the cosmos is a vast body

 

.

The moon is a white strange world, a great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. 

When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast 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 gleaming nerve-centre 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 … Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.


—D. H. Lawrence

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say i am you

.

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and moth crazy around it.
Rose and nightingale lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away.
What is, and what isn’t.

You who know,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.

You embrace some form
saying, “I am this.”
By God, you are not this
or that or the other

you are “Unique One”
“Heart-ravishing”
You are throne and palace and king;
You are bird and snare and fowler. 
As water in jar and river are in essence the same,
You are spirit, are the same.
You, every idol prostrates before;
Your every thought-form perishes in your formlessness.


—Rumi

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place(ment

 

.

Our hands imbibe like roots,
so I place them on what is beautiful in this world.

I fold them in prayer, and they
draw from the heavens
light.


—St. Francis of Assisi

.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. ―Oscar Wilde

A Roman brick from Cherchell, Algeria with a 2000-year-old imprint of a human hand.

.

The brain is not the mind, the mind inhabits the brain. Like a ghost in a machine, some say. Mind is the comforting mirage of the physical brain. An experience, not an entity.

Another way to think of mind may be as St. Augustine thought of God, as an emanation that is not located in one place, or one form, but exists throughout the universe. An essence, not just a substance.

And, of course, the mind is not located only in the brain. The mind reflects what the body senses and feels, it is influenced by a caravan of hormones and enzymes.


—Diane Ackerman
An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

.

What is the ultimate truth about ourselves? 

Various answers suggest themselves. We are a bit of stellar matter gone wrong. We are physical machinery —puppets that strut and talk and laugh and die as the hand of time pulls the strings beneath. 

But there is one elementary inescapable answer.

We are that which asks the question.


—Sir Arthur Eddington

.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. —William S. Burroughs

 

.

I am the thought that lives in the light.

I live in everyone, and I delve into them all...
I move in every creature...
I am the invisible one in all beings...
I am the voice speaking softly...
I am the real voice... the voice from the invisible thought... 

It is a mystery... I cry out in everyone...
I hid myself in everyone, and revealed myself
within them, and every mind seeking me longs
for me... 

I am she who gradually brought forth everything...
I am the image of the invisible spirit...
The mother, the light... the virgin… the womb, and the voice... 

I put breath in all beings..


—Nag Hammadi Scrolls

from Why Religion, Elaine Pagels

.

changed and odd

 

Alex Saber

.

In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen could happen—all you had to do was say it.

Nobody can explain this:
That's the way it was.


—Nalungiaq
Nalungiaq was an Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen in the early twentieth century.

.

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far off farm,
I hold still and listen for a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and were my brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,
and an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home
And asks me questions. What should I reply?


—Hermann Hesse

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notes to self

.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

―Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See

.

The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don’t you agree? Two-thirds of earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin.

―Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

.

Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together without putting many things together.
 

—Wendell Berry

In Distrust of Movements

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wait

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there is a small space

 

.

All reality is consciousness.

And the same consciousness is the life of all: thus we have the explanation for both the sanctity and the unity of life.

As far, verily, as this world-space extends, so far extends the space within the heart. 

Within it, indeed, are contained both heaven and earth, both fire and wind, both sun and moon, lightning and the stars, both what one possesses here and what one does not possess; everything here is contained within it.


—Chhandogya Upanishad 8.1.3

.

You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. 

The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage to others.  

Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.

—Buckminster Fuller

.

There is a beautiful expression [...] in the Chandogya Upanishad: 'There is this City of Brahman, (that is the body), and in this city there is a shrine, and in that shrine there is a small lotus, and in that lotus there is a small space, (akasa).'

Now what exists within that small space, that is to be sought, that is to be understood. This is the great discovery of the Upanishads, this inner shrine, this guha, or cave of the heart, where the inner meaning of life, of all human existence, is to be found.


—Bede Griffiths

.

ten thousand things

 

.

By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. 

And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.


—Yukio Mishima
Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories

.

Tao engenders One, One engenders Two,

Two engenders Three,

Three engenders the ten thousand things.


—Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo version

.

the drop that contains the sea

 

.

The fading away of the Tao is when openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, and energy turns into form. When form is born, everything is thereby stultified. 

The functioning of the Tao is when form turns into energy, energy turns into spirit, and spirit turns into openness. When openness is clear, everything thereby flows freely.

Therefore ancient sages investigated the beginnings of free flow and stultification, found the source of evolution, forgot form to cultivate energy, forgot energy to cultivate spirit, and forgot spirit to cultivate openness. 


—Tan Jingsheng, 10th century

The Immortal Sisters: Secret Teachings of Taoist Women

Thomas Cleary

 

.

Man has no Body distinct from the Soul!
for that Body is a portion of the Soul
discerned by the five Senses,
the chief inlets to the Soul in this age.

Energy is the only life and is from the Body;
and reason is the bound or outward
circumference of energy. 

Energy is eternal delight.


—William Blake
18th century

.

tastes of the water

.

 

 

There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe.

The horizontal threads are in space. 

The vertical threads are in time.

At every crossing of the threads, there is an individual, 

and every individual is a crystal bead.

And every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net, but also every other reflection throughout the entire universe.

—The Rig Veda

.

Sometimes when, through shock, dispersed attention is suddenly collected, one comes to an abrupt awakening and glimpses the relationship between energy and attention. Impressions are received differently, perceptions are wider and sharper. 

Unexpectedly, another side of oneself is revealed. The value of existence of all living things takes on new meaning.

—William Segal

.

A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas: there is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life. The reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light.

—Hung Tzu-ch’eng

.

Love is the mystery of water and a star. —Pablo Neruda

 

.

Love in its essence is spiritual fire. 

—Seneca

.

Let your love flow outward through the universe,
To its height, its depth, its broad extent,
A limitless love, without hatred or enmity.

Then as you stand or walk,
Sit or lie down,
As long as you are awake,
Strive for this with a one-pointed mind;

Your life will bring heaven to earth.


—The Sutta-Nipāta

.

In the end these things matter most:

How well did you love?

How fully did you love?

How deeply did you learn to let go?


—Buddha

.

some(times

.

We find ourselves in a world structured by matter and energy in space and time, and in that world each of us inhabits a body, one among many. At least, that is how we interpret our experiences. 

But when we analyze our conviction of the reality of the material world, we find that it is all based on experiences, nothing else, nothing more real than that.


—Piet Hut
The Nature of Reality: Matter, Experience, Appearance, Presence 

.

 

 

looking, walking, being

 

.

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.


—Kurt Vonnegut

.

I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing,
breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.


—Denise Levertov

.

you are stardust

   

.

Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again.


—Finn Butler

.

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

The cosmos is also within us. 

We are made of star-stuff. 

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

—Carl Sagan

. 

the river of love

.

Time, nature, necessity, accident,
Elements, energy, intelligence —
are but dreams of the conscious Self, the Love
dwelling in the one heart.

The world is a wheel of consciousness
turning within the one heart,
merging and emerging in
the river of Love.

The self is present in the one heart
in the one love
as butter is in cream
conscious


—Lessons from The Shvetashvatara Upanishad
Eknath Easwaran version

.

 

it(self

   

.

Consciousness is consciousness of something. 

This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness emerges supported by a being which is not itself.
 

—Jean-Paul Sartre

.

if

 

.

Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,
let them sleep

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,
sleep on

I've given up on my brain.
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,
and sleep.


—Rumi

.

.

the wind blows wild

 

.

I woke up to the sound of the wind blowing wild

Crying like a warning in the night

Crying like a warning in the night

If you would save a friend

If you would serve your own

Rise up in the morning with the light

Rise up in the morning with the light

 

Rise up in the morning and hear the sisters call

The brothers are standing at the door

They say one spirit leads you

They say it all must go

The wind blows wild on the shore

 

Now listen to the sound of the years going down

It's fifty blowing in the wind

Fifty years blowing in the wind

The memories just fade into a bright parade

How many times did you see him?

How many times did you see him?

 

Did you see him?

He was there to wave to you

All those times you've needed him before

You say this one shall lead you,

He knows we all must go

The wind blows wild on the shore

 

Nobody's fool

Everybody's clown

A riddle when there is no better answer

Tripping like through a dream like Mister Tambourine

Dancing on a sea of laughter

Dancing on a sea of laughter

 

Did you see him?

He was there to wave to you

All those times you've needed him before

You say this one shall lead you

He knows we all must go

The wind blows wild on the shore

 

Now listen to the sound of the wind blowing wild

Crying like a warning in the night

Crying like a warning in the night

If you would save a friend

If you would serve your own

Rise up in the morning with the light

Rise up in the morning with the light

Rise up in the morning and hear the sisters call

The brothers are standing at the door

You know one spirit leads you

You know we all must go

The wind blows wild on the shore

 

Did you see him?

He was there to wave to you

.

being(ness

   

.

You are neither the body nor in the body — there is no such thing as body. You have grievously misunderstood yourself; to understand rightly — investigate.

.

You must come to a firm decision. 

You must forget the thought that you are the body and be only the knowledge ‘I am’, which has no form, no name. 

When you stabilize in that beingness, it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you, and when the secrets are given to you, you transcend the beingness, and you, the Absolute will know that you are also not the consciousness.

Having gained all this knowledge, having understood what is what, a kind of quietude prevails, a tranquility.

Beingness is transcended, but beingness is available.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

in(formation

 

.

The fact is, we don’t really experience matter. 
What we experience when we look at something is the electromagnetic radiation influenced by some object that we call matter. 

When we touch matter, we are experiencing the effect of the laws of electromagnetic force owing to the repulsion of charges between the electron shells of the atoms in our fingers and the electron shells of the atoms in the object. 


—Jim Elvidge
Digital Consciousness

.

... Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek proposes that just as there are naturally emerging crystal structures in the third dimension, this same effect could be happening within what he calls “Time Crystals”, extradimensional patterns that reside within a timeless whole.

It turns out that the increasingly popular view of physicists that reality is made of information may require the existence of universal consciousness to actualize this information into physically “real” experience.

... the view that the Universe is conscious, and that the consciousness of humans and animals is derived not from the consciousness of fundamental particles, but from the consciousness of the Universe itself. 


—Alex Vikoulov
The Origins of Us

.

form(ation

 

.

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. 

Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.


—Alan Watts

.

Name and form are past bondages. The fact is, that which IS, is only one. It is omnipresent and universal. We say ‘here is a table’, ‘there is a bird’, or ‘there is a man’.

There is thus a difference in name and form only, but That which IS, is present everywhere and at all times.
That is what is known as asti - Existence, omnipresent.

To say that a thing exists there must be someone to see.
That intelligence to see is known as bhati - Consciousness.

There must be someone to say, ‘I see it, I hear it, I want it’.
That is priyam - Love.

All these three are the attributes of nature, the natural Self.

They are also called Existence, Consciousness, Bliss.
(Sat-Chit-Ananda).


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

thou art that

.

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

―Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Notes on Grief

.

Breathing in, I see the presence of my beloved in every cell of my body.
Breathing out, I smile to my beloved in every cell of my body.
My beloved in every cell,
Smiling.

Breathing in, my loved one is breathing in with me.
Breathing out, my loved one is breathing out with me.
My loved one breathing in with me
My loved one breathing out with me

Breathing in, I am breathing with my loved one's lungs.
Breathing out, our bodies relax.
Breathing with my loved one's lungs,
Our bodies relaxing.

Breathing in, I am looking with my loved one's eyes.
Breathing out, I am listening with my loved one's ears.
Looking with my loved one's eyes
Listening with my loved one's ears

Breathing in, I see I am part of the wonderful river of life, flowing continuously for thousands of years.
Breathing out, I smile and entrust myself to this river of life.
River of life, entrusting myself.

—Thich Nhat Hanh
How to Live When a Loved One Dies,

Healing Meditations for Grief and Loss

.

largerloves

quidnunc (what now?

.