The first step in love is losing your head. After the petty ego you then give up your life and bear the calamity.
With this behind you, proceed: polish the ego's rust from the mirror of your self.
—Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
Love's Alchemy
David and Sabrineh Fideler version
The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.
Some think it is East of us, others West of us.
Some say ‘among primitive earth rocks’,
Others, 'in the deep waters.’
Kabir’s instinct told him it was inside,
And what it was worth –
And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.
—Kabir
A lover doesn't figure the odds.
He figures he came clean from God
as a gift without a reason,
so he gives without cause
or calculation or limit.
A conventionally religious person
behaves a certain way
to achieve salvation.
A lover gambles everything, the self,
the circle around the zero! He or she
cuts and throws it all away.
This is beyond any religion.
Lovers do not require from God any proof,
or any text, nor do they knock on a door
to make sure this is the right street.
They run,
and they run.
—Rumi
Coleman Barks version
This
Path to God
Made me such an old sweet beggar.
I was starving until one night
My love tricked God Himself
To fall into my bowl.
Now Hafiz is infinitely rich,
But all I ever want to do
Is keep emptying out
My emerald-filled
Pockets
Upon
This tear-stained
World.
—Hafiz
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray.
—Rumi
It is every intelligent man's experience ... wrong-doing recoils on the doer sooner or later. Why is this so?
Because the Self is one in all.
When seeing others you are only seeing yourself in their shapes.
'Love they neighbor as thyself' means that you should love him because he is your Self.
—Ramana Maharshi
S. S. Cohen, 15th August, 1948
It’s rigged — everything, in your favor.
So there is nothing to worry about.Is there some position you want,
some office, some acclaim, some
award, some con, some lover,
maybe two, maybe three, maybe four
— all at once,maybe a relationship
with
God?I know there is a gold mine in you, and when you find it
the wonderment of the earth’s gifts
you will lay aside
as naturally as does
a child with a
doll.
But, dear, how sweet you look to me kissing the unreal:
comfort, fulfill yourself,
in any way possible — do that until
you ache, until you ache,
then come to me
again.
—Rumi
You are young.So you know everything.
You leap into the boat and begin rowing.
But listen to me.Without fanfare, without embarrassment,
without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul.Listen to me.Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest,
and your heart, and heart's little intelligence,
and listen to me.There is life without love.
It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe.It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.
When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight,
the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil,
fretting around the sharp rocks--
when you hear that unmistakable pounding--
when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead
the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming--
then row, row for your life toward it.
—Mary Oliver
West Wind #2
They made love among the hazel shrubs
beneath the suns of dew,
entangling in their hair
a leafy residue.
Heart of the swallow
have mercy on them.
They knelt down by the lake,
combed out the earth and leaves,
and fish swam to the water's edge
shimmering like stars.
Heart of the swallow
have mercy on them.
The reflections of trees were steaming
off the rippling waves.
O swallow let this memory
forever be engraved.
O swallow, thorn of clouds,
anchor of the air,
Icarus improved,
Assumption in formal wear,
O swallow, the calligrapher,
timeless second hand,
early ornithogothic,
a crossed eye in the sky,
O swallow, pointed silence,
mourning full of joy,
halo over lovers,
have mercy on them.
—Wislawa Szymborska
The phenomena of quantum physics tell us that the most important part of the world is invisible; that is, outside of the realm of your senses.
—Lothar Schafer
Infinite Potential
Rather than the quantum realm being illusory, quantum physics points out that the appearance of the macroscopic, conventional world can be likened to a holographic optical illusion produced by the interaction of our sense faculties with quantum reality.
—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation...
Science shows us that the
visible world is neither
matter nor spirit;
the visible world is the invisible
organization of energy.
—Heinz Pagels
...
Let the waters settle
and you will see the moon and the stars
mirrored in your own being.
—Rumi (1207 - 1273)
If you want what visible realitycan give, you're an employee.If you want the unseen world,you're not living your truth.Both wishes are foolish,but you'll be forgiven for forgettingthat what you really want islove's confusing joy.—RumiColeman Barks version
listen
hiding in this cage
of visible matter
is the invisiblelifebird
pay attentionto her
she is singingyour song—KabirSushil Rao version
Even though the senses are not able to detect most of the universe, the invisible nevertheless exists.
—Massimo Citro and Ervin LaszloThe Basic Code of the Universe
Nobody doubts that he exists, though he may doubt the existence of God. If he finds out the truth about himself and discovers his own source, this is all that is required.
—Ramana Maharshi
We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it.
We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.
This is true for the entire universe.
—The Upanishads
Give up all.
The correct understanding will be when you realize that whatever you have understood so far, is invalid.
Give up all and you gain all. Then life becomes what it was meant to be: pure radiation from an inexhaustible source.
In that light the world appears dimly, like a dream.
—Nisargadatta Maharaj
As stars, a lamp, a fault of vision,
As dewdrops or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, a cloud,
So one should see conditioned things.
—Diamond Sutra
I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voicesurging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wingsand whitely fly in circles round your face.My soul, dressed in silence, rises upand stands alone before you: can't you see?don't you know that my prayer is growing ripeupon your vision as upon a tree?If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.But when you want to wake, I am your wish,and I grow strong with all magnificenceand turn myself into a star's vast silenceabove the strange and distant city, Time.—Rainer Maria Rilke.
Tie your heart at night to mine, Love,
and we will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.
Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky’s questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow.
—Pablo Neruda
Aerodynamically (a bee) can’t fly…. there’s a hollow cavity inside his system and when he beats his wings he starts to resonate with this energy that goes back and forth similar to a guitar strumming on one side of the room and hitting the same chord on the other side of the room, or somebody hitting a high C and breaking a crystal. It’s the same thing. It’s resonance.(He) eventually reaches the resonance of the field around him (this resonance is the Earth’s rotational frequency due to its spin and is measured on today’s devices as 7.83Hz).
Once the bumblebee hits that resonance, the frequency of his surroundings, he becomes a free agent. He creates a magnetic bubble around himself and he can go anywhere he wants… That’s not in any of the science books…. We have a conventional way of doing things and we have a natural way of doing things and they’re totally different. They’re diametrically opposed in many many cases.
—Ralph Ring
Move over, Schrödinger’s cat – birds may be the true quantum animals.The bath of cells in avian eyes could prolong a delicate quantum state that helps to explain how some birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field.It is thought that light reacts with receptors in the birds’ eyes to produce two molecules with unpaired electrons, whose spins are linked by a special state called quantum entanglement.If the relative alignment of the spins is affected by Earth’s magnetic field, the electron pair can cause chemical changes that the bird can sense.In 2009, researchers at the University of Oxford calculated that such entanglement must last for at least 100 microseconds for the internal compass to work. But how the sensitive state of quantum entanglement could survive that long in the eye was a mystery.Calculations by Zachary Walters of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, now show that interactions with cells in the bird’s eye allow the electron pairs to stay entangled for longer through a dampening effect.Rather like the way a car with stiff shock absorbers takes longer to stop bouncing after going over a bump, the signal from the electron pair dies away more slowly under strong interactions with the cellular bath.Predicting exactly how long entanglement is sustained won’t be possible until the mechanism is better understood, says Walters. But he believes there’s a good chance his model could account for the 100 microseconds.Erik Gauger part of the Oxford team, is intrigued by the findings. “It seems possible that this might be the mechanism allowing for the persistence of quantum coherence,” he says. “But it is probably too early to say for sure."—Gilead Amit
