inner architecture.

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Every thought reorders the universe.

—William Stafford

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A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.


—Italo Calvino

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We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize.

In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive).

We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium.

It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecule at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant.

Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.


—James Gleick
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

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You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.


—Walter Evans-Wentz
The Tibetan Book of The Dead

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objects directly sensed

   

 

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Evolution in the complexity of life means an increase in the types of objects directly sensed. Delicacy of sense-apprehension means perceptions of objects as distinct entities. The phrasing of music is a mere abstract subtlety to the unmusical; it is a direct sense-apprehension to the initiated. 

For example, if we could imagine some lowly type of organic being thinking and aware of our thoughts, it would wonder at the abstract subtleties in which we indulge as we think of stones and bricks and drops of water and plants. It only knows of vague undifferentiated feelings in nature. It would consider us as given over to the play of excessively abstract intellects. 

But then if it could think, it would anticipate; and if it anticipated, it would soon perceive for itself.


—Alfred North Whitehead
The Concept of Nature

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the complexity of a sphere

    

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The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every glimpse of a new aspect of it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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form is emptiness, emptiness is form

    

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The cosmos that you and I are experiencing right now, with trees, plants, peoples, houses, cars, stars and galaxies, is just consciousness expressing itself at one particular frequency.

—Deepak Chopra

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We can appreciate that the colors we experience are just appearing in the mind—the light itself is not colored, it is simply energy of varying frequencies, the color we experience coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind—but it is more difficult to appreciate the same is true of the solidity we experience around us. It not only looks solid, we can touch it and feel its solidity, and experience how it impedes our movement.

We seem to be experiencing the world directly—overlooking the fact that all we are experiencing, including this solidity, is a representation of the world “out there” that appears in our field of knowing.

Even more challenging is the fact that the space in which these forms exist, from right in front of my nose to the distant skyline, is also an appearance in the mind. Our knowing has taken on the appearance of space, and within this space are placed the images we have made of the world around—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations that have been constructed.

The space we see around us is in fact the space of awareness in which all experiences appear. But now it has various substantial forms distributed throughout, confirming the assumption that we are directly experiencing an independent reality “out there.”

[...]

What we thought of as solid matter turns out to be largely empty space, and even so-called elementary particles turn out to have no real substance. As the German physicist Hans-Peter Durr put it, “Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter.” Matter as we conceive of it, exists only in the mind. Matter-stuff is just another concept, another form of mind-stuff. Another modulation of the field of knowing.

Moreover, anything we may say about the world “out there” is another form appearing in the mind. All our ideas about the world—our scientific theories and mathematical equations, our concepts of matter, energy, quarks, strings, particles, waves—they are all appearing in our field of knowing. They are no more substantial than our thoughts.

In the final analysis, it is all mind-stuff appearing as matter-stuff.

[...]

Everything I know is an appearance that “I” have taken on. “I” am, appearing as this thought, these feelings, the sounds I hear, the world I see before me. It is all arising from and within my own being.

This is very different from the claim that I am one with everything, which assumes an external reality with which I am identifying, or feel a oneness with. It is not so much that I am one with the world—the physical world I imagine around me—but that the world of my experience is one with me. This is all me!


—Peter Russel,
Theoretical Physycist and much more

 

 

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you are that

  

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Your body is made of the same elements that lionesses are built from. Three quarters of you is the same kind of water that beats rocks to rubble, wears stones away. Your DNA translates into the same twenty amino acids that wolf genes code for. 

When you look in the mirror and feel weak, remember, the air you breathe in fuels forest fires capable of destroying everything they touch. On the days you feel ugly, remember: diamonds are only carbon. You are so much more.


—Curtis Ballard

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note to self

     

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Behind matter there is some kind of heat, around and behind things,

so that what we experience is not the turtle nor the night only,

not the rising whirlwind, not the certainty, 

nor the steady gaze.

—Robert Bly 

  

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All Matter

 

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All Matter

We're all the same
And all so very different
Divine by design
It all intertwines

Ain't nothin' new
But it's always changin'
Movin' still waters
Soft yet so hard

So what is love?
(What is it?)
What is love?
(What is it?)

Cool on the outside
Hot in the middle
Cool on the outside
Hot in the middle but

You ain't even gotta try
All you gotta do is realize
You ain't even gotta try
All you gotta do is realize
(It's all matter)

One great big small thing
Like humming in the spring breeze
A speck of dust
In this vast universe
It's just like a raindrop
In the sea of consciousness

Oh, it's all matter
It's all matter

So what is love?
(What is it?)
What is love?
(What is it?)

It's all matter
It's all matter
It's all matter
It's all matter
(You ain't gotta try)

It's everything it ought to be
It's everything it needs to be
Don't stand in the way
You'll only make it hard

Just keep it flowing
Flow with the ocean
And you'll be
Just where you should be

It's all matter
It's all matter
It's all matter

 

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listen

   

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Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skyward.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skyward. And it waxed larger as it flew.
Yet it left not my heart.


—Kahlil Gibran

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The flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is Love. —Kabir

Édouard Boubat

 

 

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No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,

But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
 

—May Sarton
The Work of Happiness

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Just be Quiet and you will receive a precious gift

from the Light hiding inside you.

—Papaji

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thankyou

whiskeyriver

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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. —Plotinus

 

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The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.

Everything in the world is full of signs. 

All events are coordinated.

All things depend on each other; as has been said: Everything breathes together.

—Plotinus
ca CE 204/5–270

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The way to arrive and remain within “the force field of the Holy Spirit”, which is one way of describing consciousness – is both very simple and very hard: you’ve got to remain in love, with a foundational yes to every moment. 

You can’t risk walking around with a negative, resentful, gossipy, critical mind, because then you won’t be in the force field. You will not be a usable instrument. 

That’s why Jesus asked us to love. 
It’s that urgent. 
It’s that crucial.


—Richard Rohr

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benediction

Aleksandar Bonačić

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On waking in the morning, turn your thoughts to the realization that ‘I and the Father are One’. Gain a conviction of your oneness with the universal Life, the universal Mind, the universal Consciousness. 

As soon as you begin to feel the infinity of goodness stirring within you, or a sense of peace, or a surge of divine Life, then get out of bed and make your physical preparations for the day.

The wave is one with the ocean, indivisible and inseparable from the whole ocean. All that the ocean is, the wave is, and all the power, all the energy, all the strength, all the life, all the substance of the ocean is expressed in every wave. The wave has all that lies beneath it, for the wave really is the ocean as the ocean is the wave, inseparable, indivisible, one.

This means that your interest is the interest of every individual in the world, it means that their interest is your interest, it means that we have no interest apart from each other.

Whenever you leave one place to go to another, pause for a moment to realize that the Presence has gone before you to prepare the way, and that the same divine presence remains behind you as a benediction to all who pass that way. In realizing the divine Presence ahead of you and behind you, you will find yourself to be the Light of the world.


—Joel S. Goldsmith, Collected Essays
Meditation, excerpts

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keep walking. do your own time. —Neil Gaiman

    

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All we have to believe with is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted.

And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

—Neil Gaiman
American Gods

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Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. 

Don’t forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs, but somewhere else  . . .


—Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers

 

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Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes,

but what is within, buried, erased. 

—Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

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what is the nature of the world?

    

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Sometimes I patrol the perimeter of life,

checking for holes where reality might leak in.

—Sayings of Te Toh 

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Consciousness is always Self-consciousness. If you are conscious of anything you are essentially conscious of yourself. Unselfconscious existence is a contradiction in terms. It is no existence at all. It is merely attributed existence, whereas true existence, the SAT, is not an attribute, it is the substance itself. 

It is the Vastu (Reality). 

Reality is therefore known as SAT-CHIT, being consciousness, and never merely the one to the exclusion of the other. The world neither exists by itself, nor is it conscious of its existence. How can you say that such a world is real?

And what is the nature of the world? It is perpetual change, a continuous, interminable flux. A dependent, unselfconscious, ever-changing world cannot be real.

—Ramana Maharshi

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It is plausible that what seems like matter to our senses is nothing more than the effect of whirling dances of particles.

In holography, the reality of an object is its interference pattern, which the laser beam then translates into a three-dimensional image. In the same way the true nature of things is the rhythms of the basic code that the senses translate into three-dimensional images. Things are all essentially the same. What changes is the rhythm. 

If the rhythm of iron changed to that of wood, we would perceive it as wood and not as iron anymore. 

—Massimo Citro

The Basic Code of the Universe: The Science of the Invisible in Physics, Medicine, and Spirituality 

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This little finger covers the eye and prevents the whole world from being seen. 

In the same way this small mind covers the whole universe and prevents Reality from being seen.


—Ramana Maharshi

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the mandate of virtualization

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The universe is change; life is your perception of it. 

—Marcus Aurelius 

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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

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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)

 

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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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all my relations

 

Elin Manon

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You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. 

We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. 

And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.

—Christian Wiman

Poetry, October 2012

 

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I’ve been asked many times whether this is the aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is armageddon and this is the end, and I have to admit I don’t know. 

Whichever way it goes, my work is the same. My work is to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it.

—Ram Dass

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thank you

wait - what ?

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in(formation

  

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The premise of Digital Physics is that at the fundamental level, matter is made up of information. Recent advances in the physics of information suggest that the universe is more fundamentally made up of bits or qubits: everything in the cosmos, from black holes to galaxies and planets registers these bits of information. 

In addition, the holographic property of the universe suggests that information is the basis for understanding reality. It appears that humans, animals, plants and particles, in fact everything in the universe, communicates, computes and transmits information non-locally and holographically.


—Ediho Lokanga
Digital Physics

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Without imagination there is no world. Your conviction that you are conscious of a world is the world. The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself. 

You are the space in which it moves, the time in which it lasts, the love that gives it life. 

Cut off imagination and attachment and what remains?

Discover yourself.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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As far as I know, 

there is no proof whatever 

of the existence of an 

objective reality apart 

from our senses, 

and I do not see why 

we should accept the 

outside world as such 

solely by virtue 

of our senses.


—M. C. Escher

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little miracles of self-reference

    

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We view films in the context of darkness. We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision. In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark theatre, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen. 

We watch the world from the dark theater of our skull. The darker the room, the more luminous the screen. 

It is important to understand what we’re participating in, to realize that we rest in darkness and experience vision. 


—Nathaniel Dorsky

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When you see that the mind invents everything…
All will vanish… 

The good will vanish, the evil will vanish 
…..and you will remain as you are..


—Ramana Maharshi

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In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.  We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them.  Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. 

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems – vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.


—Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop

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The whole of life lies in the verb seeing. —Teilhard de Chardin

 

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Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.

[...] The Nothing is never at rest, neither manifestation repeats any other and everything that IS throbs and vibrates to create the mental world of "existence". 

Whatever we do "here and now" influences the surrounding environment of the planet of the Solar system, of the Galaxy, of the Universe, of the full combination of the universes.

When a blade of grass is cut the whole universe quivers ...

—The Upanishads

                    

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In the end words go; finally the perceptibles and observables go into the non-perceptible and non-observable state. Find that out. 

You will understand this slowly and get peace and rest. 

You do not do anything. It happens.


—Nisagardatta Maharaj

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find the others

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the world exerts pressure on us from the distance

  

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Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects. If, for instance, I walked along a path without being attentive, completely immersed in myself, I did not even know whether trees grew along the way, nor how tall they were, or whether they had leaves. When I awakened my attention, however, every tree immediately came to me. This must be taken quite literally. 

Every single tree projected its form, its weight, its movement—even if it was almost motionless—in my direction. I could indicate its trunk, and the place where its first branches started, even when several feet away. By and by something else became clear to me, and this can never be found in books. 

The world exerts pressure on us from the distance.

The seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. 

I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. 

Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley. This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. 

Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. 

They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.


—Jacques Lusseyran, blind hero of the French Resistance
Against the Pollution of the I

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