neti neti

.

The path of the Vedāntic discipline is the path of negation, "Neti", in which, by stern determination, all that is unreal is both negated and renounced. It is the path of jnāna, knowledge, the direct method of realizing the Absolute.


—Sri Ramakrishna

 

.

The Vedantins do not say that the world is unreal. 

That is a misunderstanding. If they did, what would be the meaning of the Vedantic text: ‘All this is Brahman’? 

They only mean that the world is unreal as world but real as Self. If you regard the world as non-self, it is not real. 

Everything, whether you call it illusion (Maya) or Divine Play (Lila) or Energy (Shakti) must be within the Self and not apart from it.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

 A yogi has no particular path. He simply renounces "imagining” things. His mind then ceases out of its own accord, and "the perfect state" naturally occurs.

There is only Seeing. 

Both the seer and the seen are contained in it.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears. —Jack Kerouac

 

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Your retina is physically bombarded by photons, giving rise to the mechanics of sight. Coded chemical information begins to course through the optic nerves leading from the eye to the brain. These data have no color in them, however, because photons are colorless, and so are optic signals. Color is known in consciousness alone. 

That is how the quality of knowingness is embedded in existence. 

You could not be here without knowingness, which applies not just to colour but to all five senses.


—Deepak Chopra
Total Meditation

.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. 

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


―Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian

  

.

 

The apathy that the gaze of the animal expresses after the combat is the sign of an existence that is essentially on a level with the world in which it moves like water in water.


—Georges Bataille
Theory of Religion

 

.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

  

.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: 

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence. 

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. 

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark. 

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.


—Wallace Stevens

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glitter and hum

   

.

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. 

Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. 

So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. 

So they covered each one over with mud. 

And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.


—Zora Neale Hurston, born 1891
Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Time, nature, necessity, accident,
Elements, energy, intelligence —
are but dreams of the conscious Self, the Love
dwelling in the one heart.

The world is a wheel of consciousness
turning within the one heart,
merging and emerging in
the river of Love.

The self is present in the one heart
in the one love
as butter is in cream
conscious


—Lessons from The Shvetashvatara Upanishad
Eknath Easwaran version

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when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because


—e.e. cummings

 

.

 

conduct(ion

  

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God dwells in you, as you, and you don't have to 'do' anything to be God-realized or Self-realized, it is already your true and natural state. 

Just drop all seeking, turn your attention inward, and sacrifice your mind to the One Self radiating in the Heart of your very being. For this to be your own presently lived experience, Self-Inquiry is the one direct and immediate way.


—Sri Ramana 

.

Love is not a sentimental attachment to a human being; 

love is a mode of conduct that comes from the heart.


—Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati 

.

so we have heard

   

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We are enshrined in each other.
We are the supreme reality.
Rejoice in that.
We are what we have coveted.

Thus working we may live a hundred years.
Thus we may work in real freedom.
When the Self in denied, the dream continues
and the true love is hidden.

Ever still, the Self is one.
Swifter than thought, swifter than the senses.
Though motionless, the Self outruns pursuit.
There is only the Self.

Seeming to move, we are ever still.
Seeming far away, we are always here,
We are within, transcending all.

When we see all creatures as the Self
And the Self as all creatures
We know no fear.
We know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of the Self be hidden from its Self?

We are everywhere. Bright is the Self,
Indivisible, untouched by sin, wise,
Immanent and transcendent,
The self holds the cosmos together.

Dreaming in the dark night, the world without alone is real;
In night darker still, the world within
Alone is real. The first leads to a life 
Of action, the second to a life of meditation.
But those who combine action with meditation
Cross the sea of death through action
And enter into the timeless Self
Through the practice of meditation.

So have we heard.

In dark night the Self is perceived as other,
Darker still when the Self is perceived as immanent only.
The Self is both immanent and transcendent,
Crossing the sea of death
With the immanent and entering into
The light with the transcendent.

So we have heard.

The face of truth is hidden. O sun, 
I, who adore the truth, see
The glory of truth. O nourishing sun,
Solitary traveller, creator,
Blessed Self of all that is created, 
I am that.

OM shanti shanti shanti


The Katha Upanishad 
lessons from Eknath Easwaren version

.

 

All this is full. All that is full.

From fullness, fullness comes.

When fullness is taken from fullness,

Fullness remains.

OM shanti shanti shanti

 

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Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

  

.

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

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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

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i am that

.

The oldest Vedantic school, Advaita [‘not two’], represents an extreme and purist position in arguing that Brahman alone is real. The self and the world are within Brahman, with any apparent difference arising from illusion [maya] and ignorance [avidya]. It is as with a rope, which seems to be a snake, or a seashell, which seems to be of silver. 

This world is like the foam on the sea, or a peacock’s egg, created simply for play [lila]. Since Brahman is all, Brahman is without attributes. When the mind, which is given to maya, tries to conceive of Brahman, it sees Ishvara in one of his many forms. If certain Upanishadic statements appear to be theistic, it is because their author (nominally,Brahman) is catering to his audience. 

Only in deep sleep, when we are no longer dreaming, might we experience something of the formlessness of Brahman. We are then pure, disengaged consciousness, like the sun after it has set. This is the experience of disembodied Atma, of death, of home.

—Neel Burton

.

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)

 

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So much time spent, Seeking what one is.

So much better is it to understand

What one is not.

Then what remains is pure and

What one is.


—Wu Hsin

.

it(self

    

.

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

.

Consciousness is consciousness of something. 

This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness emerges supported by a being which is not itself.
 

—Jean-Paul Sartre

.

the witness is the door

.

Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep.

Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something. Consciousness is partial and changeful, awareness is total, changeless, calm and silent. And it is the common matrix of every experience.

Whatever depends, is not real. The real is truly independent. Since the existence of the person depends on the existence of the world and it is circumscribed and defined by the world, it cannot be real.

As long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace – immersed in the deep silence of reality.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond. The witness is the door through which you pass beyond.
 

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I Am That, 1973

largerloves

.

You are the solitary Witness of All That Is,

Forever Free.

Your only bondage is not seeing this.

—Ashtavakra Gita

.

what originates in reality that is independent of thought?

   

.

We have to be very alert and careful here. For we tend to try to fix the essential content of our discussion in a particular concept or image, and talk about this as if it were a separate ‘thing’ that would be independent of our thought about it. We fail to notice that in fact this 'thing’ has by now become only an image, a form in the overall process of thought i.e. response of memory, which is a residue of past perception through the mind (either someone else’s or one’s own). And so, in a very subtle way, we may once again be trapped in a movement in which we treat something originating in our own thought as if it were a reality originating independently of this thought.

We can keep out of this trap by being aware that the actuality of knowledge is a living process that is taking place right now (e.g. in this room). In such an actual process, we are not just talking about the movement of knowledge, as if looking at it from the outside. We are actually taking part in this movement, and are aware that this is indeed what it is happening. That is to say, it is a genuine reality for all of us, a reality which we can observe and to which we can give our attention.

The key question is then: “Can we be aware of the ever-changing and flowing reality of this actual process of knowledge?” If we can think from such awareness, we will not be led to mistake what originates in thought with what originates in reality that is independent of thought. And thus, the art of metaphysics may develop in a way that is free of the confusion inherent in those forms of thought which try to define, once and for all, what 'the whole of reality is’, and which therefore lead us to mistake the content of such thought for the overall order of a total reality that would be independent of thought.


—David Bohm

Reality and Knowledge Considered as Process

Birbeck College

University of London, May 1974

.

The kingdom of God is not in the clouds, in some designated point of space; 

it is right behind the darkness that you perceive with closed eyes. 

—Yogananda

.

the Bravest - grope a little

  

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We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye -

A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darkness -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When no a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.


—Emily Dickinson

.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light 

Is the lion that comes down to drink. 


—Wallace Stevens
The Glass of Water

.

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

.

the drop that contains the sea

  

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The fading away of the Tao is when openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, and energy turns into form. When form is born, everything is thereby stultified. 

The functioning of the Tao is when form turns into energy, energy turns into spirit, and spirit turns into openness. When openness is clear, everything thereby flows freely.

Therefore ancient sages investigated the beginnings of free flow and stultification, found the source of evolution, forgot form to cultivate energy, forgot energy to cultivate spirit, and forgot spirit to cultivate openness. 


—Tan Jingsheng, 10th century

The Immortal Sisters: Secret Teachings of Taoist Women

Thomas Cleary

 

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Man has no Body distinct from the Soul!
for that Body is a portion of the Soul
discerned by the five Senses,
the chief inlets to the Soul in this age.

Energy is the only life and is from the Body;
and reason is the bound or outward
circumference of energy. 

Energy is eternal delight.


—William Blake
18th century

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What I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. —Rumi

 

.

Go deeper
Past thoughts into silence.

Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.

Let love consume all that is left of you.


—Kabir

.

desire itself is movement

.

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

—T. S. Eliot

.

thou art 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 

.

But I don’t want comfort. 

I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

—Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

.

worry not

   

.

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling.

Even the idea of being a man or woman, or even human, should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans.

So, first abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that.

Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind.

You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

what you are looking for is the thing that looks

  

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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, excerpts

.

Look into yourself and you will become conscious of nothing but a vicious circle, for the very reason that the act of introspection is viciously circular: you cannot see what you are looking for, because what you are looking for is the thing that looks. 

Every self-conscious attempt to know oneself, to improve oneself, to save oneself, to unite oneself with God, must come to this exasperating and impossible conclusion.


—Alan Watts

.

 

the consciousness of the atom

  

.

As you now have the definition of the atom (I am quoting from the Standard Dictionary) it is:

“An atom is a centre of force, a phase of electrical phenomena, a centre of energy, active through its own internal make-up, and giving off heat or radiation.”

Therefore, an atom is (as Lord Kelvin in 1867 thought it would ultimately turn out to be) a “vortex ring”, or centre of force, and not a particle of what we understand as tangible substance. This ultimate particle of matter is now demonstrated to be composed of a positive nucleus of energy, surrounded—just as is the sun by the planets—with many electrons or negative corpuscles, thus subdividing the atom of earlier science into numerous lesser bodies. 

The elements differ according to the number and arrangement of these negative electrons around their positive nucleus, and they rotate or move around this central charge of electricity as our planetary system rotates around the sun. Professor Soddy, in one of his latest books, has pointed out that in the atom is to be seen an entire solar system, the central sun can be recognized with the planets pursuing their orbital paths around it.

It would be apparent to each of us that when this definition of the atom is contemplated and studied an entirely new concept of substance comes before us. Dogmatic assertions are therefore out of order, for it is realized that perhaps the next discovery may reveal to us the fact that the electrons themselves may be worlds within worlds.

The atom, then, can be predicated as resolving itself into electrons, and can be expressed in therms of force or energy. When you have a centre of energy or activity you are involved in a dual concept; you have that which is the cause of movement or energy, and that which it energizes or actuates.

We are, therefore, throwing the concept of matter back to where the oriental school has always put it, to primordial stuff, to that which the orientalist call the "primordial ether”. We are led back to that intangible something which is the basis of the objective thing which you and I can see and touch and handle. The word “substance” itself means that which “stands under”, or which lies back of things. All, therefore, that we can predicate in connection with the ether of space is that it is the medium in which energy or force functions, or makes itself felt.

—Alice C. Bailey
The Consciousness of the Atom
A series of Lectures delivered in New York City
Winter of 1921-22

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As is the human body,
So is the cosmic body.

As is the human mind,
So is the cosmic mind.

As is the microcosm,
So is the macrocosm.

As is the atom,
So is the universe.


—The Upanishads

.

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited.

In the mind of each was the same thought.

‘I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,’ was the substance of the thing felt.


—Sherwood Anderson

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