The Universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. —Teilhard de Chardin

eye of a female humpback whale, rachel moore

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I could be both an I 

and the world. The great eye 

of the world is both gaze 

             and gloss. To be swallowed 

by being seen. A dream. 

To be made whole 

               by being not a witness, 

but witnessed.

—Ada Limón

 

 

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thank you, wait - what ?

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view with a grain of sand

   

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We call it a grain of sand
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.

It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.

And that it fell on the windowsill

is only our experience, not its.

For it it's no different than falling on anything else

with no assurance that it's finished falling

or that it's falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake

but the view doesn't view itself.

It exists in this world

colorless, shapeless,

soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly

and its shore exists shorelessly.

Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry

and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural,

They splash deaf to their own noise

on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless

in which the sun sets without setting at all

and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.

The wind ruffles it, its only reason being

that it blows.

A second passes

A second second.

A third.

But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.

But that's just our simile.

The character's invented, his haste is make-believe,

his news inhuman.


—Wislawa Szymborska
Stanislaw Baraniczak and Clara Cavanagh translation

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there is only the world

 

Front foot (tarsus) of a male diving beetle, Dr. Igor Siwanowicz

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May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. 

But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air.


—Paul Cézanne
Letter to Emile Bernard, 15 April 1904, 
from Theories of Modern Art, Herschel B. Chipp

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[Shapes] have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them, one recognises the principle and passion of organisms.

—Mark Rothko

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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.

—Annie Dillard

Holy the Firm

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My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. —Rilke

 

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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. 

This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things and they come
toward me, to meet and be met.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I-I

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flower child

 

orchid mantis

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The world is labyrinthine beyond possibility of imagining, inhabited on many levels by alien intelligence, infinite in extent, staggering in its beauty, terrifying in its weirdness, endlessly satisfying and peculiar.


—Terence McKenna

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so much love

 

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The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.

Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.

A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;

it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.


—Eugenio Montejo
Peter Boyle version

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mercy take your time

  

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In Hebrew the term dabar means both ‘word’ and 'deed.’ Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do, but whatever it is, it can never be undone.

Something lay hidden in the heart that is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly.

Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.


—Frederick Buechner

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For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. —Carl Sagan

 

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Be helpless, dumbfounded 
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying. 
If we say No, we don’t see it, that No will behead us 
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything, 
Beside ourselves, and only that, so 
Miraculous beings come running to help. 
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute, 
We shall be saying finally, 
With tremendous eloquence, 
Lead us.

When we have totally surrendered to that beauty, 
We shall be a mighty kindness.


—Rumi

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do not forget

 

Fred DeWitt

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Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget.

Remember passion. 

Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget.

It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness …


—Jack Kerouac
Atop An Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

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where are our boundaries?

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Most of the body’s cells are continually turning over. Some cells renew over a period of years, while others are replaced every few days. So, most of the molecules (and therefore atoms) of our bodies return to the planet as well, in an endless atomic cycling and replacements.

From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form the the transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?

As the scales of our investigation continue to get smaller, our boundaries continue to expand outward. At the atomic scale, each one of us is both our own separate self and, in complementarity, also just walking, talking Earth.


—Neil Theise
Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection,
Consciousness, and Being

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mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight

    

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And do you know what “the world” is to me? 

Shall I show it to you in my mirror? 

This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a sphere that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself–do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men? 

This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! 

And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!


—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will To Power
(do read aloud, so as not to miss a word :)

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Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. 

It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. 

Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. 

No fact is merely itself.


—Alfred North Whitehead
Modes of Thought

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the song of existence

   

 

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When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

[...]

The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. 

The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry “Heresy” on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair’s breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.

[...]

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. 

Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.

[...]

The scenery of the ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far less beautiful to us dry-shod animals, than that of the land seen only in comparatively small patches; but when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.


—John Muir
Nature Writings, excerpts

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how are the connections?

 

Skara Brae Buddo, human figure carved from whalebone, c. 2,900 – 2,400 BC. Discovered at Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement located in the Bay of Skaill on the Mainland, an island in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland.

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The Native American notion of All My Relations views all of reality and life as related and interconnected. Every aspect of life is seen as part of one intrinsic family.

In the Blackfoot tribe, when people meet, they don’t say 'How are you' but 'Tza Nee Da Bee Wah?' which means, 'How are the connections?' 

If the connections are in place, we must be all right. If the connections are not in place, then we need to tend them first.


—Mark Nepo

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Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. 

We are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts—so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up.


—Richard Rohr
Falling Upward, excerpt

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Dreams do not lack reality–they are real patterns of information. —Richard Doyle

   

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The language we’ve inherited confuses (this). We say “my” body and “your” body and “his” body and “her” body, but it isn’t that way. 

[...] This Cartesian “Me,” this autonomous little homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. 

This self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the moment one examines it.
 

—Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 15

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the only space

  

Dylan returns to the ship

Benjamin Everett

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Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. 

The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.

—Henry Miller

Stand Still Like The Hummingbird

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Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. 

It’s the only space.

—Ben Okri

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generations

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Rather than to ask what is the meaning of this universe, we would have to say that the universe is its meaning. As this changes, the universe changes along with all that is in it. What I mean by ‘the universe’ is ‘the whole of reality’ and what is beyond. And of course, we are referring not just to the meaning of the universe for us, but its meaning ‘for itself’, or the meaning of the whole for itself.

Similarly there is no point in asking the meaning of life, as life too is its meaning, which is self-referential and capable of changing, basically, when this meaning changes through a creative perception of a new and more encompassing meaning.

You could also ask another question: What is the meaning of creativity itself? As with all other fundamental questions we cannot give a final answer, but we have to constantly see afresh. For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate unfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite — that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.


—David Bohm
Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

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Forms within the universe, whether galaxies, human beings or trees, are generated as an expression of vast forces at work within a holistic framework. Separateness, fragmentation, and disconnection are all illusions. Wholeness is never lost, and the health within the human system, which is a manifestation of this unity, is also never lost.


—John Upledger

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I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers 

and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. 

—Dogen 

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if you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places

  

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To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. 

At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
 

―N. Scott Momaday

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Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …’

—W.B. Yeats

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I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe. That kind of magic. 

I believe in that kind of religion. A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.
 

—George Morrison, Grand Portage Ojibwe

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know thyself

   

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Look Within,
Approach with all Devotion,
Stay as Heart.

Only adore yourself,
worship your Self, and seek your Self,
and the rest will be taken care of.


—Papaji

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questions

   

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A visitor: Should I give up my business and take to reading books on Vedanta?

Bhagavan: If the objects have an independent existence, i.e., if they exist anywhere apart from you, then it may be possible for you to go away from them. 
But they don’t exist apart from you; they owe their existence to you, your thought. 

So, where can you go, to escape them? 

As for reading books on Vedanta, you may go on reading any number of them. They can only tell you, ‘Realise the Self within you’. The Self cannot be found in books. You have to find it out for yourself, in yourself.

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The question ‘Who am I?’ is not really meant to get an answer. 

The question ‘Who am I?’ is meant to dissolve the questioner.

Are we not at peace in the interval when one thought ceases and another does not yet arise?

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Whenever you entrust your heart to a thought,

something will be taken from you inwardly 

Whatever you think and acquire, the thief will

enter from that side where you feel safe 

So busy yourself with that which is better, so

that something less may be taken from you.


—Rumi
Mathnawi II:1505-1507 

William Chittick version

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note to self

  

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What is called the world is only thought.

—Ramana Maharshi

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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

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You are not what you think yourself to be, I assure you. 

The image you have of yourself is made up from memories and is purely accidental.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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listen

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By a single thought that comes into the mind,

in one moment a hundred worlds are overturned.

—Rumi

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dear world

  

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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

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Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. That is enough. —Nisargadatta

 

Nik Wallenda nears the middle of his tightrope walk, 1,800 feet across the mist-fogged brink of roaring Niagara Falls 

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There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.


—William Stafford, 
26 days before death
The Way it Is, 1998

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