still and still moving

  

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Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. 

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


—T. S. Eliot
East Coker V, Four Quartets, excerpt 

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path(ways

       

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In 19th century Suffolk small sickles called ‘hooks’ were hung on stiles and posts at the start of certain well-used paths: those running between villages, for example. A walker would pick up a hook and use it to lop off branches that were starting to impede passage. The hook would then be left at the other end of the path, for a walker coming in the opposite direction. In this manner the path was collectively maintained for general use.


—Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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One does not stand still looking for a path. 

One walks; and as one walks,
a path comes into being.


—Mas Kodani

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Walker, your footsteps 
are the road, and nothing more. 

Walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking. 

Walking you make the road, 
and turning to look behind 
you see the path you never 
again will step upon. 

Walker, there is no road, 
only foam trails on the sea.


—Antonio Machado
proverbs and songs #29

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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. —Plotinus

 

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God turns you from one feeling to another

and teaches by means of opposites,

so that you will have two wings to fly,

not one.

—Rumi

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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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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer. —Terence McKenna

    

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There'll never be a door. 

You're inside and the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse nor reverse nor circling nor secret center.


—Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
In Praise of Darkness

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Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.
 

—Jorge Luis Borges

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Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world. —Jack Kerouac

  

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If you are silent, be silent out of love.

If you speak, speak out of love.


—Saint Augustine



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The whole of life lies in the verb seeing. —Teilhard de Chardin

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The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. 

A stone is prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event'. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. 

The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most 'thing-like' are nothing more than long events.

—Carlo Rovelli

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It’s not so much that we don’t have a self, rather it’s that the self we do have is not a thing. It is an impermanent, fluctuating activity, a process not a particle, a verb not a noun.


—Shinzen Young

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the complexity of a sphere

   

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The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every glimpse of a new aspect of it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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First find the immutable center where all movement takes birth. 

Just like a wheel turns round an axle, so must you be always at the axle in the centre and not whirling at the periphery.

Listen: this world is the lunatic’s sphere,
Don’t always agree it’s real!

Even with my feet upon it
And the postman knowing my door
My address is somewhere else.


—Hafiz

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

  

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

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

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

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

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A step toward your own heart
is a step toward the Beloved.

In this house of mirrors
you see a lot of things –

Rub your eyes.
Only you exist.


–Rumi 
Star/Shiva version

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behind the bodily world

 

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The Maitri Upanishad mentions two aspects of Brahman, the higher and the lower. The higher Brahman being the unmanifest Supreme Reality which is soundless and totally quiescent and restful, the lower being the Shabda-Brahman which manifests itself into the everchanging restless cosmos through the medium of sound vibrations. 

The Upanishad says that “Two Brahmans there are to be known: One as sound and the other as Brahman Supreme.” The process of manifestation is from soundless to sound, from noumenality to phenomenality, from perfect quiescence of "being” to the restlessness of “becoming”.

—Sudhakar S.D, 1988, p83

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All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His Being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my
heart.

—Meister Eckhart

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all the flowers are forms of water

 

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The act of trying to find the way home is what convinces us we are lost. 

We are not lost, we are not alone, and we have never left home.

—Rumi

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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, “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 Upanishads

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All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now

when you are alone you will be all right

whether or not you know you will know

look at the old house in the dawn rain

all the flowers are forms of water

the sun reminds them through a white cloud

touches the patchwork spread on the hill

the washed colors of the afterlife

that lived there long before you were born

see how they wake without a question

even though the whole world is burning

—W. S. Merwin

Rain Light

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thinking of others

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[Man] sees the morning as the beginning of a new day; he takes germination as the start in the life of a plant, and withering as its end. But this is nothing more than biased judgment on his part. 

Nature is one. There is no starting point or destination, only an unending flux, a continuous metamorphosis of all things.

—Masanobu Fukuoka

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As you prepare breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon”s food)
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).


—Mahmoud Darwish
Think of Others

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listen

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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.

—Albert Einstein

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The purpose of man is to develop from this essence a certain type of reason, which will constitute him one of the permanent brain cells of all life. God is both the creator and an evolving being. 

He aims at developing by developing his brain cells. As we develop will, consciousness and individuality we become more ready to take our place as one of the brain cells of the universe.

It is a necessity for the universe taken as a whole to develop individuals having these three functions. At about the age of twenty-five George Bernard Shaw had a realisation that nature aims at brains. All his paradoxes and plays flow from this mechanically. 

But let us define “brains” more clearly. Ponder for a moment the thought that nature aims at individuals having will, consciousness and individuality.

A realisation of this will draw together all other knowledge and ideas, as opposed to modern attempts to find a unity of thought. It is like lifting a tent-pole with the canvas which had before lain shapeless on the ground.

—A.R. Orage

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wait

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question

 

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Your body is made of the same elements that lionesses are built from. Three quarters of you is the same kind of water that beats rocks to rubble, wears stones away. Your DNA translates into the same twenty amino acids that wolf genes code for. 

When you look in the mirror and feel weak, remember, the air you breathe in fuels forest fires capable of destroying everything they touch. On the days you feel ugly, remember: diamonds are only carbon. You are so much more.


—Curtis Ballard

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there is not a fragment in all of nature —John Muir, 1867

  

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We are connected by the fundamental oneness of our consciousness; we are all individuated lumps within, as well as parts of, the same sheet.

We are connected by the ability of one individual to vitally affect, and be affected by, another through the purposeful control of thought energy or the energy of consciousness.

We are connected by the theoretical ability of one being to exchange energy or information with any other being simply by focusing intent.


—Thomas Campbell
My Big Toe

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This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.

Listen, if you can stand to.
Union with the friend
means not being who you have been,
being instead silence, a place,
a view where language is inside seeing.

From the wet source
someone cuts a reed to make a flute
The reed sips breath like wine,
sips more, practicing. Now drunk,
it starts the high clear notes.

There is a path from me to you
that I am constantly looking for,
so I try to keep clear and still
as water does with the moon.

We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.
We can be led by the guide.
Wishes may or may not come true
in this house of disappointment.
Let's push the door open together and leave.

My essence is like the essence of a red wine.
My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.
Glass after glass of wine go into my head.
Finally, my head goes into the wine.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version
The Big Red Book

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the heart in thee is the heart of all

  

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ESSAY IX The Over-Soul 


[...] Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. 

[...] Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. 

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. 

[...] The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time, — 

"Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity." 

[...] The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

[...] In the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we know. 

[...] The soul's communication of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself. 

[...] The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one. 

[...] So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. 

He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.


—Ralph Waldo Emerson
1841

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the rest of this gorgeous thing
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warp and woof

  

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Over and over again—as Being and Becoming, as Eternity and Time, as Transcendence and Immanence, Reality and Appearance, the One and the Many—these two dominant ideas, demands, imperious instincts of man’s self will reappear; the warp and woof of his completed universe. 


—Evelyn Underhill 
Mysticism

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the ecology of meanings

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The view of things that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity.

It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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We are not one but many. Every other living organism has a point of view, something like mind, a feeling for life and a strong inclination to go on getting about in it. We humans not only construct a world but are, ourselves, an often intimate part of the makings, the natural constructions, of other kinds of equally semiotic life in this ecology of meanings.

Our various, always subjectively experienced, umwelten overlap, not with shared points of view but with shared biosemiotic systems. This shared and finally semiotically interdependent ecology of meanings is what we mean when we talk about reality.


—Wendy Wheeler
A Feeling for Life

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I will light candles this Christmas.

Candles of joy, despite all the sadness.
Candles of hope where despair keeps watch.
Candles of courage where fear is ever present.
Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days.
Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens.
Candles of love to inspire all of my living.
Candles that will burn all the year long.


—Howard Thurman
Meditations Of The Heart (1953)

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buffleheadcabin

wait

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Feast of the Epiphany

 

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Today the Magi find, crying in the manger, the one they have followed as he shone in the sky.  

Today the Magi see clearly, in swaddling clothes, the one they have long awaited as he lay hidden among the stars.  

Today the Magi gaze in deep wonder at what they see: heaven on earth, earth in heaven, man in God, God in man, one whom the universe cannot contain now enclosed in a tiny body.  

As they look, they believe and do not question, as their symbolic gifts bear witness: incense for God, gold for a king, myrrh for one who is to die.


—St Peter Chrysologus

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shanti, shanti, shanti

  

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That is perfect. This is perfect.

Perfect comes from perfect.

Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect. 

May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.


—The Isha Upanishad

💗

thin places

   

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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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tonight would be the night

   

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The moon is full tonight
an illustration for sheet music,
an image in Matthew Arnold
glimmering on the English Channel,
or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield
in one of the history plays.

It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.

And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.

And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.


—Billy Collins

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