A Ritual To Read To Each Other

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If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke. 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. 

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes, no, or maybe-- should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep.


–William Stafford

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To love is to undress our names. –Octavio Paz

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In Sweden hundreds of immigrant children whose families face deportation have contracted resignation syndrome, a baffling disorder in which the child withdraws from the world, won’t react even to painful stimuli, and must be nourished with a feeding tube— sometimes for years.

“She is not suffering now,” physician Elisabeth Hultcrantz says of Leyla Ahmed, 10,
a Syrian refugee.


–Michael Finkel
While We Sleep, Our Mind Goes on an Amazing Journey
National Geographic, August 2018

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nationalgeographic
photograph Magnus Wennman
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location

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God sleeps in stone,

breathes in plants,

dreams in animals

and awakens in man.


–Vedic proverb

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where two or more are gathered

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Those doing soul work, who want the searing truth more than solace or applause, know each other right away.

Those who want something else turn and take a seat in another room.  

Soul-makers find each other’s company.


—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

...

The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me,
apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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if you want

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Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don`t want to change,
 
let them sleep

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on

I've given up on my brain.
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,

and sleep.


–Rumi

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you are that

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

—Rumi

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there is a path from me to you

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This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.

Listen, if you can stand to.
Union with the friend
means not being who you have been,
being instead silence, a place,
a view where language is inside seeing.

From the wet source
someone cuts a reed to make a flute
The reed sips breath like wine,
sips more, practicing. Now drunk,
it starts the high clear notes.

There is a path from me to you
that I am constantly looking for,
so I try to keep clear and still
as water does with the moon.

We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.
We can be led by the guide.
Wishes may or may not come true
in this house of disappointment.
Let's push the door open together and leave.

My essence is like the essence of a red wine.
My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.
Glass after glass of wine go into my head.
Finally, my head goes into the wine.


–Rumi
Coleman Barks version
The Big Red Book

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part(ners

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The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.

–James Lovelock

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listen

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The flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is Love.

–Kabir

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ask me, excerpt

 

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Some time when the river is ice

ask me mistakes I have made.

Ask me whether what I have done is my life.

Others have come

in their slow way

into my thought,

and some have tried to help or to hurt:

ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait.

We know the current is there, hidden;

and there are comings and goings from miles

away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.


–William Stafford

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y(our body is a divine stream

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Your body is a divine stream,
as is your spirit.

When your two great rivers merge, one voice is found
and the earth applauds
in excitement.
 
Shrines are erected to those songs
the hand and heart have sung
as they serve
the world

with a love, a love
we cherish.


–St. John of the Cross

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(

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Come, live in my heart, and pay no rent.

—Samuel Lover



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listen ye children of immortal bliss

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Discriminate between that which is ever-changing and that which is changeless. 

The world comprises both. 

Know this.

–Tripura Rahasya

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light of the world, hold me. –mary oliver

Nik Wallenda nears the middle of his tightrope walk ... 1,800 feet across the mist-fogged brink of roaring Niagara Falls.

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the now is our self.

We are not present in the now.

We are the now.

The now is not a container that contains our self along with everything else.
It is our self, eternal presence.


—Rupert Spira
Presence

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wait - what?
markings
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question

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Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?

That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future?


–Herman Hesse
Siddhartha

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If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

–Herman Hesse

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no thoughts, no world

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What is called ‘mind’ is a wondrous power residing in the Self.
It causes all thoughts to arise.
Apart from thoughts, there is no such thing as mind.
Therefore, thought is the nature of mind. 

Apart from thoughts, there is no independent entity called the world.
In deep sleep there are no thoughts, and there is no world.
In the states of waking and dream, there are thoughts,
and there is a world also. 

Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web) out of itself and again withdraws it into itself, likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself.

When the mind comes out of the Self, the world appears.
Therefore, when the world appears (to be real), the Self does not appear; and when the Self appears (shines) the world does not appear. 

When one persistently inquires into the nature of the mind, the mind will end, leaving the Self (as the residue).
What is referred to as the Self is the Atman. 

The mind always exists only in dependence on something gross;
it cannot stay alone.

It is the mind that is called the subtle body or the soul (jiva).


–Sri Ramana Maharshi

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look

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Every thought reorders the universe.

—William Stafford



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is it true?

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is it true
that your mind is sometimes like
a battering ram
running all through the city,

shouting so madly inside and out
about the ten thousand things
that do not matter?


–Hafiz

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the appearance of water in a mirage

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The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.
 

–Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The appearance of water in a mirage persists after the fact that it is a mirage has dawned on us. So it is with the world. 

Though knowing it to be unreal, it continues to manifest - but we do not try to satisfy our thirst with the water of the mirage. 

As soon as one knows that it is a mirage, one gives it up as useless and does not run after it to get water.


–Ramana Maharshi

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brian cuttaz
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questions

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And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:

Where shall you seek beauty, and how 

shall you find her unless she herself be your

way and your guide?

And how shall you speak of her except 

she be the weaver of your speech?

The aggrieved and injured say, 

"Beauty is kind and gentle."

The tired and weary say,

"Beauty is of soft whisperings

She speaks in our spirit."

In winter say the snow-bound,

"She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."

All these things have you said of beauty,

Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,

And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy. 

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,

But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,

But rather an image you see, though you

close your eyes and a song you hear, though

you shut your ears.

People of Orphalese, 

beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.

But you are life and you are the veil.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

–Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

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cosmic gall

Brandon Stanton (Humans of New York) reads John Updike's ode to the neutrino
from Maria Popova on Vimeo.

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Every second, hundreds of billions of these neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during the day and from below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth!

—M.A. Ruderman and A.H. Rosenfeld
An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics,
American Scientist

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Neutrinos they are very small.
    They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
    To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
    Or photons through a sheet of glass.
    They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
    Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
    And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
    Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
    And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed — you call
    It wonderful; I call it crass.

–John Updike

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more at brainpickings
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glimpse

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The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep. They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once.

–Frederick Buechner
Whistling in the Dark

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weirdness

  

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People say, “I’m going to sleep now,” as if it were nothing. But it’s really a bizarre activity. “For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.” If you didn’t know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you’d seen. “They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be okay? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the ‘mind adventures’ got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren’t unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.” So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a science fiction movie. And whisper, ‘The creature is regenerating itself'.

—George Carlin

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questions

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Change your ways of feeling and thinking, take stock of them and examine them closely. You are in bondage by inadvertence.

Attention liberates. You are taking so many things for granted. 

Begin to question. The most obvious things are the most doubtful. 
Ask yourself such questions as: 

‘Was I really born? 
‘Am I really so-and-so?’
‘How do I know that I exist?
‘Who are my parents?’
‘Have they created me, or have I created them?’ 
‘Must I believe all I am told about myself?’
‘Who am I, anyhow?’. 

You have put so much energy into building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much on demolishing it. In fact, demolition is easy, for the false dissolves when it is discovered.


–Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The Garden of Forking Paths

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The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pen conceived it. 

In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times, which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. 

We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, not you; in others, both of us.

Through our daily rambles on the web, where each array of links is a bifurcation of alternatives, labyrinthine time has become a familiar part of our lives.

—Paul Halpern
The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler
Revolutionized Time and Reality

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question

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Where does unbelief begin? 
When I was young 

there were degrees of certainty. 
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally 
   disappear.


–Anne Carson

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The Great Blending

  

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For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance. We ride the wave and are
the wave. And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

–William Stafford 

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all are syllables

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It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

—Ursula Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea

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