in the with and as the with

    

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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

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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 

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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

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beautiful creature

   

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

 

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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.

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are you still happening there, in your body? 

—Joy Katz 

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a wonderful and significant story

 

 

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[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

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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

.

nothing the matter

.

Niels Bohr understood that the energy of electrons in atoms can take on only certain values, like the energy of light, and crucially that electrons can only jump between one atomic orbit and another with determined energies, emitting or absorbing a photon when they jump. These are the famous "quantum leaps."

Werner Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The "quantum leaps" from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being "real": an electron is a set of jumps of one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place.

It is not in a "place" at all.

It's as if God had not designed reality with a line that was heavily scored but just dotted it with a faint outline.


—Carlo Rovelli
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, excerpts

.

I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such.

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.


—Max Planck
1931 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Father of Quantum Theory

 

 

.

 

So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quartz, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics?

Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings.

What is chemistry?

Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings and then what is the mind of God?

It is the cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace.


—Michio Kaku

.

Concerning matter, we have been all wrong.

What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses.

There is no matter.

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.


—Albert Einstein

 

 

.

Umwelt!

.

Umwelt — that lovely German word for the sensory bubble each creature inhabits, both limiting and defining its perceptual reality.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn't feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

The umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.

It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity. When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.


—Ed Yong
An Immense World, excerpts
(treasures

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unit(y

.

What is religion to the mystic? The religion of the mystic is a steady progress towards unity. How is this progress made? In two ways.

In the first way, the mystic sees one’s self in others, in the good, in the bad, in all; and thus they expand the horizon of their vision. This study goes on throughout one’s lifetime; and as one progresses one comes closer to the oneness of all things.

The other way of developing is to become conscious of one’s own self in God and of God in one’s self, which means deepening the consciousness of out our innermost being. This process takes place in two directions: outwardly by being one with all we see; and inwardly, by being in touch with that one Life which is everlasting, by dissolving into it and by being conscious of that one Life.

The brain speaks through words; the heart in the glance of the eyes; and the soul through a radiance that charges the atmosphere, magnetizing all.

The phenomena of the radiance of the soul are apparent to the student of the human body. The body with its perfect mechanism loses power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness, when the soul departs from the body. This shows that the power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness belong to the soul. 

—Hazrat Inayat Khan

excerpts

.

We are creatures of each other, causing and bearing each other’s burden. —Sri Nisargadatta

.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything; 
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.

With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, 
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.

And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence. 
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…


—Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Images

.

The body is not you, the name is not you.

The body is the food you have consumed;
the taste of the food is the knowledge ‘I am’.

That is Self, the feeling ‘I am’,
that is the love to be. 

How amazing, how incredible, it has no name, but you give many names to it. 

It is the Self, the love to be. 
That love to be is all pervading. 

Before you conceptualize anything, you are. 

Even before the knowingness, you are.


—Sri Nisargadatta

.

You have long been bound thinking: 

‘I am a person’.

Let the knowledge: ‘I am Awareness alone’ 

be the sword that frees you.

—Ashtavakra Gita

 

.

(Costing not less than everything) —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

    

.

Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. 

—Albert Einstein

.

We are like the spider. 

We weave our life and then move along in it. 

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. 

This is true for the entire universe.


—The Upanishads

.

Start seeing everything as God,

But keep it a secret.

—Hafiz

.

eyes of the heart

    

 

 

 

.

For one who sees with the eyes of the heart, rather than the senses, the world looks different; the blades of grass, the song of the birds, the drops of dew, all are seen to be none other than the One Life that surrounds us in every moment. 

They see the One in every creature and every creature in the One… they see everything with an equal eye.


—Bhagavad Gita

.

Ether, air, fire, water, earth, planets, all creatures, directions, trees and plants, rivers and seas, they are all organs of God’s body. 

Remembering this a devotee respects all species.

—The Srimad Bhagavatam (2.2.41)

.

every song the heart should cry

     

.

I have come into this world to hear this: every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in the Divine womb and began spinning, every song by wing and fin and hoof, every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child, every song of stream and rock, every song of tool and lyre and flute, every song of gold and emerald and fire, every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity to know itself as God: for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching -  only imbibing the glorious Sun will complete us. 

I have come into this world to experience this: men so true to love they would rather die before speaking an unkind word, men so true their lives are a covenant - the promise of hope.

I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of rage because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound.

—Hafiz

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