The total number of minds in the universe is one.

.

.

Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science.

It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and of all previous science – including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came along and contradicted them.

And yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and everything we experience are part. There is no other.


—David Deutsch, award winning theoretical physicist
The Beginning of Infinity, and The Fabric of Reality

.

This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture. Multiplicity is only apparent; in truth, there is only one mind.

In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings. What seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this One, produced by a deception.

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world.

The present is the only thing that has no end. Eternally and always, there is only now, one and the same now. The present is the only thing that has no end. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world’.

Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singlular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves. There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction. The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad.


—Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist and theoretical biologist, one of the founding fathers of quantum theory and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.

.

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday,

separate, in the evening.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

non-duality

     

.

When you wake up in the morning, consciousness dawns. In this state of being conscious, you perceive a body, mind and world. These are appearances only, not what you are. To identify oneself with any of those appearances gives rise to the notion of being a separate person, self or individual entity. This is the cause of all seeking, suffering and doubts. Being conscious is a state that comes and goes. 

In sleep, unconsciousness or death, the experience of being conscious subsides. So it is clearly a transitory state. However, before you awoke and became conscious of anything else, including the fact of being conscious, you were there. Consciousness happened to you who were there to experience it. 

Your original, fundamental position is prior to consciousness. This "prior to consciousness" identity that you are cannot be named at all. From this unnameable, non-conceptual source, which is your original, innate nature, arises the sense of conscious presence. This is also the sense of being, the experience that "I am", or the bare fact of knowing that you are. This is the first appearance or experience upon your original state.

Within this consciousness state emerges the mind, the body and the entire world of appearances. Little can be said about your original state because it is clearly beyond all concepts and even prior to consciousness. Some pointers that have been used are: non-conceptual awareness, awareness unaware of itself, pure being (beyond being and non-being), the absolute, the unmanifest, noumenon, cognizing emptiness, no thing - to name only a few. This non-conceptual awareness or being IS what you are. It is pure non-duality or unicity in which both subject and object are merged.

Just as the sun does not know light because it IS light, so you do not know your original nature (as an object) because you ARE THAT. It is forever beyond the grasp of concepts and subject-object knowledge. Yet it is entirely evident and inescapable as that in you (which is you) that allows you to say with utter certitude "I am" and "I know that I am". Even when those words subside, you ARE. 

Even when the consciousness that knows those words subsides, you ARE. Consciousness is the light of creation. But you, as the unnameable source, are the primordial awareness, being or no thing (call it what you will) in which consciousness comes and goes.


—John Archibald Wheeler, theoretical physicist

.

When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an 

image in front of her and then steps into it.

—Meister Eckhart

.

Your consciousness is not in your body.
Your body is in your consciousness.

You are not in your reality.
Your reality is in your consciousness.

You are not within time or space.
Space and time are ideas within your consciousness.

Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it.

My guru told me, "Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done."

If you have regard for me, remember my words. The knowledge "I Am” is the greatest God, the Guru; be one with that, be intimate with it. That itself will bless you with all the knowledge relevant for you.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

thou art that

 

.

All of Nature, its forms and creatures, are interrelated;
all will be returned to their original source.

The essence of matter also returns 
to the source of its own nature.
He who has ears, let him comprehend.


—Jesus of Nazareth
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

.

When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female, then shall you enter the Kingdom.


—Jesus of Nazareth
The Gospel of Thomas

.

Love one another.

—Jesus of Nazareth

John 13:34

.

questions

  

.

We are all made of bits moving in complicated quantum motions, but when we look closely at those bits, we find that they are located out at the farthest boundaries of space. I don’t know anything less intuitive about the world than this.

Getting our collective head around the Holographic Principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics.


—Leonard Susskind
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

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I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. 

I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. 

What is there then that can be taken as true? 

Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. 


—René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

.

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light steps, soft drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is just leaving,
the night yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
are just around the corner,
figurations of time
at the turn of this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward,
asleep with all five senses awake,
rain, light steps, a murmuring of syllables,
air and water, words without weight:
what we were and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time, great grief,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the wet asphalt sparkles,
the steam rises and walks,
the night unfolds and beholds me,
you are you and your waist of fog,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, slow lightning,
you cross the street and come in through my forehead,
footsteps of water upon both my eyelids,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt sparkles, you cross the street,
the fog wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the wave of your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn both of my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a welling up of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
years go by, moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the other room?
neither here nor there: you hear them
in another time that is also this time,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight or location,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the garden,
lightning has nested there among the leaves,
a restless garden lazily drifting
— come in, your shadow covers this page.


—Octavio Paz
As One Listens To The Rain
Paul Weinfeld version

.

Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead

  

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1. The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In that core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness.

2. Between the core and its surroundings there are exchanges, which are not usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer. The credibility of religion depends on the clarity of certain unusual exchanges. The mystifications of religion are the result of trying to systematically produce such exchanges.

3. The rarity of clear exchange is due to the rarity of what can cross intact the frontier between timelessness and time.

4. To see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature. Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do collectively. The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time. It would include all those who have ever lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

5.The dead inhabited a timeless moment of construction continuously rebegun. The construction is the state of the universe at any instant.

6. According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse. Having lived, the dead can never be inert.

7. If the dead live in a timeless moment, how can they have a memory? They remember no more than being thrown into time, as does everything which existed or exists.

8. The difference between the dead and the unborn is that the dead have this memory. As the number of dead increases, the memory enlarges.

9. The memory of the dead existing in timelessness may be thought of as a form of imagination concerning the possible. This imagination is close to (resides in) God; but I do not know how.

10. In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon. The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself. During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.

11. What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future? All the future is the construction in which their "imagination" is engaged.

12. How do the living live with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus, living and dead were interdependent. Always. 

Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated.


—John Berger
Hold Everything Dear

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be foolishly in love

   

.

A spirit that lives in this world
and does not wear the shirt of love,
such an existence is a deep disgrace.
Be foolishly in love,
because love is all there is.

There is no way into presence
except through a love exchange.
If someone asks, But what is love?
answer, Dissolving the will.

True freedom comes to those
who have escaped the questions
of freewill and fate.
Love is an emperor.
The two worlds play across him.
He barely notices their tumbling game.

Anything born in spring dies in the fall,
but love is not seasonal.
With wine pressed from grapes,
expect a hangover.
But this love path has no expectations.

You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount. Travel lighter.
Wings will be given.
Be clear like a mirror
reflecting nothing.

Be clean of pictures and the worry
that comes with images.
Gaze into what is not ashamed
or afraid of any truth.
Contain all human faces in your own
without any judgment of them.

Be pure emptiness.
What is inside that? you ask.
Silence is all I can say.
Lovers have some secrets
That they keep.


—Rumi

.

you being in love

will tell who softly asks in love, 

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely

to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:

entirely having in my careful how

careful arms created this at length

inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure–you go from several

persons: believe me that strangers arrive

when i have kissed you into a memory

slowly, oh seriously

–that since and if you disappear 

solemnly

myselves

ask “life, the question how do i drink dream smile 

and how do i prefer this face to another and

why do i weep eat sleep–what does the whole intend”

they wonder. oh and they cry “to be, being, that i am alive

this absurd fraction in its lowest terms

with everything cancelled

but shadows

–what does it all come down to? love? Love

if you like and i like,for the reason that i

hate people and lean out of this window is love,love

and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason

that i do not fall into this street is love.” 


—E. E. Cummings

.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, 

absentminded. Someone sober

will worry about events going badly. 

Let the lover be.


—Rumi
Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi 

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weird enough to be wise

    

.

In old traditions those who acted as elders were considered to have one foot in daily life and the other foot in the otherworld. Elders acted as a bridge between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit and soul. A person in touch with the otherworld stands out because something normally invisible can be seen through them. The old word for having a foot in each world is weird. The original sense of weird involved both fate and destiny. Becoming weird enough to be wise requires that a person learn to accommodate the strange way they are shaped within and aimed at the world.

An old idea suggests that those seeking for an elder should look for someone weird enough to be wise. For just as there can be no general wisdom, there are no “normal” elders. Normal bespeaks the “norms” that society uses to regulate people, whereas an awakened destiny always involves connections to the weird and the warp of life. In Norse mythology, as in Shakespeare, the Fates appear as the Weird Sisters who hold time and the timeless together.

Those who would become truly wise must become weird enough to be in touch with timeless things and abnormal enough to follow the guidance of the unseen. Elders are supposed to be weird, not simply “weirdos,” but strange and unusual in meaningful ways. Elders are supposed to be more in touch with the otherworld, but not out of touch with the struggles in this world. Elders have one foot firmly in the ground of survival and another in the realm of great imagination. This double-minded stance serves to help the living community and even helps the species survive.


—Michael Meade

About Elders

.

 

Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it

and that birds vanish because of something
that I remember
flying through me as though I were a great wind
as the stones settle into the ground
the trees into themselves
staring as though I were a great wind
which is what I pray for

it is clear to me that I cannot return
but that some of us will meet once more
even here
like our own statues
and some of us still later without names
and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures
and be found and lost no more


—W.S. Merwin
The Carrier of Ladders

.

 

One old man keeps humming the same few notes
of some song he thought he had forgotten
back in the days when as he knows there was
no word for life in the language 
and if they wanted to say eyes or heart
they would hold up a leaf and he remembers
the big tree where it rose from the dry ground
and the way the birds carried water in their voices
they were all the color of their fear of the dark
and as he sits there humming he remembers
some of the words they come back to him now
he smiles hearing them come and go


—W. S. Merwin
Parts of a Tune

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you are not a thing nor separate

 

.

Without imagination there is no world. Your conviction that you are conscious of a world is the world. The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself. You are the space in which it moves, the time in which it lasts, the love that gives it life. Cut off imagination and attachment and what remains?

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, excerpts

.

utterance

   

.

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence

—W.S. Merwin

.

in the with and as the with

    

.

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. 

Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. 

Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were. 

We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature. 


—David George Haskell

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

.

Everything, then, passes between us. The “between,” as its name implies, has neither a consistency nor continuity of its own. It does not lead from one to the other; it constitutes no connective tissue, no cement, no bridge. Perhaps it is not even fair to speak of a “connection” to its subject; it is neither connected nor unconnected; it falls short of both; even better, it is that which is at the heart of a connection, the interlacing [l’entrecroisment] of strands whose extremities remain separate even at the very center of the knot. 

The ‘between’ is the stretching out [distension] and distance opened by the singular as such, as its spacing of meaning. That which does not maintain its distance from the “between” is only immanence collapsed in on itself and deprived of meaning.

[...] Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.

—Jean-Luc Nancy
Being Singular Plural
We are Meaning 

.

When you are ripe, 
you will let go of yourself 
and the part of you that is fruit 
will fall and be happy 
and the part of you that is branch 
will tremble in the wind.


—Jamie Sabines
from Adam and Eve, 1952

.

beautiful creature

   

.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a God. 

And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

—Alan Watts
The Book:On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

wait - what ? 

.

There is a beautiful creature
Living in a hole you have dug.

So at night

I set fruit and grains

And little pots of wine and milk

Beside your soft earthen Mounds

And I often sing.

But still, my dear,

You do not come out.

I have fallen in love with Someone

Who hides inside you.

We should talk about this problem--

Otherwise,

I will never leave you alone.

—Hafiz

.

 

on every act the balance of the whole depends

Earthrise, Apollo Astronauts

‘

There’s something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries… The spread of life. The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here. 

And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India. That’s all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.

—Samantha Harvey
Orbital, a novel
more from Maria Popova's Marginalian here

.

Do you see how an act is not like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it? When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. 

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

.

Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

—Dan Gerber

.

here is the world

.

Kiss the mouth 
which tells you, here, here is the world.
 

This mouth. This laughter. 
These temple bones.

—Galway Kinnell

.

 

The way the world actually is, is an enormously complex interrelated organism. —Alan Watts

.

The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. 

It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

—Henry David Thoreau

 

.

You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. 

Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless.


—Chuang Tzu
4th Century B.C.

.

are you still happening there, in your body? 

—Joy Katz 

.

a wonderful and significant story

 

 

.

[Morgan Freeman] 

So, what are we really made of? 

Dig deep inside the atom and you'll find tiny particles 

Held together by invisible forces Everything is made up 

Of tiny packets of energy 

Born in cosmic furnaces [Frank Close] 

The atoms that we're made of have 

Negatively charged electrons 

Whirling around a big bulky nucleus [Michio Kaku] 

The Quantum Theory 

Offers a very different explanation 

Of our world [Brian Cox] 

The universe is made of 

Twelve particles of matter 

Four forces of nature That's a wonderful and significant story [Richard Feynman] 

Suppose that little things 

Behaved very differently 

Than anything big Nothing's really as it seems 

It's so wonderfully different 

Than anything big The world is a dynamic mess 

Of jiggling things 

It's hard to believe [Kaku] 

The quantum theory 

Is so strange and bizarre 

Even Einstein couldn't get his head around it [Cox] 

In the quantum world 

The world of particles 

Nothing is certain

t's a world of probabilities (refrain) [Feynman] 

It's very hard to imagine 

All the crazy things 

That things really are like Electrons act like waves 

No they don't exactly 

They act like particles 

No they don't exactly [Stephen Hawking] 

We need a theory of everything 

Which is still just beyond our grasp 

We need a theory of everything, perhaps 

The ultimate triumph of science (refrain) 

[Feynman] 

I gotta stop somewhere 

I'll leave you something to imagine

.

 

on being a Being

   

.

On the edge of the forest, a strange, old-fashioned animal still hesitated. His body was the body of a tree dweller, and though tough and knotty by human standards, he was, in terms of that world into which he gazed, a weakling. His teeth, though strong for chewing on the tough roots of the forest, or for crunching the occasional unwary bird caught with his prehensile hands, were not the tearing sabres of the great cats. He had a passion for lifting himself up to see about, in his restless, roving curiosity. He would run a little stiffly and uncertainly, perhaps, on his hind legs, but only in those rare moments when he ventured out upon the ground. All this was the legacy of his climbing days; he had a hand with flexible fingers and no fine specialized hoofs upon which to gallup like the wind.

If he had any idea of competing in that new world, he had better forget it; teeth or hooves, he was much too late for either. He was a ne’er-do-well, an in-betweener. Nature had not done well by him. it was as if she had hesitated and never quite made up her mind. Perhaps as a consequence he had a malicious gleam in his eye, the gleam of an outcast who has been left nothing and knows that he is going to have to take what he gets. One day a little band of these odd apes—for apes they were—stumbled out upon the grass; the human story had begun.

[] Apes were to become men, in the inscrutable wisdom of nature, because flowers had produced seeds and fruits in such tremendous quantities that a new and totally different store of energy had become available in concentrated form.

[] Down in the grass by a streamside, one of those apes with inquisitive fingers turned over a stone and hefted it vaguely. ... He liked the feel of it in his fingers. The attack on the animal world was about to begin.

—Loren Eiseley

The Immense Journey

How Flowers Changed the World

.

It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. 

Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. 

I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. 

In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.

—Freeman Dyson

theoretical physicist and mathematician (1923–2020)

.

In the final stages of his quest to find a new way of thinking about the essence of being, Heidegger came to an understanding of awareness as the very ground of such a thinking - indeed of being itself - recognizing awareness as the open field or clearing which first gives or grants Being to beings.


—Peter Wilberg
Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought

.