The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart. —Yeats

  

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Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone, who could make such music? 


—Chuang Tzu (369-286 BCE)

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We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. 

Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind.

—Red Pine :: The Heart Sutra

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the perfect 0ne

  

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The moon is most happy 
When it is full. 

And the sun always looks
Like a perfectly minted gold coin 
That was just Polished 
And placed in flight 
By God's playful Kiss. 

And so many varieties of fruit 
Hang plump and round 
From branches that seem like a Sculptor's hands. 

I see the beautiful curve of a pregnant belly 
Shaped by a soul within, 
And the Earth itself, 
And the planets and the Spheres.

I have gotten the hint: 
There is something about circles 
The Beloved likes. 

Hafiz, 
Within the Circle of a Perfect One 
There is an Infinite Community 
Of Light.


—Hafiz
something about circles 

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When we understand, 

we are at the centre of the circle 

and there we sit 

while Yes and No 

chase each other 

around the circumference.


—Chuang Tzu

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questions

 

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Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone, who could make such music? 


—Chuang Tzu (369-286 BCE)

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God lurks in the gaps. —Jorge Luis Borges

  

Asahel Curtis, Ms. Nettleton

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We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. 

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.


—Annie Dillard
on the meaning of life

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To be human we need to experience the end of the world.

We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.


—Hélène Cixous
from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

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Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. 

Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.


—Chuang Tzu
Kuang-Ming Wu version

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The way the world actually is, is an enormously complex interrelated organism. —Alan Watts

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The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. 

It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

—Henry David Thoreau

 

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You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. 

Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless.


—Chuang Tzu
4th Century B.C.

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are you still happening there, in your body? 

—Joy Katz 

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who am I if I was not I while I slept?

   

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Is there death for you? For whom is death? The body which dies, were you aware of it, did you have it, during sleep? The body was not, when you slept, but you existed even then. When you awoke, you got the body and even in the waking state you exist. You existed both in sleep and waking. But the body did not exist in sleep and exists only in waking. That which does not exist always, but exists at one time and not at another, cannot be real. You exist always and you alone are therefore real.

We are so engrossed with the objects or appearances revealed by the light, that we pay no attention to the light. In the waking or dream state in which things appear, and in the sleep state in which we see nothing, there is always the light of Consciousness or Self, like the hall lamp which is always burning. The thing to do is to concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. 

We may even dream of interpreting a dream. 

Only on waking do we know it was a dream. 

Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.

—Chuang Tzu

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Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays

and the week with the whole year.

Time cannot be cut

with your weary scissors,

and all the names of the day

are washed out by the waters of night.

No one can claim the name of Pedro,

nobody is Rosa or Maria,

all of us are dust or sand,

all of us are rain under rain.

They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,

of Chiles and of Paraguays;

I have no idea what they are saying.

I know only the skin of the earth

and I know it is without a name.

When I lived amongst the roots

they pleased me more than flowers did,

and when I spoke to a stone

it rang like a bell.

It is so long, the spring

which goes on all winter.

Time lost its shoes.

A year is four centuries.

When I sleep every night,

what am I called or not called?

And when I wake, who am I

if I was not I while I slept?

This means to say that scarcely

have we landed into life

than we come as if new-born;

let us not fill our mouths

with so many faltering names,

with so many sad formalities,

with so many pompous letters,

with so much of yours and mine,

with so much of signing of papers.

I have a mind to confuse things,

unite them, bring them to birth,

mix them up, undress them,

until the light of the world

has the oneness of the ocean,

a generous, vast wholeness,

a crepitant fragrance.

—Pablo Neruda

Too Many Names

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clearly

Earth and Moon as seen from Space by Japanese satellite Himawari-8

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The world is sacred, of course,
it is full of gods, numina,
great powers and presences.

We give some of them names –
Mars of the fields and the war;
Vesta the fire;
Ceres the grain;
Mother Tellus the earth;
the Penates of the storehouse.
The rivers, the springs.

And in the stormcloud and
the light is the great power
called the father god.

But they aren’t people.
They don’t love and hate,
they aren’t for or against.
They accept the worship due them,
which augments their power,
through which we live.


—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

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This material dimension is just samsara. See it and you see samsara for what it’s worth. But what does it mean? 

Nothing but shifting names and changing forms. But when the ego drops away you experience this Flux. And it is beautiful not just because it is dazzling, but because the act of seeing it as it is necessitates the ego’s oblivion. The Veil is lifted and you see clearly.


—Chuang Tzu
excerpts

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wait - what ?

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