in praise of mortality, excerpt

.

Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

.

revelation

.

The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as, e.g., ‘warm and cold’) where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites. An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions. 

—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Wanderer and his Shadow

...

You are the deep innerness of all things,

the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself differently:

to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Trans. by Anita Barrows

.

listen

 

.

For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult task of all....,
the work for which all other work is but preparation.

It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen...
a great claim upon us, something that chooses us out
and calls us to vast things.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

not two

.

The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

—Alan Turing

...

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

...

Creation, invention: there is nothing more real than this body that I imagine; there is nothing less real than this body that I touch that turns into a heap of salt or vanishes into a column of smoke. With that smoke my desire will invent another body. Eroticism is the experience of a full life that appears to us as a palpable whole and through which we enter totality.


—Octavio Paz
An Erotic Beyond: Sade
translated from the Spanish by Elliot Weinburger

...

Discover yourself.

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body.

Discover that current and stay with it.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

strangerain
.

i am

.

I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice

surging forth with all my earthly feelings? 
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings

and whitely fly in circles round your face.

My soul, dressed in silence, rises up

and stands alone before you: can't you see?

don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe

upon your vision as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.

But when you want to wake, I am your wish,

and I grow strong with all magnificence

and turn myself into a star's vast silence

above the strange and distant city, Time.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

divine magnetism

 There is something in personal love, caresses,
and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does,
in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world.
 
—Walt Whitman



.

The Self is like a powerful magnet within us. It draws us gradually to itself, though we imagine we are going to It of our own accord: when we are near enough, It puts an end to our activities, makes us still, and then swallows up our personal current, thus killing our wrong personality. It overwhelms the intellect and over floods the whole being. 

We think we are meditating upon It and developing towards It, whereas the truth is that we are iron filings and It is the Atman-magnet that is pulling us towards Itself. Thus the process of finding the Self is a form of Divine magnetism.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

...

... everything can have an effect on us. And all things affect us from a distance, the near as well as the remote things, nothing touches us; everything reaches us across divisions. And just as the most remote stars cannot enter us, the ring on my hand cannot do so either: everything that reaches us can do so only the way a magnet summons and aligns the forces in some susceptible object; in this way, all things can effect a new alignment within us. And in view of this insight, do proximity and distance not simply vanish?

—Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters on Life

...

The chooser's happiness lies in his congruence with the chosen,

The peace of iron filings, obedient to the forces of the magnetic field.

Calm is the soul that is emptied of all self,

In the eternal moment of co-inherence.

A happiness within you - but not yours.

—Dag Hammarskjöld

.

release, and radiance, and roses

 You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love. 
 
—Rumi

.

We say release, and radiance, and roses,

and echo upon everything that's known;

and yet, behind the world our names enclose is

the nameless: our true archetype and home.

The sun seems male, and earth is like a woman,

the field is humble, and the forest proud;

but over everything we say, inhuman,

moves the forever-undetermined god.

We grow up; but the world remains a child.

Star and flower, in silence, watch us go.

And sometimes we appear to be the final

exam they must succeed on. And they do.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Stephen Mitchell version

...

You are music and rivers,
palaces, angels, and skies,
an endless rose, infinite and intimate ...


—Jorge Luis Borges
Paul Weinfield version
from The Endless Rose

...

You are flawed, you are stuck in old patterns,

you become carried away with yourself.

Indeed you are quite impossible in many ways.

And still, you are beautiful beyond measure.

—John Welwood

.

no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible —Stanisław Jerzy Lec

 .

How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing and pulls it toward
the heart of the world.

Each thing - each stone, blossom, child - is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things,

because they are in God's heart; they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird must do that before he can fly.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
what the things can teach us
Anita Barrows/Joanna Macy translation

...

Mr. B.C. Das, the Physics Lecturer, asked about free will and destiny. 

Ramana Maharshi: Whose will is it? ‘It is mine’ you may say. You are beyond will and fate. Abide as that and you will transcend them both. That is the meaning of conquering destiny by will. Fate can be conquered. 

Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

strange world

.

The deepest level of obsession is obsession with a sense of self. A sense of self, generated as a reaction to non-referential space, lies at the core of every habituated pattern. A self is felt to be a permanent, independent unit. The feeling of permanence manifests in life as a feeling of dullness, of not being quite present. The illusion of independence arises as a feeling of separation. The feeling of being one thing arises as a feeling of incompleteness or dissatisfaction. Together, these three qualities obscure the mystery of being.


—Ken McLeod

...

We are individualized waves of consciousness on the Infinite Ocean of Spirit; so say the sages.

But, although the Ocean has become the wave, and the wave, when it dissolves the illusion of ego-separation and limitation, realizes that it has always been one with the Infinite Ocean, the form-bound wave itself is not the Ocean. Nor is the Ocean merely the sum of its waves—the Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the Ocean.

Everything you can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and much more, is part of this Ocean. For all matter, energy and consciousness is merely waves of certain rates of vibration on the surface of the Ocean of Consciousness; Spirit has become, and is present in and as, every created thing. That is, consciousness is the “water” of the Infinite Ocean of Spirit, and all phenomena arise as modifications of this one stuff, or ripples on/of this Ocean of cosmic consciousness.


—Geoffrey D. Falk
The Science of the Soul:
On Consciousness and the Structure of Reality

...

a voice out of this world
calls on our souls
not to wait any more
get ready to move
to the original home

your real home
your real birth place
is up here with the heavens
let your soul take a flight
like a happy phoenix

you've been tied up
your feet in the mud
your body roped to a log
break loose your ties
get ready for the final flight

make your last journey
from this strange world
soar for the heights
where there is no more
separation of you and your home

God has created
your wings not to be dormant
as long as you are alive
you must try more and more
to use your wings to show you're alive

these wings of yours
are filled with quests and hopes
if they are not used
they will wither away
they will soon decay

you may not like
what i'm going to tell you
you are stuck
now you must seek
nothing but the source


—Rumi
Ghazal 945
Nader Khalili translation

...

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday,

separate, in the evening.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

.
whiskeyriver
.

all good things

.

All good things approach their goal crookedly.

Like cats, they arch their backs,
they purr inwardly over their approaching happiness: 
all good things laugh.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

...

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.​

You are silent. It says for you: I am.

And in comes meaning thousandfold​, comes at long last over everyone.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

 .

you where the heart begins

.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.


—George Eliot

...

 

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV

.

you know ...

.

The little space within the heart is 

as great as the vast universe. 

The heavens and the earth are there, 

and the sun and the moon and the stars. 

Fire and lightening and winds are there, 

and all that now is and all that is not.

—The Upanishads

...

I am blind and do not see the things of this world;
but when the Light comes from above, it enlightens my Heart,
and I can see, for the Eye of my Heart sees everything.

The Heart is a sanctuary of the Center in which there is a little space
wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye.
This is the Eye of Wakentaka by which he sees all things,
and through which we see Him.

—Black Elk

...

there is no place at all
that is not looking at you.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ―R.H. Heinlein

.

The physics of beauty requires math. The sunflower has spirals of 21, 34, 55, 89, and - in very large sunflowers - 144 seeds. Each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. This pattern seems to be everywhere: in pine needles and mollusk shells, in parrot beaks and spiral galaxies. After the fourteenth number, every number divided by the next highest number results in a sum that is the length-to-width ratio of what we call the golden mean, the basis for the Egyptian pyramids and the Greek Parthenon, for much of our art and even our music. In our own spiral-shaped inner ear’s cochlea, musical notes vibrate at a similar ratio.

The patterns of beauty repeat themselves, over and over. Yet the physics of beauty is enhanced by a self, a unique, self-organizing system. Scientists now know that a single flower is more responsive, more individual, than they had ever dreamed. Plants react to the world. Plants have ways of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing.

Rooted in soil, a flower is always on the move. Sunflowers are famous for turning toward the sun, east in the morning, west in the afternoon. Light-sensitive cells in the stem “see” sunlight, and the stem’s growth orients the flower. Certain cells in a plant see the red end of the spectrum. Other cells see blue and green. Plants even see wavelengths we cannot see, such as ultraviolet.

Most plants respond to touch. The Venus’s-flytrap snaps shut. Stroking the tendril of a climbing pea will cause it to coil. Brushed by the wind, a seedling will thicken and shorten its growth. Touching a plant in various ways, at various times, can cause it to close its leaf pores, delay flower reproduction, increase metabolism, or produce more chlorophyll.

Plants are touchy-feely. They taste the world around them. Sunflowers use their roots to “taste” the surrounding soil as they search for nutrients. The roots of a sunflower can reach down eight feet, nibbling, evaluating, growing toward the best sources of food. The leaves of some plants can taste a caterpillar’s saliva. They “sniff” the compounds sent out by nearby damaged plants. Research suggests that some seeds taste or smell smoke, which triggers germination.

The right sound wave may also trigger germination. Sunflowers, like pea plants, seem to increase their growth when they hear sounds similar to but louder than the human speaking voice.

In other ways, flowers and pollinators find each other through sound.
A tropical vine, pollinated by bats, uses a concave petal to reflect the bat’s sonar signal. 

The bat calls to the flower. The flower responds.


—Sharman Apt Russell
Anatomy of A Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers

...

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

...

No experience has been too unimportant,
and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, 

and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which
every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand 

and is laid alongside another thread
and is held and supported by a hundred others.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

.