miracles of scrutiny

 

.

In certain regions of the far north, where the dust content of the atmosphere is close to zero, light is able to move unscattered through the air. In such places, under such conditions, far away objects can often appear uncannily close at hand to the observer. 

The lichen patterns on a boulder can be seen from a hundred yards, cormorants on a sea-stack seem within reach of touch. 

Distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.


—Robert Macfarlane
Landmarks (a treasure)
Chapter 7, on Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams
(another treasure)

.

When we say that the world is knowable, i.e. that knowledge as such exists, we state through this fact itself the tenet of the essential unity of the world or its knowability. 

We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism - all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it. 

The relationship of everything and of all beings is the conditio sine qua non of their knowability.


—Anonymous (Valentin Tomberg
Meditations on the Tarot

.

the ultimate That

.

The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. 

Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. 

Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.


—Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy 

.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

 

.

We are yet to become aware of the fact that we embrace our world within ourselves; and that all that exists as persons, places, and things live only within our own consciousness.


—Joel Goldsmith

.

The world, conceived by the finite mind as a multiplicity and diversity of objects made out of dead, inert stuff called ‘matter’, comes into apparent existence when consciousness ignores the reality of itself, and it vanishes out of apparent existence when consciousness wakes up to or recognises itself.


—Rupert Spira
The Nature of Consciousness

.

The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

.

all possibilities of time

.

Like a confluence of great rivers, our lives are a series of different moments, joining together to give the impression of one continuous flow. We move from cause and effect, event to event, one point to another - which gives an outward impression that our lives are one continuous, unified movement. 

In reality, they are not.

Each moment is born and dies. And in a very real way we are born and die with it. Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin.


Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

.

 

And an astronomer said, Master, what of Time? And he answered: You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.

You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.

Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,

And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.

And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.

—Kahlil Gibran

On Time

.

everywhere the same

 

.

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. 

There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. 

This is it: this hum is the silence. 

Nature does not utter a peep - just this one. 

The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. 

The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it is all there is.


—Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk, excerpt

.

The entire universe is to be looked upon as the Lord. —The Isha Upanishad

.

God is the underlying force, the energy and the consciousness of existence. If you cannot feel the divine within, you cannot feel him without.

The first step is to feel God within. Then prayer to a personal god becomes meaningless, and meditation becomes meaningful.

The second step is to realize the divine without, to realize that God is not the creator, he is creation. He is not separate from creation. 

He is the force and consciousness of creation.


—Swami Dhyan Giten

.

what is it that you love?

 

.

It is natural and good to love oneself. 

Only, you should know exactly what it is that you love. 

It is not the body that you love, it is Life: perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. 

Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. 

Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. 
Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fullness of it. 

You come to know by dwelling in your mind on “I am,” “I know,” “I love” - with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That

.

you are that

 

.

Life has no meaning. 
Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. 

It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.


—Joseph Campbell

.

I sometimes forget that I was created for Joy.
My mind is too busy.
My Heart is too heavy
for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the Sacred dance of life.

I was created to smile
To Love
To be lifted up
And to lift others up.

O’ Sacred One
Untangle my feet
from all that ensnares.
Free my soul.
That we might
Dance
and that our dancing
might be contagious.


Hafiz

.

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

 

.

If you don't know the kind of person I am 
and I don't know the kind of person you are 
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world 
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, 
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break 
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood 
storming out to play through the broken dyke. 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, 
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, 
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty 
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, 
a remote important region in all who talk: 
though we could fool each other, we should consider-- 
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. 

For it is important that awake people be awake, 
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes, no, or maybe-- should be clear: 
the darkness around us is deep.


—William Stafford

.

this, our life

.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. 


—William Shakespeare

.

Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains. —Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

Shatial Glyphs high up in Pakistan's Indus Valley cover boulders stretching for more than 100 kilometers. The writings and designs cover various languages, religions and the symbolism of peoples dating back 10,000 years.

.

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. 

You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects. 


—Vladimir Nabokov

.

We all start from “naive realism,” i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold.

But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but something very different.


—Bertrand Russell

.

the brilliance of matter

 

.

Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change his direction in life.


—Sam Keen

.

To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of time, I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity—not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. 

Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.


—Isamu Noguchi
Listening to Stone

.

the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined

  

.

door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,

door of being: open your being
and wake ....


—Octavio Paz
Sandstone (excerpt)

.

field of be(ings

.

Each thing, each being, is in steady intercourse with the entities and elements around it, negotiating its passage and exerting its participation in the ongoing emergence of what is.

If we allow that matter is not inert, but is rather animate (or self-organizing) from the get-go … we are left with a diversely differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has gifts relative to the others. 

And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this living field, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape.

We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because—by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism—we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous. 

We can feel the tangible textures, sounds, and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight.  

Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh. We are neither pure spirits nor pure minds, but are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, and touched by the beings around us.


—David Abram
Becoming Animal, excerpts

.

you are standing in the sky

    

.

Look at your feet.
You are standing in the sky. 

When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, 
but the sky actually begins at the earth. 

We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, 
wash the dog, and drive cars in it. 

We breathe it deep within us. 

With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.


—Diane Ackerman

A Natural History of the Senses

.

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest—the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways—and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it.

Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in—to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain.

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them—neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them—and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.


—Wendell Berry
A Native Hill

.

questions

 

.

My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside 
it buckles under these things.

[...]

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, excerpt

.

this is the drop of an instant

.

Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life. 

For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
It is yours.


—Pablo Neruda
ode to the past

.

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

  

Tim Ingersoll

.

My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind. In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. 

Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. 

The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.


―Ovid
Metamorphoses, 8 CE

.

By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written
by the time you forget
by the time you are water through fingers
by the time you are taken for granted
by the time it hurts 
by the time it goes on hurting
by the time there are no words for you
by the time you remember
but without names
by the time you are in the papers
and on the telephone
passing unnoticed there too

who is it 
to whom you come  
before whose very eyes 
you are disappearing 
without making yourself known


—W. S. Merwin
to the present tense

.

hallo

   

.

 

 

You look at the world and it may seem whole or it may seem broken, but then the world looks back and some sort of reciprocity that is not of any school of poetry or any single denomination happens, and in our absolute attention we feel attended to: for here there is no place that does not see you.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

“Hallo, Rabbit,’ he said, ‘is that you?’

'Let's pretend it isn't,' said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.'”

—A. A. Milne

 

.

 

 

flow

 

.

The human skin is an artificial boundary: the world wanders into it, 

and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and constant. 

—Bernard Wolfe 

.

We all tend to see our bodies as ‘frozen sculptures’ – solid, fixed, material objects, when in truth they are more like rivers, constantly changing, flowing patterns of intelligence.

Your adipose tissue (fat cells) fill up with fat and empty out constantly, so that all of it is exchanged every three weeks.

You acquire a new stomach lining every five days. Your skin is new every five weeks. Your skeleton, seeming so solid and rigid, is entirely new every three months.

You appear to be the same outwardly, yet you are like a building whose bricks are constantly being replaced by new ones. Every year, fully 98 percent of the atoms and molecules in your body are replaced.

To change the printout of the body, we must learn to rewrite the software of the mind.


—Deepak Chopra

. 

Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. 

Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

—Roger Sperry

.

The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses—not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef—just impulses.


—Diane Ackerman
A Natural History of the Senses 

.

star(dust

 

.

Often, lost in the wide blue, I look up at the ether and into the holy sea, and I feel as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of solitude dissolved into the life of the divinity. 

To be one with all – that is the life of the divinity, that is the heaven of man. To be one with all that lives, to return in blessed self-oblivion into the All of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain height, the place of eternal repose, where the midday loses its swelter and the thunder its voice and the boiling sea resembles the billowing field of grain. To be one with all that lives! 

With these words virtue removes its wrathful armor, the spirit of man lays its scepter aside and all thoughts vanish before the image of the world’s eternal unity, just as the rules of the struggling artist vanish before his Urania; and iron fate abdicates its power, and death vanishes from the union of beings, and indivisibility and eternal youth bless and beautify the world.

—Friedrich Hölderlin 1770 – 1843

Hyperion, Ross Benjamin version

.

largerloves

wait - what ?

.

assurance

.

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies.

You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.


—William Stafford

.

life cannot be seen

.

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?


—Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

.

Master Lu Tzu said : That which exists through itself is called Meaning (Tao). Meaning has neither name nor force. 

It is the one essence, the one primordial spirit. 

Essence and life cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the Light of Heaven. 

The Light of Heaven cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the two eyes.


—Richard Wilhelm, Carl Jung

The Secret of the Golden Flower

.

wait

.

darkness within darkness

 

.

1.


The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell version

.

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.


—Rainier Maria Rilke
Robert Bly version

.

real(ly

  

 

 

.

 

Just live your life as it comes. Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself. 

Perception is based on memory and is only imagination. 
The world can be said to appear but not to be. Only that which makes perception possible is real.

You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown. Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you.  

Know yourself as you are. Distrust your mind and go beyond. Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness. 
It is utterly beyond both. 

It gives birth to consciousness. 
All else is in consciousness.

Nothing you can see, feel or think is so. 

Go beyond the personal and see. Stop imagining that you were born. You are utterly beyond all existence and non-existence, utterly beyond all that the mind conceives.  

Question yourself: Who am I? 
What is behind and beyond all this? 
Soon you will see that thinking yourself to be a person is mere habit built on memory. Inquire ceaselessly.

Just be aware of your being here and now. 
There is nothing more to it. 
In reality you are not a thing nor separate.

You are the infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility. Because you are, all can be.  

The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become. You are neither consciousness nor its content. You are the timeless Source.  

Disassociate yourself from mind and consciousness. 
Find a foothold beyond and all will be clear and easy.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I am That

.

The question ‘Who am I?’ is not really meant to get an answer. 

The question ‘Who am I?’ is meant to dissolve the questioner.


—Ramana Maharshi

. 

When past and future dissolve there is only You

—Rumi

.

as light pours like rain

.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

.

God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.


—Hafiz

.