miracles of scrutiny

 

.

In certain regions of the far north, where the dust content of the atmosphere is close to zero, light is able to move unscattered through the air. In such places, under such conditions, far away objects can often appear uncannily close at hand to the observer. 

The lichen patterns on a boulder can be seen from a hundred yards, cormorants on a sea-stack seem within reach of touch. 

Distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.


—Robert Macfarlane
Landmarks (a treasure)
Chapter 7, on Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams
(another treasure)

.

When we say that the world is knowable, i.e. that knowledge as such exists, we state through this fact itself the tenet of the essential unity of the world or its knowability. 

We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism - all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it. 

The relationship of everything and of all beings is the conditio sine qua non of their knowability.


—Anonymous (Valentin Tomberg
Meditations on the Tarot

.

the ultimate That

.

The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. 

Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. 

Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.


—Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy 

.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

 

.

We are yet to become aware of the fact that we embrace our world within ourselves; and that all that exists as persons, places, and things live only within our own consciousness.


—Joel Goldsmith

.

The world, conceived by the finite mind as a multiplicity and diversity of objects made out of dead, inert stuff called ‘matter’, comes into apparent existence when consciousness ignores the reality of itself, and it vanishes out of apparent existence when consciousness wakes up to or recognises itself.


—Rupert Spira
The Nature of Consciousness

.

The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

.

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

.

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

.

what is it that you love?

 

.

It is natural and good to love oneself. 

Only, you should know exactly what it is that you love. 

It is not the body that you love, it is Life: perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. 

Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. 

Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. 
Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fullness of it. 

You come to know by dwelling in your mind on “I am,” “I know,” “I love” - with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That

.

you are that

 

.

Life has no meaning. 
Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. 

It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.


—Joseph Campbell

.

I sometimes forget that I was created for Joy.
My mind is too busy.
My Heart is too heavy
for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the Sacred dance of life.

I was created to smile
To Love
To be lifted up
And to lift others up.

O’ Sacred One
Untangle my feet
from all that ensnares.
Free my soul.
That we might
Dance
and that our dancing
might be contagious.


Hafiz

.

this, our life

.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. 


—William Shakespeare

.

 

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

field of be(ings

.

Each thing, each being, is in steady intercourse with the entities and elements around it, negotiating its passage and exerting its participation in the ongoing emergence of what is.

If we allow that matter is not inert, but is rather animate (or self-organizing) from the get-go … we are left with a diversely differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has gifts relative to the others. 

And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this living field, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape.

We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because—by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism—we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous. 

We can feel the tangible textures, sounds, and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight.  

Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh. We are neither pure spirits nor pure minds, but are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, and touched by the beings around us.


—David Abram
Becoming Animal, excerpts

.

questions

 

.

My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside 
it buckles under these things.

[...]

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, excerpt

.

this is the drop of an instant

.

Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life. 

For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
It is yours.


—Pablo Neruda
ode to the past

.

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

.

assurance

.

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies.

You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.


—William Stafford

.

darkness within darkness

 

.

1.


The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell version

.

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.


—Rainier Maria Rilke
Robert Bly version

.

as light pours like rain

.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

.

you and i are earth

 

Tin-glazed earthenware plate found in a London sewer 

(England, 1661). Creator unknown.

.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, 
and each moment then, 

In the faces of men and women I see God, 
and in my own face in the glass, 

I find letters from God dropped in the street — and everyone is sign’d by God’s name, 

And I leave them where they are, 
for I know that whereso'er I go 

Others will punctually come forever and ever.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

.

And I, infinitesima­l being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.


—Pablo Neruda

.

I and this mystery; here we stand.   

—Walt Whitman

.

not to worry

.

Let what comes come

Let what goes go

Find out what remains.


—Ramana Maharshi

.

 

Air is anything but empty. If you’re a bat, it holds the sound of the shape of a hillside.

.

Iron in the birds’ inner ears

helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.


In other words,

the birds carry within them a piece of the earth,

a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers

its knowledge back to the birds.


—Jarod K. Anderson
PACT

.

Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.


We can hold all these ideas at once and feel

both heavy and weightless

with the absurd beauty of it all.


—Jarod K. Anderson

THE IMPOSSIBLE

.

apparently useless peculiarities

 

.

Here it is that we approach that attitude of the self, that point of view, which is loosely and generally called mystical. Here, instead of those broad blind alleys which philosophy showed us, a certain type of mind has always discerned three straight and narrow ways going out towards the Absolute. 

In religion, in pain, and in beauty—and not only in these, but in many other apparently useless peculiarities of the empirical world and of the perceiving consciousness—these persons insist that they recognize at least the fringe of the real.


—Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism

.

Brother stand the pain; 
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do. 

Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun. 
Turn away from the cave of your sleeping. 
That way a thorn expands to a rose. 
A particular glows with the universal.


—Rumi 

.

teacup talk

  

Shiu Gun Wong 

.

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.


—Hafiz
Daniel Ladinsky version

.

merrily, merrily

.

Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness towards all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you.

What they do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream.

The trick is to have a positive intention during the dream.

This is the essential point.


—Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

.

The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed.

And it is entirely private.

Take it to be a dream and be done with it.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

dream keeper

  

.

Bring me all of your dreams,

You dreamer,

Bring me all your

Heart melodies

That I may wrap them

In a blue cloud-cloth

Away from the too-rough fingers

Of the world.


—Langston Hughes

.

the curve of one position

 

.

God illumines the mind and shines within it.

One cannot know God by means of the mind. 

One can but turn the mind inwards and merge it in God.

If you believe that God will do all the things that you want Him to do, then surrender yourself to Him.

Otherwise let God alone, and know yourself. 


—Ramana Maharshi

.

Be aware that the two paths of jnana (knowledge) and bhakti (devotion) are inseparably related. 

Therefore, without separating one from the other through the delusion that they are different, practice both simultaneously and harmoniously in your heart.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

The heart can think of no devotion 

Greater than being shore to ocean 

Holding the curve of one position, 

Counting an endless repetition.


—Robert Frost

.

you know ...

.

Your effort is the bondage.

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

consolation

 

.

The tiny particles which form the vast universe are not tiny at all.
Neither is the vast universe vast. 

These are notions of the mind, which is like a knife,
always chipping away at the Tao,
trying to render it graspable and manageable. 

But that which is beyond form is ungraspable, and 
that which is beyond knowing is unmanageable. 

There is, however, this consolation:
She who lets go of the knife will find the Tao at her 
fingertips.


—Lao Tzu
Hua Hu Ching

.

There is no insurmountable solitude. 

All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.

And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.


—Pablo Neruda

.

Cannot you see clearly that everything that appears to happen happens in consciousness? 

It is all imaginary, a temporary hallucination. 

Don’t be led astray, none of it reflects your true state.

—Nisargadatta

.

the wings

Fumihiko Hirai

.

Urpflanze!

 

.

What Goethe means by the Urpflanze is the dynamic unity of the coming-into-being of all plants as the self-differencing of One plant, which is therefore intensively multiple but appears extensively as all the many different plants. 

What this means is that each plant is the Urpflanze being one possible mode of itself - the number of possibilities is indeterminate. Hence, paradoxically, it is everywhere visible and nowhere visible - although once we begin to think dynamically, this is no paradox at all. 

Instead of being separate from the many particular plants that we see, i.e., as 'the one over many', Goethe's Urpflanze is One which comes into concrete manifestation simultaneously with the many - with which it is identical because the many are now the self-differences of One. 

This is very different indeed from the two-world theory which separates the One from the many. There is no such dualism in Goethe's thinking, for which in his own words: 'The universal and the particular coincide: the particular is the universal, appearing under different conditions.'


—Henri Bortoft
Taking Appearance Seriously

.

 

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. —Arthur Eddington

 

. 

That which is above is like that which is below

and that which is below is like that which is above,

to achieve the wonders of the one thing.


—Hermes Trismegistus

.

Outwardly, I am one apple among many.

Inwardly, I am the Tree.


—Alan Watts

.