questions

 

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You are a man because you identify with the body. If you do not identify with the body, what gender are you? After leaving the body, the vital breath and the ‘I am’ merge into the substratum. Then where is man or woman?

First you have what is called ‘atma-bhava’ – that is the ‘I am’ sense. Later, this sense identifies with the form of a body, when it is called ‘aham-akar’, the ‘I am’ form, this is ego. Ego is never a title or name, but just a sense of ‘I am’ prior to words. 

The waking state, the sleep state and the knowingness ‘I am’ constitute an ego. In the absence of these three states what do you think you are? What would be the evidence of your existence?

Give up all questions except the one ‘who am I?’.  

After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you ‘are’. 

The ‘I am’ is certain, the ‘I am this’ is not. 

Struggle to find out what you are in reality.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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all things

    

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The earth is not a dead body, but is inhabited by a spirit that is its life and soul.

All created things, minerals included, draw their strength from the earth spirit.

This spirit is life, it is nourished by the stars, and it gives nourishment to all the living things it shelters in its womb.


—Basilius Valentinus
15th Century Benedictine
monk and alchemist

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All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. 

In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.


—Kahlil Gibran

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this is what you shall do

    

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There is something in personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world. 

—Walt Whitman

 

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This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors to others,

Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
Or to any man or number of men,

Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young and with the mothers of families,

Read these leaves in the open air,
Every season of every year of your life,

Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,

And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,

And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.


—Walt Whitman,
born 1819
Leaves of Grass

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questions

  

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A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different timescales

[...] A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.

—John Berger
Into the Woods

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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?


—Richard Dawkins

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I've no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother's hopes, older than I am by coming before me, and my child's wishes, older than I am by outliving me.  

And what's it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.


—Li-Young Lee
The Hammock, excerpt
Book of My Nights

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not till then

    

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...  a man can know nothing by himself, save after a natural manner, which is only that which he attains by means of the senses. For this cause he must have the phantasms and the forms of objects present in themselves and in their likenesses; otherwise it cannot be, for, as philosophers say: Ab objecto et potentia paritur notitia. 

That is: From the object that is present and from the faculty, knowledge is born in the soul. 

Wherefore, if one should speak to a man of things which he has never been able to understand, and whose likeness he has never seen, he would have no more illumination from them whatever than if naught had been said of them to him.

—John of the Cross
(1542 - 1591)

 

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For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. 

One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.  

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. 

But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. 

One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

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We make too much history.
With or without us
there will be the silence
and the rocks and the far shining.

But what we need to be
is, oh, the small talk of swallows
in evening over
dull water under the willows.

To be we need to know the river
holds the salmon and the ocean
holds the whales as lightly
as the body holds the soul
in the present tense, in the present tense


—Ursula Le Guin

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extraordinary worlds

   

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The sadness I have caused any face

by letting a stray word

strike it,

any pain 

I have caused you,

what can I do to make us even?

Demand a hundred fold of me - I'll pay it.

During the day I hold my feet accountable

to watch out for wondrous insects and their friends.

Why would I want to bring horror

into their extraordinary

world?

Magnetic fields draw us to Light; 
they move our limbs and thoughts.

But it is still dark; 
if our hearts do not hold a lantern,

we will stumble over each other,

huddled beneath the sky
as we are.

—Rumi

I hold my feet accountable

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how to love the world

  

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The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions
is this single kernel of bright yellow
dropped on our path by the sun, sensing
that we might need some marker to help us
find our way through life, to find a path
over the snow-flattened grass that was
blade by blade unbending into green,
on a morning early in April, this happening
just at the moment I thought we were lost
and I’d stopped to look around, hoping
to see something I recognized. And there
it was, a commonplace dandelion, right
at my feet, the first to bloom, especially
yellow, as if pleased to have been the one,
chosen from all the others, to show us the way.


—Ted Kooser
Dandelion
How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope

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Two days of an icy prairie fog
and every blade of grass, and twig,
and branch, and every stretch of wire, barb, post and staple,
is a knot or a thread in a lace
of the purest white. To walk
is like finding your way
through a wedding dress, the sky
inside it cold and satiny;
no past, no future, just the now
all breathless. Then a red bird,
like a pinprick, changes everything.


—Ted Kooser
Hoar Frost

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Today I celebrate with all of you, 

The miracle of sunlight, 

The humble joy of being and breath 

And the mystery and grace of each new day.

—Vincent van Gogh

The Field Next to the Other Road

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1 x 1

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LII


life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose:higher than have
—but beauty is more each than living’s all

multiplied with infinity sans if
the mightiest meditations of mankind
cancelled are by one merely opening leaf
(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)

or does some littler bird than eyes can learn
look up to silence and completely sing?
futures are obsolete;pasts are unborn
(here less than nothing’s more than everything)

death,as men call him,ends what they call men
—but beauty is more now than dying’s when

—E. E. Cummings
from 1 x 1 [One Times One] (1944)

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rebirth, excerpt

   

Riitta Ikonen

 

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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

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In our souls everything

moves guided by a mysterious hand.

We know nothing of our own souls
that are ununderstandable and say nothing.

The deepest words
of the wise man teach us 
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.


—Antonio Machado

  

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Start seeing everything as God,

But keep it a secret.

—Hafiz

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this is how all animals see

  

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Dogs and other animals detect smells using proteins called odorant receptors, chemical sensors. They sit on the surface of cells, grabbing specific molecules that float past. 

The process is temporary: after the [receptors] are done, they either release or destroy the molecules that they’ve grabbed. But one group of them bucks this trend: opsins. 

They are special because they keep hold of their target molecules, and because those molecules absorb light. This is the entire basis of vision. This is how all animals see—using light-sensitive proteins that are actually modified chemical sensors. 

In a way, we see by smelling light. 

—Ed Yong

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, excerpts

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Light is breath’s shadow.


—Ahmed Salman
NOOSPHE.RE

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'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle! ―Alice

    

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What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. 

You see, my physics students don’t understand it 

That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘but how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.

Nobody knows how it can be like that.


―Richard Feynman (treasure

The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, excerpts

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But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here.
I’m mad. You’re mad."

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”


―Lewis Carrol
Alice in Wonderland

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all shapes speak

 

Nils Udo

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The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a consulate artist, is the precondition of all visual art, and indeed, as we shall see, of an important amount of poetry. We take pleasure in the immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. But even when this dream reality is presented to us with the greatest intensity, we know it is just an illusion. 

Men of philosophy even have a sense that beneath the reality in which we live there is hidden a second, quite different world, and that our own world therefore is an illusion; and Schopenhauer actually says that the gift of being at times able to see men and objects as mere phantoms or dream images is the mark of the philosophical capacity. 

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

—Nietzche
The Birth of Tragedy

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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

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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

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human be(ing

  

💗

 

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. 

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,
clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of
work-people at their meals,
The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing
a death-sentence,
The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the
refrain of the anchor-lifters,
The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking
engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,
The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,
(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)
I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)
I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music — this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.


—Walt Whitman
song of myself
Section 26

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it is the air that makes us so

  

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As the books, precepts, and doctrines of his religion are important to the follower of a religion, so the study of the breath is important to the mystic. We ordinarily think of the breath as that little air that we feel coming and going through our nostrils; but we do not think of it as that vast current that goes through everything, that current which comes from the Consciousness and goes as far as the external being, the physi-cal world. 

In the Bible it is written that first the Word was, and from the Word all things came. But before the Word was the breath, which made the Word. [...]

Behind the word is the much greater power: breath. If a person wishes to study the self, to know the self, what is important is not the study of the mind, of the thought, the imagination, nor of the body, but the study of the breath. The breath has made the mind and the body for its expression. It has made all from the vibration to the physical atom, from the finest to the grossest. 

The breath, the change of the breath can make us sad in the midst of happiness, it can make us joyful in the saddest, the most miserable surroundings. That is why, without reason, in some places we feel glad, in other places a melancholy comes over us. It is the air that makes us so. You may say, “How can the breath make all this? How could it make the body?” I have seen people become in the course of years as their breath is. What exists in the breath is expressed in the form. As the breath is, so the child becomes.

—Hazrat Inayat Khan
The Philosophy of Breath

Vol. 8, Health and Order of Body and Mind

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Breath is a light in itself, and it becomes projected like the beam from a searchlight thrown upon an object. When the breath is coarse, undeveloped, it is full of material atoms which dim its light, but a developed breath is sometimes not different from the light of the sun but even brighter than that. Breath being a light from another dimension, which is unknown to science today, it cannot be visible to the ordinary physical eyes. The glands of the physical eyes must be cleansed and purified first by Pas-i Anfas before the eyes can see the light of breath.

What people call the aura is the light of breath, but not everyone one sees it. A radiant countenance is a proof of an aura which illumi-nates it, and the lack of it is the lack of light in the breath. A seer sees the sign of a death more clearly and longer beforehand than a physician can. The reason is that the seer sees in the aura of a person whereas the physician sees only the condition of the body. 

Many experience the phenomena of the light of breath, and yet doubt if it can be true, for they think it is perhaps an imagination. Others, who are incapable of seeing that light, confirm their doubt. The Sufi, by the development of breath, experiences this light, which becomes for him a proof of the existence of that dimension which is unknown to the ordinary world.


—Hazrat Inayat Khan
The Healing Papers
2,1: Breath

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say i am

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There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.

They make themselves manifest.

They are what is mystical.


—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.


—Wallace Stevens

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all things are essentially empty

 

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when practicing deeply the Prajna Paramita

perceives that all five skandhas are empty

and is saved from all suffering and distress.

Shariputra, 

form does not differ from emptiness,

emptiness does not differ from form.

That which is form is emptiness,

that which is emptiness form. 

The same is true of feelings,

perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

Shariputra,

all dharmas are marked with emptiness;

they do not appear or disappear,

are not tainted or pure,

do not increase or decrease.

Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings,

perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;

no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch,

no object of mind; no realm of eyes

and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness.

No ignorance and also no extinction of it,

and so forth until no old age and death

and also no extinction of them.

No suffering, no origination,

no stopping, no path, no cognition,

also no attainment with nothing to attain.

The Bodhisattva depends on Prajna Paramita

and the mind is no hindrance; 

without any hindrance no fears exist.


Heart Sutra 

Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva

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Heart Sutra Chant


ma ka han nya ha ra mi ta shin gyo

kan ji zai bo sa gyo jin han nya ha ra mi ta ji

sho ken go on kai ku do is-sai ku yaku 

sha ri shi shiki fu i ku ku fu i shiki

shiki soku ze ku ku soku ze shiki

ju so gyo shiki yaku bu nyo ze sha ri shi 

ze sho ho ku so fu sho fu metsu

fu ku fu jo fu zo fu gen ze ko ku chu mu shiki

mu ju so gyo shiki mu gen ni bi ze-shin ni

mu shiki sho ko mi soku ho mu gen kai

nai shi mu i shiki kai mu mu myo

yaku mu mu myo jin nai shi mu ro shi

yaku mu ro shi jin mu ku shu metsu do

mu chi yaku mu toku I mu sho toku ko

bo dai sat-ta e han nya ha ra mi ta ko

shin mu kei ge mu ke ge ko

mu u ku fu on ri is-sai ten do mu so

ku gyo ne han san ze sho butsu

e han-nya ha ra mi ta ko

toku a noku ta ra san myaku san bo dai

ko chi hannya ha ra mi ta

ze dai jin shu ze dai myo shu

ze mu jo shu ze mu to do shu

no jo is-sai ku shin jitsu fu ko

ko setsu han nya hara mi ta shu

soku setsu shu watsu

gya tei gya tei hara gya tei hara so gya tei

bo ji so wa ka hannya shin gyo 

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