A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself. —Niels Bohr

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[O]ne can no longer maintain the division between the observer and the observed (which is implicit in the atomistic view that regards each of these as separate aggregates of atoms). Rather, both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable.

...

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

—David Bohm

Wholeness and the Implicit Order

...

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course

you’re tired. Every atom in you

has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes

nonstop from mitosis to now.

Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance

inside themselves without you. Go to sleep. 

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch

by inch America is giving itself

to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness

lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.

You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be

one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep. 

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,

Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,

Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so

Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town

and

History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

–Albert Goldbarth
The Sciences Sing a Lullaby

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silent friend

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The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

—W. B. Yeats

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You come and go. 
The doors swing closed ever more gently, almost without a shudder. 

Of all those who move through the quiet houses, 

you are the quietest. 

We become so accustomed to you, we no longer look up when 
your shadow falls over the book we are reading and makes it glow. 
For all things sing you: at times we hear them more clearly. 

Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. 

You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark, 
I am forest. 

You are a wheel at which I stand, whose dark spokes sometimes 
catch me up, revolve me nearer to the center. 

Then all the work I put my hand to 

widens from turn to turn. 

–Rainer Maria Rilke

...

Silent friend of many distances, feel

how your breath enlarges all of space.

Let your presence ring out like a bell

into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.

Move through transformation, out and in.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?

If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power

that rounds your sense in their magic ring,

the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.

To the flashing water say: I am.

–Rainer Maria Rilke
The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 29

Steven Mitchell version

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real(ly

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Atoms themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

—Werner Heisenberg

...

I believe the first living cell

Had echoes of the future in it, and felt

Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest

And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth

Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods,

But feels and chooses. And the Galaxy, the firewheel

On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dust-grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe

Is not blind force, but fulfils its life and intends its courses. 
“All things are full of God. Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God.”

–Robinson Jeffers
De Rerum Virtute, II, excerpt

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be(longing

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I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation.

In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.


—John Muir

...

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, 1892 version

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the great wide world

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many mansions

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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

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not to worry
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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

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Both anatomy and astronomy describe you. —Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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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)

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here

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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

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sunrise

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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

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Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)

 Tree of Knowledge, 1913 
 

Altarpiece Number 1, Group X, 1907

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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

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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.

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anna
hideback
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tighten to nothing

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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

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