a thing is a think

.

Here, even the various mind-pleasing blossoming flowers
And attractive shining supreme golden houses
Have no inherently existent maker at all.
They are set up through the power of thought.
Through the power of conceptuality the world is established.

—Buddha

...

... when the thought "I" arises in dependence on mind and body, nothing within mind and body—neither the collection that is a continuum of earlier and later moments, nor the collection of the parts at one time, nor the separate parts— is even the slightest way the "I."

Also, there is not even in the slightest something that is a different entity from mind and body that is apprehensible as the "I." 

Consequently, the "I" is merely set up in dependence upon mind and body; it is not established by means of its own entity.

—Tsonghkapa

...

When Buddha said "Whatever depends on conditions

Is empty of its own inherent existence,"

What is more amazing  

Than this marvellous advise!

—Tsonghkapa

...

This is why Buddhist scriptures say that the "I" and other phenomena exist only through the power of conceptual thought. Although the "I" is set up in dependence upon mind and body, mind and body are not the "I," nor is the "I" mind and body. There is nothing within the mind and body (in dependence upon which the "I" is set up) that is the "I." Hence, the "I" depends upon conceptual thought. It and all other phenomena are only set up by the mind. When you understand this, you get a little idea that persons do not exist in and of themselves and are only dependently established. (Then,) when you see that phenomena seem to exist by their own right, you will think "Ah, that is what is being refuted."

—the Dalai Lama

...

A separate self is merely conventional reality, in the same sense as lines of latitude and longitude and the measurements of the clock; which is why one of the means of maya, illusion, is measurement. 

Things are measurements; they are units of thought, like inches are measurements. There are no things in physical nature.

How many things is a thing? However many you want. A  “thing” is a “think”, a unit of thought; it is as much reality as you can catch hold of in one idea.


—Alan Watts

💗

this road is the heart opening

.

The window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. 

Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

...

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

—Wendell Berry

...

Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night. 

If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.

If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts
then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came
from the womb!

If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves
then goats would surely get to the Holy One before us!

If the worship of stone stature could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.

Mirabai says, "The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God."


—Mirabai
Robert Bly version

...

All you need is to understand that you are the source of reality, that you give reality instead of getting it, that you need no support and no confirmation. 

Things are as they are because you accept them as they are. Stop accepting them and they will dissolve.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. —John Keats

.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.

—Vladimir Nabokov

.

nothing the matter

.

Concerning matter, we have been all wrong.

What we have called matter is energy,
whose vibration has been so lowered as to be
perceptible to the senses.

There is no matter.

...

So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quartz, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics? Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings. 

What is chemistry? Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings and then what is the mind of God? Its the cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace.

–Michio Kaku

...

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.


—Albert Einstein

.

listen

Drawing on his reverence for nature and his reverence for music as the profoundest expression of nature, Whitman composes an invitation to listening that comes alive in this beautiful short film animated by Daniela Shere, narrated by Peter Blegvad, and produced by Massive Science founder Nadja Oertelt for Poetry of Perception — Harvard’s eight-part series exploring representations of sensation and perception through the literary and visual arts.

...

What we perceive as space is the end result of visual information processing.

It is an approximation of space that is no different than the space you would see if you would wear a Virtual Reality headset. Slap on a VR and look at how it simulates space. The space you see in a VR is no different than the space you see in objective reality. Both are rendered approximations of space simulated by virtualization in the brain. All of that space doesn’t exist inside the brain so why does it overlay and seem to encompass such great distances if it’s all in your head?

This is part of the interface and how the mind has evolved the ability to process information. The mind produces a virtualization of space and projects an overlay to approximate the space as perceived by sensory constraints.

We never see true space as we have only ever observed the approximation of space through virtualization. And this is true for everything that you perceive. It is all an approximation and interpretation of information gathered by limited senses.


—Ian Wilson
Immersion Into the Human Experience

...

 

This book is the story of the highest human thought, and how it is leaving behind materialism and the sensory domain and finally comprehending the supreme truth of existence – that we inhabit an immortal, indestructible mental Singularity outside space and time, and that the illusion of materialism is generated mathematically via holography.

—Mike Hockney
The Noosphere

...

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real.

Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at
what you thought was your grief.


—Rumi

.
speakspo
markings
.

The soul should always stand ajar. —Emily Dickinson

.

Friday I tasted life.
It was a vast morsel.

A Circus passed the house —-
still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out.

The Lawn is full of south and the odors tangle,
and I hear to-day for the first time
the river in the tree.


—Emily Dickinson

...

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.


—Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

...

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the roses.


–Louis MacNeice
snow

.

largerloves

.

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

butterfly wing

.

My point about rock barnacles is those million million larvae ‘in milky clouds’ and those shed flecks of skin. Sea water seems suddenly to be but a broth of barnacle bits. Can I fancy that a million million human infants are more real? What if God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles? I don’t know if each barnacle larva is of itself unique and special, or if we the people are essentially as interchangeable as bricks. My brain is full of numbers; they swell and would split my skull like a shell. I examine the trapezoids of skin covering the back of my hands like blown dust motes moistened to clay. I have hatched, too, with millions of my kind, into a milky way that spreads from an unknown shore.

 
—Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

.

There is another world, but it is inside this one —Paul Éluard

.

Om Tryambakam Yajamahe
Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam Urvarukamiva Bandhanan Mrityor Mukshiya Maamritat We Meditate on the Three-eyed reality Which permeates and nourishes all like a fragrance. May we be liberated from death for the sake of immortality, Even as the cucumber is severed from bondage to the creeper.

—Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra
from the Rig Veda

...

There are three states only, the waking, dream and sleep. Turiya is not a fourth one; it is what underlies these three. But people do not readily understand it. Therefore it is said that this is the fourth state and the only Reality. In fact it is not apart from anything, for it forms the substratum of all happenings; it is the only Truth; it is your very Being. The three states appear as fleeting phenomena on it and then sink into it alone. Therefore they are unreal.

—Ramana Maharishi
from Talks with Ramana

.

The Larger Circle

the observable universe

.

We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.

—Wendell Berry

.

the frightful reality of things

.


Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. 
Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

―William S. Burroughs


.

The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

I have written quite a number of poems
And may write many more, of course.
Each poem of mine explains it,
Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don’t begin thinking whether it feels.
I don’t force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
valuable.
The value is there, in my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
of mine.

—Fernando Pessoa

.
buffleheadcabin

wait - what ?

.

not that

.

A person is not earth, not water,

Not fire, not wind, not space.

not consciousness, and not all of them.

What person is there other than these?

Just as due to being set up in dependence upon an
aggregation of the six constituents

A person is not established as its own reality,

So due to being set up in dependence upon an aggregation

Each of the constituents also is not established as its own reality.


Nagarjuna
The Precious Garland of Advise

...

Just as you have come to know the false discrimination of yourself

Apply this mentally to all phenomena.

All phenomena are completely devoid 

Of their own inherent existence, like space.

Through one all are known.

Through one all are also seen.


—Buddha

The King of Meditations Sutra

 .

the Dalai Lama
How to See Yourself As You Are Really Are
.

the challenge

.

Just as the great texts say, you will begin to make a distinction between existence and inherent existence through your own experience. The great texts challenge us to avoid both the extreme of exaggerating the nature of persons and things and the opposite extreme—that people and things do not exist at all. They definitely do exist; how they exist is the issue.

When you advance toward understanding that people and things cannot be found under analysis but take to mind that they do indeed exist, you may begin to feel the impact of the statement that they exist through the power of thought.

This, in turn, will challenge you to consider further how people and things appear to your mind and will undermine your confidence in the goodness or badness of these appearances, which you previously automatically accepted as intrinsic to the objects. You will begin noticing how you assent to the appearance of objects and how you latch on to them.

In this way, meditation is a long journey, not a single insight or even several insights. It gets more and more profound as the days, months, and years pass. Keep reading, and thinking and meditating.

—the Dalai Lama
How to See Yourself
As You Really Are

💗

awareness is not a thing

.

... the most fundamental scientific ‘fact’ is not the existence of a universe of things in space and time but awareness of such a universe.

Awareness is not a ‘thing’ that can evolve from or arise out of an unaware or insentient universe of things. On the contrary all things in the universe emerge and take shape out of a universal awareness.


—Peter Wilberg
The Awareness Principle

...

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.


—Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

.
wait - what ?
.

for the children

.

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down. 

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it. 

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children: 

stay together
learn the flowers
go light 


—Gary Snyder  

.

I will walk to a place with a high cliff, and camp by the lake there at evening, and study the grand firs and the nobles reflected in the water made still by the evening. 

I will sit by the fire and consider, and lie down to count stars, and sleep, and in sleep dream dreams of green bones. 

When the morning arrives, grey and cold, I will rise and walk to the high place, bringing with me a drum I have made, and a song for my scattered people. 

There, on the rock, where no one will hear, I will sing the sun up, and name names, and the names will be holy to me.


—Richard Bear
Hoedad (reforestation)

.
the rest of this lovely thing is 
here
.

be(coming

.

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. 

They do various things which irresistibly draw men near them; each one selects a certain man.

The Deer shoots the man, who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home and eat it.

Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and hides in there, but the man doesn't know it.

When enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all at once.

The men who don't have Deer in them will also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some.

This is called "takeover from inside".

—Gary Snyder

.

be light.

as minerals in the ground rise inside trees
and become tree,

as plant faces an animal

and enters the animal,

so a human

can put down the heavy

body baggage and

be light.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

.