trans(formation

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... we ought not to say ‘the tree (became) green’ or ‘the tree (is) now green’ (both of which imply a change in the tree’s ‘essence’), but rather ‘the tree greens’. By using the infinitive form of ‘to green’, we make a dynamic attribution of the predicate, an incorporeality distinct from both the tree and green-ness which captures nonetheless the dynamism of the event’s actualisation. The event is not a disruption of some continuous state, but rather the state is constituted by events ‘underlying’ it that, when actualised, mark every moment of the state as a transformation.

—Gilles Deleuze
The Deleuze Dictionary

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in(formation

 The universe is change; life is your perception of it.
—Marcus Aurelius

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The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it.  

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail. 

—James Gleick (1954 - )

...

We share our reality with a massive dichotomy of other life forms who through their own unique sensory processes have a completely different interpretation of reality than humans. 

What is important is that all life uses sensory inputs and information processing to survive. It is this mechanic of life that paints the experience of reality and each life form virtualizes reality in the form of an interface to survive.

In an information driven experiential reality system the mandate of virtualization cannot be ignored as it is why we succeed in our ability to survive and exist.

—Ian Wilson

 ...

Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us.


—Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893)

...

These forms we seem to be are cups floating in an ocean
of living consciousness.

They fill and sink without leaving an arc of bubbles or any good-bye spray. What we are is that ocean, too near to see, though we swim in it and drink it in. 

Don't be a cup with a dry rim, or someone who rides all night and never knows the horse beneath his thighs, the surging that carries him along.

—Rumi
cup and ocean
Mathnawi 1, 1109-16
Coleman Barks version

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sea water
click image to see
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beware of tiny gods

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Some gods say, the tiny ones
"I am not here in your vibrant, moist lips
That need to beach themselves upon
The golden shore of a
Naked body."

Some gods say, "I am not

The sacred yearning in the unrequited soul;

I am not the blushing cheek

Of every star and Planet--

I am not the applauding Chef

Of those precious sections that can distill

The whole mind into a perfect wincing jewel, if only

For a moment

Nor do I reside in every pile of sweet warm dung

Born of earth's

Gratuity."

Some gods say, the ones we need to hang,

"Your mouth is not designed to know His,

Love was not born to consume

The luminous

Realms."

Dear ones,

Beware of the tiny gods frightened men

Create

To bring an anesthetic relief

To their sad

Days.

—Hafiz
Ladinsky version

...

Surrender. Be crumbled, so wild flowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.

Try something different. Surrender.

—Rumi 

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will(power

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By whatever path you go, you will have to lose yourself in the One.

Surrender is complete only when you reach the stage ‘Thou art all’ and ‘Thy will be done’.


—Ramana Maharshi

...

Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own
and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.”

Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate.

Learn how it happens that one watches without willing,
rests without willing, becomes angry without willing,
loves without willing.


—Hippolytus of Rome

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no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible —Stanisław Jerzy Lec

 .

How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing and pulls it toward
the heart of the world.

Each thing - each stone, blossom, child - is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things,

because they are in God's heart; they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird must do that before he can fly.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
what the things can teach us
Anita Barrows/Joanna Macy translation

...

Mr. B.C. Das, the Physics Lecturer, asked about free will and destiny. 

Ramana Maharshi: Whose will is it? ‘It is mine’ you may say. You are beyond will and fate. Abide as that and you will transcend them both. That is the meaning of conquering destiny by will. Fate can be conquered. 

Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Desire itself is movement / Not in itself desirable; —T.S. Eliot

.

Weak desires can be removed by introspection and meditation,
but strong, deep-rooted ones must be fulfilled and their fruits, sweet or bitter, tasted.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

...

From so much loving and journeying, books emerge.
And if they don’t contain kisses or landscapes,
if they don’t contain a man with his hands full,
if they don’t contain a woman in every drop,

hunger, desire, anger, roads,
they are no use as a shield or a bell:
they have no eyes, and won’t be able to open them,
they have the dead sound of precepts.

I loved the entangling of flesh,
and out of blood and love I carved my poems.
In hard earth I brought a rose to flower,
fought over by fire and dew.

That’s how I could keep on singing.


—Pablo Neruda
Ars Magnetica

...

Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.

They stared in desire

at the naked abyss.

If you love me, said mind,

take that step into silence.

If you love me, said body,

turn and exist.


—Anne Stevenson
vertigo

.

needful things

 .

Love is not selective, desire is selective.

In Love there are no strangers.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

...

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. 

The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.


—Nikos Kazantzakis

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human free(dom

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... conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move.

Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish.

This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.


—Baruch Spinoza

...

In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale. 

(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening's end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love. 

—Federico García Lorca
ditty of first desire

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between now and now

.

Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.

Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches.


—Octavio Paz

...

Tender words we spoke
to one another
are sealed
in the secret vaults of heaven.

One day like rain,
they will fall to earth
and grow green
all over the world.


—Rumi

.

 

the most courageous work

.

Over these writings I bent my head.
Now you are considering them. If you
turn away I will look up: a bridge
that was there will be gone.
For the rest of your life I will stand here,
reaching across.

If these writings can bring a turn
or an echo that touches you - maybe
a face, a slant, a tune - you will stop
too and bend over them. When you
look up, your thought will reach
wherever I am.

I know it is strange. and there is no measure
for this. The only connection we make
is like a twinge when sometimes they change
the beat in music, and we sprawl with it
and hear another world for a minute
that is almost there.


—William Stafford
Sending These Messages

...

Open the letter of the body’s life.

Inside the words, this body, your life, is a letter
to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if
the words are right. If they

are not, start another! And do not think it is easy to open
the body and read the secret

message. This is the most courageous work, not something
for children playing with knucklebones
in the dirt. Open to

the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you
have said it says? If

you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! Bring
only what should be given.


—Rumi

...

Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken.


—Thomas Merton
A Messenger from the Horizon, excerpt

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the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined

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door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of the pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,

door of being: open your being
and wake ....


—Octavio Paz
Sandstone (excerpt)

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strange world

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The deepest level of obsession is obsession with a sense of self. A sense of self, generated as a reaction to non-referential space, lies at the core of every habituated pattern. A self is felt to be a permanent, independent unit. The feeling of permanence manifests in life as a feeling of dullness, of not being quite present. The illusion of independence arises as a feeling of separation. The feeling of being one thing arises as a feeling of incompleteness or dissatisfaction. Together, these three qualities obscure the mystery of being.


—Ken McLeod

...

We are individualized waves of consciousness on the Infinite Ocean of Spirit; so say the sages.

But, although the Ocean has become the wave, and the wave, when it dissolves the illusion of ego-separation and limitation, realizes that it has always been one with the Infinite Ocean, the form-bound wave itself is not the Ocean. Nor is the Ocean merely the sum of its waves—the Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the Ocean.

Everything you can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and much more, is part of this Ocean. For all matter, energy and consciousness is merely waves of certain rates of vibration on the surface of the Ocean of Consciousness; Spirit has become, and is present in and as, every created thing. That is, consciousness is the “water” of the Infinite Ocean of Spirit, and all phenomena arise as modifications of this one stuff, or ripples on/of this Ocean of cosmic consciousness.


—Geoffrey D. Falk
The Science of the Soul:
On Consciousness and the Structure of Reality

...

a voice out of this world
calls on our souls
not to wait any more
get ready to move
to the original home

your real home
your real birth place
is up here with the heavens
let your soul take a flight
like a happy phoenix

you've been tied up
your feet in the mud
your body roped to a log
break loose your ties
get ready for the final flight

make your last journey
from this strange world
soar for the heights
where there is no more
separation of you and your home

God has created
your wings not to be dormant
as long as you are alive
you must try more and more
to use your wings to show you're alive

these wings of yours
are filled with quests and hopes
if they are not used
they will wither away
they will soon decay

you may not like
what i'm going to tell you
you are stuck
now you must seek
nothing but the source


—Rumi
Ghazal 945
Nader Khalili translation

...

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday,

separate, in the evening.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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whiskeyriver
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not two

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If the universe is non-local at a sub-quantum level, that means that reality is ultimately a seamless web, and it is only our own idiosyncrasies that direct us to divide it up into such arbitrary categories as mind and body. 

Thus, consciousness cannot be considered fundamentally separate from matter, any more than life can be considered as fundamentally separate from non-life.

—David Bohm

 ...

Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the individual self and the immortal Self are perched on branches of the selfsame tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree; the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.

―The Upanishads

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Hendy Mp
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