the seed never sees the flower —Zen Proverb

 

.

A famous thorny issue in philosophy is the so-called infinite regress problem. For example, if we say that the properties of a diamond can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its carbon atoms, that the properties of a carbon atom can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its protons, neutrons and electrons, that the properties of a proton can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its quarks, and so on, then it seems that we're doomed to go on forever trying to explain the properties of the constituent parts. 

The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis offers a radical solution to this problem: at the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all! In other words, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not from properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks. 

The external physical reality is therefore more than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it can have many interesting properties while its parts have no intrinsic properties at all.

 

—Max Tegmark (1967 - )
Our Mathematical Univere

.

You're water. 
We're the millstone.

You're wind. 
We're dust blown up into shapes.

You're spirit. 
We're the opening and closing of our hands. 

You're the clarity. 
We're the language that tries to say it.

You're joy. 
We're all the different kinds of laughing!


—Rumi (1207 - 1273)

.

open secret

   

.

Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.


—Nikola Tesla

.

Directly opposite to the concept of a universe as machine built on law is the vision of a world self-synthesized. On this view, the notes struck out on a piano by the observer participants of all times and all places, bits though they are in and by themselves, constitute the great wide world of space and time and things. 


—John Wheeler

.

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, 

think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

—Nikola Tesla

.

everything is alright forever and forever and forever

  

.

Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. 

So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. 

The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.


—Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

.

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. 

Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. 

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. 

It is all one vast awakened thing. 

I call it the golden eternity. 

It is perfect.

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. 

That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. 

Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.


—Jack Kerouac

.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

—Julian of Norwich, 14th century

.

you shall not lose your way

 

beautiful

.

We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. 

Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we have to shatter that plate glass, we have to reach in there. 

So the old world observer simply has to be crossed off the books and we must put in the new term: participator. 

In this way we have come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.


—John Wheeler

.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. 

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


—Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, excerpt

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All things are little, changeable, perishable. 

All things come from thence, from that universal ruling power either directly proceeding or by way of sequence. 

And accordingly the lion’s gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every harmful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. 

Do not then imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.

Think always of the universe as one living creature, made of one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.


—Marcus Aurelius
April 26, 121 — March 17, 180, Rome
Meditations

.

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love. —Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall, Two Pigeons, 1925

.

And

I say to you,
I have also decided
to stick to love. For I know
that love is ultimately the only
answer to mankind’s problems. And
I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go.
I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some
circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when
I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love.
And I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the
faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too
many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in
the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see
it, I know that it does something to their faces and their
personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great
a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are
seeking the highest good, I think you can find it
through love. And the beautiful thing is that
we are moving against wrong when we do
it, because John was right, God is love.
He who hates does not know God,
but he who has love has the
key that unlocks the door
to the meaning
of ultimate
reality.

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 August 1967

Where Do We Go From Here?
[alive on all channels]

.

all the mountains are dancing

  

.

yes is a pleasant country:

if's wintery

(my lovely)

let's open the year

both is the very weather

(not either)

my treasure,

when violets appear

love is a deeper season

than reason;

my sweet one

(and april's where we're)

—e.e. cummings

.

when faces called flowers float out of the ground

and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-

but keeping is downward and doubting and never

-it’s april(yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!

yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly

yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be

(yes the mountains are dancing together)


when every leaf opens without any sound

and wishing is having and having is giving-

but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense

-alive;we’re alive,dear:it’s(kiss me now)spring!

now the pretty birds hover so she and so he

now the little fish quiver so you and so i

(now the mountains are dancing, the mountains)

when more than was lost has been found has been found

and having is giving and giving is living-

but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing

-it’s spring(all our night becomes day)o,it’s spring!

all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky

all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea

(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

—e.e. cummings

.

 

a mystical geography

.

This land was once completely forested, Dr. Alemayehu Wassie began—sweeping his arms across the surrounding countryside—so much so that nobody would have seen the church. It was all trees. Now almost all the old forests have been cut down. The only place where they are still protected are in church forests like this one. When the people here at Zajor decided to build their wall, he said, they were not bureaucratic, they just built a wall. He motioned to the elderly priest with the carved wooden staff and thanked him for initiating the project. Alemayehu hoped other priests would be inspired by this community’s example.

As we stood beside the wall, a stream of local parishioners came and went through the gate. This is what Alemayehu meant when he described the wall as “porous.” 

A group of children hopped on the wall and ran down its length to the west until they rounded the corner and were lost to sight. An elderly woman approached. She stopped beside the wall, crossed herself three times, then bowed low at the waist and began to fan her face with both hands, cupping the air and pulling it toward her, as if partaking of some invisible goodness that lay inside the wall. Then she rose and walked solemnly up the forest path. Clearly this was no mere border fence; it was an entrance into the sanctuary.

“Humans can come here any hour of the day to 

contemplate or pray or collect seeds.”

click for detail

.

During the centuries when most people were illiterate, icons served to teach the biblical stories. The paintings, most from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, were made from natural dyes taken from local plants. Other than the tin roof and solar panels, all the materials for the church came from this place. In these icons was a forest transformed, the trees and roots and pollen all having passed through the fires of human imagination, while still retaining their sylvan imprint.

Perhaps I was witnessing more than gestures of devotion, important as they were. Maybe they were also the secret to conserving the forest, small acts that together with hundreds of other gestures like them formed an invisible shield around the forests of Zajor. As I would come to learn, this shield was embedded deep within the structures of belief that had survived here since the fourth century. Our Western conceptions of belief are almost entirely inward and private. Here, and at other points on my journey into these forests, I was witnessing the performance of a mystical geography, the soul’s journey to God made visible in the landscape.

“In our tradition, the church is like an ark. 

A shelter for every kind of creature and plant.”

from the splendid essay by Fred Bahnson,

The Church Forests of Ethiopia, at Emergence Magazine

.

more magic

.

sweet(hearts

 

.

A leaf says,
“Sweethearts—don’t pick me,
For I am busy doing
God’s work. 

I am lowering my veins and roots
Like ropes
With buckets tied to them
Into the earth’s deep
Lake.  

I am drawing water
That I offer like a rose to
The sky.  

I am a singing cleaning woman
Dusting all the shelves in
The air
With my elegant green
Rags.  

I have a heart.
I can know happiness like
You.


—Hafiz

.

shanti, shanti, shanti

.

All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. 

They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. 

Yet the promise is not of a monument. The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

 

—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
wait - what ?

.

Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within.

Underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered.

—Huston Smith

. 

 

The Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; 

it is never heard but is the Hearer; 

it is never thought but is the Thinker; 

it is never known but is the Knower.

There is no other witness but This,

no other knower but This.

 

—The Upanishad

.

the realm of the densely packed

  

.

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others. For the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.

Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.


—Albert Einstein

.

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.


—Terence McKenna

.

We trust that time is linear.
That it proceeds eternally, uniformly,
Into Infinity.

But the distinction between
past, present and future is
nothing but an illusion.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow
are not consecutive, they are connected
in a never-ending circle.


—Albert Einstein

.

 

 

 

beauti(ful

.

In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This shuddering before the beautiful, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.


—S. Chandrasekhar (1910 - 1995)

.

there are an infinite number of worlds

.

 

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. 

Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

.

What do you have to do?

Pack your bags,

Go to the station without them,

Catch the train,

And leave your self behind.

 

—Wei Wu Wei

.

questions

.

Philosophers maintain that the future is similarly nothing more than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts. 

Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the “now”—where is time?

Does time exist on its own, apart from human concepts that are no more than conveniences for our formulas or for the description of motion and events? 

In this way, simple logic alone casts doubt on whether there exists anything outside of an “eternal now” that includes the human mind’s tendency to think and daydream. 

Physicists, for their part, find that all working models for reality—from Newton’s laws and Einstein’s field equations through quantum mechanics—have no need for time. They are all time-symmetrical.

—Robert Lanza M.D.

.

Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. 

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream. 

And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.

—Khalil Gibran

.

Grace is within you. If it were external, it would be useless. —Ramana Maharshi

.

You think that you are the body or that you are the mind. But there are occasions when you are free from both.

For example in deep slumber, you create a body and a world in your dream. That represents your mental activities. In your waking state you think that you are the body and then the idea of forest and the rest arise.

Now, consider the situation. You are an unchanging and continuous being who remains in all these states which are constantly changing and therefore transient.
But you are always there.

It follows that these fleeting objects are mere phenomena which appear on your being like pictures which move across a screen. The screen does not move when the picture moves. Similarly, you do not move from where you are even when the body leaves the home and mixes in society.

Your body, the society, the forest and the ways are all in you; you are not in them. You are the body also but not this body only. If you remain as your pure Self, the body and its movements need not affect you.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

You are neck-deep in water and yet cry for water.

It is as good as saying that one neck-deep in water feels thirsty, or that a fish in water feels thirsty, or that water feels thirsty.

Grace is always there.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

   

. 

Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

—Yehuda Amichai

.

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight


—W. S. Merwin
Still Morning

.

For all the features it hoards and displays
age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air
held between the hands like a stunned bird

while I stand remembering light in the trees
of another century on a continent long submerged
with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time
felt memory as they were touching the day

and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections
on the pond's surface that never were seen again

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying


—W. S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius, excerpt

.

a brighter word than bright

   

.

Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. 

The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see - thoughtfully.


—Dan Beachy-Quick

.

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges
This Craft of Verse

.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: 

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out 

and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

—Czesław Miłosz
Ars Poetica

.

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

—Rumi

.

the insatiable longing of finite beings

Jascha Heifetz playing in Mili’s darkened studio as light attached to his bow
traces the bow movement, New York, 1952

.

The beauty of visible life in the inorganic world is noticeable first of all in flowing water in its various forms-streams, mountain-rivers, waterfalls. The aesthetic significance of this living movement is enhanced by its boundlessness, which seems as it were to express the insatiable longing of finite beings separate from the absolute all-inclusive unity. 

And the boundless sea itself acquires a new beauty in its stormy motion as the symbol of rebellious life, of the gigantic struggle of elementary forces which cannot break the universal interconnectedness of the cosmos or destroy its unity, and only fill it with movement, brilliance and thunder.

—Vladimir Solovyov
wait - what ?

.

oh please

  

.

Run, my dear,
from anything that may not strengthen
your precious budding wings,

Run like hell, my dear,
from anyone likely to put a sharp knife
into the sacred, tender vision
of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
those aspects of obedience
that stand outside of our house
and shout to our reason
"oh please, oh please
come out and play!"

For we have not come here to take prisoners,
or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
our divine courage, freedom,
and Light.


—Hafiz

.

The heart brings us authentic tidings of invisible things. —James Hillman

 

.

The heart is an intricate pump. It creates electromagnetic fields that others can feel or through which we can communicate. We exist immersed in living fields of communication, all of which are imbued with meaning, generated by intelligent life forms which flow from and to us from the moment the cells of our bodies self-organize into the unique identities that we know as ourselves.

 We feel the touch of the world upon us, and those millions of unique touches hold within them specific meanings, sent to us from the heart of the world and from the heart of the living beings with which we inhabit this world. We are never alone. 

The greeks had a word for the heart’s ability to perceive meaning from the world: aisthesis.

In Aristotalian psychology the organ of aesthesis is the heart; passages from all the sense organs run to it; there the soul is set on fire. 

Its thought is innately aesthetic and sensately linked with the world.

 

—James Hillman

.

Aisthesis denotes the moment in which a flow of life force, imbued with communications, moves from one living organism to another. The word literally means ‘to breathe in’. it is a taking in of the world, a taking in of soulful communications. 

The world takes us in too—we are breathed. 

The use of the heart as an organ of perception and communication weaves us inextricably into the life web of the Earth, gathering knowledge from the heart of the world.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
The Secret Teachings of Plants, excerpts 
(treasure)

.

The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.
Some think it is East of us, others West of us.
Some say ‘among primitive earth rocks’,
Others, 'in the deep waters.’

Kabir’s instinct told him it was inside,
And what it was worth –
And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.


—Kabir

.

creat(ure

   

.

Wisdom is not assimilated with the eyes, but with the atoms. When your conviction of a truth is not merely in your brain but in your being, you may definitely vouch for its meaning.

—Sri Yukteswar

.

The pebble
is a perfect creature 

equal to itself 
mindful of its limits  

filled exactly 
with a pebbly meaning 

with a scent that does not remind one of anything 
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire 

its ardour and coldness 
are just and full of dignity 

I feel a heavy remorse 
when I hold it in my hand 
and its noble body 
is permeated by false warmth 

- Pebbles cannot be tamed - 
to the end they will look at us 
with a calm and very clear eye


—Zbigniew Herbert
Peter Dale Scott/Czesław Miłosz version

.

Everything in the world has a hidden meaning.
Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics. 

When you see them you do not understand them. 
You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. 

It is only years later that you understand.


—Nikos Kazantzakis

.