con(fusion

.

The idea that there is a mind independent of thinking, a body independent of sensing or a world independent of perceiving, is a belief.

The mind itself is limited so it can never know whether or not such a belief is true.

The mind, body and world are never experienced as they are normally conceived to be. Our only experience of them is thinking, sensing and perceiving. Thinking, sensing and perceiving are modes of knowing or experiencing and the only substance present in knowing or experiencing is our self, awareness.

...

In other words, the witness cannot stand alone.

If we truly take our stand as witnessing presence of awareness and look at the objects of the mind, body and world, we do not find any distance or separation between our self, this witnessing presence, and the objects of the mind, body or world that it witnesses. In fact, we do not find two entities there, a witnessing awareness and a body, mind or world.

We find only the seamlessness of experiencing utterly one with or pervaded by the intimacy of our own being. That is, it only finds itself.

...

In other words, we do not cease to be a separate self and become the witness and likewise we do not cease to be the witness and become pure awareness.

It is only thinking which seemingly reduces pure awareness to these apparently successive stages of limitation and localisation. And it is only for thinking that these layers of ignorance, or the ignoring of the true nature of experience, are removed. For our self, awareness, no such thing ever happens.

...

So, as we proceed back along this projected path, in the opposite direction from which it arose, it is understood that our only knowledge of the mind, body and world is thinking, sensing and perceiving.

And if we look more closely at the nature of thinking, sensing and perceiving, we find that there is no substance present there other than our self, awareness.


—Rupert Spira
Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. –William S. Burroughs

.

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.


–Wallace Stevens
theory

.

look at the unity of this

.

look at love...

how it tangles

with the one fallen in love

look at spirit

how it fuses with earth

giving it new life

why are you so busy

with this or that or good or bad

pay attention to how things blend

why talk about all

the known and the unknown

see how unknown merges into the known

why think separately

of this life and the next

when one is born from the last

look at your heart and tongue

one feels but deaf and dumb

the other speaks in words and signs

look at water and fire

earth and wind

enemies and friends all at once

the wolf and the lamb

the lion and the deer

far away yet together

look at the unity of this

spring and winter

manifested in the equinox

you too must mingle my friends

since the earth and the sky

are mingled just for you and me

be like sugarcane

sweet yet silent

don't get mixed up with bitter words

my beloved grows

right out of my own heart

how much more union can there be?


–Rumi
Nader Khalili translation

.

sight

.

Once

a single cell

found that it was full of light

and for the first time there was seeing

when

I was a bird

I could see where the stars had turned

and I set out on my journey

high

in the head of a mountain goat

I could see across a valley

under the shining trees something moving

deep

in the green sea

I saw the two sides of the water

and swam between them

I

look at you

in the first light of the morning

for as long as I can


–W. S. Merwin

.

other(wise

.

The beginning of the spiritual journey is the realization - not just the information, but the real interior conviction - that there is a higher power, or God. I would make it as easy as possible for everyone, that there is an Other - capital “O”.

Second step, is to try and become the Other - capital “O”.

And finally, the realization that there is no other.
You and the other are one. Always have been and always will be.
You just think that you aren’t and then, as the spiritual journey unfolds, one lets go of these false beliefs that there is separation from God.

One begins to perceive in events and in all other people the same presence of God, more and more aware of it, once found at the deepest level. And thus, the words of Paul become something which makes sense, that God is all in all - in other words, in a sense, we not only become God but are God.


–Father Thomas Keating

.

you are like nobody since I love you

.

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.

The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.
The birds go by, fleeing.

The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.


–Pablo Neruda
Every Day You Play, excerpt

.

question

.

What do you have to do?

Pack your bags,

Go to the station without them,

Catch the train,

And leave your self behind.

–Wei Wu Wei

.

My Clothes Lie Folded for the Journey

 

. 

Dreamed some rain so I could sleep.
Dreamed the wind left-handed
so I could part its mane and enter
the dance that carries the living, the dead, and the unborn
in one momentum through the trillion gate.

Dreamed a man and woman
in different attitudes of meeting and parting
so I could tell the time,
the periods of the sun,
and which face my heart showed,
and which is displayed to a hidden fold.

Dreamed the world an open book of traces
anyone could read who knew the language of traces.
Dreamed the world is a book. And any page
you pause at finds you
where you breathe now,
and you can read the open
secret of who you are. As you read,

and other pages go on turning, falling
through the page before you, the sound of them the waves
of the waters you walk beside
in your other dreams of the world
as story, world as song, world
you dreamed you were not dreaming.

Dreamed my father reading out loud to me,
my mother sewing beside me, singing
a counting song,
so I wouldn't be afraid to turn
from known lights toward the ancestor of light.


–Li-Young Lee 

.

If there were a spiritual journey, it would be no more than a quarter of an inch long, though many miles deep. –John O'Donohue

.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.

It is a journey we can make only by the acceptance of mystery and of mystification – by yielding to the condition that what we have expected is not there.


–Wendell Berry
The Unforeseen Wilderness, excerpt

.
caribou migrating
.

a natural history of the senses, excerpt

.

Look at your feet.
You are standing in the sky.

When we think of the sky, we tend to look up,

but the sky actually begins at the earth.

We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves,

wash the dog, and drive cars in it.

We breathe it deep within us.

With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.


–Diane Ackerman

.

say i am you

.

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away.
What is, and what isn’t.

You who know, Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.

You embrace some form
saying, “I am this.”
By God, you are not this
or that or the other

you are “Unique One”

“Heart-ravishing”
You are throne and palace and king;
You are bird and snare and fowler. 

As water in jar and river are in essence the same,

You are spirit, are the same.

You, every idol prostrates before;

Your every thought-form perishes in your formlessness.


–Rumi

.

just now

 

.

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away

the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me

that there has been something simpler than I could ever

believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for

not patient not even waiting no more hidden

than the air itself that became part of me for a while

with every breath and remained with me unnoticed

something that was here unnamed unknown in the days

and the nights not separate from them

not separate from them as they came and were gone

it must have been here neither early nor late then

by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks


–W.S. Merwin

.
buffleheadcabin
.

 

questions

.

Is anyone there

if so

are you real

either way are you

one or several

if the latter

are you all at once

or do you

take turns not answering

is your answer

the question itself

surviving the asking

without end

whose question is it

how does it begin

where does it come from

how did it ever

find out about you

over the sound

of itself

with nothing but its own

ignorance to go by

–W. S. Merwin
To The Soul

.

gosh

.

Paul Barton
!

when i was

.

When I was the stream, when I was the
forest, when I was still the field,
when I was every hoof, foot,
fin and wing, when I
was the sky
itself,
no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever
wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not
love.

It was when I left all we once were that
the agony began, the fear and questions came,
and I wept, I wept. And tears
I had never known
before.

So I returned to the river, I returned to
the mountains. I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged—I begged to wed every object and creature,
and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And He did not say,
“Where have you been?”
For then I knew my soul—every soul—
has always held Him.


–Meister Eckhart
Daniel Ladinsky version

.

it(self

.

The universe must be experienced as the Great Self.

Each is fulfilled in the other: the Great Self is fulfilled in the individual self, the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self. Alienation is overcome as soon as we experience this surge of energy from the source that has brought the universe through the centuries.

New fields of energy become available to support the human venture. These new energies find expression and support in celebration. For in the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration.

It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself.


—Thomas Berry

.

the only real(ity

.

Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment.

It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.


–Rabindranath Tagore

.

agreement

 

.

Your lamp has a triple wick: Remembering, questioning, and sheltering made of your heart’s and mind’s agreement. With it, you navigate the two seas: Day with everything inside it; night and all that’s missing.

—Li-Young Lee
The Undressing

.
strangerain
.

content(s

 

.

In essence, the ideas of space and time are creations of the mind that serve as the screen upon which we project the contents of the depths of our mind, both conscious and unconscious.

Being constructs of consciousness as well as the receptacles for its projections, space and time serve as consciousness’s own way of providing a context for its contents so that they can be revealed, brought to light, reflected upon, and contemplated by a consciousness that is forever getting to know itself in new ways.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

.
markings
ice, Ryota Kajita
.

thirst

.

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist,
but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.


–Werner Heisenberg, 1901-1976
Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics,
Pantheist



.