Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains. —Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

Shatial Glyphs high up in Pakistan's Indus Valley cover boulders stretching for more than 100 kilometers. The writings and designs cover various languages, religions and the symbolism of peoples dating back 10,000 years.

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Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. 

You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects. 


—Vladimir Nabokov

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We all start from “naive realism,” i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold.

But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but something very different.


—Bertrand Russell

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the brilliance of matter

 

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Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change his direction in life.


—Sam Keen

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To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of time, I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity—not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. 

Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.


—Isamu Noguchi
Listening to Stone

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the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined

  

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door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,

door of being: open your being
and wake ....


—Octavio Paz
Sandstone (excerpt)

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field of be(ings

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Each thing, each being, is in steady intercourse with the entities and elements around it, negotiating its passage and exerting its participation in the ongoing emergence of what is.

If we allow that matter is not inert, but is rather animate (or self-organizing) from the get-go … we are left with a diversely differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has gifts relative to the others. 

And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this living field, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape.

We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because—by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism—we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous. 

We can feel the tangible textures, sounds, and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight.  

Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh. We are neither pure spirits nor pure minds, but are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, and touched by the beings around us.


—David Abram
Becoming Animal, excerpts

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you are standing in the sky

    

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Look at your feet.
You are standing in the sky. 

When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, 
but the sky actually begins at the earth. 

We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, 
wash the dog, and drive cars in it. 

We breathe it deep within us. 

With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.


—Diane Ackerman

A Natural History of the Senses

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Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest—the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways—and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it.

Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in—to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain.

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them—neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them—and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.


—Wendell Berry
A Native Hill

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questions

 

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My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside 
it buckles under these things.

[...]

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, excerpt

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this is the drop of an instant

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Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life. 

For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
It is yours.


—Pablo Neruda
ode to the past

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

  

Tim Ingersoll

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My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind. In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. 

Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. 

The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.


―Ovid
Metamorphoses, 8 CE

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By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written
by the time you forget
by the time you are water through fingers
by the time you are taken for granted
by the time it hurts 
by the time it goes on hurting
by the time there are no words for you
by the time you remember
but without names
by the time you are in the papers
and on the telephone
passing unnoticed there too

who is it 
to whom you come  
before whose very eyes 
you are disappearing 
without making yourself known


—W. S. Merwin
to the present tense

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hallo

   

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You look at the world and it may seem whole or it may seem broken, but then the world looks back and some sort of reciprocity that is not of any school of poetry or any single denomination happens, and in our absolute attention we feel attended to: for here there is no place that does not see you.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.


—William Stafford
being a person

 

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“Hallo, Rabbit,’ he said, ‘is that you?’

'Let's pretend it isn't,' said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.'”

—A. A. Milne

 

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flow

 

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The human skin is an artificial boundary: the world wanders into it, 

and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and constant. 

—Bernard Wolfe 

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We all tend to see our bodies as ‘frozen sculptures’ – solid, fixed, material objects, when in truth they are more like rivers, constantly changing, flowing patterns of intelligence.

Your adipose tissue (fat cells) fill up with fat and empty out constantly, so that all of it is exchanged every three weeks.

You acquire a new stomach lining every five days. Your skin is new every five weeks. Your skeleton, seeming so solid and rigid, is entirely new every three months.

You appear to be the same outwardly, yet you are like a building whose bricks are constantly being replaced by new ones. Every year, fully 98 percent of the atoms and molecules in your body are replaced.

To change the printout of the body, we must learn to rewrite the software of the mind.


—Deepak Chopra

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Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. 

Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

—Roger Sperry

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The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses—not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef—just impulses.


—Diane Ackerman
A Natural History of the Senses 

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star(dust

 

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Often, lost in the wide blue, I look up at the ether and into the holy sea, and I feel as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of solitude dissolved into the life of the divinity. 

To be one with all – that is the life of the divinity, that is the heaven of man. To be one with all that lives, to return in blessed self-oblivion into the All of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain height, the place of eternal repose, where the midday loses its swelter and the thunder its voice and the boiling sea resembles the billowing field of grain. To be one with all that lives! 

With these words virtue removes its wrathful armor, the spirit of man lays its scepter aside and all thoughts vanish before the image of the world’s eternal unity, just as the rules of the struggling artist vanish before his Urania; and iron fate abdicates its power, and death vanishes from the union of beings, and indivisibility and eternal youth bless and beautify the world.

—Friedrich Hölderlin 1770 – 1843

Hyperion, Ross Benjamin version

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largerloves

wait - what ?

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assurance

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You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies.

You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.


—William Stafford

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life cannot be seen

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Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?


—Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

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Master Lu Tzu said : That which exists through itself is called Meaning (Tao). Meaning has neither name nor force. 

It is the one essence, the one primordial spirit. 

Essence and life cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the Light of Heaven. 

The Light of Heaven cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the two eyes.


—Richard Wilhelm, Carl Jung

The Secret of the Golden Flower

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wait

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darkness within darkness

 

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1.


The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell version

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You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.


—Rainier Maria Rilke
Robert Bly version

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real(ly

  

 

 

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Just live your life as it comes. Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself. 

Perception is based on memory and is only imagination. 
The world can be said to appear but not to be. Only that which makes perception possible is real.

You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown. Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you.  

Know yourself as you are. Distrust your mind and go beyond. Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness. 
It is utterly beyond both. 

It gives birth to consciousness. 
All else is in consciousness.

Nothing you can see, feel or think is so. 

Go beyond the personal and see. Stop imagining that you were born. You are utterly beyond all existence and non-existence, utterly beyond all that the mind conceives.  

Question yourself: Who am I? 
What is behind and beyond all this? 
Soon you will see that thinking yourself to be a person is mere habit built on memory. Inquire ceaselessly.

Just be aware of your being here and now. 
There is nothing more to it. 
In reality you are not a thing nor separate.

You are the infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility. Because you are, all can be.  

The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become. You are neither consciousness nor its content. You are the timeless Source.  

Disassociate yourself from mind and consciousness. 
Find a foothold beyond and all will be clear and easy.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I am That

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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.


—Ramana Maharshi

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When past and future dissolve there is only You

—Rumi

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as light pours like rain

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Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

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God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.


—Hafiz

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you and i are earth

 

Tin-glazed earthenware plate found in a London sewer 

(England, 1661). Creator unknown.

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Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, 
and each moment then, 

In the faces of men and women I see God, 
and in my own face in the glass, 

I find letters from God dropped in the street — and everyone is sign’d by God’s name, 

And I leave them where they are, 
for I know that whereso'er I go 

Others will punctually come forever and ever.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

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And I, infinitesima­l being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.


—Pablo Neruda

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I and this mystery; here we stand.   

—Walt Whitman

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not to worry

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Let what comes come

Let what goes go

Find out what remains.


—Ramana Maharshi

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Air is anything but empty. If you’re a bat, it holds the sound of the shape of a hillside.

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Iron in the birds’ inner ears

helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.


In other words,

the birds carry within them a piece of the earth,

a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers

its knowledge back to the birds.


—Jarod K. Anderson
PACT

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Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.


We can hold all these ideas at once and feel

both heavy and weightless

with the absurd beauty of it all.


—Jarod K. Anderson

THE IMPOSSIBLE

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apparently useless peculiarities

 

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Here it is that we approach that attitude of the self, that point of view, which is loosely and generally called mystical. Here, instead of those broad blind alleys which philosophy showed us, a certain type of mind has always discerned three straight and narrow ways going out towards the Absolute. 

In religion, in pain, and in beauty—and not only in these, but in many other apparently useless peculiarities of the empirical world and of the perceiving consciousness—these persons insist that they recognize at least the fringe of the real.


—Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism

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Brother stand the pain; 
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do. 

Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun. 
Turn away from the cave of your sleeping. 
That way a thorn expands to a rose. 
A particular glows with the universal.


—Rumi 

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teacup talk

  

Shiu Gun Wong 

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Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.


—Hafiz
Daniel Ladinsky version

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consciousness is a totality

 

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What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? 

They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things.

This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the “accidents” which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions.


—Idris Parry

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Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence,

when it gives birth to conscious intelligence?

—Cicero

c. 44 BCE

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It must be obvious...that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

To Taoism that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead, for without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao. In reality there is nothing in the universe which is completely perfect or completely still; it is only in the minds of men that such concepts exist.

[…] We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible. 


—Alan Watts

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merrily, merrily

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Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness towards all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you.

What they do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream.

The trick is to have a positive intention during the dream.

This is the essential point.


—Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

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The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed.

And it is entirely private.

Take it to be a dream and be done with it.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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dream keeper

  

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Bring me all of your dreams,

You dreamer,

Bring me all your

Heart melodies

That I may wrap them

In a blue cloud-cloth

Away from the too-rough fingers

Of the world.


—Langston Hughes

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questions

 

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It is every intelligent man's experience ... wrong-doing recoils on the doer sooner or later. Why is this so? 
Because the Self is one in all.

When seeing others you are only seeing yourself in their shapes. 'Love they neighbor as thyself' means that you should love him because he is your Self.


—Ramana Maharshi
S. S. Cohen, 15th August, 1948

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The picture of names and forms, the one who sees, the cohesive screen, and the pervading light – all these are he, who is oneself.

If oneself is a form, the world and God will be likewise; if oneself is not a form, who can see their forms? How? 

Can the seen be otherwise than the eye? 

The eye is oneself, the infinite eye.

Without a body, is there a world? 

Leaving the body, is there anyone who has seen a world?

The world is a form of five sense-impressions, not anything else. Those five sense-impressions are impressions to the five sense organs. Since the mind alone perceives the world by way of the five sense organs, is there a world besides the mind?


—Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

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