Love is not consolation. It is light. —Friedrich Nietzsche

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And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes,
this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light.


—Alan Watts
On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

...

All that passes descends,
and ascends again unseen
into the light: the river
coming down from sky
to hills, from hills to sea,
and carving as it moves,
to rise invisible,
gathered to light, to return
again. "The river's injury
is its shape." I've learned no more.

We are what we are given
and what is taken away;
blessed be the name
of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes
is a gift, the meaning always
carried out of sight
to renew our whereabouts,
always a starting place.
And every gift is perfect
in its beginning, for it
is "from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights."
Gravity is grace.


—Wendell Berry
The Gift of Gravity, excerpt

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whoever you are

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You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light
and of every moment of your life.

—Walt Whitman

...

I believe in an invisible universe in which we mark out our dark accomplishment. I feel the energy of the light that makes the stone break into music, and I suffer from the arrow-tip of longing that pierces us to death from the very beginning and pushes us to go searching beyond, where the wash of uncertainty begins.

—Nelly Sachs to Paul Celan
Stockholm, 1. 9. 1958 – 

from their Correspondence

...

There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity - yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.

The quality of being, in the object’s self, according to its own central  idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.

—Walt Whitman

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inner light

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No solid object is solid. It is made up of rapidly flashing packets of energy. Billions and trillions of packets of energy. They flash in and flash out of that space where the ‘object’ is. They do not just stay there. So, why does a human body or a car look like a solid continuous object when we now know that it is actually a rapidly flashing field of energy?

Think of a TV image. When you watch a movie, you see a person walk across the screen smoothly, yet in reality it is just a film reel with 24 slightly different frames a second so your eyes do not detect the gap between the frames. Even each of those frames is a composition of billions of light photons flashing at the speed of light. That is what your world is – a rapid flash that causes an illusion of being ‘solid’ and ‘continuous’.

Once you understand what your world is really, truly, you start to understand it’s true behavior and nature. You then change your view of it.


—David Cameron Gikandi

...

In the inmost of the smallest of all spaces
runs a mute and constant play of color, inaccessible to eyes.

It is the light shut in that once in the moment of creation
was born inward and abode there, going on, once it had broken 
up into the smallest of spectra in keeping with prismatic law at 
frequencies that by the sighted would be called colors
if they encountered eyes able to see.

It moved in periods unimaginably small for time and space
but still with time and space enough for the least of the small.
In fact it found it had ample room and time.

It moved in cycles of nanoseconds and microspaces
from white light and the colors of the spectrum and back to white light.
A kind of breathing for light.

The photons breathed and pulsated with one another,
alternating signs and levels.

So the light kept going in spectral balance
from dense light to split and back to dense light and split,
in spectral cycles infinitely repeated.

It was like a play of fans,
in keeping with the same law that holds for rainbows,
but with spread and folded fans alternating with one another
in keeping with the law of light inscribed in them.

It was the light when it dances enclosed
when it is not traveling abroad and seen.

It belongs to the nature of light that it can be shut in and 
still not die out in its movement,
that it preserves itself thus in the darkness as thought, intent 
and aptitude, that it remembers its changes
and performs its dance, its interplay.

With this art the light keeps together the innumerable 
swarms of matter and sings with light's spectral wings the 
endless song in honor of the fullness of the world.


—Harry Martinson

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light pours like rain

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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

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a way of be(ing

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Human being is a way of being that is held in culture and emerges through individuals. We are a collective being.


—Jeff Carreira
The Soul of a New Self

...

I describe consciousness as an observer in a large room with many windows. Consciousness is the observer in the room, and it experiences different individual reality streams looking from different windows.

For example, one window could look at a playground for children, and another at a parking lot. The two perception streams are very different, but the consciousness that perceives them is one. Consciousness is the observer, and the views from different windows are different lives. The views from different windows can have a different overall look & feel, so this metaphor is better at capturing the difference in texture between personal consciousness streams.


—Giulio Prisco
Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology

...

Consciousness is not mind; it is the ground of being, the ground of both matter and mind. Matter and mind are both possibilities of consciousness. When consciousness converts theses possibilities in a (quantum) collapse event of actual experience, some of the possibilities are collapsed as physical and some as mental.

In this way, consciousness clearly is seen as the mediator of the interaction between mind and body, and there is no dualism (Goswami 2000).

... What mediates the interaction of mind and matter? Consciousness does. What maintains the parallel functioning of mind and brain? Consciousness does.


—Amit Goswami
Quantum Doctor

 

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markings
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come to the conclusion: I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn. —Sri Nisargadatta

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We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.

—Kalu Rinpoche

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no(thing

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If only you knew what bliss I find in being nothing.

–Rumi

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inner space

 

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What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
in which you see all Forms intensified.
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,
would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates Things:
to become the very essence of a tree,
throw inner space around it, from that space
that lives in you.

Encircle it with restraint.
It has no limits. For the first time, shaped
in your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.

 
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Gabriel Caffrey version

 ...

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Stephen Mitchell version

...

Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, Friend, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.


—Li-Young Lee
Book of My Nights

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out of my heart

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Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skyward.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.

Out of my heart a bird flew skyward. And it waxed larger as it flew.

Yet it left not my heart.

–Kahlil Gibran

...

I said it to you for the clouds

I said it to you for the tree of the sea

For each wave for the birds in the leaves

For the pebbles of sound

For familiar hands

For the eye that becomes landscape or face

And sleep returns it the heaven of its colour

For all that night drank

For the network of roads

For the open window for a bare forehead

I said it to you for your thoughts for your words

Every caress every trust survives.

–Paul Eluard

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