You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love. —Rumi

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We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit. It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security...

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

—Sogyal Rinpoche

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Are you looking for me?

I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours. 

You will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables. 

When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time. 

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.

—Kabir

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All of you is holy. 

You are already more and less than whatever you can know. 

Breathe out, look in, let go. 

—John Welwood

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kind(red

 

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What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. 

The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. 

We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.

—Valarie Kaur
Sikh activist and human rights lawyer

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Your body is made of the same elements that lionesses are built from. Three quarters of you is the same kind of water that beats rocks to rubble, wears stones away. Your DNA translates into the same twenty amino acids that wolf genes code for. 

When you look in the mirror and feel weak, remember, the air you breathe in fuels forest fires capable of destroying everything they touch. On the days you feel ugly, remember: diamonds are only carbon. You are so much more.


—Curtis Ballard

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You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it

It’s too bad that you want to be someone else

You don’t see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.


—Rumi

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I, the Beloved, and Love

       

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We lay in the dark, breathing together. 

The deepest intimacy … 

—L. Gluck



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In those days before a trace of the two worlds,
no "other" yet imprinted on the Tablet of Existence,

I, the Beloved, and Love lived together
in the corner of an uninhabited cell.


—Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
Divine Flashes

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For this is the truth about our soul, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.


—Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway

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If a thing loves, it is infinite.


—William Blake

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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. —William S. Burroughs

 

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"Hopefully, this wakes us up a little bit.
We're vulnerable and we really need to learn to understand that we are part of the natural world, not separate from it.

And we rely on it for clean air, for clean water. We rely on the forest to regulate temperature and to regulate rainfall.

So, we've just got to start thinking differently."


—Jane Goodall

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the soul of the whole

    

whales sleeping

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We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime 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 shining parts, is the soul.

[...] All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.


—Albert Einstein

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for the children

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I will walk to a place with a high cliff, and camp by the lake there at evening, and study the grand firs and the nobles reflected in the water made still by the evening. 

I will sit by the fire and consider, and lie down to count stars, and sleep, and in sleep dream dreams of green bones. 

When the morning arrives, grey and cold, I will rise and walk to the high place, bringing with me a drum I have made, and a song for my scattered people. 

There, on the rock, where no one will hear, I will sing the sun up, and name names, and the names will be holy to me.


—Richard Bear
Hoedad (reforestation)

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The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down. 

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it. 

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children: 

stay together
learn the flowers
go light 


—Gary Snyder 

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questions

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What is Real? 

We could define ‘real’ as something which never changes. In order to change, a thing has to cease to be what it is and become something else; i.e. it would have to become what it is not.

Therefore, anything that changes cannot be real, since the act of changing involves non-existence

What is Unreal? 

Unreal is the appearance of something in the place/location of its non-existence. Example the snake appears where it does not exist, ie the rope. The snake appears in the location of its own absence. This is the very definition of falsity or unreality. 

Where something is not, there it appears. 
Then it is false. 

Blue color appears in the sky where it does not exist. The blue color appears where there is no blue color. The sky is not blue. 

Similarly, the entire universe of experience (waking world, dream world, deep sleep blankness) continuously appears and disappears in the sky of Awareness. 

Awareness is the locus or location of the absence of the mind. Awareness is where the mind appears, plays it games and dissapears. Hence, the mind is unreal. 

The locus in which something appears and disappears, then in that locus, that thing is an appearance and unreal. The locus only is real.

You are that locus - Awareness.


—Swami Sarvapriyananda
Lectures on Mandukya Karika

 

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Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. 

If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. 


—Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893)

 

 

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Nature is a temple in which
living columns sometimes
emit confused words. 

Man approaches it through
forests of symbols, which
observe him with familiar glances.


—Charles Baudelaire 

(1821 - 1867)

 

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infinit(esimal

   

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(The student) ought to succeed in noting that 

nothing of all that is from him, is him.

He, physically and mentally, is a multitude of others.

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This "multitude of others" includes the material – the ground, one might say – which he owes to his heredity, to his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his "I", form there a swarming throng.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

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No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. 

When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought.


—Giacomo Leopardi 
(1798 - 1837)

 

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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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revelation

 

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Hidden in the heart of every creature
Exists the One Self, subtler than the subtlest,
Greater than the greatest. They go beyond
All sorrow who extinguish their self-will
And behold the glory of the Self
Through the grace of the One Heart.

Though one sits in meditation in a 
Particular place, the Self within
Can exercise its influence far away.
Though still, it moves everything everywhere.

When the wise realize the Self,
Formless in the midst of forms, changeless
In the midst of change, omnipresent
And supreme, they go beyond sorrow.

The Self cannot be known through study
Of the scriptures, nor through the intellect,
Nor through hearing discourses about it.
The Self can be attained only by those
Whom the Self chooses. Verily unto them
Does the Self reveal itself.


—The Katha Upanishad
from the Eknath Easwaran version

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No striving, no grasping at this or that, no entertaining any self-involved stories whatsoever. 

Instead, attention pivots toward a light in the heart in which the ‘field of boundless emptiness’ is revealed. All questions and doubts are put to rest.  


—Hongzhi

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Air is anything but empty. If you’re a bat, it holds the sound of the shape of a hillside.

 

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When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. 

And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.


―Ingmar Bergman

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Iron in the birds’ inner ears

helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.


In other words,

the birds carry within them a piece of the earth,

a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers

its knowledge back to the birds.


—Jarod K. Anderson
PACT 

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Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.


We can hold all these ideas at once and feel

both heavy and weightless

with the absurd beauty of it all.


—Jarod K. Anderson

THE IMPOSSIBLE

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complicate your complexities

 

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Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again.

And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key.

Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.

Embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.


—Hermann Hesse
excerpted from Steppenwolfe 
by Maria Popova
here

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All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

—Kurt Vonnegut

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To see materials as static is an illusion. If the human life span were a day, flowers might seem as enduring as rocks. 

If we lived a thousand years, rock might seem mobile. 

—Anne Whiston Spirn
The Language of Landscape

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the shape of all shapes

 

Black Elk

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Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.

—Black Elk

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And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

―Black Elk

Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt

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Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. 

Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that. 

Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. 

A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. 

Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.


―John (Fire) Lame Deer
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

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this short life is long and beautiful

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Beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community.
Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things.

It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.

And there it is ahead of all as the Beloved, toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which brings them into being.


—Pseudo-Dionysius, late 5th to early 6th century mystical theologist, Neoplatonic philosopher, from The Divine Names

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Open the letter of the body’s life inside the words. 

This body, your life, is a letter to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if the words are right. If they are not start another!

And do not think it easy to open the body and read the secret message. This is the most courageous work, not something for children playing with knucklebones in the dirt.

Open to the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you have said it says? If you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! 

Bring only what should be given.

—Rumi

The Soul of Rumi

Coleman Barks version

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Life is an island. People come out of the sea, 

cross the island, and return to the sea. 

But this short life is long and beautiful. 
 

—Martiros Saryan

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as the light allows

  

Front foot (tarsus) of a male diving beetle, Dr. Igor Siwanowicz

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Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green.

But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super - efficiently, there would be hardly any left over - and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. 

This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am.


—Peter Wohlleben
The Hidden Life of Trees

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There is no such thing as an artist: there is

only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.

—Annie Dillard

Holy the Firm

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There is only Seeing. 

Both the seer and the seen are contained in it.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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i love you much(most beautiful darling)

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i love you much(most beautiful darling)
 

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming
 

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess
 

(except my life)the true time of year-


and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each


nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love


—E. E. Cummings

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all of life dies all of the time

 

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Everything in the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of an abstraction. If you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you can catch sight of is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. If it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand under your feet. 

There are some creatures who do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cells, living all over again. 

The cycles of the slime mold have episodes that seem as conclusive as death, but the withered slug, with its stock and fruiting body, is plainly the transient tissue of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebocytes use this organ collectively to produce more of themselves.

Who ever sees dead birds, in anything like the huge numbers stipulated by the certainty of the death of all birds? A dead bird is an incongruity, more startling than an unexpected live bird, sure evidence to the human mind that something has gone wrong. Birds do their dying off somewhere, behind things, under things, never on the wing. It is a natural marvel. 

All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. […] I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my back yard, they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel.

I suppose it is just as well. If the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be looked at, we would never have it out of our minds. We can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying seem more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves engage. There are 3 billion of us on the earth and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something more than 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy. 

We speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors.

Less than half a century from now (2024), our replacements will have more than doubled in numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. 

We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process. 

Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company.


—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell, 1974, excerpts
(treasure)

 

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the this and the that

     

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The Master is not trapped in opposites. His this is also a that. He sees that life becomes death and death becomes life, that right has a kernel of wrong within it and wrong a kernel of right, that the true turns into the false and the false into the true. 

He understands that nothing is absolute, that since every point of view depends on the viewer, affirmation and denial are equally beside the point. The place where the this and the that are not opposed to each other is called "the pivot of the Tao." When we find this pivot, we find ourselves at the center of the circle, and here we sit, serene, while Yes and No keep chasing each other around the circumference, endlessly. 

Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object, ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness streaming through. The pivot of the Tao is the mind free of its thoughts. It does not believe that this is a this or that that is a that. 

Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference toward a finish line that doesn't exist. How can they stop trying to win the argument of life until you stop? 

When you do, you realize that you were the only one running. Yes was you, No was you, the whole circumference, with its colored banners, its pom-pom girls and frenzied crowds - that was you as well. At the center, the eyes open and again it is the sweet morning of the world. There's nothing here to limit you, no one here to draw a circumference. In fact, there is no one here - not even you.

—Stephen Mitchell (treasure
The Second Book of the Tao

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