the depth of the drop is the height of the moon

 

.

You are like a dewdrop, on a multidimensional spider's web in the morning. 

And if you look at that thing carefully, you will see in every dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops. 

So the way that dewdrop looks goes with the way all the other ones look, you see.

—Alan Watts

.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. 
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. 

Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water. 

Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. 

The depth of the drop is the height of the moon.

Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.


—Dogen Zenji (1200 - 1253)

.

the principal element of creation

 

.

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.  


—Rabindranath Tagore

.

every conscious be(ing

 

.

You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate you to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. 

The only real "you” is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. 

For “you” is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. 

Just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.


—Hakuin

.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.


—T. S. Eliot
No.1 of 'Four Quartets'

.

bless

 

this will help

.

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

The birds they sang at the break of day “Start again”, 

I seem to hear them say 

Don’t dwell on what has passed away 

Or what is yet to be 

Ah, the wars, they will be fought again 

The holy dove, she will be caught again 

Bought and sold and bought again 

The dove is never free 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

We asked for signs, and the signs were sent 

The birth betrayed, the marriage spent 

Yeah, the widowhood of every single government 

Signs for all to see 

I can’t run no more with that lawless crowd 

While the killers in high places say their prayers out loud 

But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up a thundercloud 

And they’re going to hear from me 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

You can add up the parts

But you won't have the sum

You can strike up the march

On your little broken drum

Every heart, every heart

To love will come 

But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in 

That’s how the light gets in 

That’s how the light gets in  

—Leonard Cohen

.

One eye sees, the other feels. —Paul Klee

 

.

People who study anatomy and the development of the eye have shown that the retina is, in fact, the brain: in the development of the embryo, a piece of the brain comes out in front, and long fibers grow back, connecting the eyes to the brain. 

The retina is organized in just the way the brain is organized and, as someone has beautifully put it, “The brain has developed a way to look out upon the world.” The eye is a piece of brain that is touching light, so to speak, on the outside.

—Richard Feynman

.

Every single eye is a tiny scrap of the divine mystery. Sight is the precise meeting place of object and thought, it is the pearl that allows the mind to unfurl in the light of the sun.

—Jostein Gaarder

Through a Glass, Darkly

. 

Try another way of looking.

Try you looking and the whole universe seeing.

—Rumi

.

Love is not consolation. It is light. —Friedrich Nietzsche

 

.

  

All that passes descends,
and ascends again unseen
into the light: the river
coming down from sky
to hills, from hills to sea,
and carving as it moves,
to rise invisible,
gathered to light, to return
again. "The river's injury
is its shape." I've learned no more.

We are what we are given
and what is taken away;
blessed be the name
of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes
is a gift, the meaning always
carried out of sight
to renew our whereabouts,
always a starting place.
And every gift is perfect 
in its beginning, for it
is "from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights."
Gravity is grace.


—Wendell Berry 
The Gift of Gravity, excerpt

. 

And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light.

—Alan Watts

On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

.

Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places. —Flann O'Brien

 

.

How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?

—St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 213-268)

.

Your thinking that you have to make an effort to get rid of this dream of the waking state, and your making efforts to attain jnana (realization of Self) or real awakening, are all parts of the dream.


—Ramana Maharshi

.

Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a universe that is person - and through all of this there blows, animating it and spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of union - and of the Feminine.

The diaphany of the Divine is at the heart of a glowing universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the earth - the divine radiating from depths of blazing matter.

[...] the world will open the arms of God to us. It is for us to throw ourselves into these arms so that the divine milieu should close around our lives like a circle.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Divine Milieu

.

strange creature

 

.

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power of evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. 

This is given. It is not learned.


—Annie Dillard
Teaching A Stone To Talk

.

In quiet moments in my study, or outdoors, this deeper voice convinced me that the prospects are bleak unless we can once again relate to the Earth not as a thing or as a machine, but as a strange creature that improvises it’s own unfolding in the cosmos through the ongoing creativity of evolution and self-transformation.


—Stephan Harding
Animate Earth

.

O human, see then the human being rightly; the human being has heaven and earth and the whole of creation in itself, and yet is a complete form, and everything is already present, though hidden.

—Hildegarde of Bingen

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place(ment

 

.

The little space within the heart is 
as great as the vast universe. 

The heavens and the earth are there, 
and the sun and the moon and the stars. 

Fire and lightening and winds are there, 
and all that now is and all that is not.


—The Upanishads

.

I am blind and do not see the things of this world;
but when the Light comes from above, it enlightens my Heart,
and I can see, for the Eye of my Heart sees everything.

The Heart is a sanctuary of the Center in which there is a little space
wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye. 

This is the Eye of Wakentaka by which he sees all things,
and through which we see Him.


—Black Elk

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there is no place at all

that is not looking at you.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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hold steady

 

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Sunrays touch the coastline
On the cutter shows the dust
Long nights are gone with the river
The water has been waiting long enough

We float on the river of time
Hold steady, hold steady
The sea comes 'cause the summer forced out the cold
The boat fought the change of the tides
Hold steady, hold steady
Storm for hours and rainy days

And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home

Sunrays touch the coastline
Warm our feet, show the glare
We walk through the sand in the warm night
The water will take the weight from us

And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home
And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home

We sell our lives to the sea
The sky lights up from the beach


—HAEVN
Symphonic Tales 

.

There is not a fragment in all of nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. 

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.

—Naturalist John Muir, 1867

.

Bless the spirit that makes connections,

for truly we live in what we imagine.

Clocks move along side our real life

with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,

we are held in place by what links us.

Across trackless distances

antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!

Distracted by each day's doing,

how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors

there where the seed turns into summer,

it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII

Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

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the world is an idea

 

Lorenzo Ranieri Tenti

Rising from the dust | Tenerife, Canary Islands

.

It is in the brain that everything takes place.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, 

that the skylark sings.

—Oscar Wilde

.

It is not possible to explain intellectually how sensations of the physical world are converted into ideas, how the leap-over from nervous vibrations into consciousness occurs, and how a neurosis becomes a psychosis. No one has ever explained this, nor will any scientist ever succeed in doing so. 

Truth alone can dispose of this poser by pointing out that sensations never really occur, but that the Self merely projects ideas of them; just as a man sees a mirage and mistakes it for real water merely by his mental projection, so people regard the world as real when they are merely transferring their own mental ideas to the world.

The Theosophic doctrine that the physical world is an externalization of an astral plane or even the higher Platonic doctrine that it crystallizes a world of divine ideation is given to beginners as a help to give them a crude grasp, a first step towards the theory that the world is an idea, until they are mentally developed. 

When their mind is mature they are then told to discard the astral plane theory and told the pure truth that all existence is idea.


—Paul Brunton
Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism
Chapter 3: The Individual and World Mind

.

The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. 

This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.


—D. H. Lawrence

.

Meditation Celestial and Terrestial

 

.

The wild warblers are warbling in the jungle
Of life and spring of the lustrious inundations,
Flood on flood, of our returning sun.

Day after day, throughout the winter,

We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason

In a world of wind and frost,

And by will, unshaken and florid

In mornings of angular ice,

That passed beyond us through the narrow sky.

But what are radiant reason and radiant will

To warblings early in the hilarious trees

Of summer, the drunken mother?

—Wallace Stevens

.

queerly various

 

. 

You taught me the courage of stars before you left. 

How light carries on endlessly, even after death. 

With shortness of breath, you explained the infinite. 

How rare and beautiful it is to even exist.


—Sleeping at Last
Saturn

.

For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. 

Death in such a case would be only another arrangement. 


—William H. Gass
Omensetter’s Luck 

.

portions and percipients

 

.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.  

But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. 

It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. 

It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.


—Hermann Hesse
A Defence of Poetry

.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.


—Hermann Hesse

. 

You must become brother and sister
to each and every thing
so that they flow through you
dissolving every difference
between what belongs to you and others.

No star, no leaf shall fall -
you fall with them -
to rise again
in every new beginning.


—Hermann Hesse (1887 - 1962)

The Seasons of the Soul

.

look

 

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The eye with which I see God is the same eye
with which God sees me.


—Meister Eckhart 

.

In this house of mirrors you see a lot of things.

Rub your eyes. 

Only you exist.


—Rumi

.

questions

.

Now, of course, reality—from a philosopher’s point of view—is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me: what do I mean by reality? Am I talking about the physical world of nature, or am I talking about a spiritual world, or what? And to that, I have a very simple answer. When we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept. So, in the same way, if I say that reality is spiritual, that’s also a philosophical concept. And reality itself is not a concept. Reality is, and we won’t give it a name.

Now, it’s amazing what doesn’t exist in the real world. For example, in the real world there aren’t any things, nor are there any events. That doesn’t mean to say that the real world is a perfectly featureless blank. It means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot, or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind’s eye, in our system of concepts. They are not—out there, as constellations—already grouped in the sky.

So, in the same way, the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea. It is not a real difference. And meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. That is to say, that we become interiorally silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think compulsively all the time, that is to say, we talk to ourselves.


—Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Essential Lectures, Meditation 

.

Real courage is possible only through seeing. It’s not possible through belief in the divine self, which we all share in common, as if that were something you could believe in. This is only to be discovered through not hanging on to anything, not having any armour, not having any beliefs, not having any kind of gimmick with which you try to hold the weaving smoke in position. You don’t need it. If you really are the basis of the world, you don’t need a belief that that is so.

... The gift of remembering and binding time creates the illusion that the past stands to the present as agent to act, mover to moved. Living thus from the past, with echoes taking the lead, we are not truly here, and are always a bit late to the feast.


—Alan Watts

.

If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts: 

the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing. 

the human soul, living forever within you. 

the celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird.


—Carl Jung
liber novus/ the red book
(black book 6- 1916)

.

real(ly

 

.

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. 

What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.


—David Bohm

.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.


—Vladimir Nabokov

.

sublime emptiness

 

.

For days the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree without moving, without any urge to teach. The gods came and encouraged him but he replied, “What I have discovered will not be wanted by almost anyone. Those who are not ready can not be swayed with words and those who are ready can discover it for themselves.” 

One of the gods pondered this for days and then returned and said “Great Buddha, what of those with only a little dust covering their eyes? What of those who are almost ready but only held back by a small hindrance? If you teach then these ones will enter the stream of wisdom.” 

After a moment the Buddha rose from his seat and went to give his first teaching.


—Traktung Rinpoche

.

Subhuti was Buddha’s disciple. 

He was able to understand the potency of emptiness, 
the viewpoint that nothing exists except in its relationship of 
subjectivity and objectivity.

One day Subhuti, in a mood of sublime emptiness, 
was sitting under a tree. Flowers began to fall about him.

“We are praising you for your discourse on emptiness,” 
the gods whispered to him.

“But I have not spoken of emptiness,” said Subhuti.

“You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness,” 
responded the gods.

“This is true emptiness.” 

And blossoms showered upon Subhuto as rain.


—Zen Flesh, Zen Bones:
Zen and Pre-Zen Writings
collected by Paul Reps, Nyogen Senzaki

.

real(ly

   

.

We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent “elementary parts” of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts.

Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.

—David Bohm

.

Stories come to us like new senses

a wave and an ash tree were sisters

they had been separated since they were children

but they went on believing in each other

though each was sure that the other must be lost

they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of

as family resemblances features they held in common

the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance

of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree

in summer air and the limbs of the ash tree

recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it

and they wrote to each other every day

without knowing where to send the letters

some of which have come to light only now

revealing in their old but familiar language

a view of the world we could not have guessed at

but that we always wanted to believe

—W.S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius
Recognitions

.