Be a good animal, true to your instincts. –D.H.L.

.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

—D. H. Lawrence

...

I want to let go -
so I don't give a damn about fine writing,
I'm rolling my sleeves up.
The dough's rising...
Oh what a shame
I can't bake cathedrals...
that sublimity of style
I've always yearned for...
Child of our time -
haven't you found the right shell for your soul?

Before I die I
shall
bake a cathedral.


—Edith Södergran

.

listen

 

.

For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult task of all....,
the work for which all other work is but preparation.

It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen...
a great claim upon us, something that chooses us out
and calls us to vast things.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

love flows down

.

Love comes with a knife, not some 
shy question, and not with fears 
for its reputation! I say 
these things disinterestedly. Accept them 
in kind. Love is a madman 

working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, 
running through the mountains, drinking poison, 
and now quietly choosing annihilation. 

You've been walking the ocean’s edge, 
holding up your robes to keep them dry. 
You must dive naked under and deeper under, 
a thousand times deeper! Love flows down. 

The ground submits to the sky and suffers 
what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse 
for giving in like that? 

Don’t put blankets over the drum! 
Open completely. Let your spirit-ear 
listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. 

Let the cords of your robe be untied. 
Shiver in this new love beyond all 
above and below. The sun rises, but which way 
does night go? I have no more words. 

Let soul speak with the silent 
articulation of a face.

—Jelalludin Rumi 1207 – 1273

Coleman Barks version

.

love is a place

.

The Sky where we live
Is no place to lose your wings.

So love, love,

Love.


—Hafiz

.

quest(ions

 

 .

What in your life is calling you?

When all the noise is silenced,
the meetings adjourned,
the lists laid aside,
and the wild iris blooms by itself
in the dark forest,
what still pulls on your soul?


—Rumi

.

Through what roads and how did you find my soul?

Who taught you the steps that would lead you to me?

What flower, what stone, what smoke revealed my abode?


—Pablo Neruda
milky night

.

You are all things, and all things are your soul. —Conrad Aiken from Preludes for Memnon (VIII)

.
 

I am not this hair,

I am not this skin,

I am the soul that lives within.


—Rumi

...

I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe.

We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul.


—Paulo Coelho
from The Alchemist

.

love is a place

.

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and
right-doing, there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase
'each other'
doesn’t make any sense.


—Rumi

.

yes

. 

For all that has been, Thanks.

To all that shall be, Yes.

—Dag Hammarskjöld

.
strangerain
.

yes is a pleasant country

.

yes is a pleasant country:

if's wintery

(my lovely)

let's open the year

both is the very weather

(not either)

my treasure,

when violets appear

love is a deeper season

than reason;

my sweet one

(and april's where we're)

—E. E. Cummings

.

Everything in the world began with a yes. —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

.

It is part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. For the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of all the things which can follow from its nature, and hence, so that the mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things at once.

—Baruch Spinoza
Ethics, IVP45S

...

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.


—Wallace Stevens
The Well Dressed Man With A Beard

.

being(ness

.

You are neither the body nor in the body — there is no such thing as body. You have grievously misunderstood yourself; to understand rightly — investigate.

...

You must come to a firm decision. You must forget the thought that you are the body and be only the knowledge ‘I am’, which has no form, no name. Just be. When you stabilize in that beingness, it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you, and when the secrets are given to you, you transcend the beingness, and you, the Absolute will know that you are also not the consciousness. Having gained all this knowledge, having understood what is what, a kind of quietude prevails, a tranquility. Beingness is transcended, but beingness is available.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

origin(al

.

Maharaj: There are may persons who have a great attachment to their own individuality. They want first and foremost to remain as an individual and then search, for they are not prepared to lose that individuality. While retaining their identity, they want to find out what is the truth. But in this process, you must get rid of the identity itself.

If you really find out what you are, you will see that you are not an individual, you are not a person, you are not a body. And people who cling to their body identity are not fit for this knowledge.

The names and forms that appear, with different colors and all that, their origin is water. But nobody says I'm water, they say I am the body. But if you see the origin of the body then ultimately the body has appeared only from water. All these plants and everything, all name and forms, they appear from water only. But still people don't identify themselves with water; they say I am the body.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The Ultimate Medicine, Dialogues

...

From the waters everything is made, both what is manifest and what is Unmanifest.
Therefore, all manifestation (murti) is water.


—Prasna Upanishad 1.4-5

.

you are that

.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.

This is
always the case.

Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.

I move
to keep things whole.


—Mark Strand
keeping things whole

...

Remember, you are entirely on your own.

You must realize first of all that you are the proof of everything, including yourself.

None can prove your existence, because this existence must be confirmed by you first.

Your being and knowing you owe nobody.

You are entirely on your own. 

You do not come from somewhere, you do not go anywhere.

You are timeless being and awareness.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

The body is our general medium for having a world. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty

. 

... what is the direction of servitude between the body and the mind, and where does the constellation of certitudes we experience as a self reside in all of it?


—Maria Popova


how does a single-celled embryo grow up to be a differentiated biological body of organs?


—Amit Goswami

...

An embryo expands by cell division, making an exact replica of itself with all the same DNA, the same genes. But in the adult body, the cells are differentiated as to their functions.

... The proteins a cell makes determine cellular function; the genes have the code to make the proteins. ... But the source of the programs is not part of the DNA.

... Rupert Sheldrake (1981) has shown how nonlocal and nonphysical morphogenic fields are essential to understand biological form-making from the one-celled embryo. The instructions of form-making cell-differentiation (all cells contain the same genes, yet toe cell genes are activated very differently from brain cell genes), are nowhere to be found in the physical body, and that includes the genes (which are more or less instructions for protein-making).


—Amit Goswami
Quantum Doctor

...

What we call the body is not feet or shins,
The body, likewise, is not thighs or loins.
It’s not the belly nor indeed the back,
And from the chest and arms the body is not formed.

The body is not ribs or hands,
Armpits, shoulders, bowels, or entrails;
It is not the head or throat:
From none of these is “body” constituted.

If “body,” step by step,
Pervades and spreads itself throughout its members,
Its parts indeed are present in the parts,
But where does the “body,” in itself, abide!

If “body,” single and entire,
Is present in the hand and other members,
However many parts there are, the hand and all the rest,
You’ll find an equal quantity of “bodies.”

If “body” is not outside or within its parts,
How is it, then, residing in its members?
And since it has no basis other than its parts,
How can it be said to be at all?

Thus there is no “body” in the limbs,
But from illusion does the idea spring,
To be affixed to a specific shape—
Just as when a scarecrow is mistaken for a man.

As long as the conditions are assembled,
A body will appear and seem to be a man.
As long as all the parts are likewise present,
It’s there that we will see a body.

Likewise, since it is a group of fingers,
The hand itself is not a single entity.
And so it is with fingers, made of joints—
And joints themselves consist of many parts.

These parts themselves will break down into atoms,
And atoms will divide according to direction.
These fragments, too, will also fall to nothing.
Thus atoms are like empty space—
they have no real existence.

All form, therefore, is like a dream,
And who will be attached to it, who thus investigates!
The body, in this way, has no existence;
What is male, therefore, and what is female!


—Shantideva
The Way of the Bodhisattva

...

The moment you know your real being, you are afraid of nothing. Every vestige of your imaginative self must first die, then the universe is your own, it becomes your body and your expression. Nothing can truly affect you, you are free beyond description.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

love letters

.

The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.

—Hippocrates

...

Your body is away from me, but there is a window open
from my Heart to yours.
From this window, like the moon,
I keep sending news secretly.

—Rumi

.

not two

.

The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

—Alan Turing

...

I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

...

Creation, invention: there is nothing more real than this body that I imagine; there is nothing less real than this body that I touch that turns into a heap of salt or vanishes into a column of smoke. With that smoke my desire will invent another body. Eroticism is the experience of a full life that appears to us as a palpable whole and through which we enter totality.


—Octavio Paz
An Erotic Beyond: Sade
translated from the Spanish by Elliot Weinburger

...

Discover yourself.

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body.

Discover that current and stay with it.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

strangerain
.