questions

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What we see depends on the light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or—as Newton thought—minute particles, and things seen are colours. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colours, which are not attributes of matter.

Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what a theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness without dragging in its relations to mind. The modern account of what the mind knows of nature is not, as it should be, merely an account of what the mind knows of nature; but it is also confused with an account of what nature does to the mind.

[…] The ground taken is this: sense-awareness is an awareness of something. What then is the general character of that something of which we are aware? We do not ask about the percipient or about the process, but about the perceived.

—Alfred North Whitehead
The Concept of Nature, ch 2

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Give your attention to the experience of seeing rather than to the object seen and you will find yourself everywhere. —Rupert Spira

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We’re only finding out recently that a lot of animals have colors and patterns that we cannot see because they’re outside of our visual range. It calls to attention how much of the world we can’t experience because our senses are limited.

When we shine UV lights on them, they glow pink or blue, but these are the colors that we can see…. they could be a bunch of different colors, which we see as all pink.

It’s also interesting to consider that most of these animals are not aware of having glowing patches on their bodies…. isn’t it also possible that we have skin or hair patterns that were not aware of?

(There is actually some research out there to support the idea that our own skin fluoresces as well and that there are gender differences in the pattern and glow.)


—anatomika.science

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Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

—Flannery O’Connor

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sight

  

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Once

a single cell

found that it was full of light

and for the first time there was seeing

when

I was a bird

I could see where the stars had turned

and I set out on my journey

high

in the head of a mountain goat

I could see across a valley

under the shining trees something moving

deep

in the green sea

I saw the two sides of the water

and swam between them

I

look at you

in the first light of the morning

for as long as I can


—W. S. Merwin

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being(ness

  

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You are neither the body nor in the body — there is no such thing as body. You have grievously misunderstood yourself; to understand rightly — investigate.

.

You must come to a firm decision. 

You must forget the thought that you are the body and be only the knowledge ‘I am’, which has no form, no name. 

When you stabilize in that beingness, it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you, and when the secrets are given to you, you transcend the beingness, and you, the Absolute will know that you are also not the consciousness.

Having gained all this knowledge, having understood what is what, a kind of quietude prevails, a tranquility.

Beingness is transcended, but beingness is available.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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it(self

  

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Consciousness is consciousness of something. 

This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness emerges supported by a being which is not itself.
 

—Jean-Paul Sartre

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no(thing not nothing

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When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.

Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.


―Ingmar Bergman

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Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception.

There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.

And yet it moved.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger

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[...] I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.


—Pablo Neruda

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note to self

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Buddha and Shankara supposed the world to be radically false and miserable; therefore escape from the world was to them the only wisdom.

But this world is Brahman, the world is God, the world is Satyam, the world is Ananda; it is our misreading of the world through mental egoism that is a falsehood and our wrong relation with God in the world that is a misery.


—Sri Aurobindo

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Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.  

Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of humans—cannot.


—Richard Rorty
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

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Don’t rely on your mind for liberation.

It is the mind that brought you into bondage.

Go beyond it altogether.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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wait

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con(clusion

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You know you are. 

How do you know it? 

And with what do you know it? 

This is the sum total of my teaching needed to put you on the right track, its very quintessence.

Come to the conclusion: I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn.

Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.

That is all.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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what has been, is no(thing

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The path to heaven lies through heaven,

and all the way to heaven is heaven.

—Catherine of Siena

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The bird has no path;
where the bird flies is the path.

The fish has no path in water;
wherever it swims is the path.


—The Upanishads

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Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace
Than the going beast
Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets
(As is only right). The beast
Where he no longer is
(And is therefore no use)
Marks that he was there before
(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray
Nature, since the nature of yesterday
Is not nature.
What has been, is nothing.
Remembering
Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me
To move on.


—Fernando Pessoa
Thomas Merton version

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tran(sition

  

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We just sit.

It is like something happening in the great sky.

Whatever kind of bird flies through it, the sky doesn’t care.

That is the mind transmitted from Buddha to us.


—Shunryu Suzuki

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the voice from the invisible thought

 

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I am the thought that lives in the light.

I live in everyone, and I delve into them all...
I move in every creature...
I am the invisible one in all beings...
I am the voice speaking softly...
I am the real voice... the voice from the invisible thought... 

It is a mystery... I cry out in everyone...
I hid myself in everyone, and revealed myself
within them, and every mind seeking me longs
for me... 

I am she who gradually brought forth
everything...
I am the image of the invisible spirit...
The mother, the light... the virgin... the
womb, and the voice... 

I put breath in all beings..


—Nag Hammadi Scrolls

from Why Religion, Elaine Pagels

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out of my heart

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Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skyward.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skyward. And it waxed larger as it flew.
Yet it left not my heart.


—Kahlil Gibran

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I said it to you for the clouds
I said it to you for the tree of the sea
For each wave for the birds in the leaves
For the pebbles of sound
For familiar hands
For the eye that becomes landscape or face
And sleep returns it the heaven of its colour
For all that night drank
For the network of roads
For the open window for a bare forehead
I said it to you for your thoughts for your words
Every caress every trust survives.


—Paul Eluard

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questions

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I did my best to notice

When the call came down the line

Up to the platform of surrender

I was brought, but I was kind

And sometimes I get nervous

When I see an open door

Close your eyes, clear your heart

Cut the cord

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

My sign is vital

My hands are cold

And I'm on my knees

Looking for the answer

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

 

Pay my respects to grace and virtue

Send my condolences to good

Give my regards to soul and romance

They always did the best they could

And so long to devotion

You taught me everything I know

Wave goodbye, wish me well

 

You've got to let me go

 

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

My sign is vital

My hands are cold

And I'm on my knees

Looking for the answer

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

 

Will your system be alright

When you dream of home tonight?

There is no message we're receiving

Let me know, is your heart still beating?

 

Are we human

Or are we dancer?

My sign is vital

My hands are cold

And I'm on my knees

Looking for the answer

.

thanks Roy

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in(formation

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The fact is, we don’t really experience matter.
What we experience when we look at something is the electromagnetic radiation influenced by some object that we call matter.

When we touch matter, we are experiencing the effect of the laws of electromagnetic force owing to the repulsion of charges between the electron shells of the atoms in our fingers and the electron shells of the atoms in the object.


—Jim Elvidge
Digital Consciousness

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... Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek proposes that just as there are naturally emerging crystal structures in the third dimension, this same effect could be happening within what he calls “Time Crystals”, extradimensional patterns that reside within a timeless whole.

It turns out that the increasingly popular view of physicists that reality is made of information may require the existence of universal consciousness to actualize this information into physically “real” experience.

... the view that the Universe is conscious, and that the consciousness of humans and animals is derived not from the consciousness of fundamental particles, but from the consciousness of the Universe itself.


—Alex Vikoulov
The Origins of Us

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always the beautiful answer

 

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you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of
growing: the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.

[...] Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush 'tie it into my hand'—

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making; only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening; only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong; never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom, greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have: only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.


—E. E. Cummings
introduction from Collected Poems, excerpts

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soul friend

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In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.”

In everyone’s life, there is a great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. 

Where you are understood, you are at home.

The anam cara experience opens a friendship that is not wounded or limited by separation or distance. Such friendship can remain alive even when the friends live far away from each other. Because they have broken through the barriers of persona and egoism to the soul level, the unity of their souls is not easily severed. When the soul is awakened, physical space is transfigured. Even across the distance, two friends can stay attuned to each other and continue to sense the flow of each other’s lives. With your anam cara you awaken the eternal.


—John O'Donohue

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wait

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years and distances, stars and candles

   

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Researchers have captured the first image of what dolphins see using echolocation.

"When a dolphin scans an object with its high frequency sound beam, each short click captures a still image, similar to a camera taking photographs,” Reid said. “Each dolphin click is a pulse of pure sound that becomes modulated by the shape of the object."


—John Stuart Reid

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It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together.

My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.


― Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea

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the secret of both worlds

  

 

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The whole world is a marketplace for Love,

For naught that is, from Love remains remote.

The Eternal Wisdom made all things in Love.

On Love they all depend, to Love all turn.

The earth, the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars

The center of their orbit find in Love.

By Love are all bewildered, stupefied,

Intoxicated by the Wine of Love.

From each, Love demands a mystic silence.

What do all seek so earnestly? “Tis Love.

Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts,

In Love no longer “Thou” and “I” exist,

For self has passed away in the Beloved. 

Now will I draw aside the veil from Love,

And in the temple of mine inmost soul

Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love.

He who would know the secret of both worlds

Will find that the secret of them both is Love.

—Farid ud Din Attar

Essential Sufism

.

 

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

.

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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cosmic music

Doug Dance

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String Theory says that all the notes on a vibrating string correspond to a particle. That to an electron is actually a rubber band; a very tiny rubber band. But if you twang this rubber band and the rubber band vibrates at a different frequency, it turns into a quark. And you twang it again and it turns into a neutrino. 

So, how many musical notes are there? An infinite. How many musical notes are there on a string? An infinite number. And that may explain why we have so many subatomic particles. They are nothing but musical notes. 

So, physics are nothing but the laws of harmonies on a string. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on vibrating strings. And the mind of God, the mind of God that Einstein worked on for the last 30 years of his life, the mind of God would be cosmic music. Cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

—Micho Kaku

Theoretical Physicist

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wait

.

lute strings

  

.

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.


—Albert Einstein 

.

In the ocean are many bright strands and many dark strands like veins that are seen when a wing is lifted up.

Your hidden self is blood in those, those veins that are lute strings that make ocean music – not the sad sound of surf, but the sound of no shore.


—Rumi

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As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul. —Hermes

.

Close your eyes and let the mind expand. Let no fear of death or darkness arrest its course. Allow the mind to merge with Mind. Let it flow out upon the great curve of consciousness. Let it soar on the wings of the great bird of duration, up to the very Circle of Eternity.

[…]

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God.

Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.


―Hermes Trismegistus

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wait
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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. —William S. Burroughs

.

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."


—Morpheus, The Matrix

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unit(y

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There is not a fragment in all of nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.   

—John Muir, 1867

.

If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts:

the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing.

the human soul, living forever within you.

the celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird.


—Carl Jung

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Inviting the Wisdom of Death into Life

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The five invitations are my attempt to honor the lessons I have learned sitting bedside with so many dying patients. They are five mutually supportive principles, permeated with love.


Don't wait.

Welcome everything, push away nothing.

Bring your whole self to the experience.

Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

Cultivate don't know mind.


—Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

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