everything is really everyone

  

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Conventional terms such as ‘the environment,’ and even ‘nature’ itself (particularly when opposed to ‘culture’), compound the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide in the world between us and them, between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet. 

All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. 

This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us. We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.

Lynn Margulis, the most significant evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, had this to say about our entanglement with non-human life: 'No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our own skin. These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without "the other” we do not survive.’

The world is made up of subjects, not objects. Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view and forms of life.  

‘Life and Reality’ wrote the Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts, ‘are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.’

—James Bridle
Ways of Being
excerpts 

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Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. 

You and me are us and them, and it and sky.


—Ada Limon

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soul sparks

     

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Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, 

"When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you."


—Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch. 

One of the odd discoveries made by small boys is that when two pebbles are struck sharply against each other they emit, briefly, a curious smoky odor. 

The phenomenon fades when the stones are immaculately cleaned, vanishes when they are heated to furnace temperature, and reappears when they are simply touched by the hand again, before being struck.


—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell

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Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.


—Charles Simic
The Voice at 3 A.M.

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this is the freedom of the universe

   

 

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No man is so guileless as

the serpent. The lonely white

rabbit on the roof is a star

twitching its ears at the rain.

The llama intricately

folding its hind legs to be seated

not disdains but mildly

disregards human approval.

What joy when the insouciant

armadillo glances at us and doesn't

quicken his trotting

across the track and into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal

falters, but knows what it must do?

That the snake has no blemish,

that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings

in white star-silence? The llama

rests in dignity, the armadillo

has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.

Those who were sacred have remained so,

holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence

of bronze, only the sight that saw it

faltered and turned from it.

An old joy returns in holy presence.

—Denise Levertov

Poems: 1960-1967

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"To every Form of being is assigned,"
Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage,
"An 'active' Principle:--howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.

Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.

This is the freedom of the universe;
Unfolded still the more, more visible,
The more we know; and yet is reverenced least,
And least respected in the human Mind,
Its most apparent home."


—William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850
The Excursion, Book 9, excerpt

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questions

  

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If we look at the basics of a perception we have sensory inputs, an information processor and the screen for the output. 

Unlike a computer that has a monitor or tv by which to output the final rendered product of information processing, life has done something far more extraordinary. 

We don’t have a computer screen inside of our head. Instead, the mind simulates the screen, as all the regions of the brain required to process sensory information are distributed within a 3D cellular matrix.


—Ian Wilson
Immersion Into the Human Experience

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What we see depends on the light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or—as Newton thought—minute particles, and things seen are colours. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. 

Namely, there are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colours, which are not attributes of matter.

Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what a theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. 

There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness without dragging in its relations to mind. The modern account of what the mind knows of nature is not, as it should be, merely an account of what the mind knows of nature; but it is also confused with an account of what nature does to the mind.

The ground taken is this: sense-awareness is an awareness of something. What then is the general character of that something of which we are aware? We do not ask about the percipient or about the process, but about the perceived.

Evolution in the complexity of life means an increase in the types of objects directly sensed. Delicacy of sense-apprehension means perceptions of objects as distinct entities. The phrasing of music is a mere abstract subtlety to the unmusical; it is a direct sense-apprehension to the initiated. 

For example, if we could imagine some lowly type of organic being thinking and aware of our thoughts, it would wonder at the abstract subtleties in which we indulge as we think of stones and bricks and drops of water and plants. It only knows of vague undifferentiated feelings in nature. It would consider us as given over to the play of excessively abstract intellects. 

But then if it could think, it would anticipate; and if it anticipated, it would soon perceive for itself.


—Alfred North Whitehead
The Concept of Nature, excerpts

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part(ner

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As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies – supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down graphic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind, a profoundly carnal field, as this very dimension of smells and tastes and chirping rhythms warmed by the sun and shivering with seeds.

It is, indeed, nothing other than the biosphere – the matrix of earthly life in which we ourselves are embedded. The biosphere as it is experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body – by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he, or she, experiences.


—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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primordial is-ness

  

Mike Walker

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The daily enhancement practice system of the Completion stage teachings of the Yuthok Nyingthig (called) the ‘Spontaneous Arising of the Three Kayas’:

“Having ascertained that all the phenomena, all the appearances and arisings of Samsara-Nirvana exist within your own mind, recognize the essence of one’s mind as primordial - it does not arise, cease, or abide, it is free of either center or periphery, of the stain of (spatial) elaboration. Devoid of any basic characteristics whatsoever, it appears as a manifold display of radiance (of light and colour), and yet even in appearing it is devoid of any fundamental basis of an ‘appear-er’. 

Beyond expression and thought, inconceivable, ineffable, the naked primordial awareness is clear and bright, totally relaxed and open. It is all external appearances without exception, it is all internal awareness without exception. It is wholly unobstructed wisdom. It is beyond the need for rejecting afflictive emotions and bad actions, and is free of any ‘rejecter’. Perceive, without perceiving any ‘thing’, the natural state of this primordial is-ness. With this changeless wisdom of experiential awareness appearing in the depths of one’s mind, relax into the freshness of this suchness, the immediacy (that pervades) the four activities of walking, moving, lying down and sitting, of body, speech and mind, every activity. 

Let go into relaxed and uncontrived presence, relax into your own uncontrived spontaneously manifesting self-radiance. Maintaining this awareness in its bare and open state without any distraction whatsoever, your own mind will undoubtedly be transformed into that of Samantabhadra within this very life.” 


—Nida Chenagtsang
Mirror of Light: A Commentary on Yuthok’s Ati Yoga, Volume 1

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somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will enclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands


—e. e. cummings

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