this short life is long and beautiful

splendid!

.

Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the intrument with which one speaks. 

As you speak, so is your heart. 

—Paracelsus

.

Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. 

All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.


―Tony Hillerman
The Ghostway

.

Life is an island. People come out of the sea, 

cross the island, and return to the sea. 

But this short life is long and beautiful. 
 

—Martiros Saryan

.

thank you, wait - what?

.

If the eye of the heart is open, in each atom there will be one hundred secrets. —Attar

.

Listening to your own heart is really very interesting. This untrained heart races around following its own habits. It jumps about excitedly, randomly, because it has never been trained. Train your heart! 

Buddhist meditation is about the heart; it’s about developing the heart or mind, about developing your own heart. This is very, very important. Buddhism is the religion of the heart. Only this. 

One who practices to develop the heart is one who practices Buddhism.

—Ajahn Chah

Food for the Heart

.

The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth.

—Carl Jung

.

And now here it my secret, a very simple secret; 

it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; 

what is essential is invisible to the eye.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

.

question

.

 

‘What is grace?’ I asked God.

And He said, 
‘All that happens.’

Then He added, when I looked perplexed,

‘Could not lovers
say that every moment in their Beloved’s arms
was grace?

Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me

until the heart has 
wisdom.’


—St. John of the Cross
Love Poems from God
Daniel Ladinsky

.

However smart we may be, however rich and clever or loving 

or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, doesn't help us at all. 

The real power comes in to us from the beyond.

Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless,
and from below, where we do not understand. 

And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might 
and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, 
we shall continue empty.


—D. H. Lawrence

.

note to self

.

Ready-made knowledge can only be memorized; knowledge is not truly our own until we are capable of reproducing the given content in a form of our own making. Memorizing is but a negative condition; true, organic assimilation is impossible without inner transformation of what we learn. 

All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create. 

Only by his divine capacity for production is man truly a man; without it, no more than a tolerably well-devised machine. He who has not—with the same high impulse as the artist who out of the raw material calls forth the image of his soul—his own invention, who has not fashioned the image of his science in all its parts and features in perfect harmony with the archetype, has not truly grasped it.


—Schelling
On University Studies (Lecture 3)

.

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. 

Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.


—Henri Bergson

.

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

if you hanker

 

Laurence Winram

.

If you hanker for
a zenith of felicity
on the bed of the Divine
begin by dusting off
the wings of wonder
on your local pillow

Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane
Aim for airborne
with the eye of the heart
as your sky pilot
and soar to glory


—James Broughton

.

ditty of first desire

   

.

In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart. 

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale. 

(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening's end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love. 

—Federico García Lorca

.

 

 

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 breath 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

.

Love (Rescue)

    

.

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.


—Czesław Miłosz
The Way One Looks At Distant Things
Robert Haas version

.

y(our body is a divine stream

  

. 

Your body is a divine stream,
as is your spirit. 

When your two great rivers merge, one voice is found 
and the earth applauds 
in excitement. 
 
Shrines are erected to those songs 
the hand and heart have sung 
as they serve 
the world 

with a love, a love 
we cherish.


—St. John of the Cross

.

you're looking at you

 

.

Everything is natural. The light on your fingertips is starlight. Life begins with coiling — molecules and nebulae. Cruelty, selfishness, and vanity are boring. Each self is many selves. Reason is beauty. Light and darkness are arbitrary divisions.

Cleanliness is as undefinable and as natural as filth. The physiological body is pure spirit. Monotony is madness. The frontier is both outside and inside. The universe is the messiah. The senses are gods and goddesses. Where the body is — there are all things.


—Michael McClure

.

the one who is at home

 

.

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. 

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. 

This is true for the entire universe.

―The Upanishads

.

Each day I long so much to see
The true teacher. And each time
At dusk when I open the cabin
Door and empty the teapot,
I think I know where he is:
West of us in the forest.

Or perhaps I am the one
Who is out in the night,
The forest sand wet under
My feet, moonlight shining
On the sides of the birch trees,
The sea far off gleaming.

And he is the one who is 
At home. He sits in my chair
Calmly; he reads and prays
All night. He loves to feel
His own body around him;
He does not leave the house.


—Francisco Albanez
Robert Bly version

.

the spirit is the bouquet of nature

 

.

The divine manifestation is ubiquitous, only our eyes are not open to it. Awe is what moves us forward. 

Live from your own center. The divine lives within you.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary. 

Beyond the world of opposites is an unseen, but experienced, unity and identity in us all.

You must return with the bliss and integrate it.
The return is seeing that the radiance is everywhere.

The world is a match for us. We are a match for the world.
The spirit is the bouquet of nature.

Sanctify the place you are in.


—Joseph Campbell

.

part(icle

 

.

It is better not to view a particle as a permanent entity, but rather as an instantaneous event. Sometimes these events link together to create the illusion of permanent entities. 

[...] What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.  

Particles are just appearances. 

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.


—Erwin Schrodinger
Quantum Theory

.

"The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. 

He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. 

"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." 

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. 

We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism." 

"It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. 

Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, - objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast." 

"Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are." 


—Emerson

.

no thoughts, no world

 

.

A man goes to sleep in this hall. He dreams he has gone on a world tour, is roaming over hill and dale, forest and country, desert and sea, across various continents and after many years of weary and strenuous travel, returns to this country, reaches Tiruvannamalai, enters the ashram and walks into the hall.

Just at that moment he wakes up and finds he has not moved an inch but was sleeping where he lay down.

He has not returned after great effort to this hall, but is and always has been in the hall.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi


 

.

What is called ‘mind’ is a wondrous power residing in the Self. 
It causes all thoughts to arise. 
Apart from thoughts, there is no such thing as mind. 
Therefore, thought is the nature of mind. 

Apart from thoughts, there is no independent entity called the world.
In deep sleep there are no thoughts, and there is no world.
In the states of waking and dream, there are thoughts,
and there is a world also. 

Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web) out of itself and again withdraws it into itself, likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself.

When the mind comes out of the Self, the world appears.
Therefore, when the world appears (to be real), the Self does not appear; and when the Self appears (shines) the world does not appear. 

When one persistently inquires into the nature of the mind, the mind will end, leaving the Self (as the residue).
What is referred to as the Self is the Atman. 

The mind always exists only in dependence on something gross;
it cannot stay alone. 

It is the mind that is called the subtle body or the soul (jiva). 


—Sri Ramana Maharshi 

.

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, 1342 – c. 1416(23)

.

mean(ings

 

.

Everything has a hidden face. Hidden, not in the sense that it is intentionally concealed, but in that it can only be seen with different eyes than the physical. A different mode of perception must be used. The hidden face of Nature can only be seen with the heart. 

[...] Everything we encounter in the wildness of the world gives off its own electromagnetic pulse of communication. These waveforms are filled with meanings, living communications that touch us and that we experience as feelings.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
The Secret Teachings of Plants

.

In front of the breast lies the great world of activity; behind it, in the spinal cord, is the vast, illimitable, unfathomable ocean of consciousness, motionless and peaceful. 

The waves of the world are hurling themselves upon the breast, breaking there and sinking down into the deep peace of the ocean within. 

—Sri Anirvan

.

Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, mean egotism vanishes. 

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

―Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature and Selected Essays

.

 

 

I know you’re tired but come, this is the way. —Rumi

 

.

When the soul is naughted and transformed ... she is so full of peace that though she press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth from them than peace.


—Saint Catherine of Genoa

.

We are the same as plants, as trees,
as other people, as the rain that falls. 

We consist of that which is around us.

We are the same as everything.


—Buddhist teaching

.

peace will arrive

  

.

The whole world is you. 

Yet you keep thinking there is something else.

—Hsueh-Feng 

. 

  

… whatever has been pierced by the searchlight of the intellect is instantaneously transformed into a mere 'thing', a quantifiable object for our thought that is henceforth only mechanically related to other objects. The paradoxical expression of a modern sage, “we perceive only that which is dead,” is a lapidary formulation of a deep truth.


—Ludwig Klages
On Consciousness and Life in The Biocentric Worldview

.

  

in every breath

if you're the center

of your own desires

you'll lose the grace

of your beloved

but if in every breath

you blow away

your self claim

the ecstasy of love

will soon arrive

in every breath

if you're the center

of your own thoughts

the sadness of autumn

will fall on you

but if in every breath

you strip naked

just like a winter

the joy of spring

will grow from within

all your impatience

comes from the push

for gain of patience

let go of the effort

and peace will arrive

all your unfulfilled desires

are from your greed

for gain of fulfillments

let go of them all

and they will be sent as gifts

fall in love with

the agony of love

not the ecstasy

then the beloved

will fall in love with you

—Rumi

Ghazal (Ode) 323

Nader Khalili translation

.

the first peace

.

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. 

The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.

—Heȟáka Sápa, Black Elk
The Sacred Pipe, 1953

.

wait

.

God lurks in the gaps. —Jorge Luis Borges

 

.

We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. 

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.


—Annie Dillard
on the meaning of life

.

To be human we need to experience the end of the world.

We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.


—Hélène Cixous
from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

.

Asahel Curtis, Ms. Nettleton

.

you are this

 

.

Rest in peace.

You are the unchangeable Awareness in which all activity takes place.

Always rest in peace. 

You are eternal Being, unbounded and undivided. 
Just keep Quiet. All is well. Keep Quiet Here and Now. 

You are Happiness, you are Peace, you are Freedom. 
Do not entertain any notions that you are in trouble. 

Be kind to yourself. Open to your Heart and simply Be. 
Those who know This know Everything. 
If not, even the most learned know nothing at all.


—Papaji

.

i divide, in the sky, in the the seams, between the beams

 

.

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness, 
When your fears surrender to your strengths, 
You will begin to experience 
That all existence 
Is a teeming sea of infinite life. 

In a handful of ocean water
You could not count all the finely tuned
Musicians 
Who are acting stoned 
For very intelligent and sane reasons 
And of course are becoming extremely sweet 
And wild! 

In a handful of the sky and earth, 
In a handful of God, 
We cannot count 
All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there 
Behind the mysterious veil. 

True art reveals there is no void 
Or darkness. 
There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic 
In this luminous, brimming 
Playful world. 


—Hafiz

.

shuddering before the beautiful

 

.

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)

.