love is the whole and more than all —E. E. Cummings

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The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. 

Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.

—Stephen Mitchell

The Enlightened Mind

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There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe.
The horizontal threads are in space.
The vertical threads are in time.

At every crossing of the threads, there is an individual,
and every individual is a crystal bead.

And every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net, but also every other reflection throughout the entire universe.


—The Rig Veda

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I don't give any exercise or practice because all practice is in time and is in mind. What I recommend is to simply stay quiet, don't make effort, don't think. 

This is all you have to do now. Do this now.

—Papaji

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Need, then, is the net for all things. —Rumi

  

 

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We never see the world as our retina sees it. In fact, it would be a pretty horrible sight: a highly distorted set of light and dark pixels, blown up toward the center of the retina, masked by blood vessels, with a  massive hole at the location of the “blind spot” where cables leave for the brain; the image would constantly blur and change as our gaze moved around. 

What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilized for our eye and head movements, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience of similar visual scenes. 

All these operations unfold unconsciously—although many of them are so complicated that they resist computer modeling. For instance, our visual system detects the presence of shadows in the image and removes them. At a glance, our brain unconsciously infers the sources of lights and deduces the shape, opacity, reflectance, and luminance of the objects.

—Stanislas Dehaene

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

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You need not do anything.

Remain sitting at your table and listen.

You need not even listen, just wait.

You need not even wait, 

just learn to be quiet, still and solitary,

and the world will freely offer itself to you unmasked.

It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.


—Franz Kafka

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Give up to grace.

The ocean takes care of each wave ‘til

it gets to shore.

You need more help than you know.

—Rumi

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you are the many-petalled melting point of repeating decimals —Andrew Joron

   

the most detailed image of one human cell to date, obtained by radiography, nuclear magnetic resonance and cryoelectron microscopy.

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Who else is Arunachala than 'I AM’? Look within; you too are Arunachala. Plunge inwards.

Arunachala is within and not without. 

The Self (Awareness) is Arunachala.

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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This perception of division between the seer and the object that is seen, is situated in the mind. For those remaining in the heart, the seer becomes one with the sight. 

Give your attention to the experience of seeing rather than to the object seen and you will find yourself everywhere.

—Rupert Spira

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I open my journal, write a few
sounds with green ink, and suddenly
fierceness enters me, stars
begin to revolve, and pick up
alligator dust from under the ocean. 

The music comes, I feel the bushy
tail of the Great Bear
reach down and brush the sea floor.


—Robert Bly
Words Rising
The Man in the Black Coat Turns

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Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening —Mirabai

 

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When we practice deep looking directed toward the heart of reality, we receive help, we receive understanding, we receive the wisdom that makes us free.


—Thich Nhat Hanh
True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart

💗

love is not all

   

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963

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Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. 

—John O'Donohue

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Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolutions power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It may well be. I do not think I would.


—Edna St. Vincent Millay

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friend

     

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If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond 
 

and you were to come by 
one evening
when the moon was shining 
down into my dark home 

and stand there at the edge 
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful 
here by this pond. I wish 
somebody loved me,"

I'd love you and be your catfish 
friend and drive such lonely 
thoughts from your mind 
and suddenly you would be
at peace,

and ask yourself, "I wonder 
if there are any catfish 
in this pond? It seems like 
a perfect place for them."

—Richard Brautigan

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hero

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I, I will be king 
And you, you will be queen 
Though nothing will drive them away 
We can beat them, just for one day 
We can be heroes, just for one day

And you, you can be mean 
And I, I'll drink all the time 
'Cause we're lovers, and that is a fact 
Yes, we're lovers, and that is that

Though nothing, will keep us together 
We could steal time, just for one day 
We can be heroes, for ever and ever 
What d'you say?

I, I wish you could swim 
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim 
Though nothing, nothing will keep us together 
We can beat them, for ever and ever 
Oh we can be heroes, just for one day

I, I will be king 
And you, you will be queen 
Though nothing will drive them away 
We can be heroes, just for one day 
We can be us, just for one day

I, I can remember (I remember) 
Standing, by the wall (by the wall) 
And the guns shot above our heads (over our heads) 
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall) 
And the shame was on the other side 
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever 
Then we could be heroes, just for one day

We can be heroes

We can be heroes

We can be heroes 
Just for one day 
We can be heroes

We're nothing, and nothing will help us 
Maybe we're lying, then you better not stay 
But we could be safer, just for one day

—David Bowie

Heroes 

💗

 

 

 

still and still moving

   

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Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. 

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


—T. S. Eliot
East Coker V, Four Quartets, excerpt 

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bless

 

Reykjavik peace tower, tribute to John Lennon

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With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

—W. S. Merwin

to the new year

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May you have warm words on a cold evening, 

a full moon on a dark night 

and a smooth road all the way to your door.

 

—Irish blessing

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