The body is our general medium for having a world. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Do you know who God is?

God is not Vishnu, Shiva or Brahma; not the wind, the sun or the moon; not the brahmana or the king, nor I nor you; not Lakshmi nor the mind (intellect). God is without form and undivided; that splendor (devanam) which is not made and which has neither beginning nor end is known as God (Deva) or Lord Shiva which is Pure Consciousness.

I asked the Lord: Pray tell me how this world is transmuted into Pure Consciousness and also how that Pure Consciousness appears as the jiva and other things. 

The Lord continued: Indeed only that cid-akasha (the Infinite Space of Consciousness), which alone exists even after the cosmic dissolution, exists even now, utterly devoid of objectivity.

Even as the duality experienced in dream is illusory, the duality implied in the creation of the world is illusory. 

Even as the objects seem to exist and function in the inner world of Consciousness in a Dream, objects seem to exist and function in the outer world of Consciousness during the Wakeful state. 

Nothing really happens in both these states.

Even as Consciousness alone is the Reality in the Dream state, Consciousness alone is the Substance in the Wakeful state too. 

That is the Lord, 

That is the Supreme Truth, 

That You Are, 

That I Am and

That is All.

—Swami Venkatesananda

Vasistha's Yoga, exerpts

know-the-self

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A thought without a body is not a star. —Aaron Shurin

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Buddhist philosophy, the notion of mutually dependent origination, says that everything originates together, mutually dependent. It is close to implicate order, which says that everything comes out of a good and everything is interrelated, and that underlying it there is no substance that can be defined. That also gives rise to karma, but karma too becomes changeable since even our own state of mind is part of the whole, and when it changes the whole changes, so the karma changes.

The holomovement which is 'life implicit' is the ground both of 'life explicit' and of 'inanimate matter', and this ground is what is primary, self-existent and universal. Thus, we do not fragment life and inanimate matter, nor do we try to reduce the former completely to nothing but an outcome of the latter.

Thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly. And, as we'll discuss further on, it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person. Yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that is not doing anything—that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. 

But I want to say that you don't decide what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives the false information that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought, whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. 

Until thought is understood—better yet, more than understood, perceived—it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do. 

That's the difficulty. Thought is participating and then saying it's not participating. But it is taking part in everything. Fragmentation is a particular case of that. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.

—David Bohm(1917 - 1992)
tao-of-digital-photography

 

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in(side

 

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How something is made flesh

no one can say. The buffalo soup

becomes a woman

who sings every day to her horses

or summons another to her private body

saying, come, touch, this is how

it begins, the path of a newly born

who, salvaged from other lives and worlds,

will grow to become a woman, a man,

with a heart that never rests,

and the gathered berries,

the wild grapes

enter the body,

human wine

which can love,

where nothing created is wasted;

the swallowed grain takes you through the dreams

of another night,

the deer meat becomes hands

strong enough to work.

But I love most

the white-haired creature

eating green leaves;

the sun shines there

swallowed, showing in her face

taking in all the light,

and in the end

when the shadow from the ground

enters the body and remains,

in the end, you might say,

This is myself,

still unknown, still a mystery.


—Linda Hogan

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process(ion

 

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Everything in the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of an abstraction. If you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you can catch sight of is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. If it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand under your feet.

There are some creatures who do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cells, living all over again. 

The cycles of the slime mold have episodes that seem as conclusive as death, but the withered slug, with its stock and fruiting body, is plainly the transient tissue of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebocytes use this organ collectively to produce more of themselves.

Who ever sees dead birds, in anything like the huge numbers stipulated by the certainty of the death of all birds? A dead bird is an incongruity, more startling than an unexpected live bird, sure evidence to the human mind that something has gone wrong. Birds do their dying off somewhere, behind things, under things, never on the wing. It is a natural marvel. 

All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. […] I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my back yard, they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel.

I suppose it is just as well. If the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be looked at, we would never have it out of our minds. We can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying seem more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves engage. There are 3 billion of us on the earth and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something more than 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy.

We speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors.

Less than half a century from now (2024), our replacements will have more than doubled in numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. 

We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process.

Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company.


—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell, 1974, excerpts
(treasure)

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What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies 

but rather the shape of our motions over time?

—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The Mushroom at the End of the World

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blood, sea

    

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In 1976, the Italian writer Italo Calvino published a famous collection of poetic prose, t zero. The story “Blood, Sea" recounts a sequence of events narrated from the first-person perspective of a blood cell, alternating with a story about human protagonists, told in the conventional perspective of the third person. 

In the story, among a lot of other astonishing relations, Calvino explores the fact that the water of the earth’s oceans shows a mineral composition which strikingly resembles that of our body fluids. The blood plasma is the sea in which life once began. This ocean still fills us, as it fills all other lifeforms. 

Calvino imagined a narrative told by a blood cell, a cell which is suspended in this primordial ocean within our bodies. He told a story from the perspective of life itself, or rather from the perspective of the life-giving ability of the primal fluid and its invitation to make intimate connections. 

He spoke from the standpoint of an outside which is also an inside. Calvino invented “Biopoetics” avant la lettre. He envisioned a first-person account of what is not human through our shared qualities, through our participation in a vast web of transformations. 

For Calvino, the poet, it was only evident that we are able to make statements about this network of changes and exchanges because we are a part of it, and we are concerned by it, as we are by our own fate. 

Poetic creativity is the power to know something through intimate participation. […] Calvino is a poet, and as such he knows about the fact that true novelty in this world, and also true experiences of connection, only arise through the exchange, the breakdown and recreation of what is real.

—Andreas Weber

Biopoetics

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I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me.

That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, 
and my blood is part of the sea.

There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

—D. H. Lawrence

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being imperfect

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Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. 

How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity.

—Jack Kerouac

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Some things, niño, some things are like this,
That instantly and in themselves are gay
And you and I are such things, O most miserable...

For a moment they are gay and are a part
Of an element, the exactest element for us,
In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own.

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things
And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,
That we are joyously ourselves and we think

Without the labor of thought, in that element,
And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if
There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves,

A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,
The will to be and to be total in belief,
Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.


—Wallace Stevens
Of Bright & Blue Birds & The Gala Sun

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