i divide, in the sky, in the the seams, between the beams

.

in a single teaspoon of ocean water one can find
a universe of plankton

.

Is anyone there

if so

are you real

either way are you

one or several

if the latter

are you all at once

or do you

take turns not answering

is your answer

the question itself

surviving the asking

without end

whose question is it

how does it begin

where does it come from

how did it ever

find out about you

over the sound

of itself

with nothing but its own

ignorance to go by

—W. S. Merwin
To The Soul

.

boil me

.

A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot 

where it’s being boiled. 

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ 

The cook knocks him down with the ladle. 

‘Don’t you try to jump out. 

You think I’m torturing you. 

I’m giving you flavour, 

so you can mix with spices and rice 

and be the lovely vitality of a human being. 

Remember when you drank rain in the garden. 

That was for this.’ 

Grace first. Sexual pleasure, 

then a boiling new life begins, 

and the Friend has something good to eat. 

Eventually the chickpea 

will say to the cook, 

‘Boil me some more. 

Hit me with the skimming spoon. 

I can’t do this by myself. 

I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens 

back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention 

to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver, 

my way to existence. I love your cooking.’ 

The cook says, 

‘I was once like you, 

fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, 

and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings. 

My animal soul grew powerful. 

I controlled it with practices, 

and boiled some more, and boiled 

once beyond that, 

and became your teacher.’

—Rumi 

The Essential Rumi, 

Coleman Barks and John Moyne version

.

listen

 .

Listen.

Sit, be still, and listen,

because you’re drunk and we’re at the edge of the roof.

—Rumi

...

You and I are just swinging doors.

This kind of understanding is necessary.

—Shunryu Suzuki

.

form(ation

. 

When you look at anything, it is the ultimate you see, but you imagine that you see a cloud or a tree. 

Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realise that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear. 

Even the sense of ‘I am’ is composed of the pure light and the sense of being. The ‘I’ is there even without the ‘am’. So is the pure light there whether you say ‘I’ or not. Become aware of that pure light and you will never lose it. The beingness in being, the awareness in consciousness, the interest in every experience — that is not describable, yet perfectly accessible, for there is nothing else.

—Ramana Maharshi

...

If you are stone, be magnetic;

if a plant, be sensitive;

if you are human, be love.

—Victor Hugo

Les Miserables

.

Only 

That Illumined 

One 

Who keeps 

Seducing the formless into form 

Had the charm to win my 

Heart. 

Only a Perfect One 

Who is always 

Laughing at the word 

Two 

Can make you know 

Of 

Love.

—Hafiz

.
Paul Slyer photo

.

trans(formation

.

... 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

.

in(formation

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

.

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

.
sea water
click image to see
.

beware of tiny gods

.

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 

.

will(power

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

human free(dom

.

... 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

.