the witness is the door

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Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep.

Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something. Consciousness is partial and changeful, awareness is total, changeless, calm and silent. And it is the common matrix of every experience.

Whatever depends, is not real. The real is truly independent. Since the existence of the person depends on the existence of the world and it is circumscribed and defined by the world, it cannot be real.

As long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace – immersed in the deep silence of reality.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond. The witness is the door through which you pass beyond.
 

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I Am That, 1973

largerloves

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You are the solitary Witness of All That Is,

Forever Free.

Your only bondage is not seeing this.

—Ashtavakra Gita

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what originates in reality that is independent of thought?

   

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We have to be very alert and careful here. For we tend to try to fix the essential content of our discussion in a particular concept or image, and talk about this as if it were a separate ‘thing’ that would be independent of our thought about it. We fail to notice that in fact this 'thing’ has by now become only an image, a form in the overall process of thought i.e. response of memory, which is a residue of past perception through the mind (either someone else’s or one’s own). And so, in a very subtle way, we may once again be trapped in a movement in which we treat something originating in our own thought as if it were a reality originating independently of this thought.

We can keep out of this trap by being aware that the actuality of knowledge is a living process that is taking place right now (e.g. in this room). In such an actual process, we are not just talking about the movement of knowledge, as if looking at it from the outside. We are actually taking part in this movement, and are aware that this is indeed what it is happening. That is to say, it is a genuine reality for all of us, a reality which we can observe and to which we can give our attention.

The key question is then: “Can we be aware of the ever-changing and flowing reality of this actual process of knowledge?” If we can think from such awareness, we will not be led to mistake what originates in thought with what originates in reality that is independent of thought. And thus, the art of metaphysics may develop in a way that is free of the confusion inherent in those forms of thought which try to define, once and for all, what 'the whole of reality is’, and which therefore lead us to mistake the content of such thought for the overall order of a total reality that would be independent of thought.


—David Bohm

Reality and Knowledge Considered as Process

Birbeck College

University of London, May 1974

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The kingdom of God is not in the clouds, in some designated point of space; 

it is right behind the darkness that you perceive with closed eyes. 

—Yogananda

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the Bravest - grope a little

  

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We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye -

A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darkness -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When no a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.


—Emily Dickinson

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Here in the centre stands the glass. Light 

Is the lion that comes down to drink. 


—Wallace Stevens
The Glass of Water

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darkness within darkness

  

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1.


The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell version

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You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.


—Rainier Maria Rilke
Robert Bly version

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the drop that contains the sea

  

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The fading away of the Tao is when openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, and energy turns into form. When form is born, everything is thereby stultified. 

The functioning of the Tao is when form turns into energy, energy turns into spirit, and spirit turns into openness. When openness is clear, everything thereby flows freely.

Therefore ancient sages investigated the beginnings of free flow and stultification, found the source of evolution, forgot form to cultivate energy, forgot energy to cultivate spirit, and forgot spirit to cultivate openness. 


—Tan Jingsheng, 10th century

The Immortal Sisters: Secret Teachings of Taoist Women

Thomas Cleary

 

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Man has no Body distinct from the Soul!
for that Body is a portion of the Soul
discerned by the five Senses,
the chief inlets to the Soul in this age.

Energy is the only life and is from the Body;
and reason is the bound or outward
circumference of energy. 

Energy is eternal delight.


—William Blake
18th century

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What I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. —Rumi

 

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Go deeper
Past thoughts into silence.

Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.

Let love consume all that is left of you.


—Kabir

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desire itself is movement

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Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

—T. S. Eliot

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thou art that

 

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The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. 

Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. 

Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.


—Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy 

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But I don’t want comfort. 

I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

—Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

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worry not

   

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If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling.

Even the idea of being a man or woman, or even human, should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans.

So, first abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that.

Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind.

You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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what you are looking for is the thing that looks

  

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My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside 
it buckles under these things.

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, excerpts

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Look into yourself and you will become conscious of nothing but a vicious circle, for the very reason that the act of introspection is viciously circular: you cannot see what you are looking for, because what you are looking for is the thing that looks. 

Every self-conscious attempt to know oneself, to improve oneself, to save oneself, to unite oneself with God, must come to this exasperating and impossible conclusion.


—Alan Watts

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the consciousness of the atom

  

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As you now have the definition of the atom (I am quoting from the Standard Dictionary) it is:

“An atom is a centre of force, a phase of electrical phenomena, a centre of energy, active through its own internal make-up, and giving off heat or radiation.”

Therefore, an atom is (as Lord Kelvin in 1867 thought it would ultimately turn out to be) a “vortex ring”, or centre of force, and not a particle of what we understand as tangible substance. This ultimate particle of matter is now demonstrated to be composed of a positive nucleus of energy, surrounded—just as is the sun by the planets—with many electrons or negative corpuscles, thus subdividing the atom of earlier science into numerous lesser bodies. 

The elements differ according to the number and arrangement of these negative electrons around their positive nucleus, and they rotate or move around this central charge of electricity as our planetary system rotates around the sun. Professor Soddy, in one of his latest books, has pointed out that in the atom is to be seen an entire solar system, the central sun can be recognized with the planets pursuing their orbital paths around it.

It would be apparent to each of us that when this definition of the atom is contemplated and studied an entirely new concept of substance comes before us. Dogmatic assertions are therefore out of order, for it is realized that perhaps the next discovery may reveal to us the fact that the electrons themselves may be worlds within worlds.

The atom, then, can be predicated as resolving itself into electrons, and can be expressed in therms of force or energy. When you have a centre of energy or activity you are involved in a dual concept; you have that which is the cause of movement or energy, and that which it energizes or actuates.

We are, therefore, throwing the concept of matter back to where the oriental school has always put it, to primordial stuff, to that which the orientalist call the "primordial ether”. We are led back to that intangible something which is the basis of the objective thing which you and I can see and touch and handle. The word “substance” itself means that which “stands under”, or which lies back of things. All, therefore, that we can predicate in connection with the ether of space is that it is the medium in which energy or force functions, or makes itself felt.

—Alice C. Bailey
The Consciousness of the Atom
A series of Lectures delivered in New York City
Winter of 1921-22

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As is the human body,
So is the cosmic body.

As is the human mind,
So is the cosmic mind.

As is the microcosm,
So is the macrocosm.

As is the atom,
So is the universe.


—The Upanishads

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In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited.

In the mind of each was the same thought.

‘I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,’ was the substance of the thing felt.


—Sherwood Anderson

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as light pours like rain

  

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Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

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God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.


—Hafiz

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inner light

      

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No solid object is solid. It is made up of rapidly flashing packets of energy. Billions and trillions of packets of energy. They flash in and flash out of that space where the ‘object’ is. 

They do not just stay there. 

So, why does a human body or a car look like a solid continuous object when we now know that it is actually a rapidly flashing field of energy?

Think of a TV image. When you watch a movie, you see a person walk across the screen smoothly, yet in reality it is just a film reel with 24 slightly different frames a second so your eyes do not detect the gap between the frames. Even each of those frames is a composition of billions of light photons flashing at the speed of light. 

That is what your world is – a rapid flash that causes an illusion of being ‘solid’ and ‘continuous’.

Once you understand what your world is really, truly, you start to understand its true behavior and nature. 

You then change your view of it.


—David Cameron Gikandi

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In the inmost of the smallest of all spaces
runs a mute and constant play of color, inaccessible to eyes.

It is the light shut in that once in the moment of creation
was born inward and abode there, going on, once it had broken 
up into the smallest of spectra in keeping with prismatic law at 
frequencies that by the sighted would be called colors
if they encountered eyes able to see.

It moved in periods unimaginably small for time and space
but still with time and space enough for the least of the small.
In fact it found it had ample room and time.

It moved in cycles of nanoseconds and microspaces
from white light and the colors of the spectrum and back to white light. A kind of breathing for light.

The photons breathed and pulsated with one another,
alternating signs and levels.

So the light kept going in spectral balance
from dense light to split and back to dense light and split,
in spectral cycles infinitely repeated.

It was like a play of fans,
in keeping with the same law that holds for rainbows,
but with spread and folded fans alternating with one another
in keeping with the law of light inscribed in them.

It was the light when it dances enclosed
when it is not traveling abroad and seen.

It belongs to the nature of light that it can be shut in and 
still not die out in its movement,
that it preserves itself thus in the darkness as thought, intent 
and aptitude, that it remembers its changes
and performs its dance, its interplay.

With this art the light keeps together the innumerable 
swarms of matter and sings with light's spectral wings the 
endless song in honor of the fullness of the world.


—Harry Martinson

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The soul should always stand ajar. —Emily Dickinson

  

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Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” 

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. 

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.




Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon.
You can’t take it with you.

—Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the roses.


—Louis MacNeice

snow

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Friday I tasted life. 
It was a vast morsel. 

A Circus passed the house —- 
still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out. 

The Lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, 
and I hear to-day for the first time 
the river in the tree.


—Emily Dickinson

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note to self

  

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life is a garden,
not a road

we enter and exit
through the same gate

wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice


—Bokonon

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some(times

 

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We find ourselves in a world structured by matter and energy in space and time, and in that world each of us inhabits a body, one among many. At least, that is how we interpret our experiences. 

But when we analyze our conviction of the reality of the material world, we find that it is all based on experiences, nothing else, nothing more real than that.


—Piet Hut
The Nature of Reality: Matter, Experience, Appearance, Presence 

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... late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.


—Li-Young Lee

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this is the drop of an instant

 

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The future is a concept, it does not exist.
There is no such thing as tomorrow.
There never will be, because time is always now.

That is one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking.
We find that there is only present, with an eternal now.


—Alan Watts

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Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life. 

For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
It is yours.


—Pablo Neruda
ode to the past

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My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside 
it buckles under these things.

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, excerpts

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i am that

  

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I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings? 
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.

My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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Water has a perfect memory, and is forever trying to get back to where it was. —Toni Morrison

  

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We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air - not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a future in time.


—Gilles Deleuze
Difference and Repetition

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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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The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.


—Hildegard of Bingen

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