you are that

 

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Brahman, the single binding unity of all that exists, 

is indivisible and pure.

Realize Brahman and go beyond all change.

Realize that there are no separate minds.

Waking, sleeping, dreaming, the Self is one.

The One appears many, just as the moon 
appears many, reflected in water.

But there is only one Self, present in all beings.


lessons from the Amritabindu Upanishad
Eknath Easwaren version

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The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.

Everything in the world is full of signs. 

All events are coordinated.

All things depend on each other; as has been said: Everything breathes together.

—Plotinus

ca CE 204/5–270

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Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us 

so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. 

You and me are us and them, and it and sky.

—Ada Limon

 

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note to self

  

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Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. 

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

—Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

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Let your mind and heart release all that disturbs you.

Let your body be still, and all the frettings of your body, and all that surrounds it.

Let the earth and sea and air be still, and heaven itself;
and then think of spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining into you, through you, and out from you in all directions while you sit quiet.

—Plotinus, 204/5 - 270 CE

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no man is an island

 

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When going to bed, first a Mevlevî “sees with” the pillow, and then lies down. Then, when he is pulling the quilt over himself, he “sees with” that too, kissing its edge. Before he drinks water, tea or coffee, he kisses the glass: he “sees with” it.

When a Mevlevî takes a book to read, he or she “sees with” the book. After she finishes reading it, again she “sees with” the book and puts it lightly back in its place. 

She picks up the tasbīḥ (prayer beads) and “sees with” them, and when she has finished chanting, she “sees with” the tasbīḥ and puts them gently back in their place.

This practice applies to everything . . . 

—ADÜLBÂKI GÖLPINARLI
Mevlevi Adab and Customs, excerpts from the glossary
sufism.org

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When I am not present to myself, then I am only aware of that half of me, that mode of my being which turns outward to created things. 

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them. Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self toward God. 

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. My senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth. 

Recollection brings them home. It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God.


—Thomas Merton
No Man is an Island, excerpt 

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God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things,

though they are ignorant that this is so.

—Plotinus

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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. —Plotinus

  

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God turns you from one feeling to another

and teaches by means of opposites,

so that you will have two wings to fly,

not one.

—Rumi

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You are sitting in a wagon being
drawn by a horse whose
reins you 
hold.

There are two inside of you
who can steer.

Most never hand the reins to Me
so they go from place to place the
best they can, though
rarely happy.

And rarely does their whole body laugh
feeling God's poke 
in the 
ribs.

If you feel tired, dear,
my shoulder is soft,
I'd be glad to
steer a
while.


—Kabir

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delicious trouble

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Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless. 

Each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

The sun and stars that float in the open air, the appleshaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is something grand; I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness.

And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot or reconnoissance,
And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass - the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.


—Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass, excerpts

 

 

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This the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.

For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this is the Soul's feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.

These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.


—Plotinus

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the First Beauty

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Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

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This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adequatio et rei et intellectus—the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

[] “As above, so below’ the ancients used to say: to the world outside us there corresponds, in some fashion, a world inside us.


—E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed

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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Never did the eye see the sun unless it has first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.


—Plotinus

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