cosmic dancing at the level of truth, the level of source

  

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Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. 

On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. 


—Cormac McCarthy
The Road

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The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. 

Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance. 

—Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation

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My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears. —Jack Kerouac

 

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Your retina is physically bombarded by photons, giving rise to the mechanics of sight. Coded chemical information begins to course through the optic nerves leading from the eye to the brain. These data have no color in them, however, because photons are colorless, and so are optic signals. Color is known in consciousness alone. 

That is how the quality of knowingness is embedded in existence. 

You could not be here without knowingness, which applies not just to colour but to all five senses.


—Deepak Chopra
Total Meditation

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The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. 

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


―Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian

  

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The apathy that the gaze of the animal expresses after the combat is the sign of an existence that is essentially on a level with the world in which it moves like water in water.


—Georges Bataille
Theory of Religion

 

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memory has no memory

 

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Our lives, it seems, are a memory 

we had once in another place. 

Or are they its metaphor? 

The trees, if trees they are, seem the same, 

and the creeks do. 

The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way, 

And the clouds, if clouds they really are, 

still follow us, 

one after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place. 

I wanted the metaphor, if metaphor it is, to remain 

always the same one. 

I wanted the hills to be the same, 

And the rivers too, 

especially the old rivers, 

The French Broad and Little Pigeon, the Holston and Tennessee, 

And me beside them, under the stopped clouds and stopped stars. 

I wanted to walk in that metaphor, 

untouched by time's corruption. 

I wanted the memory adamantine, never-changing. 

I wanted the memory amber, 

and me in it,

A figure among its translucent highlights and swirls, 

Mid-stride in its glittery motions. 

Wanted the memory cloud-sharp and river-sharp, 

My place inside it transfiguring, ever-still, 

no wind and no wave.

But memory has no memory. Or metaphor. 

It moves as it wants to move, 

and never measures the distance. 

People have died of thirst in crossing a memory. 

Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, 

and good for a season. 

The wind blows, the rivers run, and waves come to a head. 

Memory's logo is the abyss, and that’s no metaphor. 

—Charles Wright
Transparencies, Scar Tissue

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The moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. 

Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. 

Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground —intelligible perspective, in a word.


—William James

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I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.


—Cormac McCarthy

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Black holes are where God divided by zero. ―Albert Einstein

     

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But just why is everything impermanent and in constant change? The answer has to do with what might be called the flip-side of anicca: pratityasamutpada, or, technically, “interdependent origination.” 

More simply: everything changes because everything is interrelated. Everything comes into being and continues in being through and with something else.  

Nothing, Buddha came to see, has its own existence. 

In fact, when he wanted to describe the human self, or the self/identity of anything, the term he used was anatta, which means literally no-self. We are not “selves” in the sense of individual, separate, independent “things.” Rather, we are constantly changing because we are constantly interrelating (or being interrelated).

 

—Paul F. Knitter

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Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. 

Before that all was blackness and silence.
And yet it moved.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger 

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every(thing is necessary

  

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There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson.

Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. 

And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. 

Of the telling there is no end. And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all, all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing 

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you shall not lose your way

 

beautiful

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We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass. 

Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we have to shatter that plate glass, we have to reach in there. 

So the old world observer simply has to be crossed off the books and we must put in the new term: participator. 

In this way we have come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.


—John Wheeler

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The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. 

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


—Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, excerpt

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All things are little, changeable, perishable. 

All things come from thence, from that universal ruling power either directly proceeding or by way of sequence. 

And accordingly the lion’s gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every harmful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. 

Do not then imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.

Think always of the universe as one living creature, made of one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.


—Marcus Aurelius
April 26, 121 — March 17, 180, Rome
Meditations

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existence has its own order

 

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The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. 

Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

―Cormac McCarthy

Evening Redness in the West

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Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.

They stared in desire

at the naked abyss.

If you love me, said mind,

take that step into silence.

If you love me, said body,

turn and exist.


—Anne Stevenson
vertigo

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come to the conclusion: I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn. —Sri Nisargadatta

   

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Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself, independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. 

There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.

And yet it moved.

—Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger

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We live in illusion and the appearance of things. 

There is a reality. We are that reality. 

When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. 

That is all.


—Kalu Rinpoche

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