Epic of Gilgamesh

turtle image

palm

 

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Interior of the hand.

Sole that has come to walk

only on feelings. That faces upward

and in its mirror

receives heavenly roads, which travel

along themselves.

That has learned to walk upon water

when it scoops,

that walks upon wells,

transfiguring every path.

That steps into other hands,

changes those that are like it

into a landscape:

wanders and arrives within them,

fills them with arrival.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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the highest teaching

 

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From joy all beings have come. 
In joy all beings are sustained. 
To joy all beings return. 

This is the highest teaching. 
This is the highest teaching.


—The Upanishads

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friend(ship

  

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963

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Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. 


—John O'Donohue

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spirit of a place

 

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Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, a different vibration of chemical exhalation, a different polarity with the stars; call it what you like. 

But the spirit of a place is a great reality.


—D. H. Lawrence

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A thought without a body is not a star. —Aaron Shurin

  

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Immanuel Kant perhaps composed the longest list of defects in classical Greek “pure reason”. One that has received less publicity than most goes like this:

When an arrow gets fired from a bow toward a target it appears to move through space. However, at every instant the arrow actually occupies one position in space, not two or three or more positions. Thus, at every instant the arrow exists in one place, not in two or three or more. In other words, at every instant the arrow has a position. If the arrow has one and only one definition position at every instant, then at every instant it does not move. If it does not move at any of these instants, it never moves at all.

You cannot escape this Logic by positing instants-between-instants. In these nanotime units, the same logic holds. At each nano-instant, the arrow has some location, not several locations. Therefore, even in nano-instant, the arrow does not move at all.

It seems the only way out of this absurdity consists of claiming that the arrow does, after all, occupy two locations at the same time. Alas, this leads to worse problems, which I leave you to discover for yourself.

And that shows where Logic gets you, if uncorrected by observations. If we do not correct our Logic by comparing it with experience, we may go on for centuries elaborating our most ancient errors endlessly.

—Robert Anton Wilson

Quantum Psychology

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Seek God in self-abasement and self-extinction,

for nothing but form is produced by thinking.

And if you derive no comfort except from form,

then the form that comes to birth within you involuntarily is best.

Suppose it is the form of a city to which you are going:

you are drawn there by a formless feeling of pleasure, O dependent one;

therefore, you are really going to that which has no location,

for pleasure is something different from time and place.

Suppose it is the form of a friend to whom you would go:

you are going for the sake of enjoying his company;

therefore, in reality you go to the formless world,

though you are unaware of that being the object of your journey.

In truth, then, God is worshiped by all, since all wayfaring

is for the sake of the pleasure of which He is the source.

—Rumi 
Mathnawi VI: 3749-3755
Camille and Kabir Helminski version

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