... every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. —Walt Whitman

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It has been said since ancient times that the nature of reality is much closer to music than to a machine, and this is confirmed by many discoveries in modern science. The essence of a melody does not lie in its notes; it lies in the relationships between the notes, in the intervals, frequencies, and rhythms. 

When a string is set vibrating we hear not only a single tone but also its overtones—an entire scale is sounded. Thus each note involves all the others, just as each subatomic particle involves all the others, according to current ideas in particle physics.

—Fritjof Capra

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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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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 

than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—Shakespeare

Hamlet

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the nature of real(ity

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As long as we confuse the myriad forms of the divine /i/am with reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya. Maya, therefore, does not mean that the world is an illusion, as is often wrongly stated.

The illusion merely lies in our point of view, if we think that the shapes and structures, things and events, around us are realities of nature, instead of realizing that they are concepts of our measuring and categorizing minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory.

In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great magician of the divine play. The world of maya changes continuously, because the divine /i/am is a rhythmic, dynamic play.


—Fritjof Capra
The Tao of Physics

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The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.

—Fritjof Capra

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i do not have it, i am it. —Nancy Mujo Baker

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Contemplative and philosophical traditions, Eastern and Western, insist on this: that the source and ground of the mind’s unity is the transcendent reality of unity as such, the simplicity of God, the one ground of both consciousness and being. 

For Plotinus, the oneness of nous, the intellective apex of the self, is a participation in the One, the divine origin of all things and the ground of the openness of mind and world one to another. 

For Sufi thought, God is the Self of all selves, the One—al-Ahad—who is the sole true 'I' underlying the consciousness of every dependent 'me.’ 

According to the Kena Upanishad, Brahman is not that which the mind knows like an object, or that the eye sees or the ear hears, but is that by which the mind comprehends, by which the eye sees, by which the ear hears; atman—the self in its divine depth—is the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, the ground of all knowing.

—David Bentley Hart

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The witnessing force behind mind, that characteristic self or spirit 

is called atman; the God in you.

—Gian Kumar

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when logic won't quite do

   

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“Logic is a very elegant tool,” he [Gregory Bateson] said, “and we’ve got a lot of mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butterflies and habit formation” – his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause, looking out over the ocean – “you know, to all those pretty things” – and now, looking straight at me [Capra] – “logic won’t quite do … because that whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes.” 

... He stopped again, and at that moment I suddenly had an insight, making a connection to something I had been interested in for a long time. I got very excited and said with a provocative smile: “Heraclitus knew that! … And so did Lao Tzu.”

“Yes, indeed; and so do the trees over there. Logic won’t do for them.”

“So what do they use instead?”

“Metaphor.”

“Metaphor?”

“Yes, metaphor. That’s how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.”

—Fritjof Capra

Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with remarkable people

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