many mansions

.

The sea doesn't let the fish out,

nor does it let the creatures of the earth in.

Water is the original home of the fish;

the weighty animal is of the earth.

Nothing we do can change this.

The lock of Divine destiny is strong,

and the only opener is God:

cling to surrender and contentment with God's will.

Though the atoms, one by one, should become keys,

yet this opening is not effected except by grace.

When you forget your own scheming,

happiness will come to you from your spiritual guide.

When you are forgetful of self,

you are remembered by God;

when you have become God's slave,

then you are set free.

–Rumi

.
not to worry
.

Atoms are not things. —Werner Heisenberg

  

–Neil deGrasse Tyson

...

All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. 

In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.


–Kahlil Gibran

.




 

Both anatomy and astronomy describe you. —Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

... When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.


–Max Planck

1931 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Father of Quantum Theory

...

I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life. Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified.

–Albert Einstein

...

Your cure is in you, but you are unaware,

And your illness is from you, but you do not see.

And you consider yourself to be a small mass

While within you lies the greatest world.

And you are the clear book

Whose letters make manifest the hidden.


–Amīr al-Mu’mineen, Imam Ali (ع)

.

here

.

As is the human body,

So is the cosmic body.

As is the human mind,

So is the cosmic mind.

As is the microcosm,

So is the macrocosm.

As is the atom,

So is the universe.

—The Upanishads

...

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited.

In the mind of each was the same thought.

‘I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,’ was the substance of the thing felt.

—Sherwood Anderson

.

sunrise

.

The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.


–Annie Dillard

.

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)

 Tree of Knowledge, 1913 
 

Altarpiece Number 1, Group X, 1907

.

There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists — all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands.

... 

Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.

―Rudolf Steiner

.

Hilma af Klint’s paintings are diagrams of a spiritual plane that underlies the visual world. She was a member of a small group of women who would meet to access religious spirits with knowledge of the afterlife. 

Gregor, one of the spiritual masters she contacted during these meetings, said to her that the paintings represent “All the knowledge that is not of the senses, not of the intellect, not of the heart but is the property that exclusively belongs to the deepest aspect of your being […] the knowledge of your spirit.”

Altarpiece Number 1 was intended to display in the Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual center in Switzerland. 

Hilma af Klint wanted to keep her paintings secret from the public until 20 years after her death.

.
anna
hideback
.

tighten to nothing

.

All things
are too small
to hold me,
I am so vast
In the Infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated
I have
touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide
Everything else
is too narrow
You know this well,
you who are also there

Tighten
to nothing
the circle
that is
the world's things
Then the Naked
circle
can grow wide,
enlarging,
embracing all


—Hadewijch, l or ll (13th Century),
Jane Hirshfield version
Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women

.

all things

.

All things are little, changeable, perishable. All things come from thence, from that universal ruling power either directly proceeding or by way of sequence. And accordingly the lion’s gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every harmful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. Do not then imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.

—Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

.
strangerain
.

the source of all things

.

For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community.
Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. 

It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.  

And there it is ahead of all as...the Beloved ...toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which actually brings them into being.

–Pseudo-Dionysius
from The Divine Names

.

the over-soul, excerpts

.

ESSAY IX The Over-Soul


... Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

... within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.

... All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.

... The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time, —

"Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity."

... The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

... In the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we know.

... the soul's communication of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself.

... the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

... So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.


–Ralph Waldo Emerson
1841

.
the rest of this gorgeous thing
.

from blossoms

.

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the joy 

at the bend in the road where we turned toward 

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands, 

from sweet fellowship in the bins, 

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, 

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside, 

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into 

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live 

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy 

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to 

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

–Li-Young Lee

.

saying grace

.

... when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:

Your seeds shall live in my body,

And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,

And your fragrance shall be my breath,

And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.


―Kahlil Gibran

.

light pours like rain

.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

...

God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious

stuff their cups with parchment

and critique the taste of ink

while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs

without worry of redemption,

every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls

with words that wet their parched lips

as light

pours like rain

into every empty cup

set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.

–Hafiz

.