you are that

 

.

Maharaj: There are many persons who have a great attachment to their own individuality. They want first and foremost to remain as an individual and then search, for they are not prepared to lose that individuality. While retaining their identity, they want to find out what is the truth. But in this process, you must get rid of the identity itself.  

If you really find out what you are, you will see that you are not an individual, you are not a person, you are not a body. And people who cling to their body identity are not fit for this knowledge.

The names and forms that appear, with different colors and all that, their origin is water. But nobody says I'm water, they say I am the body. But if you see the origin of the body then ultimately the body has appeared only from water. All these plants and everything, all name and forms, they appear from water only. But still people don't identify themselves with water; they say I am the body.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The Ultimate Medicine, Dialogues

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From the waters everything is made,

both what is manifest and what is Unmanifest. 

Therefore, all manifestation (murti) is water. 

—Prasna Upanishad 1.4-5

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Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. —Carl Jung

 

.

There are three states only, the waking, dream and sleep. Turiya is not a fourth one; it is what underlies these three. But people do not readily understand it. Therefore it is said that this is the fourth state and the only Reality. In fact it is not apart from anything, for it forms the substratum of all happenings; it is the only Truth; it is your very Being. The three states appear as fleeting phenomena on it and then sink into it alone. Therefore they are unreal.


—Ramana Maharishi
Talks with Ramana

.

So what can they tell us,
the writers of dreambooks,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors
with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times
even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.


—Wisława Szymborska
Dreams, excerpt
Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

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We have seen so much.

Reality has almost used us up ...

—Tomas Tranströmer

Windows and Stones

.

there are numberless aspects to all things

.

When the truth doesn’t fill our body and mind, we think we have had enough. When the truth fills our body and mind, we realize that something is missing. 

For example, when we look at the ocean from a boat, with no land in sight, it seems circular and nothing else. But the ocean is neither round nor square, and its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. Only to our eyes, only for a moment, does it seem circular. All things are like this. 

Although there are numberless aspects to all things, we see only as far as our vision can reach. And in our vision of all things, we must appreciate that although they may look round or square, the other aspects of oceans or mountains are infinite in variety, and that universes lie all around us. 

It is like this everywhere, right here, in the tiniest drop of water.


—Dogen

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you are the deep innerness of all things

.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.


—Wisława Szymborska
View With a Grain of Sand
Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh version

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You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Anita Barrows version

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The only things we can ever perceive … are our perceptions. —George Berkeley

 

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In reality, time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention. Discard all you are not and go ever deeper. 

Just as a man digging a well discards what is not water ... so must you discard what is not your own, till nothing is left which you can disown. 

You will find that what is left is nothing which the mind can hook on to. 

You are not even a human being.

You just are - a point of awareness, co-extensive with time and space and beyond both, the ultimate cause, itself uncaused. 

If you ask me “Who are you?”, my answer would be: “Nothing in particular. Yet, I am.”


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



 

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kin(dred

 

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... down deep, at the molecular heart of life, 
we are essentially identical to trees.


—Carl Sagan

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The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature as opposites (as, e.g., ‘warm and cold’) where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. 

This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites. 

An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions. 


—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Wanderer and his Shadow

.

 

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.


—Dag Hammarskjöld

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the way in

 

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Who really respects the earthworm,
the farmworker far under the grass in the soil.
He keeps the earth always changing.
He works entirely full of soil,
speechless with soil, and blind.

He is the underneath farmer, the underground one,
where the fields are getting on their harvest clothes. 

Who really respects him, this deep and calm earth-worker,
this deathless, gray, tiny farmer in the planet's soil?


—Harry Martinson
the earthworm
Robert Bly version

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Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding, and beauty. 

To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water. 

To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.


—Linda Hogan
the way in

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to have a world

 

Cueva de las Manos, Cave of the Hands, Argentina

.

Trungpa Rinpoche once said, “Emotions are composed of energy, which can be likened to water, and a dualistic thought process, which could be likened to pigment or paint. When energy and thought are mixed together, they become vivid and colorful emotions. Concept gives the energy a particular location, a sense of relationship, which makes the emotions vivid and strong. Fundamentally, the reason emotions are discomforting, painful, frustrating is that our relationship to the emotions is not quite clear.”

And strangely enough, these experiences of the six realms - gods, jealous gods, human beings, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell - are ‘space’, different versions of space. It seems intense and solid, but in actual fact it isn’t at all. They are different aspects of space - that’s the exciting or interesting part. In fact, it is complete open space, without any colors or any particularly solid way of relating. 

That is why they have been described as six types of consciousness. It is pure consciousness rather than a solid situation - it almost could be called unconsciousness rather than even consciousness. The development of ego operates completely at the unconscious level, from one unconscious level to another unconscious level. That is why these levels are referred to as loka, which means ‘realm’ or 'world’. 

They are six types of 'world’. Each is a complete unit of its own. In order to have a world, you have to have an atmosphere; you have to have space to formulate things. So the six realms are the fundamental space through which any bardo experience operates. Because of that, it is possible to transmute these spaces into six types of awakened state, or freedom.

—Chögyam Trungpa

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The world is not populated by singular, autonomous, sovereign beings. It comprises a constantly oscillating network of dynamic interactions in which one thing changes through the change of another. The relationship counts, not the substance. 

And to make this relationship possible, it is necessary that the two sides touch each other, that they nestle into one another, penetrate one another, grind themselves against each other. This is the fundamental erotic that constantly makes new things out of other things.

—Andreas Weber
Matter and Desire

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I promise to make you more alive than you have ever been.
For the first time you will see your pores opening
like the gills of fish and you will hear
the noise of blood in galleries
and feel light gliding on your corneas
like the dragging of a dress across the floor. 

For the first time, you will note gravity’s prick
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will hurt from the imperative of wings. 

I promise to make you so alive that
the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,
and you will feel your eyebrows like two wounds forming
and your memories will seem to begin
with the creation of the world.

—Nina Cassian
Ordeal 
Michael Impey and Brian Swann version from the Romanian 

 

.

 

 

pray(er

 

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Four times a day—on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed—Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed. 

He prayed that the seething factions merge and dissolve their hatred. He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart. 

Agnes’s struggle with the Ojibwe language, the influence of it, had an effect on her prayers. For she preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anama’ay, with its sense of a great motion upward. She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction—those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart. 

Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light. What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation. Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien.  

She rose, once she was finished, rubbed her eyes like a child, went on in Father Damien’s skin. Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.


—Louise Erdrich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

. 

We have weaved our past into the present, a rhythmic pattern of long cotton strings pressing in and pulling out across the loom. It thunders through our existence like wild horses run across the desert. No matter how far we go, what kind of car we drive, how much money we make, how many degrees we pile up behind our name, we are still here. 

We are here, a tiny piece of woven stories, like pixels in a photo or molecules of mist in a rainbow. We are here, together on the same earth. It is important to notice one another smile, hug, dance, and sing together while our piece of thread is being woven into a bigger picture of a peaceful future.


—Tu Bears

.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

 

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Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: 

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence. 

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. 

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark. 

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.


—Wallace Stevens

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closer than breathing

   

.

Instead of the old myths of death and resurrection, of victory and twilight of the gods, which the Enlightenment removed from people’s consciousness, the nineteenth century has justified the barren idea that life moves like some sort of transportation on a straight road, and that one can increase speed or change direction. 

However, life never advances one-dimensionally, neither forwards nor backwards; neither upwards nor downwards – it rather breathes in space.


—Georg Götsch
Die Jugendbewegung als Volksgewissen

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... the most fundamental scientific ‘fact’ is not the existence of a universe of things in space and time but awareness of such a universe.

Awareness is not a ‘thing’ that can evolve from or arise out of an unaware or insentient universe of things. On the contrary, all things in the universe emerge and take shape out of a universal awareness. 


—Peter Wilberg
The Awareness Principle

.

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. 

For everything that rises must converge.


—Pierre Teilhard De Chardin 

.

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and knows,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.


—Rumi

.

Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight, there are watchers in the skies.

—Euripides

The Bacchae c. 406 BC,

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you where the heart begins

 

.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.


—George Eliot

.

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV 

.

You must learn to stop being yourself. That's where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That's how it's done. 

The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground. 

Like so.


—Paul Auster
Mr. Vertigo

.

 

pray without ceasing

   

 

 

 

 

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What I wear is pants.

What I do is live.

How I pray is breathe.

—Thomas Merton 

.

Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.


—Wendell Berry

.

breathing with the forest

see this gorgeous video here

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We imagine ourselves as sealed-off individuals, but we are inextricably embedded in a web of life. Our bodies are porous, suffused with the world around us, home to thousands of microscopic symbiotic inhabitants; with each breath, we exchange parts of ourselves with the wider world. Our connection with trees is particularly intimate—oxygen they exhale flows into our lungs and through our blood, coursing from the heart outward through fractal-like branching arteries to feed every cell in our bodies.

Breathing with the Forest is an experience of deep continuity and reciprocity with a Capinuri tree (Maquira coriacea) in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. Inviting us to see inside its hidden pathways, this multimedia journey brings us into relationship with the rhythmic interchange of breath that keeps the forest—and us—alive. Entering the forest, we step out of our separateness to embody something much more than human.

The rainforest is a place that dissolves the borders we construct around the self. When we look closely at the web of interconnected, symbiotic relationships sharing nutrients, light, and breath, we discover that our idea of separation between one being and the next is an illusion. In this interactive experience, digitized projections of oxygen and water vapor molecules traveling through the trees’ xylem and phloem and the subterranean mycorrhizal network are visualized in a five-second cycle—the average pace of a human breath. By synchronizing our breathing with these larger cyclical rhythms, we begin to feel the continuity between body and forest, expanding our sense of self to include the planet around us.

This digital forest is a detailed recreation of a section of the Leticia region of the Amazon rainforest in the southernmost tip of Colombia along the Amazon river. This area is home to the Ticuna people, who inhabit the wider Leticia area alongside the Witoto, Inga, Tucano, and Nukak communities who have stewarded the land for thousands of years.

—Marshmallow Laser Feast

Emergence Magazine

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That which speech does not illumine, but which illumines speech:

know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be thought by mind, but by which, they say, mind is able to think: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eye is able to see: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be heard by the ear, but by which the ear is able to hear: know that alone to be Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be breathed by the lungs, but by which breath is in–breathed: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

—The Kena Upanishad

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i can be breathed

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A monk dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, overcoming covetousness and grief in the world;

He dwells contemplating the feelings in the feelings, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, and putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world;

He dwells contemplating the states of mind in the states of mind, ardent, clearly contemplating and mindful, overcoming covetousness and grief in the world;

He dwells contemplating thoughts and perceptions in the thoughts and perceptions, ardent, clearly contemplating and mindful, overcoming covetousness and grief in the world.

—Satipatthana Sutta

The Four Foundatons of Mindfulness

.

 

I can be infinitely more relaxed than I am.
I can be infinitely more sensitive to my sensations.
I can be breathed.
I can be open to a thought from above.


—William Segal

. 

I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:

Imagine what would it be like to dance close together 

In this land of water and knowledge…

To drink deep what is undrinkable.


—Joy Harjo
Speaking Tree

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imag(ine

 

.

Imagine if all the tumult of the body were to quiet down, 
along with our busy thoughts. 

Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still. 

And imagine if that moment were to go on and on, leaving behind 
all other sights and sounds but this one vision which ravishes and 

absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy, 

so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of 
illumination, which leaves us breathless.


—Saint Augustine

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exist(ential

 

gnarled goddess, David Lorenz Winston

.

Often, the ideas, concepts, and questions of metaphysics sound easy—childish even. What are objects? Do colours and shapes have some form of existence? What is it for one thing to cause another rather than just being associated with it? What is possible? Does time pass? Do absences, holes, lackings, and nothingnesses have any form of positive existence at all? 

To some these seem like silly questions, but for others they are at the core of what philosophy is all about. And those who see it that way often get a sense that the issues these questions raise are the most fundamental and profound about which humans can think. 

Metaphysics is the subject among all others that inspires the sense of wonder in us, and for that reason some think that doing metaphysics is the most valuable use we could make of our time.


—Stephen Mumford
Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction

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time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live —D. Marianoff

 

.

Throughout his life, (John) Wheeler aspired to understand the most fundamental components of the cosmos. 

He changed his mind on that issue several times in his career, starting with particles, venturing into fields and geometry, and finally delving into information. 

He also wanted to comprehend the organizing principles steering those components into recognizable patterns. Sum over histories, based on the principle of least action applied to quantum physics, was one such idea, but he also considered others. 

In the end, he became convinced that the answer had to do with a “self-excited circuit”: a symbiosis between conscious observers and what they were observing, namely, the cosmic past. Somehow, through our looks back in time, we organized our own universe, from among the frothy possibilities of the quantum foam. 

Therefore, in Wheeler’s mind, the questions of “How come existence?” and “How come the quantum?” became inextricably linked. 


—Paul Halpern
The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality

.

I, like other searchers, attempt formulation after formulation of the central issues and here present a wider overview, taking for working hypothesis the most effective one that has survived this winnowing: It from Bit. Otherwise put, every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits.

It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.


—John Archibald Wheeler

.

[...] the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— [that] gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. 

For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.

―John Steinbeck
East of Eden

 

.

 

 

open secret

  

.

Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.


—Nikola Tesla

.

Directly opposite to the concept of a universe as machine built on law is the vision of a world self-synthesized. On this view, the notes struck out on a piano by the observer participants of all times and all places, bits though they are in and by themselves, constitute the great wide world of space and time and things. 


—John Wheeler

.

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, 

think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

—Nikola Tesla

.

questions

.

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. 

And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. 

And, going further, what did Time look like? 

Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. 

That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded.

—Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles

.

Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.” 

This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.

―Natalie Goldberg

Long Quiet Highway

.

 

I have heard what the talkers were talking,
the talk of the beginning and the end.
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world …

—Walt Whitman

Song of Myself

.

wait

whiskeyriver

.

we are occasional like that

 

.

We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.


—Jack Gilbert
Music Is In The Piano Only When It Is Played

 

 

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