matters of being

 

. 

 

The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. 

Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the “Other.” 

The intra-actively emergent “parts” of phenomena are co­constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future.

Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. Even atoms, whose very name, ατομοσ (atomos), means “indivisible” or “uncuttable,” can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. 

Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant.


—Karen Barad

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, excerpts noosphe.re

  

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Blessed be you,
mighty matter,
irresistible march of evolution,
reality ever newborn;
you who, by constantly
shattering our mental categories,
force us to go ever further
and further in our
pursuit of the truth.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955)
Hymn of the Universe

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the complexity of a sphere

     

.

The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every glimpse of a new aspect of it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

.

'Does it change the way the world feels?' i ask Christopher Toth. 'Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter — about what matters? Are you surprised that we don't fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?'

Christopher nods. He thinks.  

... 'At the weekends,' Christopher says, 'when I'm out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we're walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.'

He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe. 

'But mostly, and in several ways, I'm amazed I'm able to hold the hand of the person I love.'

—Robert Macfarlane
—Christopher Toth, physicist
Underland, from Chapter 3, Dark Matter

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there is some kind of heat

 

  

.

Behind matter there is some kind of heat, around and behind things,

so that what we experience is not the turtle nor the night only,

not the rising whirlwind, not the certainty, 

nor the steady gaze.

—Robert Bly 

  

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needful things

  

.

All you need are these: 

certainty of judgment in the present moment;  

action for the common good in the present moment;  

and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.

—Marcus Aurelius

Meditations 9.6

.

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

.

What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies 

but rather the shape of our motions over time?

—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The Mushroom at the End of the World

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beauty is all where

 

.

For intervals, then, throughout our lives we savor a concurrence, the great blending of our chance selves with what sustains all chance. 

We ride the wave and are the wave.

And with renewed belief inner and outer we find our talk turned to prayer, our prayer into truth: for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.


—William Stafford

.

Under a lonely sky a lonely tree
Is beautiful. All that is loneliness
Is beautiful. A feather lost at sea;
A staring owl; a moth; a yellow tress
Of seaweed on a rock, is beautiful.

The night-lit moon, wide-wandering in sky;
A blue-bright spark, where ne'er a cloud is up;
A wing, where no wing is, it is so high;
A bee in winter, or a buttercup,
Late-blown, are lonely, and are beautiful.

The eye that watched you from a cottage door;
The first leaf, and the last; the break of day;
The mouse, the cuckoo, and the cloud, are beautiful.

For all that is, is lonely; all that may
Will be as lonely as is that you see;
The lonely heart sings on a lonely spray,
The lonely soul swings lonely in the sea,
And all that loneliness is beautiful.

All, all alone, and all without a part
Is beautiful, for beauty is all where;
Where is an eye is beauty, where a heart
Is beauty, brooding out, on empty air,
All that is lonely and is beautiful.


—James Stephens
on a lonely spray 

.

Take me to the other side of this night,

where I am you, we are us,

the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined

… and the sea sang with the murmur of light.


—Octavio Paz

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pray without ceasing

.

What I wear is pants.

What I do is live.

How I pray is breathe.

—Thomas Merton 

.

Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.


—Wendell Berry

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i have two moons

 .

سَبْعُ سنابِلَ تكفي لمائدةِ الصَيْفِ…”

سَبْعُ سَنَابِلَ بين يديَّ. وفي كل سُنْبُلَةٍ

يُنْبِتُ الحقلُ حقلاً من القمح. كانَ

أَبي يَسْحَبُ الماءَ من بئرِهِ ويقولُ

لَهُ: لا تجفَّ. ويأخذني من يَدِيْ

…لأَرى كيف أكبُرُ كالفَرْفَحِينَةِ

أَمشي على حافَّة البئر: لِيْ قَمَرانْ

واحدٌ في الأعالي

آخرُ في الماء يسبَحُ … لِيْ قمرانْ

.

Seven sheaths of grain are enough for the summer table
Seven sheaths of grain in my hands. And in each grain
a wheat field makes another grow. My father
drew water from his well. Don’t dry up, he told it. 

He took me by the hand to see how I’d grow like rose moss
I walk at the edge of the well: I have two moons
one above and another in the water swimming
I have two moons

A cloud in my hand wounds me. I don’t
want from earth more than
this earth : the scent of cardamom and hay
between my father and a horse 

In my hand is a cloud that wounded me. But I
don’t want from the sun more
than an orange seed and more than
the gold that flowed from the call to prayer


—Mahmoud Darwish
Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?
Jeffrey Sacks version, excerpts

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all the flowers are forms of water

   

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The act of trying to find the way home is what convinces us we are lost. 

We are not lost, we are not alone, and we have never left home.

—Rumi

. 

 

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.

 

—Huston Smith

 

.

 

As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, 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 Upanishads 

 

 

. 

the rest is prayer

Lola Nampijinpa Brown, Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming) 

.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The sea has many voices….
the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. 

Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual….
And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised….
The life of significant soil.


—T.S. Eliot
No. 3 of Four Quartets, excerpts

 

.

Once

a single cell

found that it was full of light

and for the first time there was seeing

when

I was a bird

I could see where the stars had turned

and I set out on my journey

high

in the head of a mountain goat

I could see across a valley

under the shining trees something moving

deep

in the green sea

I saw the two sides of the water

and swam between them

I

look at you

in the first light of the morning

for as long as I can

—W. S. Merwin
sight

.

blood, sea

     

.

In 1976, the Italian writer Italo Calvino published a famous collection of poetic prose, t zero. The story “Blood, Sea" recounts a sequence of events narrated from the first-person perspective of a blood cell, alternating with a story about human protagonists, told in the conventional perspective of the third person. 

In the story, among a lot of other astonishing relations, Calvino explores the fact that the water of the earth’s oceans shows a mineral composition which strikingly resembles that of our body fluids. The blood plasma is the sea in which life once began. This ocean still fills us, as it fills all other lifeforms. 

Calvino imagined a narrative told by a blood cell, a cell which is suspended in this primordial ocean within our bodies. He told a story from the perspective of life itself, or rather from the perspective of the life-giving ability of the primal fluid and its invitation to make intimate connections. 

He spoke from the standpoint of an outside which is also an inside. Calvino invented “Biopoetics” avant la lettre. He envisioned a first-person account of what is not human through our shared qualities, through our participation in a vast web of transformations. 

For Calvino, the poet, it was only evident that we are able to make statements about this network of changes and exchanges because we are a part of it, and we are concerned by it, as we are by our own fate. 

Poetic creativity is the power to know something through intimate participation. Calvino is a poet, and as such he knows about the fact that true novelty in this world, and also true experiences of connection, only arise through the exchange, the breakdown and recreation of what is real.

—Andreas Weber

Biopoetics

.

Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.

At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.


—Deepak Chopra

.

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me.

That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, 
and my blood is part of the sea.

There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

—D. H. Lawrence

.

Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible. —Rumi

    

 

.

 

If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it 

and you will see the world


—Robert Kaplan

.

From the earliest times, it was understood that the visible world implied the existence of an invisible world, where everything was infused with the supernatural and the felt sense of the sacred. 

Thomas Yellowtail expressed: ‘A man’s attitude toward the nature around him, and the animals in nature, is of special importance, because as we respect our created world, so also do we show respect for the real world that we cannot see.’ 

Through the traditional wisdom of American Indians we learn that there are ways of knowing that are obtained through the earth that allow human beings to listen and learn directly from the Great Spirit.


—Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
Parabola Magazine
Fall 2017 Issue: “The Sacred” 

.

Names belong to things, but zero belongs to nothing. It counts the totality of what isn’t there. By this reasoning it must be everywhere with regard to this and that: with regard, for instance, to the number of humming-birds in that bowl with seven — or now six — apples. Then what does zero name?


—Robert Kaplan

.

 

Could I live like this? I ask myself

and I know, somehow, I must.

More and more my life is peeling paint,

straight horizons.

More and more my name dissolves in the air,

salt, something invisible I taste,

and forget.


—Naomi Shihab Nye
At Otto’s Place, excerpt 

.

For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. —Carl Sagan

  

.

Be helpless, dumbfounded 
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying. 
If we say No, we don’t see it, that No will behead us 
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything, 
Beside ourselves, and only that, so 
Miraculous beings come running to help. 
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute, 
We shall be saying finally, 
With tremendous eloquence, 
Lead us.

When we have totally surrendered to that beauty, 
We shall be a mighty kindness.


—Rumi

.

relation is mutual

  

.

I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with the earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law—of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate. I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure material relation. In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. 

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.

The tree is not impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood: but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it—only in a different way.

Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation in mutual. The tree will have a consciousness, then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.


—Martin Buber
I and Thou
Ronald Gregor Smith version

.

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. 

He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. 

Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

―Martin Buber

.

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. —Arthur Eddington

  

. 

That which is above is like that which is below

and that which is below is like that which is above,

to achieve the wonders of the one thing.


—Hermes Trismegistus

.

Outwardly, I am one apple among many.

Inwardly, I am the Tree.


—Alan Watts

.

travelling together

    

 

.

 

Brahman, the single binding unity of all that exists, 

is indivisible and pure.

Realize Brahman and go beyond all change.

Realize that there are no separate minds.

Waking, sleeping, dreaming, the Self is one.

The One appears many, just as the moon 
appears many, reflected in water.

But there is only one Self, present in all beings.


from the Amritabindu Upanishad
Eknath Easwaren version

The Upanishads

  

.

If we are separated I will 
try to wait for you 
on your side of things 

your side of the wall and the water 
and of the light moving at its own speed 
even on leaves that we have seen 
I will wait on one side 

while a side is there 


—W.S. Merwin

 

 

.

 

all things change, no(thing perishes

  

.

Everything must change
Nothing remains the same
Everyone must change
No one and nothing remains the same

The young becomes the old
Oh, mysteries unfold
Cause that's the way of time
Nothing and no one remains the same

There is so little in life you can be sure of 
Except the rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And, Hummingbirds do fly

The young becomes the old
And, mysteries do unfold
That's the way of time
Nothing, no one remains unchanged

There are so little things, so few things in life you can be sure of
Except
Rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And Hummingbirds do fly
Everything must change

Everything
Everything must change


—Bernard Ighner 

.

there is nothing new under the sun –Ecclesiastes 1:9

  

.

There is nothing new you will find here. 

The work we are doing is timeless. 

It was the same ten thousand years ago. 

Centuries roll on.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Consciousness is always Self-consciousness. If you are conscious of anything you are essentially conscious of yourself. Unselfconscious existence is a contradiction in terms. It is no existence at all. It is merely attributed existence, whereas true existence, the SAT, is not an attribute, it is the substance itself. 

It is the Vastu (Reality). 

Reality is therefore known as SAT-CHIT, being consciousness, and never merely the one to the exclusion of the other. The world neither exists by itself, nor is it conscious of its existence. How can you say that such a world is real?

And what is the nature of the world? It is perpetual change, a continuous, interminable flux. A dependent, unselfconscious, ever-changing world cannot be real.

—Ramana Maharshi

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