bless

 

 

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Discriminate between that which is ever-changing 

and that which is changeless. 

The world comprises both. 

Know this.

—Tripura Rahasya

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the soul is a harmony

    

  

Pythagorean Harmonic Music Interval Diagram 
showing Perfect Numerical Ratios appearing through Music

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Pythagoras used various intervals of harmonic ratios as a medicine for diseases of the body, the emotions and the Soul. He aligned Souls to their divine nature and through music he performed what he called, “Soul Adjustments”. 

Pythagoras was able to discern the harmony and consonance of heavenly bodies, the “Music of the Spheres”, and put to use his discovery of mathematics as they relate to the harmonic ratios. He made stringed instruments that could be tuned so that they would consistently produce layered consonant musical intervals.

Later Pythagoras calculated other chromatic and enharmonic orders, (using simple ratios to create complex intervals). He recognized that music was an expression of “Harmonia”, the Divine principle that brings order to chaos and discord. Thus music has a dual value because like mathematics, it enables humans to see into the structures of nature.  

Pythagoras taught that if it was utilized correctly, music can: 

a) bring the faculties of the Soul into harmony 
 

b) compose and purify the mind
 

c) heal the physical body, thus restoring and maintaining perfect health. 

One of his most important discoveries was that harmonic musical intervals could be expressed by perfect numerical ratios, a finding that led him to the realization that all sensible phenomena follow the pattern of number.

Pythagoras said the first important lesson to learn is that which subsists through music, for it possesses remedies of human manners and passions that are able to restore pristine harmony and faculties of the soul.

The more immediate, evident, and undeniable evidence of the influence of Number on our (mental, psychic, emotional) state is through the medium of music. Pythagorean philosophy is a “purification”, the aim of which is the assimilation to God. 

The universe is divine because of its order (kosmos), harmonies and the symmetries it contains and reflects. These principles make the universe divine for they are the characteristics of divinity and so they also innately subsist within the human soul. 

The Pythagoreans taught that the soul is a harmony. If we are to become like God, then according to Pythagorean philosophy the soul must become aware of its harmonic origin. According to Pythagoras, all harmony and order is the divine principle of number, and for them, mathematical studies are the contemplation of divine principles.

—Dr. James Hopkins
excerpts

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There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. 

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. 

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. 
What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. 

―Chuck Palahniuk
Survivor, excerpts

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The Power of Mantras, Frequencies that Heal and Transcend

 

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Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language that is based on sounds and vibrations. Each alphabet with its pronunciation has a specific meaning; like ku denotes earth, khE is sky etc.

OM is the first and foremost of all mantras. It is the sound of cosmic energy housing all the sounds. The spiritual efficacy of OM is heard, not by the ears but by the heart. It surcharges the innermost being of man with vibrations of the highest reality. 

All galaxies (including ours) are believed to rotate around the sound frequency resonating with OM.

Frequency of OM is 7.83 Hz, which is inaudible to the human ear with its double strand DNA that cannot discern sounds of frequency less than 20 hertz. 

Birds, dogs and a few other animals can hear it however.

OM has been adapted into other religions as AMEN, the numerical- 786 (OM symbol shown in mirror), SHALOM, OMKAR/ONKAR etc, but they do NOT work like the original OM. While OM releases Nitric Oxide, Amen and Shalom only emit a sound.

Frequencies of various Beej Mantras are -  

 

OM – 7.83 Hz

Gam – 14 Hz

Hleem – 20 Hz

Hreem – 26 Hz

Kleem – 33 Hz

Krowm – 39 Hz

Sreem – 45 Hz

These cosmic sounds were heard by 12 strand DNA maharishis in their spiritual trances which broadened their sense spectrums. However, our brain can register only the vibrations.

Om (also spelled Aum) is a Hindu Sacred Sound that is considered the greatest of all Mantras. The syllable Om is composed of the three sounds a-u-m (in Sanskrit, the vowels a and u combine to become o) and the symbol’s threefold Nature is central to its meaning. It represent several important triads:

The Three Worlds - Earth, Atmosphere, and Heaven
The Three Major Hindu Gods - Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva
The Three Sacred Vedic Scriptures - Rg, Yajur, and Sama

Om Mystically embodies the Essence of the entire Universe. This meaning is further deepened by the Indian Philosophical belief that God first created Sound and the Universe arose from it. As the most Sacred Sound, Om is the Root of the Universe and everything that exists and it continues to hold everything together.


—K. Nagori

'

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.

Healing is an act of communion.

—Bell Hooks

All About Love 

💔

you are that

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What is Real?

We could define ‘real’ as something which never changes. In order to change, a thing has to cease to be what it is and become something else; i.e. it would have to become what it is not.

Therefore, anything that changes cannot be real, since the act of changing involves non-existence

What is Unreal?

Unreal is the appearance of something in the place/location of its non-existence. Example the snake appears where it does not exist, ie the rope. The snake appears in the location of its own absence. This is the very definition of falsity or unreality.

Where something is not, there it appears.
Then it is false.

Blue color appears in the sky where it does not exist. The blue color appears where there is no blue color. The sky is not blue.

Similarly, the entire universe of experience (waking world, dream world, deep sleep blankness) continuously appears and disappears in the sky of Awareness.

Awareness is the locus or location of the absence of the mind. Awareness is where the mind appears, plays it games and dissapears. Hence, the mind is unreal.

The locus in which something appears and disappears, then in that locus, that thing is an appearance and unreal. The locus only is real.

You are that locus - Awareness.


—Swami Sarvapriyananda
Lectures on Mandukya Karika

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Nature is a temple in which
living columns sometimes
emit confused words.

Man approaches it through
forests of symbols, which
observe him with familiar glances.


—Charles Baudelaire 

(1821 - 1867)

 

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We must ask from the gods things suited to hearts that shall die,

knowing the path we are in, the nature of our doom.

—Pindar

Pythian III

C. M. Bowra version

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not two

   

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It is an easy thing to say that the world is an illusion,
but do you know what that really means? 

It is like the burning of camphor, 
which leaves no residue. 

It is not even like the burning of wood,
which leaves ashes behind. 

... there is absolutely no recognition of '¡', thou' 
and the universe.


—Sri Ramakrishna

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It is the hand that lifts, but you say “I lift”.
The eyes see but you say, “I see”.
The nose smells, but you say, “I smell”.
All this is the power of the Self and yet you say, “I did it”.
That power belongs to God. 

Who is this ego arrogating ‘I’? 
He has no place in the palace, but once admitted inside, he
overrules the king and affirms his own existence. 
After some enquiry, this ego’s existence is easily disproved. 
Then the king once again affirms, “I am Reality.” 

There is one thing about this condition – there is bliss. 
If there are two, then there is pain. 
Where there is One, there is bliss.


—Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj

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there is a livingness

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There is more to our world than inanimate matter and human beings, there is a livingness in nature. [The world] can be seen in an entirely new way, perceiving the rocks we pass by without notice each day as alive and aware.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers

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Just now

A rock took fright

When it saw me.

It escaped

By playing dead.


—Norbert Mayer


 

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Carefully placed upon the future, 

it tips from the breeze and skims away, 

frail thing of words, this valentine, 

so far to sail. And if you find it 

caught in the reeds, its message blurred, 

the thought that you are holding it 

a moment is enough for me.


This Paper Boat
—Ted Kooser

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thank you

wait - what ?

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Tear off the mask. Your face is glorious. —Rumi

  

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"We see the seasons pass, the moons fatten and go dark, infants grow to old men, but this is not time. 

We see the water strike against the shore and with each wave we say a moment has passed, but this is not time. Inside, we feel our strength go from a baby’s weakness to a youth’s strength to a man’s endurance to the weakness of a baby again, but this is not time, either, nor are your whiteman’s clocks and bells, nor the sun rising and the sun going down. These things are not time."

“What is it then?” said Father Damien. “I want to know, myself.” 

“Time is a fish,” said Nanapush slowly, “and all of us are living on the rib of its fin.” Damien stared at him in quizzical fascination and asked what type of fish.

“A moving fish that never stops. Sometimes in swimming through the weeds one or another of us will be shaken off time’s fin.” 

“Into the water?” asked Damien.

“No,” said Nanapush, “into something else called not time."


—Louise Erdich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

 

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The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in 

and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.

—The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

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the nonlinearity of how we become who we are

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The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.


—Eudora Welty

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A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity;

a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material;

a continually changing constellation of potentialities,
not a fixed quantity of traits.


—Carl Rogers

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As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. 

And as the old Greeks said: live as though 

all your ancestors were living again through you.

—Ted Hughes

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everyone is the other, and no one is himself

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The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window, less or more light enters the world.


—Aziz Nasafi

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Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.

The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Dasein (existence), is the nobody to whom every Dasein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.


—Martin Heidegger
Being and Time
Joan Stambaugh version

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Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. 

It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.

—Rabindranath Tagore

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dream(time

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This life is all a dream, a dream within a dream. We dream this world, we dream that we die and take birth in another body. And in this birth we dream that we have dreams. 

All kinds of pleasures and suffering alternate in these dreams, but a moment comes when waking up happens.

In this moment, which we call realizing the Self, there is the understanding that all the births, all the deaths, all the sufferings and all the pleasures were unreal dreams that have finally come to end.


—Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK

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The mind is like a river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify yourself with some particular ripple and call it "my thought".

All you are conscious of is your mind.

Awareness is the cognizance of consciousness as a whole.


—Sri Nisargadatta

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the this and the that

    

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The Master is not trapped in opposites. His this is also a that. He sees that life becomes death and death becomes life, that right has a kernel of wrong within it and wrong a kernel of right, that the true turns into the false and the false into the true. 

He understands that nothing is absolute, that since every point of view depends on the viewer, affirmation and denial are equally beside the point. The place where the this and the that are not opposed to each other is called "the pivot of the Tao." When we find this pivot, we find ourselves at the center of the circle, and here we sit, serene, while Yes and No keep chasing each other around the circumference, endlessly. 

Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object, ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness streaming through. The pivot of the Tao is the mind free of its thoughts. It does not believe that this is a this or that that is a that. 

Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference toward a finish line that doesn't exist. How can they stop trying to win the argument of life until you stop? When you do, you realize that you were the only one running. Yes was you, No was you, the whole circumference, with its colored banners, its pom-pom girls and frenzied crowds - that was you as well. At the center, the eyes open and again it is the sweet morning of the world. There's nothing here to limit you, no one here to draw a circumference. In fact, there is no one here - not even you.

—Stephen Mitchell
The Second Book of the Tao

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this much is true

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You know quite well, deep within you,
that there is only a single magic,

a single power, a single salvation...
and that is called loving.


—Herman Hesse

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For small creatures such as we,

the vastness is bearable only through love.

—Carl Sagan 

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divine magnetism and the peace of iron filings

    

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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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The Self is like a powerful magnet within us. It draws us gradually to itself, though we imagine we are going to It of our own accord: when we are near enough, It puts an end to our activities, makes us still, and then swallows up our personal current, thus killing our wrong personality. It overwhelms the intellect and over floods the whole being. 

We think we are meditating upon It and developing towards It, whereas the truth is that we are iron filings and It is the Atman-magnet that is pulling us towards Itself. Thus the process of finding the Self is a form of Divine magnetism.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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... everything can have an effect on us. And all things affect us from a distance, the near as well as the remote things, nothing touches us; everything reaches us across divisions. And just as the most remote stars cannot enter us, the ring on my hand cannot do so either: everything that reaches us can do so only the way a magnet summons and aligns the forces in some susceptible object; in this way, all things can effect a new alignment within us. And in view of this insight, do proximity and distance not simply vanish?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters on Life

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The chooser's happiness lies in his congruence with the chosen, The peace of iron filings, obedient to the forces of the magnetic field.

Calm is the soul that is emptied of all self,
In the eternal moment of co-inherence.
A happiness within you - but not yours.


—Dag Hammarskjöld

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be the mystery

    

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In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

—Dag Hammarskjöld

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Be the mystery.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.


—Rainer Maria Rilke 

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we are that

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The thinker of thoughts is merely 

Another thought.

The one who knows this is

No longer in his own way.

—Wu Hsin

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Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the individual self and the immortal Self are perched on the branches of the self-same tree. 

The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree; the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.


—The Mundaka Upanishad

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There is only Seeing. 

Both the seer and the seen are contained in it.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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thank you

know-the-self 

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all things depend on each other

   

 

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Observe your own body. It breathes. 

You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? 

The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. 

You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, 'my life' is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. 

You don't possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.

—Ilchi Lee

 

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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 greatest secret

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Meaning is important, is even central. It is not only that man is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one way or the other?

Man could never come into being in such a universe.

That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According to this principle, a life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world.


—John A. Wheeler
foreword to The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler

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For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.

The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.


—Viktor Frankl

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thank you

noosphe

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philosophy

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I’ve lost my way…I need someone to take me by the hand and lead me out of the woods.

—Kurt Vonnegut

 

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I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,
lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,
contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman
might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandy glass.

I used to hunger to be engaged
as I walked the long shaded boulevards,
eyeing women of all nationalities,
a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,
a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath
in a cork-lined room--disengaged, soaking
in the calm, restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house
for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,
fingers interlocked upon his stomach,
as he deduces another proof for God's existence,

intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.
And as I kick through the leaves and snap
the windfallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch
reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter, must have souls.
But when I finally reach the top of the hill
and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,
I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges
and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight
slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.
Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,
the smokey chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,
even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,
cloud-enshrined, tilted back on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome of thought
where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,
where all the formulas of calculus unravel,
tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun--

that zone just below the one where angels accelerate
and the ampitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.
And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,
and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me
as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her
as she sniffs her way through the leaves,
her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.


—Billy Collins
The Art of Drowning

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thank you

largerloves

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no(thingness

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Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. 

It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. 

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. 

Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

—Albert Einstein

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God made everything out of nothing.

But the nothingness shows through.

—Paul Valéry

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The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. —Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The appearance of water in a mirage persists after the fact that it is a mirage has dawned on us. So it is with the world.

Though knowing it to be unreal, it continues to manifest - but we do not try to satisfy our thirst with the water of the mirage.

As soon as one knows that it is a mirage, one gives it up as useless and does not run after it to get water.


—Ramana Maharshi

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A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go 

 ―E.E. Cummings

 

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the softness of all phenomenal reality

 

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Strongly influenced by the substrata of the native religion Bon (a form of Northeast Asian shamanism) and the later imports of Mahayana Buddhism and tantric ideas from India and Nepal, the Tibetan world view is uncompromising in its insistence on the “softness” of all phenomenal reality. 

The question of “apparent” versus “real” in relation to phenomenal existence, which has long been a preoccupation of Western philosophy, was in Tibet long ago firmly decided in favour of the former; stong pa nyid (“emptiness,” “voidness”) is part of everyday speech of a Tibetan and the explanation he offers for the many riddles of life. 

In the Tibetan view, all that exists is a mirage of the mind, imperfect images on a screen covering “absolute” reality, which can only be realized in liberation. Everything in the universe, then, has a meaning other than the apparent one, and the world is full of oracles and signs that need to be interpreted. 

Imagination reigns supreme and all that can be imagined is as real as all that exists. There is no place for the supernatural in this world since one may arbitrarily choose to regard everything either as miraculous or as commonplace. 

As David-Neel describes it, “None in Tibet deny that such events may take place, but no one regards them as miracles. Indeed, Tibetans do not recognize any supernatural agent. The so-called wonders, they think, are as natural as common daily events and depend on the clever handling of little known laws and forces.” 

Since phenomenal existence is believed to be created by the mind, then phenomenal reality can also be controlled, the relationship between its elements varied, and new phenomena created, by special types of mental effort involving concentrated meditation, elaborate rituals and the transforming power of mantra.


—Sudhir Kakar
Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors

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