0ne Heart, 0ne Self

   

  

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Brahman is a word/sound that refers to the ground of being, the one heart, that which 'is'

The sound OM/Aum is a sound which expresses the 'consciousness of’

Spoken, it expresses conscious awareness of the invisible, indivisible wholeness

Manifested beings exist only in the consciousness of the one Heart

Perceptions of change and manifestations are the play of consciousness of the one Self


The Isha Upanishad, excerpts
Eknath Easwaren version

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In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked. 

For a long time, Siddhartha had been partaking in the discussions of the wise men, practicing debate with Govinda, practicing with Govinda the art of reflection, the service of meditation.

He already knew how to speak the Om silently, the word of words, to speak it silently into himself while inhaling, to speak it silently out of himself while exhaling, with all the concentration of his soul, the forehead surrounded by the glow of the clear-thinking spirit. 

He already knew to feel Atman in the depths of his being, indestructible, one with the universe.


—Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Siddhartha

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All this is full. All that is full.

From fulness, fulness comes.

When fulness is taken from fulness, 

Fulness still remains.

OM shanti, shanti

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listen carefully

  

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The moon is a white strange world, a great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. 

When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. 

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time … Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.


—D. H. Lawrence

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Although the evening is cold and starless
And the rain is raging,
I’m still singing my song during this period,

I don’t know who’s listening.
Though the world is drowned in war and fear,
At some point
Burning secretly, if no one sees them,
The love continues.

—Hermann Hesse

 

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Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas 
Nor the Qur'an 
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind 
All the way to heaven.

—Kabir

 

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changed and odd

  

Alex Saber

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In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen could happen—all you had to do was say it.

Nobody can explain this:
That's the way it was.


—Nalungiaq
Nalungiaq was an Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen in the early twentieth century.

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Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far off farm,
I hold still and listen for a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and were my brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,
and an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home
And asks me questions. What should I reply?


—Hermann Hesse

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what if?

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Perhaps we don't love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? 

Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant?


—Franz Kafka
Letters to Milena

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No permanence is ours; we are a wave 
That flows to fit whatever form it finds: 
Through day or night, cathedral or cave 
We pass forever, craving form that binds.
 

—Hermann Hesse
from “Lament” in The Glass Bead Game
Clara and Richard Winston version

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Although from the beginning 
I knew
the world is impermanent,
not a moment passes
when my sleeves are dry.


—Ryokan
Sky Above, Great Wind

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If you can see it, it can see you. That’s true of just about anything. —Margaret Atwood

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All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker — no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential.


—Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Narcissus and Goldmund

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According to whether we are in the same place or separated one from the other, I know you twice. There are two of you. When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me.

This presence is multiform: it consists of countless images, passages, meanings, things known, landmarks, yet the whole remains marked by your absence, in that it is diffuse. It is as if your person becomes a place, your contours horizons.

I live in you then like living in a country.

You are everywhere.


—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?


—John Berger

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portions and percipients

  

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All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.  

But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. 

It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. 

It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.


—Hermann Hesse
A Defence of Poetry

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Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.


—Hermann Hesse

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You must become brother and sister
to each and every thing
so that they flow through you
dissolving every difference
between what belongs to you and others.

No star, no leaf shall fall -
you fall with them -
to rise again
in every new beginning.


—Hermann Hesse (1887 - 1962)

The Seasons of the Soul

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Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself. —William Blake

  

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"The things we see,” Pistorius said softly, “are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. You can be happy that way. But once you know the other interpretation you no longer have the choice of following the crowd. Sinclair, the majority’s path is an easy one, ours is difficult."


—Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf

 

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manifold world

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Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again… 

And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key.

Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.

Embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.


—Hermann Hesse
excerpted from Steppenwolfe
by Maria Popova (treasure)
here

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look

 

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I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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I learned through my body and soul
that it was necessary for me to sin, 
that I needed lust, 
that I had to strive for property, 
and experience nausea and the depths of despair 
in order to learn not to resist them, 
in order to learn to love the world ... 


—Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha

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