the world is the river of god

  

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In the depths of meditation, sages
Saw within themselves the Love
which dwells in the heart of every creature.

Deep in the hearts of all, love dwells, hidden
Behind the manifestations of law, energy,
and inertia. It is One. 

The world is the river of God,
Flowing from love and flowing back to love.
Those who perceive it in every creature
See that they are merged in love.

Wake up from this dream of separateness.
Know love to be enshrined in your heart always
As butter lies hidden in cream. 

Truly there is nothing more in life to know.
Meditate and realize that you
are filled with the presence of God. 


—The Shvetashvatara Upanishad
from the Eknath Easwaren version

 

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Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realise yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition. 

Once you realise that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. 

Without this realisation you identify yourself with the externals, like the body, mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute. 

But these are all escapes from fear. 

It is only when you fully accept your responsibility for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That

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When you know your Self others become that Self, 

the world becomes the Self, 

the tree becomes the Self, 

the sky becomes the Self, 

the planets becomes the Self, 

the whole universe is the Self. 

 

Therefore wherever you go, 

whatever you do, 

you are seeing the Self.

—Robert Adams

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divine magnetism and the peace of iron filings

     

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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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all things sing you

  

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The world is full of magic things, 

patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

—W. B. Yeats

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You come and go. 
The doors swing closed ever more gently, almost without a shudder. 
Of all those who move through the quiet houses, 
you are the quietest. 

We become so accustomed to you, we no longer look up when 
your shadow falls over the book we are reading and makes it glow. 
For all things sing you: at times we hear them more clearly. 

Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. 
You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark, 
I am forest. 

You are a wheel at which I stand, whose dark spokes sometimes 
catch me up, revolve me nearer to the center. 

Then all the work I put my hand to 
widens from turn to turn. 


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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yes

  

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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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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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this is prayer

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Each house has a number of windows, which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as seen from the house. By no means does it seem like a section of a larger world. 

Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house— its [Umwelt] unique sensory bubble. The garden which appears to our eye is fundamentally different to that which presents itself to the inhabitants of the house.


—Jakob von Uexküll, 1909
from An Immense World, Ed Yong

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Even when animals share the same senses with us, their Umwelten can be very different. There are animals that can hear sounds in what to us seems like perfect silence, see colours in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness. 

There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins see with their entire bodies. 


—Ed Yong (treasure)
An Immense World
also treasure

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To be conscious of oneself right to the core is to perceive, at the depths of the self, an Other. 

This is prayer: to be conscious of oneself to the very center, to the point of meeting an Other. 

Thus prayer is the only human gesture which totally realizes the human being’s stature.


—Luigi Giussani

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question

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Who is this self on whom we meditate?

Is it the self by which we see, hear, smell and taste,
Through which we speak in words? Is self the mind
By which we perceive, direct, understand,
Know, remember, think, will, desire and love?

These are but servants of the Self, who is 
Pure consciousness.
The self is all in all.

He is all the gods, the five elements,
Earth, air, fire, water, and space; all creatures,
Great or small, born of eggs, of wombs, of heat,
Of shoots; horses, cows, elephants, men and women,
All beings that walk, all beings that fly,
And all that neither walk nor fly. Prajna
Is pure consciousness, guiding all. The world
Rests on Prajna, and prajna is Brahman.

Those who realize Brahman live in joy
And go beyond death. Indeed
They go beyond death.

Om shanti shanti shanti


—The Aitareya Upanishad, Part III
Eknath Easwaren version, 
Easwaren's Classics of Indian Spirituality, Book 2

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treat each day as a word spoken to us, your(self—as an answer to the word —Anna Kamieńska

Late Victorian mountaineers, including a lady fully dressed and corseted,

cross a crevasse in the Alps, 1900 Decades of the 20th Century —Nick Yapp

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Consciousness is reflected in a word as a sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.


—Lev Vygotsky

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Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling.

Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately. If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. 

An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. 

Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling. 


—Robert Johnson
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden

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We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. 

But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. 


—Anthony Marra
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt Thought and Language, 2012, p.271

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language without words

  

Lara Carlson

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Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island. 

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions. 

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,
language without words. 


—Tomas Tranströmer
March 1979, excerpt
Robin Robertson translation 

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Words, even if they come from
the soul, hide the soul, as fog

rising off the sea covers the sea,
the coast, the fish, the pearls.

It's noble work to build coherent
philosophical discourses, but

they block out the sun of truth.
See God's qualities as an ocean,

this world as foam on the purity
of that. Brush away and look

through the alphabet to essence,
as you do the hair covering your

beloved's eyes. Here's the mystery:
this intricate, astonishing world

is proof of God's presence even as
it covers the beauty. One flake

from the wall of a gold mine does
not give much idea what it's like

when the sun shines in and turns
the air and the workers golden.


—Rumi

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I am where I was:

I walk behind the murmur,

footsteps within me, heard with my eyes,

the murmur is in the mind, I am my footsteps,

I hear the voices that I think,

the voices that think me as as I think them.

I am the shadow my words cast.


—Octavio Paz
closing lines to A Draft of Shadows
Eliot Weinberger translation 

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say I am

  

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Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word,

Not more than a honey bee
Takes on his foot
From an overspilling jar.


—Mechtild of Magdeburg
Jane Hirshfield version
Women in Praise of the Sacred

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questions

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I had tea yesterday with a great theologian,
and he asked me,

“What is your experience of God’s will?”

I liked that question –
for the distillation of thought hones thought in others.
Clarity, I know, is freedom.

What is my experience of God’s will?
Everyone is a traveler. Most all need lodging, food,
and clothes.

I let enter my mouth what will enrich me. 
I wear what will make my eye content,
I sleep where I will wake with the strength to deeply love
all my mind can hold.

What is God’s will for a wing?
Every bird knows that.


—St. Teresa of Avila

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I searched for God and found only myself. 

I searched for myself and found only God. 

—Sufi

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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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the universe is fluid and volatile

   

. 

 

There are no fixtures in nature.

The universe is fluid and volatile.

Permanence is but a word of degrees. 


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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We perceive an eddy and imagine that it is in some way separate from the river and that it is in some way permanent. We experience ourselves, and likewise assume that there is an unchanging core, even if there is much evidence to undermine that conclusion.


—Bodhipaksa
Living as a River

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We are what we think. 

All that we are arises with our thoughts. 

With our thoughts we make the world. 

Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow 

As your shadow, unshakeable.


—The Dhammapada

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all the worlds are words

 

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Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 

The stars are words 

and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, 

and so is this world too. 

And I realize that no matter where I am, 

whether in a little room full of thought, 

or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, 

it’s all in my mind. 

—Jack Kerouac 

Lonesome Traveler 

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Are we not at peace in the interval when one thought ceases 

and another does not yet arise?

—Ramana Maharshi

 

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Thinking and prayer are much the same thing anyway, when you stop to think about it ... 

Prayer goes up and thought comes down—or so it seems. 

As far as I can tell, that's the only difference.


—Alan Bradley
A Red Herring Without Mustard

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everyone is the other, and no one is himself

   

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

 

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It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, storm and mountain; it is their soul and their meaning. Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we have to harden our hearts to bear it.


—Robinson Jeffers
The World’s Wonders

 

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You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this — although you will not believe in it — is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.


—Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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People think that the world itself is overflowing with beauty,

but they forget that they are its cause.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

💗

the heart is the only reality

    

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D.: How is the mind to dive into the Heart?

M.: The mind now sees itself diversified as the universe. 

If the diversity is not manifest, it remains in its own essence, that is the Heart. Entering the Heart means remaining without distractions.

The Heart is the only Reality. The mind is only a transient phase. 

To remain as one’s Self is to enter the Heart.


—Ramana Maharshi 

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Be at peace with your own soul.
Then heaven & earth will be at peace with you.

Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you,
And you will see the things that are in heaven, for there is but one single entry to them both. 

The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within your soul…
Dive into yourself and in your soul and you will discover the stairs by which to ascend.


—Isaac of Nineveh

 

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 .

ditty of first desire

    

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I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love's
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering the Beloved,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me,
For I am a Sweet Old Vagabond
With an Infinite Leaking Barrel
Of Light and Laughter and Truth
that the Beloved has tied to my back.

Dear one,
Indeed, please bring your heart near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love.


—Hafiz

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In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart. 

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale. 

(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening's end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love. 

—Federico García Lorca

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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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i give you the end of a golden string, just wind it into a ball ... William Blake

 

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When you discover
your new work travels the ground you had traversed
decades ago, you wonder, panicked,
‘Have I outlived my vocation ? Said already
all that was mine too say ?’

There’s a remedy –
only one – for the paralysis seizing your throat to mute you,
numbing your hands: Remember the great ones, remember
Cezanne
doggedly sur le motif, his mountain
a tireless noonday angel he grappled like Jacob,
demanding reluctant blessing. Remember James rehearsing
over and over his theme, the loss
of innocence and the attainment
(not by separate note sounding its tone
until by accretion a chord resounds) of somber
understanding. Each life in art
goes forth to meet dragons that rise from their bloody scales
in cyclic rhythm: Know and forget, know and forget.
It’s not only
the passion for getting it right (though it’s that , too)
it’s the way
radiant epiphanies recur, recur,
consuming, pristine, unrecognized –
and remembrance dismays you. And then, look,
some reflection of light, some wing of shadow
is other, unvoiced. You can, you must
proceed.


—Denise Levertov
For Those Whom the Gods Love Less

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