existence has its own order

.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

―Cormac McCarthy

Evening Redness in the West

.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—Shakespeare

Hamlet

.

 

Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.

They stared in desire

at the naked abyss.

If you love me, said mind,

take that step into silence.

If you love me, said body,

turn and exist.


—Anne Stevenson
vertigo

.

i am that

.

Watching my hand; He is moving it.

Hearing my voice; He is speaking.

Walking from room to room --

No one here but Him.


—Rumi
Andrew Harvey version

.

Staying very still in the darkness,

I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed.


—Haruki Murakami

.

no void, no darkness

 

.

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

.

no(thingness

 

.

Here, even the various mind-pleasing blossoming flowers
And attractive shining supreme golden houses
Have no inherently existent maker at all. 

They are set up through the power of thought.
Through the power of conceptuality the world is established.


—Buddha

 

.

When Buddha said "Whatever depends on conditions

Is empty of its own inherent existence,"

What is more amazing 

Than this marvellous advise!


—Tsonghkapa

.

a song on the end of the world

.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now. 

As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now. 

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he is much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.


—Czesław Miłosz

.

sorrow arrow

   

 .

You sit in your body, quietly making blood 

Wild blood 

Bird of the world

—Emily Kendal Frey

.

earth is made of non-earth elements

 

💗

Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

—Dan Gerber

.

Take my hand.
We will walk.
We will only walk.

We will enjoy our walk
without thinking of arriving anywhere.

Walk peacefully.
Walk happily.
Our walk is a peace walk.
Our walk is a happiness walk.

Then we learn
that there is no peace walk;
that peace is the walk;
that there is no happiness walk;
that happiness is the walk.

We walk for ourselves.
We walk for everyone
always hand in hand.

Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.

Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom under our feet.

Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Print on Earth your love and happiness.

Earth will be safe
when we feel in us enough safety.


—Thich Nhat Hanh

.

larger loves

.

steep

.

We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. 

Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.


—Charles Darwin, 1868

.

Sons and daughters of the earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness.

You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? 

Well, you were like to have perished of hunger.

You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for your intellect: do you not see that the very law of your own nature makes these a necessity for you?


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

.

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968

.

the lesson of Nature

 

.

It is, admittedly, a strange thought: that one could achieve transcendence by immersing oneself in lived experience, that transcendence was not to be found “out there,” but only in a deeper exploration of life. But this idea is precisely what drew young Nietzsche to Emerson.


—John Kaag
Hiking With Nietzsche

.

There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. 

This is the thought of identity - yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. 

In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. 

Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.

The quality of being, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.


—Walt Whitman

.

Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself. —William Blake

 .

Much of Earth’s life moves and communicates on a time scale 

humans cannot hope to comprehend. 

—Mose Feldenkrais

.

The plant that directs its growth tendency to the light does not understand the arithmetic of wavelengths; it simply perceives light as good in the form of a positive affection. […] 

Today’s botanists have used ingenious experiments to confirm the subjectivity of plants. They observed that identical plant clones — multiple vegetative twins whose DNA sequences are identical to the letter — behave differently, even though room temperature and substrate moisture are the same. They are clones, but their bodies unfold into individual shapes. They individually choose between different options. […]

Every sprout has its own preferences. Each is an individual, not simply an automaton carrying out a genetic blueprint. […]

Intelligence, according to the meaning of the Latin verb intelligere, means to be in between, to be able to choose. It signifies the ability to make a decision, and hence the judgment of a distinct self for whom a choice means something — survival, growth, flourishing. In this sense intelligence and life are one and the same thing.


—Andreas Weber
The Biology of Wonder

.

release, and radiance, and roses

 

.

You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love. 

—Rumi

.

We say release, and radiance, and roses,
and echo upon everything that's known;
and yet, behind the world our names enclose is
the nameless: our true archetype and home.

The sun seems male, and earth is like a woman,the field is humble, and the forest proud; but over everything we say, inhuman,
moves the forever-undetermined god.

We grow up; but the world remains a child.
Star and flower, in silence, watch us go.
And sometimes we appear to be the final
exam they must succeed on. And they do.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Stephen Mitchell version

.

You are music and rivers, palaces, angels, and skies,

an endless rose, infinite and intimate ...

—Jorge Luis Borges

Paul Weinfield version

The Endless Rose

.

You are flawed, you are stuck in old patterns,
you become carried away with yourself.

Indeed you are quite impossible in many ways.

And still, you are beautiful beyond measure.


—John Welwood

.

delicious trouble

 

.

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless

Each of us with his or her
right upon the earth,

Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,

Each of us here
as divinely as any is here.

[...]


The sun and stars that float in the open air... the appleshaped earth and we upon it... surely the drift of them is something grand;

I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,

And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot or reconnoissance,

And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,

And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

[...]



To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same; 

Every spear of grass - the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women,
and all that concerns them,

All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. 


—Walt Whitman

.

This the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.

For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this is the Soul's feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.

These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.


—Plotinus

.

this pale blue dot

.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.


—Carl Sagan
Pale Blue Dot, excerpt

.

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty , how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)



—E. E. Cummings

.

 

everything is connected and the web is holy —Marcus Aurelius

.

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

—John Muir

.

starting with little things

  

.

Start with little things.

Love the earth like a mole, 
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands --

Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.

Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.


—William Stafford 
The Way It Is

.

the seed never sees the flower —Zen Proverb

.

A famous thorny issue in philosophy is the so-called infinite regress problem. For example, if we say that the properties of a diamond can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its carbon atoms, that the properties of a carbon atom can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its protons, neutrons and electrons, that the properties of a proton can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its quarks, and so on, then it seems that we're doomed to go on forever trying to explain the properties of the constituent parts. 

The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis offers a radical solution to this problem: at the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all! In other words, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not from properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks. 

The external physical reality is therefore more than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it can have many interesting properties while its parts have no intrinsic properties at all.

 

—Max Tegmark (1967 - )
Our Mathematical Univere

.

You're water.
We're the millstone.

You're wind.
We're dust blown up into shapes.

You're spirit.
We're the opening and closing of our hands.

You're the clarity.
We're the language that tries to say it.

You're joy.
We're all the different kinds of laughing!


—Rumi (1207 - 1273)

.

every form is an experiencing form

the observable universe

.

The sensibility in perceiving all things as a sign of the Mystery 

is the tranquil truth of the human being.

—Fr. Giussani

.

 

Magic, in its most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form that one perceives—from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are different from our very own.

—David Abram

.

We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.


—Wendell Berry

.

every(thing is necessary

 

.

Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way. 

Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God.


—Søren Kierkegaard
Works of Love (1847)

.

There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson.

Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling.

Of the telling there is no end. And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all, all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing

.

two orders of reality & the light of consciousness (always a finer constitution)

 

.

[Physicist David] Bohm suggested that the explicate order is extracted from the implicate order in a similar way in which a holographic image is extracted from a series of swirls and shadings into a three-dimensional image when illuminated by laser light. 

The illumination that extracts the physical universe from the implicate order is the light of consciousness. 

In this model the act of observation draws ‘in-formation’ out of the implicate order and manifests it in the explicate order. Bohm was keen to use the term in-formation rather than information. By this he meant a process that actually ‘forms’ the recipient.


—Anthony Peake
Infinite Mindfield

.

 

 

We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle 'nature'. We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.


—Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
The Critique of Pure Reason 

.

the nature of things

Sweden, 1925

.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.


—Henry David Thoreau
from Economy, 1854

.

Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of “things” that are in this or that state but in terms of “processes” instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another.  

The properties of “things” manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction—that is to say, at the edges of the processes—and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one. 

This is the vertiginous dive taken by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Dirac—into the depth of the nature of things.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

.

do you hear the footsteps in the other room?

 

.

We are all made of bits moving in complicated quantum motions, but when we look closely at those bits, we find that they are located out at the farthest boundaries of space. I don’t know anything less intuitive about the world than this.

Getting our collective head around the Holographic Principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics.


—Leonard Susskind
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

.

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. 

What is there then that can be taken as true? 

Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. 


—René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

.

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light steps, soft drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is just leaving,
the night yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
are just around the corner,
figurations of time
at the turn of this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward,
asleep with all five senses awake,
rain, light steps, a murmuring of syllables,
air and water, words without weight:
what we were and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time, great grief,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the wet asphalt sparkles,
the steam rises and walks,
the night unfolds and beholds me,
you are you and your waist of fog,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, slow lightning,
you cross the street and come in through my forehead,
footsteps of water upon both my eyelids,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt sparkles, you cross the street,
the fog wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the wave of your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn both of my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a welling up of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
years go by, moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the other room?
neither here nor there: you hear them
in another time that is also this time,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight or location,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the garden,
lightning has nested there among the leaves,
a restless garden lazily drifting
— come in, your shadow covers this page.


—Octavio Paz
As One Listens To The Rain
Paul Weinfeld version

.

the mind has no existence by itself

.

.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance - by your sufferance. 

See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

.

The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. 

And it is entirely private. 

Take it to be a dream and be done with it.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

The vast marvel is to be alive… 

The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. 

Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul.

There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

—D.H. Lawrence

The Apocalypse

.

wait

.

every beating heart

lotus pod
Karen Lindquist

.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. 

A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

—Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

.

largerloves

.

the good secret

   

Gregory Colbert

.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Then when you see what is around you as not other-than-you, and all and everything as the existence of the One; when you do not see anything else with Him or in him; but see Him in everything as yourself and at the same time as the nonexistence of yourself; then what you see is the truth.


—Ibn al-Arabi

.

Love all.

Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand.

Love every leaf and every ray of light.

Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment.

If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.


—Dostoevsky

.

this is how love catches up and wants to be our friend, as we hold 

each other, and the good secret inside slides forth continuous

—Rumi

.