Water has a perfect memory, and is forever trying to get back to where it was. —Toni Morrison

 

.

We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air - not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a future in time.


—Gilles Deleuze
Difference and Repetition

.

The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.


—Hildegard of Bingen

.

on, 0ff

 

.

Now this lesson is quite simply this, that any experience that we have through our senses, whether of sound or of light, or touch, is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects, one called “on” and the other called “off”. Vibration seems to be propagated in waves and every wave system has crests and it has troughs. And so, life is a system of “now you see it, now you don’t”. And these two aspects always go together.

For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence. And that’s simply the way things are. Only you must remember that the crest and the trough of the wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests, just as you don’t encounter, in life, people with fronts but no backs. Just as you don’t encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails.

Just as the heads and tails, backs and fronts, the positives and the negatives are different, they are at the same time One. And one must get used to the notion that different things can be inseparable.


—Alan Watts

.

not no(thing

 

.

It is impossible for us to know the reactions of beings constituted in a different way. It is, however, reasonable to think that in the same world ... different worlds are perceived by different beings according to the nature of their respective organs of perception.

[...] Does that mean that in absolute truth our senses have made contact with a real horse, a real apricot, etc.? There is no proof of this, for the only existing proof depends on the evidence of the senses ...

[...] We cannot presume any thing more than the existence of a stimulus which has caused the sensation that we have felt, a sensation which we have interpreted in our own way, adding to it images of our own invention.

Should we then believe that we have been taken in by a pure mirage? Not entirely. Probably the stimulus corresponds to something, but this something, that is to say the object of some kind with which one of our senses has made contact, remains unknown to us.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

.

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. 

And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he has a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.


—Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
Republic, The Allegory of the Cave

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everything that rises must converge

 .

The Universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. 

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. 

The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.  

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

.

To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the ‘other.’ The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. 

There is no mind without synthesis. 

The same holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism.’ Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

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My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.

Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. 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

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radi(ant

 

.

Art and love are the same thing: 

it’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.  

—Chuck Klosterman

. 

[The Buddha] used to make monks and laypeople alike practice a certain discipline called the “immeasurables,” because it made you bigger. You sat and you sent out waves of benevolence and good wishes to the whole world, not excluding anyone from your radius of benevolence. 

It’s a radius. You have to start off when you’re totally thinking soupy, wonderful things about people far off in Africa, for example, and if you’re not getting on with your colleagues or your ex-wife or various other difficulties, you’ve got to think well of them. 

As you do so, the Buddha said, as you move out and beyond, you will find an enlargement, a transcendence. They will find that they were imbued with abundant, exalted, measureless loving kindness. 

And they will for a moment experience an ecstasy that takes them out of themselves above, below, around, and everywhere. 


—Karen Armstrong

.

The collective unconscious, the same as other transpersonal phenomena, is evidence that our mind is not an isolated entity but is constantly in touch with other minds as well as with the world around us. We are never entirely detached from the outside world; never entirely enclosed within our skin. 

Our mind is coherent with the world, and when we do not repress the intuitions that link us with other people and with nature, we can become aware of our oneness with the universe.


—James Orocall 

.

if strangers meet
life begins-
not poor not rich
(only aware)
kind neither
nor cruel
(only complete)
i not not you
not possible;
only truthful
-truthfully,once
if strangers(who
deep our most are
selves)touch:
forever

(and so to dark)


—E. E. Cummings

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wit(ness

 

.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.

Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.

We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.


—Alan Watts

.

Close both eyes. 

Look from the other eye.

—Rumi

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you are that which has the infinite potential to love, yet, you cling to your imagined personality —NM

 

. 

As we awaken from sleep, our consciousness undergoes a radical transformation composed of dramatic adjustments in neural processes. 

Some neural circuits go quiet while others come online. The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor, the decentralized process does have hot spots of top-down modulation linked by connections built over evolutionary time. 

These "command centers,” for lack of a more accurate but succinct term, do one thing really well: They create our sense of self, our sense of being a protagonist in a continuously unfolding nonlinear narrative through which we can travel again and again in our memories and plan possible and even impossible futures.


—Antonio Damasio
Self Comes to Mind 

 

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It is by the action of consciousness becoming aware of itself that intelligence manifests itself, not when consciousness apprehends an inert object.

The one Self perceives itself within itself as the infinite consciousness. Taste the pure consciousness, which is, in truth, the very essence of all that exists, by resolutely renouncing objectivity of consciousness (all the concepts and precepts) and contemplating the changeless consciousness which is infinite.

Know that you are the essence of consciousness.

Be firmly established in this wisdom and discard the impure notion of ego-sense from your heart. When the pure heart contemplates the infinite space of consciousness, which is the source of all bliss and which is within easy reach of all, it rests in the Supreme Self.


—Yoga Vasistha
The Supreme Yoga

  

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the numinous radiance of sentient things

 

.

Within heaven and earth, inside all the cosmos, there is contained a singular treasure concealed in the form-mountain—the numinous radiance of sentient things. 

Utterly empty, still, and difficult to perceive within or without, it is styled the “mystery of mysteries.” Its skill reaches out beyond the [celestial palace] of Purple Subtlety, and its function resides in the very midst of empty non-being. 

Unmoving among manifold transformations, it is solitary, not two. Its voice brings forth wondrous reverberations; its form spews forth iridescent displays. But look as you will, it has no locus; it is known to us as the emptiness of emptiness.


僧肇 –Sengzhao, Pao-tsang lun
(Treasure Store Treatise)

.

Black holes are where God divided by zero. ―Albert Einstein

    

.

But just why is everything impermanent and in constant change? The answer has to do with what might be called the flip-side of anicca: pratityasamutpada, or, technically, “interdependent origination.” 

More simply: everything changes because everything is interrelated. Everything comes into being and continues in being through and with something else.  

Nothing, Buddha came to see, has its own existence. 

In fact, when he wanted to describe the human self, or the self/identity of anything, the term he used was anatta, which means literally no-self. We are not “selves” in the sense of individual, separate, independent “things.” Rather, we are constantly changing because we are constantly interrelating (or being interrelated).

 

—Paul F. Knitter

.

Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. 

Before that all was blackness and silence.
And yet it moved.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger

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every(thing is sentient

 

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In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. 

A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. 

It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.


—Ed Yong
NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

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all living thought is a world in preparation

 

. 

The Heart is the center of the Self and the Self is the center of centers. Just as the subtle force of electricity travels through wires and does many wonderful things, so too the Heart imparts sentience to the senses.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

Be conscious first of thyself within, then think and act. 

All living thought is a world in preparation; all real act is a thought manifested. The material world exists because an idea began to play in divine self–consciousness.


—Sri Aurobindo

.

The mind is like a river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify yourself with some particular ripple and call it "my thought".  

All you are conscious of is your mind. 

Awareness is the cognizance of consciousness as a whole.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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i am that

 

.

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 

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Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed.


—Haruki Murakami

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you shall not lose your way

beautiful

.

We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. 

Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we have to shatter that plate glass, we have to reach in there. 

So the old world observer simply has to be crossed off the books and we must put in the new term: participator. 

In this way we have come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.


—John Wheeler

.

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 McCarthy
Blood Meridian, excerpt

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All things are little, changeable, perishable.

All things come from thence, from that universal ruling power either directly proceeding or by way of sequence.

And accordingly the lion’s gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every harmful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful.

Do not then imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.

[...] Think always of the universe as one living creature, made of one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.


—Marcus Aurelius
April 26, 121 — March 17, 180, Rome
Meditations

.

A person is neither a thing nor a process, but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.

.

When the mind that is subtle goes out through the brain and the sense-organs, the gross names and forms appear; when it stays in the Heart, the names and forms disappear. Not letting the mind go out, but retaining it in the Heart is what is called ‘inwardness’ (antarmukha). Letting the mind go out of the Heart is known as ‘externalisation’ (bahirmukha).

Thus, when the mind stays in the Heart, the ‘I’ which is the source of all thoughts will go, and the Self which ever exists will shine. 

Whatever one does, one should do without the egoity ‘I’. 

If one acts in that way, all will appear as of the nature of Siva. 

Who am I?’ is not a mantra. It means that you must find out where in you arises the I-thought which is the source of all other thoughts. But if you find this vichara marga (self enquiry) too hard for you, you can go on repeating “I, I” and that will lead you to the same goal. 

There is no harm in using ‘I’ as a mantra. 

It is the first name of God.


—Ramana Maharshi 

.

dear friends

.

An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.


―Carl Jung

.

I used to know my name. Now I don’t.

I think a river understands me.

For what does it call itself in that blessed moment when it starts emptying into the Infinite Luminous Sea, and opening every aspect of self wider than it ever thought possible? Each drop of itself now running to embrace and unite with a million new friends.

And you were there, in my union with All, everyone who will ever see this page.


—Hafiz

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wait

.

deny yourself nothing

 

.

We’re only different in the ‘Left hemisphere, 

’in the 'Right Hemisphere’ we all share the same morphogenetic field

—Robert A. Wilson

.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). 

In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.


—Anne Carson
Eros the Bittersweet

.

Make love of yourself perfect. 

Deny yourself nothing – give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them; you are beyond. 


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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how to write the world

 

Fred Tomaselli

.

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. 

Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.


―Rainer Maria Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

.

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.

I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while. 


—The Chryptonaturalis

.

Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world. —Jack Kerouac

 

.

God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things,

though they are ignorant that this is so.

—Plotinus

.

You need not go to heaven to see God; nor need you speak loud, as if God were far away; nor need you cry for wings like a dove to fly to Him. Only be in silence, and you will come upon God within yourself.


—Saint Teresa of Avila

.

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

.