a mystical geography

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This land was once completely forested, Dr. Alemayehu Wassie began—sweeping his arms across the surrounding countryside—so much so that nobody would have seen the church. It was all trees. Now almost all the old forests have been cut down. The only place where they are still protected are in church forests like this one. When the people here at Zajor decided to build their wall, he said, they were not bureaucratic, they just built a wall. He motioned to the elderly priest with the carved wooden staff and thanked him for initiating the project. Alemayehu hoped other priests would be inspired by this community’s example.

As we stood beside the wall, a stream of local parishioners came and went through the gate. This is what Alemayehu meant when he described the wall as “porous.” 

A group of children hopped on the wall and ran down its length to the west until they rounded the corner and were lost to sight. An elderly woman approached. She stopped beside the wall, crossed herself three times, then bowed low at the waist and began to fan her face with both hands, cupping the air and pulling it toward her, as if partaking of some invisible goodness that lay inside the wall. Then she rose and walked solemnly up the forest path. Clearly this was no mere border fence; it was an entrance into the sanctuary.

“Humans can come here any hour of the day to 

contemplate or pray or collect seeds.”

click for detail

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During the centuries when most people were illiterate, icons served to teach the biblical stories. The paintings, most from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, were made from natural dyes taken from local plants. Other than the tin roof and solar panels, all the materials for the church came from this place. In these icons was a forest transformed, the trees and roots and pollen all having passed through the fires of human imagination, while still retaining their sylvan imprint.

Perhaps I was witnessing more than gestures of devotion, important as they were. Maybe they were also the secret to conserving the forest, small acts that together with hundreds of other gestures like them formed an invisible shield around the forests of Zajor. As I would come to learn, this shield was embedded deep within the structures of belief that had survived here since the fourth century. Our Western conceptions of belief are almost entirely inward and private. Here, and at other points on my journey into these forests, I was witnessing the performance of a mystical geography, the soul’s journey to God made visible in the landscape.

“In our tradition, the church is like an ark. 

A shelter for every kind of creature and plant.”

from the splendid essay by Fred Bahnson,

The Church Forests of Ethiopia, at Emergence Magazine

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more magic

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sweet(hearts

 

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A leaf says,
“Sweethearts—don’t pick me,
For I am busy doing
God’s work. 

I am lowering my veins and roots
Like ropes
With buckets tied to them
Into the earth’s deep
Lake.  

I am drawing water
That I offer like a rose to
The sky.  

I am a singing cleaning woman
Dusting all the shelves in
The air
With my elegant green
Rags.  

I have a heart.
I can know happiness like
You.


—Hafiz

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shanti, shanti, shanti

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All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. 

They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. 

Yet the promise is not of a monument. The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

 

—John Berger
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
wait - what ?

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Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within.

Underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered.

—Huston Smith

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The Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; 

it is never heard but is the Hearer; 

it is never thought but is the Thinker; 

it is never known but is the Knower.

There is no other witness but This,

no other knower but This.

 

—The Upanishad

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the realm of the densely packed

  

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Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others. For the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.

Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.


—Albert Einstein

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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.


—Terence McKenna

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We trust that time is linear.
That it proceeds eternally, uniformly,
Into Infinity.

But the distinction between
past, present and future is
nothing but an illusion.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow
are not consecutive, they are connected
in a never-ending circle.


—Albert Einstein

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beauti(ful

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In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This shuddering before the beautiful, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.


—S. Chandrasekhar (1910 - 1995)

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there are an infinite number of worlds

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It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. 

Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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What do you have to do?

Pack your bags,

Go to the station without them,

Catch the train,

And leave your self behind.

 

—Wei Wu Wei

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questions

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Philosophers maintain that the future is similarly nothing more than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts. 

Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the “now”—where is time?

Does time exist on its own, apart from human concepts that are no more than conveniences for our formulas or for the description of motion and events? 

In this way, simple logic alone casts doubt on whether there exists anything outside of an “eternal now” that includes the human mind’s tendency to think and daydream. 

Physicists, for their part, find that all working models for reality—from Newton’s laws and Einstein’s field equations through quantum mechanics—have no need for time. They are all time-symmetrical.

—Robert Lanza M.D.

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Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. 

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream. 

And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.

—Khalil Gibran

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Grace is within you. If it were external, it would be useless. —Ramana Maharshi

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You think that you are the body or that you are the mind. But there are occasions when you are free from both.

For example in deep slumber, you create a body and a world in your dream. That represents your mental activities. In your waking state you think that you are the body and then the idea of forest and the rest arise.

Now, consider the situation. You are an unchanging and continuous being who remains in all these states which are constantly changing and therefore transient.
But you are always there.

It follows that these fleeting objects are mere phenomena which appear on your being like pictures which move across a screen. The screen does not move when the picture moves. Similarly, you do not move from where you are even when the body leaves the home and mixes in society.

Your body, the society, the forest and the ways are all in you; you are not in them. You are the body also but not this body only. If you remain as your pure Self, the body and its movements need not affect you.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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You are neck-deep in water and yet cry for water.

It is as good as saying that one neck-deep in water feels thirsty, or that a fish in water feels thirsty, or that water feels thirsty.

Grace is always there.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

   

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Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

—Yehuda Amichai

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It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight


—W. S. Merwin
Still Morning

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For all the features it hoards and displays
age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air
held between the hands like a stunned bird

while I stand remembering light in the trees
of another century on a continent long submerged
with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time
felt memory as they were touching the day

and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections
on the pond's surface that never were seen again

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying


—W. S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius, excerpt

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a brighter word than bright

   

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Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. 

The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see - thoughtfully.


—Dan Beachy-Quick

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A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges
This Craft of Verse

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In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: 

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out 

and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

—Czesław Miłosz
Ars Poetica

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In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

—Rumi

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the insatiable longing of finite beings

Jascha Heifetz playing in Mili’s darkened studio as light attached to his bow
traces the bow movement, New York, 1952

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The beauty of visible life in the inorganic world is noticeable first of all in flowing water in its various forms-streams, mountain-rivers, waterfalls. The aesthetic significance of this living movement is enhanced by its boundlessness, which seems as it were to express the insatiable longing of finite beings separate from the absolute all-inclusive unity. 

And the boundless sea itself acquires a new beauty in its stormy motion as the symbol of rebellious life, of the gigantic struggle of elementary forces which cannot break the universal interconnectedness of the cosmos or destroy its unity, and only fill it with movement, brilliance and thunder.

—Vladimir Solovyov
wait - what ?

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oh please

  

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Run, my dear,
from anything that may not strengthen
your precious budding wings,

Run like hell, my dear,
from anyone likely to put a sharp knife
into the sacred, tender vision
of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
those aspects of obedience
that stand outside of our house
and shout to our reason
"oh please, oh please
come out and play!"

For we have not come here to take prisoners,
or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
our divine courage, freedom,
and Light.


—Hafiz

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The heart brings us authentic tidings of invisible things. —James Hillman

 

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The heart is an intricate pump. It creates electromagnetic fields that others can feel or through which we can communicate. We exist immersed in living fields of communication, all of which are imbued with meaning, generated by intelligent life forms which flow from and to us from the moment the cells of our bodies self-organize into the unique identities that we know as ourselves.

 We feel the touch of the world upon us, and those millions of unique touches hold within them specific meanings, sent to us from the heart of the world and from the heart of the living beings with which we inhabit this world. We are never alone. 

The greeks had a word for the heart’s ability to perceive meaning from the world: aisthesis.

In Aristotalian psychology the organ of aesthesis is the heart; passages from all the sense organs run to it; there the soul is set on fire. 

Its thought is innately aesthetic and sensately linked with the world.

 

—James Hillman

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Aisthesis denotes the moment in which a flow of life force, imbued with communications, moves from one living organism to another. The word literally means ‘to breathe in’. it is a taking in of the world, a taking in of soulful communications. 

The world takes us in too—we are breathed. 

The use of the heart as an organ of perception and communication weaves us inextricably into the life web of the Earth, gathering knowledge from the heart of the world.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
The Secret Teachings of Plants, excerpts 
(treasure)

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The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.
Some think it is East of us, others West of us.
Some say ‘among primitive earth rocks’,
Others, 'in the deep waters.’

Kabir’s instinct told him it was inside,
And what it was worth –
And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.


—Kabir

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creat(ure

   

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Wisdom is not assimilated with the eyes, but with the atoms. When your conviction of a truth is not merely in your brain but in your being, you may definitely vouch for its meaning.

—Sri Yukteswar

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The pebble
is a perfect creature 

equal to itself 
mindful of its limits  

filled exactly 
with a pebbly meaning 

with a scent that does not remind one of anything 
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire 

its ardour and coldness 
are just and full of dignity 

I feel a heavy remorse 
when I hold it in my hand 
and its noble body 
is permeated by false warmth 

- Pebbles cannot be tamed - 
to the end they will look at us 
with a calm and very clear eye


—Zbigniew Herbert
Peter Dale Scott/Czesław Miłosz version

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Everything in the world has a hidden meaning.
Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics. 

When you see them you do not understand them. 
You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. 

It is only years later that you understand.


—Nikos Kazantzakis

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speech pouring down

   

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Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.

I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield […]. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

—Thomas Merton 

Raids on the Unspeakable (1960)

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Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.


—Thomas Merton

 

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two orders of reality & the light of consciousness (always a finer constitution)

  

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[Physicist David] Bohm suggested that the explicate order is extracted from the implicate order in a similar way in which a holographic image is extracted from a series of swirls and shadings into a three-dimensional image when illuminated by laser light. 

The illumination that extracts the physical universe from the implicate order is the light of consciousness. 

In this model the act of observation draws ‘in-formation’ out of the implicate order and manifests it in the explicate order. Bohm was keen to use the term in-formation rather than information. By this he meant a process that actually ‘forms’ the recipient.


—Anthony Peake
Infinite Mindfield

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We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle 'nature'. We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.


—Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
The Critique of Pure Reason 

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All is allegory. Each creature is a key to all others. —J.M. Coetzee

 

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Biology is discovering subjectivity as a fundamental principle throughout nature. It finds that even the most simple living things —bacterial cells, fertilized eggs, nematodes in tidal flats—act according to values. 

Organisms value everything they encounter according to its meaning for the further coherence of their embodied self. Even the cell’s self-production, the continuous maintenance of a highly structured order, can only be understood if we perceive the cell as an actor that persistently follows a goal. Life always has an inside, which is the result of how its matter, its outside, is organized.

 

—Andreas Weber

The Biology of Wonder

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The conscious self is not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives.

—Northrop Frye

 

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this road is the heart opening —Mirabai

    

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To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. 

To know the dark, go dark. 

Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.


—Wendell Berry

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The window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in.

All you need is to understand that you are the source of reality, that you give reality instead of getting it, that you need no support and no confirmation. 

Things are as they are because you accept them as they are. Stop accepting them and they will dissolve.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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question

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Questioner: Why is it that we naturally seem to think of ourselves as separate individuals?

Maharaj: Your thoughts about individuality are really not your own thoughts; they are all collective thoughts. You think that you are the one who has the thoughts; in fact thoughts arise in consciousness.

As our spiritual knowledge grows, our identification with an individual body-mind diminishes, and our consciousness expands into universal consciousness. The life force continues to act, but its thoughts and actions are no longer limited to an individual. They become the total manifestation. It is like the action of the wind - the wind doesn't blow for any particular individual, but for the total manifestation.

Cannot you see clearly that everything that appears to happen happens in consciousness? It is all imaginary, a temporary hallucination. Don't be led astray, none of it reflects your true state.

The real is changeless. 

What changes is not real, what is real does not change.

What begins and ends is mere appearance. 

The world can be said to appear, but not to be. The appearance may last very long on some scale of time, and very short on another, but ultimately it comes to the same. Whatever is time-bound is momentary and has no reality.

Transiency is the best proof of unreality.

Know your Self to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. 

That is enough.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

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The moment you realize that you are not the thoughts but the space in 

which they float, you have understood the phenomenon of awareness.

—Osho

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I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter as derivative from consciousness. —Max Planck

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The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. 

It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, — or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.

We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.


—William James
The Principles of Psychology

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A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day. 

A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible. 

It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it.


—John Berger
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

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The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

—Joseph Campbell 

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Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal. —Carlos Fuentes

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God sleeps in stone,

breathes in plants,

dreams in animals

and awakens in man.


—Vedic proverb

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Whether we write or speak or do but look 
We are ever unapparent. What we are 
Cannot be transfused into word or book. 
Our soul from us is infinitely far. 
However much we give our thoughts the will 
To be our soul and gesture it abroad, 
Our hearts are incommunicable still. 

In what we show ourselves we are ignored. 
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged 
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming. 
Unto our very selves we are abridged 
When we would utter to our thought our being. 
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams, 
And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.

—Fernando Pessoa

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If you are stone, be magnetic;

if a plant, be sensitive;

if you are human, be love.


—Victor Hugo
Les Miserables

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