite regress problem. For example, if we say that the properties of a diamond can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its carbon atoms, that the properties of a carbon atom can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its protons, neutrons and electrons, that the properties of a proton can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its quarks, and so on, then it seems that we're doomed to go on forever trying to explain the properties of the constituent parts.
The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis offers a radical solution to this problem: at the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all! In other words, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not from properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks.The external physical reality is therefore more than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it can have many interesting properties while its parts have no intrinsic properties at all.
—Max Tegmark (1967 - )
Our Mathematical Univere
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You're water.
We're the millstone.
You're wind.
We're dust blown up into shapes.
You're spirit.
We're the opening and closing of our hands.
You're the clarity.
We're the language that tries to say it.
You're joy.
We're all the different kinds of laughing!
—Rumi (1207 - 1273)
Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way.
Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God.
—Søren Kierkegaard
Works of Love (1847)
There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson.
Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling.
Of the telling there is no end. And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all, all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.
—Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing
[Physicist David] Bohm suggested that the explicate order is extracted from the implicate order in a similar way in which a holographic image is extracted from a series of swirls and shadings into a three-dimensional image when illuminated by laser light.
The illumination that extracts the physical universe from the implicate order is the light of consciousness.
In this model the act of observation draws ‘in-formation’ out of the implicate order and manifests it in the explicate order. Bohm was keen to use the term in-formation rather than information. By this he meant a process that actually ‘forms’ the recipient.
—Anthony Peake
Infinite Mindfield
We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle 'nature'. We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.
—Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
The Critique of Pure Reason
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.
—Henry David Thoreau
from Economy, 1854
Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of “things” that are in this or that state but in terms of “processes” instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another.
The properties of “things” manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction—that is to say, at the edges of the processes—and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one.This is the vertiginous dive taken by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Dirac—into the depth of the nature of things.
—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Then when you see what is around you as not other-than-you, and all and everything as the existence of the One; when you do not see anything else with Him or in him; but see Him in everything as yourself and at the same time as the nonexistence of yourself; then what you see is the truth.
—Ibn al-Arabi
Love all.
Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand.
Love every leaf and every ray of light.
Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment.
If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.
—Dostoevsky
If you want what visible reality
can give, you're an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you'll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love's confusing joy.
—Rumi
Coleman Barks version
listen
hiding in this cage
of visible matter
is the invisible
lifebird
pay attention
to her
she is singing
your song
—Kabir
Sushil Rao version
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When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it.
You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.—Ram Dass
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excerpts:
This land was once completely forested, Dr. Alemayehu Wassie began—sweeping his arms across the surrounding countryside—so much so that nobody would have seen the church. It was all trees. Now almost all the old forests have been cut down. The only place where they are still protected are in church forests like this one. When the people here at Zajor decided to build their wall, he said, they were not bureaucratic, they just built a wall. He motioned to the elderly priest with the carved wooden staff and thanked him for initiating the project. Alemayehu hoped other priests would be inspired by this community’s example.
As we stood beside the wall, a stream of local parishioners came and went through the gate. This is what Alemayehu meant when he described the wall as “porous.”
A group of children hopped on the wall and ran down its length to the west until they rounded the corner and were lost to sight. An elderly woman approached. She stopped beside the wall, crossed herself three times, then bowed low at the waist and began to fan her face with both hands, cupping the air and pulling it toward her, as if partaking of some invisible goodness that lay inside the wall. Then she rose and walked solemnly up the forest path. Clearly this was no mere border fence; it was an entrance into the sanctuary.
During the centuries when most people were illiterate, icons served to teach the biblical stories. The paintings, most from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, were made from natural dyes taken from local plants. Other than the tin roof and solar panels, all the materials for the church came from this place. In these icons was a forest transformed, the trees and roots and pollen all having passed through the fires of human imagination, while still retaining their sylvan imprint.Perhaps I was witnessing more than gestures of devotion, important as they were. Maybe they were also the secret to conserving the forest, small acts that together with hundreds of other gestures like them formed an invisible shield around the forests of Zajor. As I would come to learn, this shield was embedded deep within the structures of belief that had survived here since the fourth century. Our Western conceptions of belief are almost entirely inward and private. Here, and at other points on my journey into these forests, I was witnessing the performance of a mystical geography, the soul’s journey to God made visible in the landscape.
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The Kummakivi (Strange Rock) Ruokolahti, Finland |
We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense America is dying, from within, because they forgot the instructions of how to live on earth.
It is the Hopi belief, it is our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth, and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, it is likely that you will not make it.
Everything is spiritual, everything has a spirit, everything was brought here by the creator, the one creator. Some people call him God, some people call him Buddha, some people call him Allah, some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila... Grandfather.
We are here on earth only a few winters, then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real then most of us believe. The spirit world is everything. Over 95% of our body is water. In order to stay healthy you've got to drink good water. ... Water is sacred, air is sacred.
Our DNA is made out of the same DNA as the tree, the tree breaths what we exhale, we need what the tree exhales. So we have a common destiny with the tree. We are all from the earth, and when earth, the water, the atmosphere is corrupted then it will create its own reaction. The mother is reacting.
In the Hopi prophecy they say the storms and floods will become greater. To me its not a negative thing to know that there will be great changes. Its not negative, its evolution. When you look at it as evolution, it's time, nothing stays the same.
You should learn how to plant something. That is the first connection. You should treat all things as spirit, realize that we are one family. It is never something like the end. It is like life, there is no end to life.
—Floyd Red Crow Westerman
There's a tree walking around in the rain,
it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
It has an errand. It gathers life
out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.
When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear nights
waiting as we do for the moment
when the snowflakes blossom in space.
—Tomas Tranströmer
the tree and the sky
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein we err, and greatly err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man.
In a world older and more complete than ours they move
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
—Henry Beston
The Outermost House
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Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth.
I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;
while there is a criminal element, I am of it;while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
—Eugene Debs
Statement to the Court, excerpt
Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act,
September 18, 1918.
The most living moment comes when
those who love each other meet each
other's eyes and in what flowsbetween them then. To see your facein a crowd of others, or alone on afrightening street, I weep for that.Our tears improve the earth. Thetime you scolded me, your gratitude,your laughing, always your qualitiesincrease the soul. Seeing you is awine that does not muddle or numb.We sit inside the cypress shadowwhere amazement and clear thoughttwine their slow growth into us.
—Rumi
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David Sanger |
I have been thinking of the difference between
water and the waves on it.
Rising, water's still water, falling back, it is water.
Will you give me a hint how to tell them apart?
Because someone has made up the word "wave,"
do I have to distinguish it from water?
There is a Secret One inside us; the planets in all the galaxies pass through his hands like beads.
That is a string of beads one should look at
with luminous eyes.
—Kabir
God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.
The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light
and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.
Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips
as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.
—Hafiz
