sometimes words have two meanings

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The fourth dimension offers a shock to the mind accustomed to practical handling of matter, because all our experiences of measurement or dimensionality are ultimately founded upon matter possessing but three dimensions, so that we have great difficulty in accepting the reality of a direction not contained in our space or our matter but definitely at right angles to every line that can be drawn within the matter and space which contain all our ordinary experiences.

Our idea of space is partial, and like many another of our ideas needs modification to accommodate it to fuller knowledge. 

What we think of as space is more probably only some part of space made perceptible. It may be that our space bears a relation to space in its totality analogous to that which the images cast by a magic lantern bear to the wall on which these images are made to appear—a wall with solidity, thickness, extension in other and more directions than those embraced within the wavering circle of light which would correspond to our sense of the cosmos.

In other words, perhaps that which we think of as space is only so much of it as our limited sensuous mechanism is able to apprehend.


—Claude Bragdon
A Primer of Higher Space: The Fourth Dimension
noosphe.re

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There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to Heaven
When she gets there, she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word, she can get what she came for
And she's buying a stairway to Heaven

There's a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know, sometimes words have two meanings
In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven
It makes me wonder

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts, I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking
It really makes me wonder

And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now
It's just a spring clean for the May Queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
And there's still time to change the road you're on
And it makes me wonder

Your head is humming, and it won't go, in case you don't know
The piper's calling you to join him
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind, oh-oh?

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show

How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all,
To be a rock and not to roll
And she's buying a stairway to Heaven

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need, then, is the net for all things. —Rumi

 

Paris at night, from the International Space Station

huge image, click on

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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. 

Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. 

At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.


—Alan Lightman, American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Einstein’s Dreams, London, Vintage, 2004. 

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We cannot live only for ourselves.

A thousand fibers connect us

with our fellow men;

and among those fibers,

as sympathetic threads,

our actions run as causes,

and they come back

to us as effects.


—Herman Melville
(1819 - 1891)

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cosmic unit

   

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In an ideal world, as connectivity progresses, each human of our world would function the way a cell functions in a human body. We would see each other in the context of our individuality but realise how our individual actions both directly and indirectly affect the greater Earth. 

It would be as if our Atmans (our individual spirits) could merge into a Brahmin (a cosmic unity)

—Kiran Bhat

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All day I have been reading
about the invisible world, the one
that’s always trying to reach us. 

What if we could hear
the small round o’s of dirt,
the chant of stars and plants,
carbon and sulphur, calling to each other, innumerable
to innumerable, a throat at every blade of grass.

—Ellery Akers
Night: Volcano, California

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mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight

.

And do you know what “the world” is to me?

Shall I show it to you in my mirror?

This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a sphere that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself–do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?

This world is the will to power–and nothing besides!

And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!


—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will To Power
(begs to be read aloud

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Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types.

It is of the essence of types, that they be connected.

Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered.

No fact is merely itself.


—Alfred North Whitehead
Modes of Thought

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live roots and rising airships

  

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[...] he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel - gently he grasped the copper handle of the door - the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then - he started opening the door - he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day's-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. 

Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.


―László Krasznahorkai
The Melancholy of Resistance

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Give us courage, gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare us to our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.

If it may not, give us the strength to encounter
that which is to come, that we be brave in peril,
constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates
of death, loyal and loving to one another.


—Robert Louis Stevenson 

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LOVE is anterior to life,

Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.

—Emily Dickinson

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all things swim and glitter

 

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Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. 

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. 

Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius!


—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series

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I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.


—William Stafford
when i met my muse

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no man is an island

 

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When going to bed, first a Mevlevî “sees with” the pillow, and then lies down. Then, when he is pulling the quilt over himself, he “sees with” that too, kissing its edge. Before he drinks water, tea or coffee, he kisses the glass: he “sees with” it.

When a Mevlevî takes a book to read, he or she “sees with” the book. After she finishes reading it, again she “sees with” the book and puts it lightly back in its place. 

She picks up the tasbīḥ (prayer beads) and “sees with” them, and when she has finished chanting, she “sees with” the tasbīḥ and puts them gently back in their place.

This practice applies to everything . . . 

—ADÜLBÂKI GÖLPINARLI
Mevlevi Adab and Customs, excerpts from the glossary
sufism.org

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When I am not present to myself, then I am only aware of that half of me, that mode of my being which turns outward to created things. 

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them. Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self toward God. 

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. My senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth. 

Recollection brings them home. It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God.


—Thomas Merton
No Man is an Island, excerpt 

.

God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things,

though they are ignorant that this is so.

—Plotinus

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glimpsey

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The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep. 

They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once.

—Frederick Buechner
Whistling in the Dark

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Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.


—Czesław Miłosz
The Way One Looks At Distant Things
Robert Haas version

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the invisible walls,

the rotten masks that divide one man

from another, one man from himself,

they crumble for one enormous moment and we glimpse the unity that we lost, the desolation of being man, and all its glories,

sharing bread and sun and death,

the forgotten astonishment of being alive

—Octavio Paz

Sunstone (Piedra de Sol) excerpt

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thou art that

  

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A knower of the Truth
travels without leaving a trace
speaks without causing harm
gives without keeping an account

The door he shuts, though having no lock,
cannot be opened
The knot he ties, though using no cord,
cannot be undone

If you think otherwise,
despite your knowledge, you have blundered


—Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching

.

You know that you are. 

Don’t burden yourself with names, just be. 

Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.

—Sri Nisargadatta

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there are no spaces

  

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The world is the wheel of God, turning round

And round with all living creatures upon its rim.

The world is the river of consciousness,

Flowing in the one self.

On this ever-revolving wheel of being

The individual self goes round and round

Through life after life, believing itself

To be a separate creature, until

It sees its identity with the Lord of Love

Immortal in the indivisible whole.


—Svetashvatara Upanishad [4-6] 
version

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The self is the sun shining in the sky,

The wind blowing in space; we are the fire 

At the altar and in the home the guest;

We dwell as human beings, in gods, in truth,

And in the vast firmament; we are the fish

Born in water, the plant growing in the earth, 

The river flowing down from the mountain, 

We are incomparable.


—Katha Upanishad 11.2.2
version

.

listen carefully

  

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The moon is a white strange world, a great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. 

When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. 

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time … Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.


—D. H. Lawrence

.

Although the evening is cold and starless
And the rain is raging,
I’m still singing my song during this period,

I don’t know who’s listening.
Though the world is drowned in war and fear,
At some point
Burning secretly, if no one sees them,
The love continues.

—Hermann Hesse

 

.

Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas 
Nor the Qur'an 
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind 
All the way to heaven.

—Kabir

 

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rest

.

Just rest. 

Just sit there right now
Don’t do a thing
Just rest.

For your separation from God,
From love,
Is the hardest work
In this
World.

Let me bring you trays of food
And something
That you like to
Drink.

You can use my soft words
As a cushion
For your
Head.


—Hafiz 
Daniel Ladinsky version

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strange world

 

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a voice out of this world
calls on our souls
not to wait any more
get ready to move
to the original home

your real home
your real birth place
is up here with the heavens
let your soul take a flight
like a happy phoenix

you've been tied up
your feet in the mud
your body roped to a log
break loose your ties
get ready for the final flight

make your last journey
from this strange world
soar for the heights
where there is no more
separation of you and your home

God has created
your wings not to be dormant
as long as you are alive
you must try more and more
to use your wings to show you're alive

these wings of yours
are filled with quests and hopes
if they are not used
they will wither away
they will soon decay

you may not like
what i'm going to tell you
you are stuck
now you must seek
nothing but the source


—Rumi 
Ghazal 945 
Nader Khalili translation

.

knowing with an(other

  

.

One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. 

People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. 

And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.

—Joseph Campbell

.

According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. 

The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous. 

―Deepak Chopra

Synchro Destiny

.

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

—Walt Whitman

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the house we live in

   

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What we speak
becomes the house
we live in. 
Who will want
to sleep in your bed
if the roof leaks
right above it?

Fear is the 
cheapest room 
in the house,
I would like
to see you living
in better conditions.

There is only one reason
we have followed God
into this world:
to encourage laughter,
freedom,
dance and love ....

God and I are rushing
from every corner of 
existence,
needing to say
we are yours.

The sun never says
to the earth,
even after all this time
“you owe me”.

I once asked a bird
how is it that you 
fly in this gravity
of darkness?
she responded,
love lifts me.

I should not make 
any promises right now
but I know if you pray
somewhere in this world
something good 
will happen.


—Hafiz
Daniel Ladinsky and
Robert Bly version

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will there really be a morning?

.

101

Will there really be a "Morning"?
Is there such a thing as "Day"?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Men from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called "Morning" lies!


—Emily Dickinson

.

Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden here.

The continents blasted, cities and little towns,
everything become a scorched blacked ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here is 
there is no news at all.


—Rumi

.

real(ization

   

.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. 

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 the shining parts, is the soul. 

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. 

The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one. 

So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. 

He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.


—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
ESSAY IX The Over-Soul, excerpts 

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The Self in man and in the sun are one.
Those who understand this see through the world
And go beyond various sheaths
Of being to realize the unity of life.

Those who realize that all life is one
Are at home everywhere and see themselves
In all beings. They sing in wonder:

“I am the food of life, I am, I am,
I eat the food of life, I eat, I eat,
I link food and water, I link, I link,
I am the first-born in the universe;
Older than the gods, I am immortal.

Who shares food with the hungry protects me;
Who shares not with them is consumed by me.
I am this world and I consume this world.
They who understand this understand life.”

This is the Upanishad, the secret teaching.

OM shanti shanti shanti

—The Taittiriya Upanishad, excerpt
Eknath Easwaren version

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