What in your life is calling you?When all the noise is silenced,
the meetings adjourned,
the lists laid aside,
and the wild iris blooms by itself
in the dark forest,
what still pulls on your soul?
—Rumi
Through what roads and how did you find my soul?
Who taught you the steps that would lead you to me?
What flower, what stone, what smoke revealed my abode?
—Pablo Neruda
milky night
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
—Czesław Miłosz
[T]here is nothing before language, for there is no consciousness, and therefore no world, without a system of signs. In fact, it is the speaking-being that has created this universe, even if language excludes him from it. This means that we are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is.
We need poetry, not to regain this intimacy, which is impossible, but to remember that we miss it and to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in silence.
—Yves Bonnefoy
The Art of Poetry no. 69
As soon as one speaks, as soon as one enters the medium of language, one loses that very singularity.
[...] Once I speak, I am never and no longer myself, alone and unique.—Jacques Derrida
The Gift of Death.
Go deeper
Past thoughts into silence.
Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.
Let love consume all that is left of you.
—Kabir
You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything.
God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.—Gustave Thibon
There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.
And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
—Pablo Neruda
If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will never harm another, and they will come to find they hold everything you want.
If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will no longer lift anything to your mouth that might wound your precious land, that sacred earth that is your body.
If you put your soul against this oar with me, the power that made the universe will enter your sinew from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm that lives within us.
Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give.
Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack of the past and future?
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacity will find no rest.
Be kind to yourself, dear - to our innocent follies.
Forget any sound or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.
If you put your heart against the earth with me, in serving every creature, our Beloved will enter you from our sacred realm and we will be, we will be happy.
—Rumi
Love Poems From God
Daniel Ladinsky version
.
The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and inter-dependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind.
Words create words, reality is silent.
—Nisargadatta
You are the only faithful student you have.
All the others leave eventually.
Have you been making yourself shallow
with making others eminent?
Just remember, when you're in union,
you don't have to fear
that you'll be drained.
The command comes to speak,
and you feel the ocean
moving through you.
Then comes, Be silent,
as when the rain stops,
and the trees in the orchard
begin to draw moisture
up into themselves.
—Rumi
Mathnawi, V, 3195-3219)
Coleman Barks version
.
silence.isalookingbird:theturning;edge,oflife(inquiry before snow—E. E. Cummings
.
No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.
No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.
Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.
He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium.
—Ernst Cassirer
Philosopher (1874 - 1945)
Our conscious now—what William James dubbed the “specious present"—is actually an interval of about three seconds. That is the span over which our brains knit up arriving sense data into a unified experience.
—Jim Holt
When Einstein Walked with Gödel
The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.
Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, — or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
... We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.
—William James
The Principles of Psychology
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.
—John Donne 1572 – 1631
The Good Morrow
The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention.
The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone.
In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently.
We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff.
Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! Your world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab!
—William James
The Principles of Psychology
Lord, the air smells good today,
straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown
across the garden,
free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer,
the birds in praise
the first blue violets kneeling.
Whatever came from Being
is caught up in being,
drunkenly forgetting the way back.
—Jelaluddin Rumi
The time of judging
Who is drunk or sober,
Who is right and who is wrong,
Who is closer to god, and who is farther away,
All that is over.
This caravan is led instead by a great delight,
The simple joy that sits with us now.
That is the grace.
—Hafiz
In the great head-end which has been mostly darkness springs up myriads of twinkling stationary lights and myriads of trains of moving lights of many different directions. It is as though activity from one of those local places which continued restless in the darkened main-mass suddenly spread far and wide and invaded all.
The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning.
It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.
Now as the waking body rouses, sub-patterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down into the unlit tracks of the stalk-piece of the scheme. Strings of flashing and travelling sparks engage the lengths of it. This means that the body is up and rises to meet its waking day.
—Sir Charles Sherrington, English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s
Man on His Nature (1942), p. 178
Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredrome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag. The neocortex has ridges, valleys, and folds because the brain kept remodeling itself though space was tight. We take for granted the ridiculous-sounding yet undeniable fact that each person carries around atop the body a complete universe in which trillions of sensations, thoughts, and desires stream. They mix privately, silently, while agitating on many levels, some of which we’re not aware of, thank heavens.If we needed to remember how to work the bellows of the lungs or the writhing python of digestion, we’d be swamped by formed and forming memories, and there’d be no time left for buying cute socks. My brain likes cute socks. But it also likes kisses. And asparagus. And watching boat-tailed grackles. And biking. And drinking Japanese green tea in a rose garden. There’s the nub of it — the brain is personality’s whereabouts. It’s also a stern warden, and, at times, a self-tormentor. It’s where catchy tunes snag, and cravings keep tugging. Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations. It’s also an impersonal landscape where minute bolts of lightning prowl and strike. A hall of mirrors, it can contemplate existentialism, the delicate hooves of a goat, and its own birth and death in a matter of seconds. It’s blunt as a skunk, and a real gossip hound, but also voluptuous, clever, playful, and forgiving.
The brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death. That monologue often seems like a barrier between us and our neighbors and loved ones, but actually it unites us at a fundamental level, as nothing else can. It takes many forms: our finding similarities among seemingly unrelated things, wadding up worries into tangled balls of obsession difficult to pierce even with the spike of logic, painting elaborate status or romance fantasies in which we star, picturing ourselves elsewhere and elsewhen. Happily storing information outside our bodies, the brain extends itself through time and space by creating extensions to the senses such as telescopes and telephones. How evocation becomes sound in Ravel’s nostalgic “Pour une Infante Défunte,” a plaintive-sounding dance for a princess from a faraway time, is an art of the brain. So is the vast gallantry of imagining how other people, and even other animals, experience life.
The brain is not completely hardwired, though at times it may seem so. Someone once wisely observed that if one’s only tool is a key, then every problem will seem to be a lock. Thus the brain analyzes as a way of life in Western cultures, abhors contradiction, honors formal logic, and abides by many rules. Reasoning we call it, as if it were a spice. Cuisine may be a good metaphor for the modishness and malleability of the thinking brain. In some non-Western cultures the brain doesn’t reason through logic but by relating things to the environment, in a process that includes contradiction, conflict, and the sudden appearance of random forces and events. The biologist Alexander Luria was struck by this when he interviewed Russian nomads in 1931. “All the bears up north are white,” he said. “I have a friend up there who saw a bear. What color was the bear?” A nomad stared at him, puzzled: “How am I supposed to know? Ask your friend!” These are but two styles in the art of the brain. All people are alike enough to be recognizable, even predictable at times, yet everyone has a slightly different flavor of mind. Whole cultures do. Just different enough to keep things interesting, or, depending on your point of view, frightening.
The brain analyzes, the brain loves, the brain detects a whiff of pine and is transported to a childhood summer spent at Girl Scout camp in the Poconos, the brain tingles under the caress of a feather. But the brain is silent, dark, and dumb. It feels nothing. It sees nothing. The art of the brain is to transcend those daunting limitations and canvass the world. The brain can hurl itself across mountains or into outer space. The brain can imagine an apple and experience it as real. Indeed, the brain barely knows the difference between an imagined apple and an observed one. Hence the success of athletes visualizing perfect performances, and authors luring readers into their picturesque empires. In one instant, the brain can rule the world as a self-styled god, and the next succumb to helplessness and despair.
Until now, using the slang we take for granted, I’ve been saying the “brain” when what I really mean is that fantasia of self-regard we call the “mind.” The brain is not the mind, the mind inhabits the brain. Like a ghost in a machine, some say. Mind is the comforting mirage of the physical brain. An experience, not an entity. Another way to think of mind may be as Saint Augustine thought of God, as an emanation that’s not located in one place, or one form, but exists throughout the universe. An essence, not just a substance.And, of course, the mind isn’t located only in the brain. The mind reflects what the body senses and feels, it’s influenced by a caravan of hormones and enzymes. Each mind inhabits a private universe of its own devising that changes daily, depending on the vagaries of medication, intense emotions, pollution, genes, or countless other personal-size cataclysms. In Kafka’s fiction, a character finds the question “How are you?” impossible to answer. We slur over the sensory details of each day. Otherwise life would be too exhausting to live. The brain knows how to idle when necessary and yet be ready to rev up at the sound of a bear claw scratching over rock, or a math teacher calling out one’s name.
Among the bad jokes evolution has played on us are these: (1) we have brains that can conceive of states of perfection they can’t achieve; (2) we have brains that compare our insides to other people’s outsides; (3) we have brains desperate to stay alive, yet we are finite beings who perish. There are many more, of course.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the art and beauty of the brain, because it seems too abstract and hidden an empire, a dense jungle of neurons. The idea that a surgeon might reach into it to revise its career seems as dangerous as taking the lid off a time bomb and discovering thousands of wires. Which one controls the timing mechanism? Getting it wrong may be deadly. Still, there are bomb squads and there are brain surgeons. The art of the brain is to liken and learn, never resist a mystery, and question everything, even itself.
—Diane Ackerman
The Enchanted Loom
An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
.It seems that life is constructed in such a way that no one can fulfill it alone. Just as it’s not enough for a flower to have pistils and stamens, an insect or breeze must introduce a pistil to a stamen. Life contains its own absence, which only an Other can fulfill. It seems the world is the summation of Others.
And yet, we neither know nor are told that we will fulfill each other.
We lead our scattered lives, perfectly unaware of each other or at times, allowed to find the Others’s presence disagreeable. Why is it, that the world is constructed so loosely? A horse fly, bathed in light, flies in close to a blooming flower.
I, too, might have been someone’s horse fly.
Perhaps you, too, had once been my breeze.
—Hirokazu Kore-Eda
from Air Doll.
.
Change your ways of feeling and thinking, take stock of them and examine them closely. You are in bondage by inadvertence. Attention liberates. You are taking so many things for granted.
Begin to question. The most obvious things are the most doubtful. Ask yourself such questions as:
Was I really born?
Am I really so-and-so?
How do I know that I exist?
Who are my parents?
Have they created me, or have I created them?
Must I believe all I am told about myself?
Who am I, anyhow?
You have put so much energy into building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much on demolishing it. In fact, demolition is easy, for the false dissolves when it is discovered.
—Nisargadatta Maharaj
.
All good things approach their goal crookedly.
Like cats, they arch their backs,
they purr inwardly over their approaching happiness:
all good things laugh.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant …
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise!
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
—Emily Dickinson
Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And in comes meaning thousandfold, comes at long last over everyone.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
 |
David Whyte |
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature–not his Father but his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. From time to time she claims kinship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own.
—Henry David Thoreau
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”
The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”
The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”
The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”
The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”
The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”
Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”
To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”
—Útmutató a Léleknek
Life after Birth
.
Karl Jaspers calls the primal connection that the first people had with the universe Pre-Axial Consciousness. David Suzuki finds this Pre-Axial Consciousness among aboriginal people today as well.
"Aboriginal people do not believe they end at their skin or fingertips. The earth as mother is real to them, and their history, culture and purpose are embodied in the land. The aboriginal sense of the interconnection of everything in the world is also readily demonstrable and irrefutable scientifically."
Indeed, the new quantum physics reveals, as Ilia Delio says, that "matter is not composed of basic building blocks but complicated webs of relations. Interconnectedness lies at the core of all that exists."
—Fr. Richard Rohr
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.
—Alice Walker
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
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 ChahFood 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
‘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 lovingor 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
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
 |
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
