I do not believe in miracles. I rely on them. —Yogi Bhajan

.

alright so we're all
gonna die but now is the
time to sing & see, to be
humble, sacrificed, late,
crazy, talkative, foolish,
proud, indispensable, early
sane, silent, serious


—Jack Kerouac 
Book of Sketches

.

Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. 

Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget.

It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness …


—Jack Kerouac
Atop An Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

.

 

The year's doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown. 

Last night you told me: tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper. 

Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.

—Octavio Paz

January First
Elizabeth Bishop version

.

the most courageous work

  

.

 

Open the letter of the body’s life.

Inside the words, this body, your life, is a letter
to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if
the words are right. If they

are not, start another! And do not think it is easy to open
the body and read the secret

message. This is the most courageous work, not something
for children playing with knucklebones
in the dirt. Open to

the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you
have said it says? If

you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! Bring
only what should be given.


—Rumi

.

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.


—Robert Bly
Morning Poems

.

Over these writings I bent my head.

Now you are considering them. If you

turn away I will look up: a bridge

that was there will be gone.

For the rest of your life I will stand here,

reaching across.

If these writings can bring a turn
or an echo that touches you - maybe
a face, a slant, a tune - you will stop
too and bend over them. When you
look up, your thought will reach
wherever I am.

I know it is strange. and there is no measure
for this. The only connection we make
is like a twinge when sometimes they change
the beat in music, and we sprawl with it
and hear another world for a minute
that is almost there.

—William Stafford
Sending These Messages

.

 

and now (notes to self

.

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands. 

Let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

.

No, you do not have a thousand years to live. Urgency is upon you. 

So while you live, while you can, become good.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life.

Now take what is left and live it properly.

—Marcus Aurelius 121 to 180 CE

.

everyday gods

 

.

Let us not speak now of God the Father. Let us speak rather of the gods, your neighbours, and of your brothers, the elements that move about your houses and your fields.

You would rise in fancy unto the cloud, and you deem it height; and you would pass over the vast sea and claim it to be distance. But I say unto you that when you sow a seed in the earth, you reach a greater height; and when you hail the beauty of the morning to your neighbour, you cross a greater sea.

Too often do you sing God, the Infinite, and yet in truth you hear not the song. Would that you might listen to the songbirds, and to the leaves that forsake the branch when the wind passes by, and forget not, my friends, that these sing only when they are separated from the branch! Again, I bid you to speak not so freely of God, who is your All, but speak rather and understand one another, neighbour unto neighbour, a god unto a god.

For what shall feed the fledgling in the nest if the mother bird flies skyward? And what anemone in the field shall be fulfilled unless it be husbanded by a bee from another anemone?

It is only when you are lost in your smaller selves that you seek the sky which you call God. Would that you might find paths into your vast selves; would that you might be less idle and pave the roads!

My mariners and my friends, it were wiser to speak less of God, whom we cannot understand, and more of each other, whom we may understand. Yet I would have you know that we are the breath and the fragrance of God. 

We are God, in leaf, in flower and, oftentimes, in fruit.


—Kahlil Gibran
excerpts from The Garden of The Prophet

. 

In order for us to use our power well, we must become a hollow bone. We must prepare ourselves to become a channel. Our channel must be clean before we can use our power well. We must be free of resentments, guilt, shame, anger, self pity and fear.

If these things are in us, we cannot be hollow bones. These things block us from our power. The cleaner we are, the more power we move. We must become a hollow bone so the Creator can use us to do what he wants us to do.

My Creator, remove from me today all resentment, anger, fear, guilt and selfishness. Do not let my weaknesses stand in the way of my usefulness to You. Make me a hollow bone so Your power can flow through me.


—Sparrow White Elk Raven

.

The Great Learning, excerpts

    

.

The Great Way has no gate; there are a thousand paths to it.

If you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone.  

—Wu-Men

.

Wanting equilibrium in the empire, that light which comes from looking straight into her and acting, they first set up good government in their own states.

Wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart); wishing to obtain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories. 

When things had been classified in organic categories, knowledge moved toward fulfillment; given the extreme knowable points, the inarticulate thoughts were defined with precision (the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally).

Having obtained this precise verbal definition (aliter, this sincerity), they then stabilized their hearts, they disciplined themselves; having obtained self-discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their own homes, they brought good government to their own states; and when their states were well governed, the empire was brought into equilibrium.

From the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root.

If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed. The solid cannot be swept away as trivial, nor can trash be established as solid. It just does not happen.


—Confucius
Ezra Pound version

.

little universes

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

.

Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.

Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadences, —
Ah, what sagacity perished here!

Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.


—Emily Dickinson

.

frothy wakings

 

 

Tracks made by atomic particles from a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up the particles.

.

The eye can’t see protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles, but a camera records their frothy wakes in a chamber of liquefied neon and hydrogen at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Physicists study the tracks to learn about the characteristics of the particles that produced them. 

—National Geographic 1978

.

When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move. 

I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what a chessman is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. 

Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen.

—Paul A. M. Dirac (1902 - 1984)

.

inner space

.

 

We fashion the world that surrounds us by the intensity of our imagination and feeling, and we illuminate or darken our lives by the concepts we hold of ourselves. Nothing is more important to us than our conception of ourselves, and especially is true of our concept of the deep, dimensionally greater One within us.

Those that help or hinder us, whether they know it or not, are the servants of that law which shapes outward circumstances in harmony with our inner nature. It is our conception of ourselves which frees or constrains us, though it may use material agencies to achieve its purpose. Because life molds the outer world to reflect the inner arrangement of our minds, there is no way of bringing about the outer perfection we seek other than by the transformation of ourselves. 

No help cometh from without: the hills to which we lift our eyes are those of an inner range.

It is thus to our own consciousness that we must turn as to the only reality, the only foundation on which all phenomena can be explained. We can rely absolutely on the justice of this law to give us only that which is of the nature of ourselves.

To attempt to change the world before we change our concept of ourselves is to struggle against the nature of things. There can be no outer change until there is first an inner change.


—Neville Goddard

.

If a little pebble thrown into the sea puts the water in action, one hardly stops to think to what extent this vibration acts upon the sea. What one can see is the little waves and circles that the pebble produces before one. One sees these, but the vibration that has been produced in the sea reaches much further than man can ever imagine.

What we call space is a much finer world. If we call it sea, it is a sea with the finest fluid. If we call it land, it is a land that is incomparably more fertile than the land we know. This land takes everything in it and brings it up, it rears it, it allows it to grow—our eyes do not see it, our ears do not hear it.


—Hazrat Inayat Khan
The Mysticism of Sound and Music
noosphe.re

.

Don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. 

It is quiet, but the roots are down there riotous. 

—Rumi

.

art(work

   

.

We’ve seen nonlocality pop up all over the place: in experiments on the quantum realm, in the paradoxes of black holes, in the grand structure of the universe, in the maelstrom of particle collisions. 

In all these examples, physics enters a twilight zone. 

Things can outrun light; cause and effect can be reversed; distance can lose meaning; two objects may actually be one. The universe becomes spooky.


—George Musser 
Spooky Action at a Distance

.

.

 

Love is not exactly a relation between two people, but a relation between two multiplicities. And it is also a kind of construction, the construction of a landscape, of a universe that can include these multiplicities. So, in a certain way it is work of art. 

The loving subject is an artist, and I would say the subject in general has to be thought not simply as a self-related identity but as an artist. 

Subjectivity is a matter of operations, and those operations are alterations. There is a becoming-other in the very constitution of the other as an object of love. 

—J. Rancière
Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition

 

.

Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

[…]

I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.

—Robert Macfarlane

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

.

Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you. —Rumi

 

.

The world is nothing but the picture of your own "I” consciousness. As if you had received a phone call telling you that you are, and immediately the world appears. 

When you are in deep sleep and you feel that you are awake, the dream world appears simultaneously. 

With the (knowledge) “I Am,” the world appears in the waking and dream states.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

 

I pray in words. I pray in poems.

I want to learn to pray through breathing, through dreams and sleeplessness, through love and renunciation.

I pray through snow that falls outside the window.

I pray with the tears that do not end.


—Anna Kamienska
In That Great River: A Notebook

 

. 

I am nothing; I see all; 

the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; 

I am part or particle of God.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

larger loves

 

 

.

what we are, that only can we see

   

Clement Siegried

.

(The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.

The poet is the namer, the sayer, and represents beauty.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. 

[The Poet] is a beholder of ideas, and utterer of the necessary and casual. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet.)


—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series, 1844
excerpts

.

 

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect—What is truth? and of the affections—What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will.

Then shall come to pass what my poet said; 'Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient.

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you.'

For you is the phenomenon perfect.

What we are, that only can we see.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Nature

.

the soul of the whole

    

whales sleeping

.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One. 

And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are One.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

[...] All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

.

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.


—Albert Einstein

.

 

Everything you see has its roots

In the unseen world.

The forms may change

Yet the essence remains the same.

Every wondrous sight will vanish,

Every sweet word will fade,

But do not be disheartened.

The Source they come from is Eternal,

Growing, branching out,

Giving new life and new joy.

Why do you weep?

That Source is within you

And this whole world

Is springing up from it.

The Source is full,

Its waters are ever-flowing;

Do not grieve,

Drink your fill!

Don’t think it will ever run dry,

This is the endless Ocean.

—Rumi

.

manifold world

.

Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again… 

And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key.

Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.

Embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.


—Hermann Hesse
excerpted from Steppenwolfe
by Maria Popova (treasure)
here

.

mattering

 

 

.

 

The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. 

Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the “Other.” 

The intra-actively emergent “parts” of phenomena are co­constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future.

Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. Even atoms, whose very name, ατομοσ (atomos), means “indivisible” or “uncuttable,” can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. 

Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant.


—Karen Barad

Meeting the Universe Halfway:

Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning excerpts noosphe.re

  

.

No, you do not have a thousand years to live. 

Urgency is on you. 

So while you live, while you can, become good.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life.

Now take what is left and live it properly.

—Marcus Aurelius (r. 161 to 180 CE)

.

what speaks in the blood

.

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. They do various things which irresistibly draw men near them; each one selects a certain man.

The Deer shoots the man, who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home and eat it.

Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and hides in there, but the man doesn't know it.

When enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all at once.

The men who don't have Deer in them will also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some.

This is called "takeover from inside".


—Gary Snyder

.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires.

It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another.

Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say.
Watch and listen.

You are the result of the love of thousands.


—Linda Hogan

. 

be light.

as minerals in the ground rise inside trees
and become tree,

as plant faces an animal
and enters the animal,

so a human
can put down the heavy
body baggage and
be light.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

.

shanti, shanti, shanti

 

.

Om Om Om

Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu

Sarvesham Shantir Bhavatu

Sarvesham Poornam Bhavatu

Sarvesham Mangalam Bhavatu

Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti



Om Om Om

May there be happiness in all

May there be peace in all

May there be completeness in all

May there be success in all

Om, Peace, Peace, Peace

.

more truly and more strange

.

I was in the world in which I walked, and what I saw 

Or heard or felt came not but from myself 

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


—Wallace Stevens
Tea in the Palaz of Hoon

.

We are individualized waves of consciousness on the Infinite Ocean of Spirit; so say the sages. But, although the Ocean has become the wave, and the wave, when it dissolves the illusion of ego-separation and limitation, realizes that it has always been one with the Infinite Ocean, the form-bound wave itself is not the Ocean. 

Nor is the Ocean merely the sum of its waves—the Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the Ocean.

Everything you can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and much more, is part of this Ocean. For all matter, energy and consciousness is merely waves of certain rates of vibration on the surface of the Ocean of Consciousness; Spirit has become, and is present in and as, every created thing. That is, consciousness is the “water” of the Infinite Ocean of Spirit, and all phenomena arise as modifications of this one stuff, or ripples on/of this Ocean of cosmic consciousness.


—Geoffrey D. Falk
The Science of the Soul: On Consciousness

and the Structure of Reality

.

Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book -
maybe the book you give away.

Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.


—Louise Erdrich
from Advice to Myself #2: Resistance
whiskeyriver (treasure)

.

rest now

    

.

Rest in peace. You are the unchangeable Awareness in which all activity takes place.

Always rest in peace. 

You are eternal Being, unbounded and undivided. 
Just keep Quiet. All is well. Keep Quiet Here and Now. 

You are Happiness, you are Peace, you are Freedom. 
Do not entertain any notions that you are in trouble. 

Be kind to yourself. Open to your Heart and simply Be. 
Those who know This know Everything. 
If not, even the most learned know nothing at all.


—Papaji

.

When you see your own essence, when you have that direct experience, you will see that every plant and animal is your own Self. 

They will all start to speak to you. 

This is the formless Self in the Heart of all beings. 

—Papaji

.

It is not the work that hinders (peace) 

but the idea that it is you who are doing it.

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.