Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

   

.

Matter, which appears to be dense, according to physics actually is made up mostly of empty space, with a few very small particles moving around like planets. At high energy, other particles pass through what appears to be solid matter.

… As you probe more deeply into matter, it appears to have more and more subtle properties. In my view, the implications of physics seem to be that nature is so subtle that it could be almost alive or intelligent.

… The question is whether matter is rather crude and mechanical, or whether it gets more and more subtle, and becomes indistinguishable from what people have called mind.


—David Bohm
from Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity

.

Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. 

—Albert Einstein

.

put thoughts to rest

  

.

Wherever you are can be considered the center, because all directions from you are infinite; and, therefore, if you wish to put it this way, they are all the same distance. 

No one spot really is any more ‘The’ center than any other spot; no one spot is really more the end, or the edge, than any other spot. No one reality is actually any more or less ‘real’ than any other reality. 

Everything is the same one thing; the same one thing manifesting in all the simultaneous, multidimensional ways that it can manifest.

—Bashar

.

Put thoughts to rest.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

—Lin Chi

.

on every act the balance of the whole depends

 

.

Do you see how an act is not like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it? When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. 

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

.

We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero.


—Deleuze and Guattari 

.

beautyway

 

The Alien Throne, Bisti Badlands (in Diné bizaad: Bistahí Dééł Náázíní)

Valley of Dreams, inside the Dinétah, New Mexico.

Photo Joe Witkowski 

.

Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order.

Each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.

Among the various sung ceremonies of this people - Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway - there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).


―Barry López
Crossing Open Ground (excerpts)

.

be(loved

 

.

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.

Help some soul heal.

Walk out of your house like a shepherd.


—Rumi

.

Exhale only love.

—Rumi 

.

the frightful reality of things

  

.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.

Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

―William S. Burroughs

.

The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

I have written quite a number of poems
And may write many more, of course.
Each poem of mine explains it,
Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don’t begin thinking whether it feels.
I don’t force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
valuable.
The value is there, in my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
of mine.


—Fernando Pessoa

.

(Costing not less than everything) —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

   

.

Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. 

—Albert Einstein

.

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

.

Start seeing everything as God,

But keep it a secret.

—Hafiz

.

the days we live

  

.

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the joy 

at the bend in the road where we turned toward 

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands, 

from sweet fellowship in the bins, 

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, 

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside, 

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into 

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live 

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy 

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to 

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

—Li-Young Lee

.

common senses

 

.

Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science. 

It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and of all previous science – including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came along and contradicted them. 

And yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and everything we experience are part. There is no other.


—David Deutsch 

The Beginning of Infinity

.

We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually.

The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone.

Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind.


—Red Pine
The Heart Sutra

.

wait

.

He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.—César Aira, Varamo

 

.

 

II The Primordial Purity and Cutting Through Hardness

 

If one condenses this meaning down in its entirety, the View, Meditation, Conduct, Fruit, Delusion, and Liberation, and so on, all phenomena comprising the appearances and arisings of Samsara-Nirvana, they are all within one’s own mind. 

If the mind, in its own basic nature, itself searches and tries to see whether it can discover its existence or non-existence, whether it is true or false, singular or differentiated, even at the level of the tiniest particle of conceptually elaborated dependent or conditioned phenomena, it won’t find anything. 

The cognizant awareness of the thinker who thinks ‘nothing has been found, there’s nothing that can be found or expressed’ reaches a point of refuting and undermining itself - having realized this, attachment to the basis of what has been realized disappears.  

The object of investigation is abandoned, the one who investigates is annihilated, one passes beyond the mind of philosophical tenets and conceptual elaborations entirely. All recollections and speculations, memories and thoughts are generally and wholly purified, appearances are clear and resplendent in their very essence, whatever arises dissolves into this clarity of the essence of awareness. All appears without any ground for appearing whatsoever, pure and clear, unobstructed by any mindful awareness. 

Being self-pure without any basis for arising at all, one realizes that one comes up empty-handed, that that which is sought after doesn’t exist. One realizes that one comes up empty-handed too in trying to find anyone who searches, and that the awareness that observes this ‘searcher’ is wholly undifferentiated, without any individual parts at all. 

Manifesting ineffably in an instant, it is self-radiant without any basis whatsoever. The object of cognition is clear and vivid, the cognizer or knower, realizing that it is without any graspable self, turns back on itself and is without any ‘home’ or location. Thus, being without any origin, it has no recognizable characteristics that can be perceived, nor can even this thought of its imperceptibility be perceived in any way either. 

Not even the slightest basis to hold onto can be found at all.

Remaining in a state of one’s own innate self-radiance, not grasping at or identifying anything, this discovery of non-discovery is vivid and clear like the vast expanse of the pure heavens. It is not limited in scope in any way at all, it is unbiased, has not fallen into any particular view or perspective. 

No essential quality of either centre or periphery exists for it at all. It is the mindfulness of self-cognizing awareness that is liberated in and of itself into insubstantiality, undistracted by the derailing of mindfulness or the break-down of concentration from the coming, going, and clearing away of thoughts.

—Nida Chenagtsang

Mirror of Light: A Commentary on Yuthok’s Ati Yoga, Volume 1

.

It is a lie, any talk of God that does not comfort you.

—Meister Ekhart

.

white light

  

.

Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest. 

Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. 

It is your own true nature, it is home.

—Tibetan Book of the Dead

.

river run

 

.

You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. 

If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. 

To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.


—Alan Watts

.

 

 

the strange theory of light and matter

  

.

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school… It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it… That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

―Richard Feynman (treasure)
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

.

I don’t know any longer whether I’m living or remembering. —Albert Camus

 

.

 

One old man keeps humming the same few notes
of some song he thought he had forgotten
back in the days when as he knows there was
no word for life in the language 
and if they wanted to say eyes or heart
they would hold up a leaf and he remembers
the big tree where it rose from the dry ground
and the way the birds carried water in their voices
they were all the color of their fear of the dark
and as he sits there humming he remembers
some of the words they come back to him now
he smiles hearing them come and go


—W. S. Merwin
Parts of a Tune

.

 

There are more like us. All over the world

there are confused people, who can’t remember

the name of their dog when they wake up, and people

who love God but can’t remember where

he was when they went to sleep. It’s

all right. The world cleanses itself this way.


—Robert Bly
from People Like Us 

.

 

Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it

and that birds vanish because of something
that I remember
flying through me as though I were a great wind
as the stones settle into the ground
the trees into themselves
staring as though I were a great wind
which is what I pray for

it is clear to me that I cannot return
but that some of us will meet once more
even here
like our own statues
and some of us still later without names
and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures
and be found and lost no more


—W.S. Merwin
The Carrier of Ladders

.

weird enough to be wise

   

.

In old traditions those who acted as elders were considered to have one foot in daily life and the other foot in the otherworld. Elders acted as a bridge between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit and soul. A person in touch with the otherworld stands out because something normally invisible can be seen through them. The old word for having a foot in each world is weird. The original sense of weird involved both fate and destiny. Becoming weird enough to be wise requires that a person learn to accommodate the strange way they are shaped within and aimed at the world.

An old idea suggests that those seeking for an elder should look for someone weird enough to be wise. For just as there can be no general wisdom, there are no “normal” elders. Normal bespeaks the “norms” that society uses to regulate people, whereas an awakened destiny always involves connections to the weird and the warp of life. In Norse mythology, as in Shakespeare, the Fates appear as the Weird Sisters who hold time and the timeless together.

Those who would become truly wise must become weird enough to be in touch with timeless things and abnormal enough to follow the guidance of the unseen. Elders are supposed to be weird, not simply “weirdos,” but strange and unusual in meaningful ways. Elders are supposed to be more in touch with the otherworld, but not out of touch with the struggles in this world. Elders have one foot firmly in the ground of survival and another in the realm of great imagination. This double-minded stance serves to help the living community and even helps the species survive.


—Michael Meade

About Elders

.

hello

.

Sawubona, a Zulu word for hello, literally translates to 
"I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being."


—Susan David

TED talk

.

A Word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day. 

—Emily Dickinson

LXXXIX

.

namaste

.

often i imagine the earth

   

.

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

.

every song the heart should cry

    

.

I have come into this world to hear this: every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in the Divine womb and began spinning, every song by wing and fin and hoof, every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child, every song of stream and rock, every song of tool and lyre and flute, every song of gold and emerald and fire, every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity to know itself as God: for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching -  only imbibing the glorious Sun will complete us. 

I have come into this world to experience this: men so true to love they would rather die before speaking an unkind word, men so true their lives are a covenant - the promise of hope.

I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of rage because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound.

—Hafiz

.

words for love

   

.

Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling.

Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately.

If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love … we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. 

An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. 

Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling. 


—Robert Johnson
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden

.

a glossary of chickens

 

 .

There should be a word for the way

they look with just one eye, neck bent,

for beetle or worm or strewn grain.

“Gleaning,” maybe, between “gizzard”

and “grit.” 

And for the way they run toward
someone they trust, their skirts

hiked, their plump bodies wobbling:

“bobbling,” let’s call it, inserted

after “blowout” and before “bloom.”

There should be terms, too, for things

they do not do—like urinate or chew—

but perhaps there already are.

I’d want a word for the way they drink,

head thrown back, throat wriggling,

like an old woman swallowing

a pill; a word beginning with “S,”

coming after “sex feather” and before “shank.”

And one for the sweetness of hens

but not roosters.

We think that by naming we can understand,

as if the tongue were more than muscle.


—Gary Whitehead

 

 

.