Imagine better than the best you know. —Neville Goddard

  

.

If it looks like wisdom but is unkind, it’s not wisdom.

If it feels like love but is not wise, it’s not love.

—Lama Surya Das

.

all my relations

.

In their relationship, plants and mycorrhizal fungi enact a polarity: plant shoots engage with the light and air, while the fungi and plant roots engage with the solid ground. Plants pack up light and carbon dioxide into sugars and lipids. Mycorrhizal fungi unpack nutrients bound up in rock and decomposing material. 

These are fungi with a dual niche: part of their life happens within the plant, part in the soil. They are stationed at the entry point of carbon into terrestrial life cycles and stitch the atmosphere into relation with the ground. To this day, mycorrhizal fungi help plants cope with drought, heat and the many other stresses life on land has presented from the very beginning, as do the symbiotic fungi that crowd into plant leaves and stems. 

What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.

—Merlin Sheldrake,

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures

 

.

 

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called “true enough.” 

I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

―Rupert Sheldrake

.

Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego; which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

—Terence McKenna

.

I need to be silent for a while. Worlds are forming in my heart.

—Meister Eckhart

Daniel Ladinsky version

from Expands His Being

.

wilder(ness

 

.

The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and reaction that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people.


—Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass, pg 256

.

The inhabited regions of earth – if prehistoric people had such a conception – were simply the location of a band within some traditionally determined hunting area. The idea of wilderness with connotations of wasteland, badlands, or hinterlands was not conceivable, just as a round earth is not conceivable to people who believe in a flat earth. 

Paul Shepard argues that space for prehistoric people “is a society of named places – not categories such as ‘river’ or ‘mountain’ but proper names, marked in tribal memory and sometimes in myth… Seeing all nature as a society may have made possible the evolution of intelligence to that acute degree of awareness without which the vast physical universe would be found terrifying, even intolerable”. 

Home was a natural world of plants, animals, and land with which archaic people were bound. 

The idea of “being lost in the wilderness” logically necessitates a geographical referent conceptualized as home as distinct from all other places; but for Paleolithic people home was where they were and where they had always been. 

They could not become lost in the wilderness, since it did not exist. The conjecture that the conscious life of Paleolithic people was devoid of such ideas as “being away from home” or “in the wilderness away from the inhabited regions of earth” is thus plausible.


—Max Oelschlaeger
The Idea of Wilderness

.

… stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course. —Lao Tzu

 

      .

They asked al-Hallaj, "To which religious School do you belong?
he answered, "God's own."

He who limned 
a thousand worlds with paint -
you layabout! - do you expect
He'll use your color or mine?

Our paints and tints
are but opinions and fantasy,
He is colorless
and we must adopt His hue.

Look: a shadow lies crooked upon the ground because the very earth is laid rough; but no, that crookedness is straightness itself, for the perfection, the "straightness" of the eyebrow is in its sinuous curve.

Only because it is bent
is this piece of wood a bow.
Reality is a sphere: wherever you place your finger,
there is its dead center.


—Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
Divine Flashes

.

This place where you are right now, 

God circled on a map for you.


—Hafiz

.

Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you. —Rumi

.

I pray in words. I pray in poems. 

I want to learn to pray through breathing, through dreams and sleeplessness, through love and renunciation. 

I pray through snow that falls outside the window. 

I pray with the tears that do not end.

—Anna Kamienska

In That Great River: A Notebook

.

Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
 

—Franz Kafka

Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923

.

larger loves

.

there are an infinite number of worlds

.

 

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. 

Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

.

whiskeyriver

.

Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

.

The many stuffs—matter, energy, waves, phenomena—that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all; but from other worlds. 

Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.


—Nelson Goodman
Ways of Worldmaking

.

[...] there is something in the transfer, in the belief, in the folklore of what you do as a cook that makes your food that much different or that much better. 

If I want to believe that the enzymes (in the Kalbi Marinade mother sauce) break down the tough sinew and protein in the meat, I transfer that energy to the marinade, and that belief and that spirit transfers to the food. Somehow it's going to transfer to you and we're all going to be ok.


—Roy Choi 
from his excellent Masterclass

.

A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.


—Swami Sivananda

.

I have been many things,

Before becoming as I am.

I have been a narrow multi-colored sword.

I have been a tear in the air.

I have lived as the faintest of stars.

I have been a word among letters,

A book among words.


—Taliesin, 500 ACE

.

Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone. —Tomas Tranströmer

  

.

This is a place where a door might be
here where I am standing
In the light outside all the walls

there would be a shadow here
all day long
and a door into it
where now there is me
and somebody would come and knock
on this air
long after I have gone
and there in front of me a life
would open


—W. S. Merwin

.

 

Tie your heart at night to mine, Love,
and we will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.

Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky’s questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow.


—Pablo Neruda

.

question

 

.

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. 

Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

.

What do you have to do?

Pack your bags,

Go to the station without them,

Catch the train,

And leave your self behind.

 

—Wei Wu Wei

.

whiskeyriver

.

how trees talk to each other

 

.

Like humans, trees are extremely social creatures, utterly dependent on each other for their survival. And, as it is with us, communication is key.

After scientists discovered pine tree roots could transfer carbon to other pine tree roots in a lab, ecology professor Suzanne Simard set out to figure out how they did it. What she discovered was a vast tangled web of hair-like mushroom roots — an information super highway allowing trees to communicate important messages to other members of their species and related species, such that the forest behaves as “a single organism.”

The idea that trees could share information underground was controversial. Some of Simard’s colleagues thought she was crazy. Having trouble finding research funding, she eventually set out to conduct the experiments herself, planting 240 birch, fir and cedar trees in a Canadian forest. She covered the seedlings with plastic bags and filled them with various types of carbon gas. An hour later she took the bags off, ran her Geiger counter over their leaves and heard “the most beautiful sound,” she says in the Ted Talk.

“Crrrrr… It was the sound of Birch talking to Fir,” she said. “Birch was saying, ‘hey, can I help you?’” “And Fir was saying yeah, can you send me some of your carbon? Somebody threw a shade cloth over me.”

She also scanned the cedar’s leaves, and as she suspected — silence. The cedar was in its own world. It was not connected into the fungal web linking birches and firs. The birch and fir were in a “lively two-way conversation,” Simard says. When the fir was shaded by the birch in summer, the birch sent more carbon to it. When the birch was leafless in the winter, the fir sent more carbon to it.

The two trees were totally interdependent, Simard discovered, “like yin and yang.”

That’s when Simard knew she was onto something big… In the past, we assumed trees were competing with each other for carbon, sunlight, water and nutrients. But Simard’s work showed us trees were also cooperators.

They communicate by sending mysterious chemical and hormonal signals to each other via the mycelium, to determine which trees need more carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon, and which trees have some to spare, sending the elements back and forth to each other until the entire forest is balanced. “The web is so dense there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single foot step,” Simard says.

The mycelium web connects mother trees with baby trees, allowing them to feed their young. A single mother tree can provide nourishment for hundreds of smaller trees in the under-story of her branches, she says. Mother trees even recognize their kin, sending them more mycelium and carbon annd reducing their own root size to make room for their babies.

This new understanding of tree communication had Simard worried about the implications of clear-cutting. When mother trees are injured or dying, they send their wisdom onto the next generation. They can’t do this is if they are all wiped out at once. “You can take out one or two hub trees, but there comes a tipping point, if you take out one too many, the whole system collapses,” she says. Often clear-cut forests are replanted with only one or two species. “These simplified forests lack complexity making them vulnerable to infection and bugs.”

To ensure the survival of the planet’s lungs at a time when they are most crucial, Simard suggests four simple solutions to end the damage caused by clear cutting :

1. Get out in the forest more — this in and of itself will remind us how interdependent we are on this ecosystem.

2. Save old growth forests as repositories of genes, mother trees and mycelium networks.

3. Where we do cut, save the “legacy” trees so they can pass on important information to the next generation.

4. Regenerate cut patches with diverse native species

.

what speaks in the blood

  

.

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. They do various things which irresistibly draw men near them; each one selects a certain man.

The Deer shoots the man, who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home and eat it.

Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and hides in there, but the man doesn't know it.

When enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all at once.

The men who don't have Deer in them will also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some.

This is called "takeover from inside".


—Gary Snyder

.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. 

It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. 

Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say.
Watch and listen. 

You are the result of the love of thousands.


—Linda Hogan

 

. 

 

be light.

as minerals in the ground rise inside trees
and become tree,

as plant faces an animal
and enters the animal,

so a human
can put down the heavy
body baggage and
be light.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

 

.

 

 

 

Bumble Bees, Levitation and Earth’s Magnetic Grid

   

.

Aerodynamically (a bee) can’t fly…. there’s a hollow cavity inside his system and when he beats his wings he starts to resonate with this energy that goes back and forth similar to a guitar strumming on one side of the room and hitting the same chord on the other side of the room, or somebody hitting a high C and breaking a crystal. It’s the same thing. It’s resonance. 

(He) eventually reaches the resonance of the field around him (this resonance is the Earth’s rotational frequency due to its spin and is measured on today’s devices as 7.83Hz). 

Once the bumblebee hits that resonance, the frequency of his surroundings, he becomes a free agent. He creates a magnetic bubble around himself and he can go anywhere he wants… That’s not in any of the science books…. We have a conventional way of doing things and we have a natural way of doing things and they’re totally different. They’re diametrically opposed in many many cases.


—Ralph Ring

 .

Move over, Schrödinger’s cat – birds may be the true quantum animals. 

The bath of cells in avian eyes could prolong a delicate quantum state that helps to explain how some birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field. 

It is thought that light reacts with receptors in the birds’ eyes to produce two molecules with unpaired electrons, whose spins are linked by a special state called quantum entanglement. 

If the relative alignment of the spins is affected by Earth’s magnetic field, the electron pair can cause chemical changes that the bird can sense. 

In 2009, researchers at the University of Oxford calculated that such entanglement must last for at least 100 microseconds for the internal compass to work. But how the sensitive state of quantum entanglement could survive that long in the eye was a mystery. 

Calculations by Zachary Walters of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, now show that interactions with cells in the bird’s eye allow the electron pairs to stay entangled for longer through a dampening effect. 

Rather like the way a car with stiff shock absorbers takes longer to stop bouncing after going over a bump, the signal from the electron pair dies away more slowly under strong interactions with the cellular bath. 

Predicting exactly how long entanglement is sustained won’t be possible until the  mechanism is better understood, says Walters. But he believes there’s a good chance his model could account for the 100 microseconds. 

Erik Gauger part of the Oxford team, is intrigued by the findings. “It seems possible that this might be the mechanism allowing for the persistence of quantum coherence,” he says. “But it is probably too early to say for sure."

—Gilead Amit

.
newscientist

more 
.

bee(loved

 

  

.

A pink gentian grows in southern Africa, which is pollinated by handsome, furry carpenter bees. The flowers of the gentian spread their petals wide, revealing to all a curving white style and three large stamens. Each stamen ends in a long thick anther that seems to be covered in yellow pollen, an obvious temptation to any passing pollen-feeding insect. But that is something of an illusion.

The yellow anther is hollow, and the pollen is held inside. The only way it can escape is through a tiny hole right at the top of the anther and there is only one way of extracting it. The bee knows how.

As it alights on an anther, it continues beating its wings but lowers the frequency so that the note of its buzz falls to approximately middle C. This causes the anther to vibrate at just the right frequency needed to release the pollen and the grains spout out of the hole at the top of the yellow fountain. The bee then industriously gathers it up and packs it into the carrying baskets on its back legs.


—Sir David Attenborough

.

two sources of order

  

.

I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn 
between an organism and its environment. The environment is in you. 

It is passing through you. You are breathing it in and out. 

You and every other creature.


—Wendell Berry

.

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order.

Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. 

We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.

—Stuart Kauffman

.

dreaming ourselves awake

   

.

Oftentimes have I heard you speak
of one who commits a wrong as though
he were not one of you
but a stranger unto you
and an intruder upon your world

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous
cannot rise beyond the highest
which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak
cannot fall lower than the lowest
which is in you also

And as a single leaf turns not yellow
but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong
without the hidden will of you all

 
—Kahlil Gibran

.

The world is nothing but the picture of your own "I” consciousness. As if you had received a phone call telling you that you are, and immediately the world appears. 

When you are in deep sleep and you feel that you are awake, the dream world appears simultaneously. 

With the (knowledge) “I Am,” the world appears in the waking and dream states.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

All architecture is what you do to it
when you look upon it, 

(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone?
or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

All music is what awakes from you
when you are reminded by the instruments,

It is not the violins and the cornets,
it is not the oboe nor the beating drums,
nor the score of the baritone singer singing 
his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus,
nor that of the women's chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they.


—Walt Whitman 
Leaves of Grass

.

door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of the pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined, 

door of being: open your being
and wake ....

—Octavio Paz
Sandstone, excerpt

.

 

love is the whole and more than all —E. E. Cummings

  

.

We’ve seen nonlocality pop up all over the place: in experiments on the quantum realm, in the paradoxes of black holes, in the grand structure of the universe, in the maelstrom of particle collisions.

In all these examples, physics enters a twilight zone.

Things can outrun light; cause and effect can be reversed; distance can lose meaning; two objects may actually be one. The universe becomes spooky.


—George Musser
Spooky Action at a Distance

.

.

 

Love is not exactly a relation between two people, but a relation between two multiplicities. And it is also a kind of construction, the construction of a landscape, of a universe that can include these multiplicities. So, in a certain way it is work of art. The loving subject is an artist, and I would say the subject in general has to be thought not simply as a self-related identity but as an artist. Subjectivity is a matter of operations, and those operations are alterations. 

There is a becoming-other in the very constitution of the other as an object of love. 


—J. Rancière
Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition

 

.

Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

[…]

I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.

—Robert Macfarlane

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

.

the last word

.

Total awareness opens the way to understanding, and when any given situation is understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest, and the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true, or at least as nearly true as it is possible for a verbal expression of the ineffable to be. 

One in all and all in One; samsara and nirvana are the same; multiplicity is unity, and unity is not so much one as not-two; all things are void, and yet all things are the Dharma — Body of the Buddha — and so on. So far as conceptual knowledge is concerned, such phrases are completely meaningless. 

It is only when there is understanding that they make sense. For when there is understanding, there is an experienced fusion of the End with the Means, of the Wisdom, which is the timeless realization of Suchness, with the Compassion which is Wisdom in action.

Love is the last word


—Aldous Huxley

.

more at

brainpickings

.