behind every atom hides an infinite universe. –Rumi

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Go inside a stone

That would be my way.

Let somebody else become a dove

Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.

I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:

No one knows how to answer it.

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet

Even though a cow steps on it full weight,

Even though a child throws it in a river;

The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed

To the river bottom

Where the fishes come to knock on it

And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed,

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill—

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the star-charts

On the inner walls.

–Charles Simic
The Voice at 3 A.M.

  

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epic

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My super power is the thought, Eve should be in my arms
when she’s afraid, and there she is, safe, full of bones
and blood and going nowhere if I have anything
to say about it. Vice versa applies when I’m afraid,
this is our pact, that we’ll hold each other
before we hold a door or gun, feather or piece
of a star, if we’re ever lucky enough to be walking along
and trip over a discarded chunk of heaven.

I can also make anything below eight thousand pounds
levitate, but in comparison, that power is whimsical
and irrelevant to my emotional makeup, I can take or leave
making things float and fly, but I can’t leave Eve.

My whole life has been an argument with the saying,
You’re born alone and you die alone, as I suspect
my mother was there, otherwise, why has she taken credit
for the melding of my spirit and flesh, if we go
with the old-school notion of human beings
as a combo pack of soul and guts. You’re born
into a relay race of affection if you’re lucky, handed
from cherishing to cherishing and likewise
carry others as far as you can, until they ask
to be set down or you get tired, and then,
after a long struggle or just a few seconds
of looking at a donkey in a field eating alfalfa,
you die. There are other sequences, of course—
I’m exhausted, not exhaustive—but I’m pretty sure
I’ve made my point or at least acted convincingly
like I have one, though I’m not sure of much.

Does this sound familiar: one day, I found myself
looking in a mirror and thinking, Well I guess I’m you,
after which I went at the list someone put in my hand,
crossing items off only to have them appear again,
suggesting that the people who say It’s a process
aren’t just annoying but smug and we should ask them
to leave the pool. With thrashing this deeply
at the core of the endeavor, clinging
and being clung to aren’t just romantic,
they’re what static has been telling us to do,
and I refuse to ignore the physical laws of the universe,
especially the one about the Conversation
of Matter—that everything is speaking to us
all the time, we’re just too busy to listen.

You don’t remember that one from school?
Maybe you were absent or absent minded that day,
or it was wrongly presented as the Conservation
of Matter, that misguided notion that energy
is neither created or destroyed. I’ve created
a shit-ton of energy with Eve, that’s a British measure
equal to 2,300 pounds, and plan to keep on
making this stuff up as we go, the going
being the most important part of any journey
or think piece or life, this thing I find myself
in or of, needing or kneading or both, be it desire
or bread I’m after, the love of a good woman
or bad star, as long as there’s light,
I’m going to stand here clinging to the feet
of my shadow, and in the dark, hold its place,
as I would for any stranger in any line.


—Bob Hicok

 

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Tear off the mask. Your face is glorious. —Rumi

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As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

–Carl Gustav Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, excerpt

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mysticmeandering
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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
.

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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