part(icle

   

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It is better not to view a particle as a permanent entity, but rather as an instantaneous event. Sometimes these events link together to create the illusion of permanent entities. 

[...] What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.  

Particles are just appearances. 

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.


—Erwin Schrodinger
Quantum Theory

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"The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. 

He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. 

"As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come." 

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. 

We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism." 

"It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. 

Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. 

Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are." 


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I know you’re tired but come, this is the way. —Rumi

  

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When the soul is naughted and transformed ... she is so full of peace that though she press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth from them than peace.


—Saint Catherine of Genoa

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We are the same as plants, as trees,
as other people, as the rain that falls. 

We consist of that which is around us.

We are the same as everything.


—Buddhist teaching

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you are the clear book

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These roses under my window make no
reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are;
they exist with God to-day.

There is no time to them.
There is simply the rose; it is perfect in
every moment of its existence. 

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts;
in the full-blown flower, there is no more;
in the leafless root, there is no less.

Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,
in all moments alike.
There is no time to it.

But man postpones or remembers;
he does not live in the present, but with
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of
the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe
to foresee the future. 

He cannot be happy and strong until he too
lives with nature in the present, above time.


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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Your cure is in you, but you are unaware,

And your illness is from you, but you do not see.

And you consider yourself to be a small mass

While within you lies the greatest world.

And you are the clear book

Whose letters make manifest the hidden.

—Amīr al-Mu’mineen, Imam Ali (ع)

 

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Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. 

For everything that rises must converge.


—Pierre Teilhard De Chardin 

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each hath one world, and is one

 

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No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.

No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium.


—Ernst Cassirer
Philosopher (1874 - 1945)

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Our conscious now—what William James dubbed the “specious present"—is actually an interval of about three seconds. That is the span over which our brains knit up arriving sense data into a unified experience.

—Jim Holt
When Einstein Walked with Gödel

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And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere. 

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.


—John Donne 1572 – 1631
The Good Morrow

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ancient rites of conscience

 

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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

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Silence will carry your voice like the nest that holds the sleeping birds. —Rabindranath Tagore

   

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The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and inter-dependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind.

Words create words, reality is silent.


—Nisargadatta 

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You are the only faithful student you have.
All the others leave eventually.

Have you been making yourself shallow
with making others eminent?

Just remember, when you're in union,
you don't have to fear 
that you'll be drained.

The command comes to speak,
and you feel the ocean 
moving through you. 

Then comes, Be silent,
as when the rain stops,
and the trees in the orchard
begin to draw moisture
up into themselves.


—Rumi
Mathnawi, V, 3195-3219) 
Coleman Barks version

 

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silence

.is

a

looking

bird:the

turn

ing;edge,of

life 

(inquiry before snow

—e. e. cummings

 

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on seeing what is to be seen

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Pirandello said once that we are, in reality, the juxtaposition of infinite, blurred selves. It’s so, and we can’t unblur all the selves. But we can recognize that they exist, and above all, we can let them look at things, remembering always Goethe’s saying that, of all the things that we do, that we can do, the nicest of all is just to stand and look. 

From the moment that one pays continuous attention to anything, no matter what it is–a leaf, a nail–whatever is being regarded becomes a world in itself, mysterious, imposing, unspeakably magnified and inexhaustibly fertile in possibilities. 

Once you have begun to do this, you have entered into the kingdom of the Other, recognizing its otherness, and wanting to learn from it. The feeling that you get is that the world, and each aspect of it, is a mystery, is unfathomable, and that it glows against the background of universal darkness with a kind of strange and even magical light, both utterly meaningful and utterly meaningless, as the universe itself is.

—James Dickey

The Kingdom of the Other: on seeing what is to be seen

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What a strange machine man is! 

You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and 

out come sighs, laughter, and dreams.

—Nikos Kazantzakis, 1883-1957

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A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it. —Henry David Thoreau

 

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The careful observer can observe the seemingly impossible even with the unaided eye, a fact which forces one to prostrate oneself in adoration before the mysterious origin of all things.  

We all walk in mysteries. We do not know what is stirring in the atmosphere that surrounds us, nor how it is connected with our own spirit. So much is certain—that at times we can put out the feelers of our soul beyond its bodily limits; and a presentiment, an actual insight is accorded to it.

—Geothe

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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

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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

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others will come

The Atacama Giant, Atacama Desert, Chile. It is the largest prehistoric anthropomorphic figure in the world with a length of 119 metres, and was made between 1000-1400 CE. The figure was an early astronomical calendar used for predicting the weather.

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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

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We don’t choose each other at random.

We meet those who exist already in our unconsciousness.

—Sigmund Freud 

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bless

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So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is the expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. 

But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e., it possesses only an historical significance.


—Carl Jung (1875-1961)

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Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

The birds they sang at the break of day “Start again”, 

I seem to hear them say 

Don’t dwell on what has passed away 

Or what is yet to be 

Ah, the wars, they will be fought again 

The holy dove, she will be caught again 

Bought and sold and bought again 

The dove is never free 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

We asked for signs, and the signs were sent 

The birth betrayed, the marriage spent 

Yeah, the widowhood of every single government 

Signs for all to see 

I can’t run no more with that lawless crowd 

While the killers in high places say their prayers out loud 

But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up a thundercloud 

And they’re going to hear from me 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

You can add up the parts

But you won't have the sum

You can strike up the march

On your little broken drum

Every heart, every heart

To love will come 

But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

That’s how the light gets in 

That’s how the light gets in  

—Leonard Cohen

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then can it happen

 

Jim Denevan makes temporary drawings on sand earth and ice
that are eventually erased by waves and weather

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For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.  

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. 

But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. 

One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

―Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

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that which abides

    

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The sea wind sways over the endless oceans -
spreads its wings night and day
rises and sinks again
over the desolate swaying floor of the immortal ocean. 

Now it is nearly morning
or it is nearly evening
and the ocean wind feels in its face - the land wind. 

Clockbuoy toll morning and evening psalms,
the smoke of a coalboat
or the smoke of a tar-burning phoenician ship faces away at the horizons. 

The lonely jellyfish who has no history rocks around with
burning blue feet.
It's nearly evening now or morning.


—Harry Martinson

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With their round dance the electrons spin
chrysalises of that which abides,
the inmost cocoons
which do not open of their own accord
but are of that which abides.

There it is not a matter of hatching out.

There it is a matter of tending and protecting
the metamorphoses of the inmost
deeper-down swaying,

the innermost playing of women in dance.


—Harry Martinson

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the whole of the moon

 

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I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands 
I had flashes 
But you saw the plan 
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room 
I saw the crescent 
You saw the whole of the moon 
The whole of the moon

You were there in the turnstiles 
With the wind at your heels 
You stretched for the stars 
And you know how it feels 
To reach too high 
Too far 
Too soon 
You saw the whole of the moon

I was grounded 
While you filled the skies 
I was dumb-founded by truths 
You cut through lies
I saw the rain, dirty valley 
You saw Brigadoon 
I saw the crescent 
You saw the whole of the moon

I spoke about wings 
You just flew 
I wondered, I guessed, and I tried 
You just knew 
I sighed
But you swooned 
I saw the crescent 
You saw the whole of the moon 
The whole of the moon

With a torch in your pocket 
And the wind at your heels 
You climbed on the ladder 
And you know how it feels
To get too high 
Too far 
Too soon 
You saw the whole of the moon 
The whole of the moon

Hey yeah 
Unicorns and cannonballs 
Palaces and piers 
Trumpets, towers, and tenements 
Wide oceans full of tears 
Flags, rags, ferry boats 
Scimitars and scarves 
Every precious dream and vision 
Underneath the stars

Yes, you climbed on the ladder 
With the wind in your sails 
You came like a comet 
Blazing your trail 
Too high 
Too far 
Too soon 
You saw the whole of the moon

—Michael Scott

 

 

YouTube notes: Fiona Apple covered The Waterboys’ The Whole of the Moon for the series finale of Showtime’s The Affair. She asked Tony Berg to produce the record. Tony called in Matt Chamberlain, Patrick Warren, Ethan Gruska, Wendy Melvoin, and Phoebe Bridgers. Fiona has worked often with Matt and Patrick and knew Ethan as the brother of her former bandmate, drummer, Barbara. This was the first time she had met Wendy and Phoebe and fell in love with both of them. In a few hours they produced this beautiful rendition of a classic written by Mike Scott. After Mr. Scott (@ MickPuck) heard the performance he tweeted – “Prepare ye to receive goosebumps.” Fiona practiced the first take in a small vocal closet but when it came time for the main event, Tony moved Fiona into the big room where she had a great expanse to sing into. I tagged along with my new camera which I could barely work because I had forgotten my glasses – couldn’t see the buttons, couldn’t focus. Despite the crappy camera work of a blind photographer, the magic that is Fiona shines through. I hope you enjoy this captivating version of a sublime song. Drums – Matt Chamberlain Chamberlin – Patrick Warren Bass – Wendy Melvoin Piano – Ethan Gruska Background Vocals – Phoebe Bridgers BTW, Fiona was named after a character in the musical, Brigadoon. And Tony Berg is the one who described Fiona as "pissed off, funny, and warm."

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just so the world

The stones of Stenness, Orkney, Scotland, 1906

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...light from Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own, takes 2.4 million years to reach us. When we see it, the light has been rushing towards us a 186,000 miles a second for 2.4 million years. And beyond our galactic neighborhood lie an estimated 80 billion more galaxies, unimaginably far away. 

We know outer space is vast and mostly empty, but we usually consider our familiar world as more solid. Yet the atoms that make up our own bodies are actually 99.99 percent empty space. The distance between atoms, and the space within atoms, compared with their mass makes us as spacious internally as the universe we live in. 

I was struck by the reality that inner space is a microcosmic version of outer space.

—Tara Brach

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I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it’s environment.

The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.


—Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder: Distant Neighbours
wait - what ?

.

 

space is not empty

 

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Like modern string theorists, the Dogon say that, conceptually, prior to existing as particles, matter exists as primordial threads, which are effectively woven into matter. Each thread is said to pass through a series of 7 vibrations inside a tiny egg, which the Dogon call The Po Pilu and which we take as a likely counterpart to the tiny, wrapped-up bundles of seven dimensions in string theory or torsion theory called the Calabi-Yau Space. 

It is this component of matter that the Dogon Priests call the egg of the world and describe as a pivotal component of matter to be found in the world just 'below' ours. The vibrations inside this egg are conceived of as seven rays of a star of increasing length and are represented by yet another Dogon drawing. The figures of this drawing are read from right to left, like Egyptian glyphs as they are arranged in some inscriptions or like the letters of a traditional Hebrew text.


—Laird Scranton
The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol

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Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.


—Thomas Merton

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aspects of open space

  

Cueva de las Manos, Cave of the Hands, Argentina

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Trungpa Rinpoche once said, “Emotions are composed of energy, which can be likened to water, and a dualistic thought process, which could be likened to pigment or paint. When energy and thought are mixed together, they become vivid and colorful emotions. Concept gives the energy a particular location, a sense of relationship, which makes the emotions vivid and strong. Fundamentally, the reason emotions are discomforting, painful, frustrating is that our relationship to the emotions is not quite clear.”

And strangely enough, these experiences of the six realms - gods, jealous gods, human beings, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell - are ‘space’, different versions of space. It seems intense and solid, but in actual fact it isn’t at all. They are different aspects of space - that’s the exciting or interesting part. In fact, it is complete open space, without any colors or any particularly solid way of relating. 

That is why they have been described as six types of consciousness. It is pure consciousness rather than a solid situation - it almost could be called unconsciousness rather than even consciousness. The development of ego operates completely at the unconscious level, from one unconscious level to another unconscious level. That is why these levels are referred to as loka, which means ‘realm’ or 'world’. 

They are six types of 'world’. Each is a complete unit of its own. In order to have a world, you have to have an atmosphere; you have to have space to formulate things. So the six realms are the fundamental space through which any bardo experience operates. Because of that, it is possible to transmute these spaces into six types of awakened state, or freedom.

—Chögyam Trungpa

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The world is not populated by singular, autonomous, sovereign beings. It comprises a constantly oscillating network of dynamic interactions in which one thing changes through the change of another. The relationship counts, not the substance. 

And to make this relationship possible, it is necessary that the two sides touch each other, that they nestle into one another, penetrate one another, grind themselves against each other. This is the fundamental erotic that constantly makes new things out of other things.

—Andreas Weber
Matter and Desire

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I promise to make you more alive than you have ever been.
For the first time you will see your pores opening
like the gills of fish and you will hear
the noise of blood in galleries
and feel light gliding on your corneas
like the dragging of a dress across the floor. 

For the first time, you will note gravity’s prick
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will hurt from the imperative of wings. 

I promise to make you so alive that
the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,
and you will feel your eyebrows like two wounds forming
and your memories will seem to begin
with the creation of the world.

—Nina Cassian
Ordeal  
Michael Impey and Brian Swann version from the Romanian 

 

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you are this

  

.

Rest in peace.

You are the unchangeable Awareness in which all activity takes place.

Always rest in peace. 

You are eternal Being, unbounded and undivided. 
Just keep Quiet. All is well. Keep Quiet Here and Now. 

You are Happiness, you are Peace, you are Freedom. 
Do not entertain any notions that you are in trouble. 

Be kind to yourself. Open to your Heart and simply Be. 
Those who know This know Everything. 
If not, even the most learned know nothing at all.


—Papaji

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