Thought has altitude. Thought has velocity.
Thought has acceleration. Thought has dimension.
Thought has edges and vertices.
Thought has a radius and a circumference.
Thought dances in front of a thoughtless mirror.—Ahmed Salman
On land off an ice covered sea the traveler can ... detect the presence of open water, simply because it reflects less light than land or ice.
The open sea’s telltale sign is thus a darkness on the underside of the clouds.
—Harold Gatty
finding your way without map or compass
Here is what the sea smells like. It is more texture than scent, because the sea is primarily made of two substances that have no smell of their own: water and salt. Salt has no smell, but makes the air sting, and so all of the other smells of the sea are layered upon the pang of salt.Water has no smell but instead a comfort. We feel moisture as life and so the smells of the ocean are layered upon the contentment of the water. Salt is treble and water is bass. I don’t know how I know this is true, but I know it is true.The sea smells like old wood and wet leaves. Like cold mud and warm stone. Like every creature who has ever lived in it, a churning graveyard and nursery. Like winds from the inland carrying the hot circulation of life and winds from the ocean carrying the distant froth of waves against ships and islands. Like gray, only more so. Like blue, only less so.—Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Maharaj: Your thoughts about individuality are really not your own thoughts; they are all collective thoughts. You think that you are the one who has the thoughts; in fact thoughts arise in consciousness.
As our spiritual knowledge grows, our identification with an individual body-mind diminishes, and our consciousness expands into universal consciousness. The life force continues to act, but its thoughts and actions are no longer limited to an individual. They become the total manifestation. It is like the action of the wind - the wind doesn't blow for any particular individual, but for the total manifestation.
... Cannot you see clearly that everything that appears to happen happens in consciousness? It is all imaginary, a temporary hallucination. Don't be led astray, none of it reflects your true state.
... The real is changeless. What changes is not real, what is real does not change.... What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear, but not to be. The appearance may last very long on some scale of time, and very short on another, but ultimately it comes to the same. Whatever is time-bound is momentary and has no reality.
... Transiency is the best proof of unreality.Know your Self to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind.That is enough.
—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty.
The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. And because every littlest thing is, as John Muir observed, “hitched to everything else in the universe” when we pay generous and unalloyed attention to anything, we are learning to love everything; we are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous.
—Maria Popova (treasure)
the first paragraph of her most wonderful review of The Paradise Notebooks, Richard J. Nevle & Steven Nightingale
.
For Andreas Weber, the interiority of a plant or an animal readily reveals itself, to those who have eyes to see, in the outward expression or display of that creature’s bodily presence.—David Abram
Biology is discovering subjectivity as a fundamental principle throughout nature. It finds that even the most simple living things —bacterial cells, fertilized eggs, nematodes in tidal flats—act according to values.Organisms value everything they encounter according to its meaning for the further coherence of their embodied self. Even the cell’s self-production, the continuous maintenance of a highly structured order, can only be understood if we perceive the cell as an actor that persistently follows a goal. Life always has an inside, which is the result of how its matter, its outside, is organized.—Andreas WeberThe Biology of Wonder
.
The conscious self is not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives.
—Northrop Frye
.
Learn to distinguish the immovable in the movable, the unchanging in the changing, till you realize that all differences are in appearance only and oneness is a fact.
This basic identity—you may call God, or Brahman, or the matrix (Prakriti), the words matter little—is only the realization that all is one.
Once you can say with confidence born from direct experience: ‘I am the world, the world is myself’, you are free from desire and fear on one hand and become totally responsible for the world on the other.
—Nisargadatta
.
III
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.—E. E. Cummings
Spring is like a perhaps hand
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened
—E.E. Cummings
 |
We invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is.—Carl SaganBillions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death
And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:
Where shall you seek beauty, and how
shall you find her unless she herself be your
way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except
she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and injured say,
"Beauty is kind and gentle."
The tired and weary say,
"Beauty is of soft whisperings
She speaks in our spirit."
In winter say the snow-bound,
"She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."
All these things have you said of beauty,
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see, though you
close your eyes and a song you hear, though
you shut your ears.
People of Orphalese,
beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
—Kahlil Gibran
from The Prophet
If anyone asks youhow the perfect satisfactionof all our longingwill look, lift your faceand say,Like this.
When someone mentions the gracefulnessof the night sky, climb up on the roofand dance and say,Like this?
If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,or what "God's fragrance" means,lean your head toward him or her.Keep your face there close,Like this.
When someone quotes the old adageabout clouds gradually uncovering the moon,slowly loosen knot by knot the stringsof your robe,Like this?
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,don't try to explain the miracle.Kiss me on the lips,Like this. Like this.
When someone asks what it meansto "die for love," pointhere.
If someone asks how tall I am, frownand measure with your fingers the spacebetween the creases on your forehead.This tall.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.When someone doesn't believe that,walk back into my house.Like this.
I am a sky where spirits live.Stare into this deepening blue,While the breeze says a secret.Like this.
When someone asks what there is to do,light the candle in his hand.Like this.
—Rumi
Coleman Barks version, excerpt
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 McCarthyEvening Redness in the West
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.—ShakespeareHamlet
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
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
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.
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
You sit in your body, quietly making blood
Wild blood
Bird of the world—Emily Kendal Frey
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
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 GuinA Wizard of Earthsea, 1968
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
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
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 BorgesPaul Weinfield versionThe 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
.
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
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.
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
