what is the nature of the world?

    

Paris by night, from the International Space Station

click to see

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You are like a dewdrop, on a multidimensional spider's web in the morning. And if you look at that thing carefully, you will see in every dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops. So the way that dewdrop looks goes with the way all the other ones look, you see.

—Alan Watts

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This must be well grasped: the world hangs on the 

thread of consciousness.  No consciousness, no world. 

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts.  

Seeing the moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged, 
she went and wrote: 

‘If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.’

—D. H. Lawrence 
The Rainbow

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blood, sea

     

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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

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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

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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

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listen carefully

  

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The moon is a white strange world, a great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. 

When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. 

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time … Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.


—D. H. Lawrence

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Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas 
Nor the Qur'an 
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind 
All the way to heaven.

—Kabir

 

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a dark sort of joy

  

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In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so to derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. 

This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.


—D. H. Lawrence

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Ursula, in a garden, found 
A bed of radishes.
She kneeled upon the ground
And gathered them,
With flowers around,
Blue, gold, pink, and green.

She dressed in red and gold brocade
And in the grass an offering made
Of radishes and flowers.

She said, “My dear,
upon your alters
I have placed the marguerites and coquelicot,
And roses 
Frail as April snow;

But here," she said,
"Where none can see,
I make an offering in the grass
Of radishes and flowers.”
And then she wept
For fear the Lord would not accept.

The good Lord in his garden sought
New leaf and shadowy tinct,
And they were all his thought.
He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.

This is not writ
In any book.


—Wallace Stevens
radishes and roses

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this is what i believe

   

Beth Moon, Ancient Trees: Portraits Of Time 

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This is what I believe: That I am I.

That my soul is a dark forest.

That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.

That I must have the courage to let them come and go.


—D. H. Lawrence

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I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he 

who is not afraid of my darkness, will find 

banks full of roses under my cypresses.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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as above

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The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. 

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.


—D. H. Lawrence

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The omega point represents a quantum leap in global evolution. The omega point is to the individual minds which form it as the individual human mind is to the neurons which form the brain. 

Like the human mind, the omega point has its own emergent and qualitatively higher properties. It has a transcendent mystical dimension, and at the same time it unifies and centralizes the activities of its constituent minds in a fashion not unlike that in which the activity of the individual human mind draws together and centralizes the activities of the nerve cells of the brain. 

This process occurs, not through loss of individuality but through a mutual enfolding of the most personal inwardness of each individual with other individuals. 

In a word, the omega point is the fruit of that most essential of inner experiences—love.


—allan combs, mark holland
synchronicity

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Changes in the emotional state are inevitable; joy, doubt, regret, anxiety. But through them all remember that in your heart-beyond-mind the changeless background glows.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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question

 

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‘What is grace?’ I asked God.

And He said, 
‘All that happens.’

Then He added, when I looked perplexed,

‘Could not lovers
say that every moment in their Beloved’s arms
was grace?

Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me

until the heart has 
wisdom.’


—St. John of the Cross
Love Poems from God
Daniel Ladinsky

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However smart we may be, however rich and clever or loving 

or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, doesn't help us at all. 

The real power comes in to us from the beyond.

Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless,
and from below, where we do not understand. 

And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might 
and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, 
we shall continue empty.


—D. H. Lawrence

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the world is an idea

 

Lorenzo Ranieri Tenti

Rising from the dust | Tenerife, Canary Islands

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It is in the brain that everything takes place.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, 

that the skylark sings.

—Oscar Wilde

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It is not possible to explain intellectually how sensations of the physical world are converted into ideas, how the leap-over from nervous vibrations into consciousness occurs, and how a neurosis becomes a psychosis. No one has ever explained this, nor will any scientist ever succeed in doing so. 

Truth alone can dispose of this poser by pointing out that sensations never really occur, but that the Self merely projects ideas of them; just as a man sees a mirage and mistakes it for real water merely by his mental projection, so people regard the world as real when they are merely transferring their own mental ideas to the world.

The Theosophic doctrine that the physical world is an externalization of an astral plane or even the higher Platonic doctrine that it crystallizes a world of divine ideation is given to beginners as a help to give them a crude grasp, a first step towards the theory that the world is an idea, until they are mentally developed. 

When their mind is mature they are then told to discard the astral plane theory and told the pure truth that all existence is idea.


—Paul Brunton
Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism
Chapter 3: The Individual and World Mind

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The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. 

This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.


—D. H. Lawrence

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Be still, my heart, these great trees are prayers. —Rabindranath Tagore

    

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Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely: 

Imitate the magnificent trees 

That speak no word of their rapture, but only 

Breathe largely the luminous breeze. 


—D. H. Lawrence
Corot, Love Poems and Others

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spirit of a place

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Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, a different vibration of chemical exhalation, a different polarity with the stars; call it what you like. 

But the spirit of a place is a great reality.


—D. H. Lawrence

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The mountains, I become part of it…

The herbs, the fir tree, I become part of it.

The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering waters,

I become part of it.

The wilderness, the dew drops, the pollen …
 
I become part of it. 


—Navajo Chant

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I know of a place not ruled by flatness 
Or constant risings and depressions, 
and those alive are not afraid to die. 

There wild flowers come up through the leafy floor, 
and the fragrance of "I am" floats on the wind.

There the love bee stays deep inside the flower 
and cares for no other thing.


—Kabir

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things will happen

  

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When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.


—D. H. Lawrence

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I want to let go -
so I don't give a damn about fine writing,
I'm rolling my sleeves up.
The dough's rising...
Oh what a shame
I can't bake cathedrals...
that sublimity of style
I've always yearned for...
Child of our time -
haven't you found the right shell for your soul?

Before I die I 
shall
bake a cathedral. 


—Edith Södergran

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note to self

 

Doug Dance/Gray Skies

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I never saw a wild thing 

sorry for itself. 


A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough 

without ever having felt sorry for itself. 


—D. H. Lawrence 

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take off from here

   

bower

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There is no point in work unless it pre-occupies you as well as occupies you.

When you are only occupied, you are an empty shell.

A man needs to be independent at his work, so that he can put his own self into it.

When a man puts his own self into his work he is living, not merely working. 

When men wove with their hands and their soul’s attention the cloth they wore, they lived themselves forth, like a tree putting out woven leaves and it made them happy, and the woven cloth of their hands came from them living like leaves from the tree of their life and clothed them with living leaves.

And as with cloth, so with all things, houses, shoes, wagons or cups, men used to put them forth sensitively like boughs, leaves, fruits, flowers from their tree of life, and villages, whole cities lived, lived as true bowers of men.

It will be so again, for man will smash all his machines again at last, and for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaf-like cloth, issued from his life and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a bird in a bush and drinking from the cups that have flowered from his own fingers he will cancel again these machines we have got.

—D.H. Lawrence

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Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. 

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. 

Take off from here. 

And don't be so earnest.

—Seamus Heaney

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Be a good animal, true to your instincts. —D. H. Lawrence

  

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You are not a drop in the ocean.

You are the entire ocean in a drop.


—Rumi

know deeply

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Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.

But say, in the dark wild metal of your heart

is there a gem, which came into being between us?

is there a sapphire of mutual trust, a blue spark?

Is there a ruby of fused being, mine and yours, an inward glint?

If there is not, O then leave me, go away.

For I cannot be bullied back into the appearances of love,

any more than August can be bullied to look like March.

Love out of season, especially at the end of the season

is merely ridiculous.

If you insist on it, I insist on departure.

Have you no deep old heart of wild womanhood

self-forgetful, and gemmed with experience,

and swinging in a strange union of power

with the heart of the man you are supposed to have loved?

If you have not, go away.

If you can only sit with a mirror in your hand, an ageing woman

posing on and on as a lover,

in love with a self that now is shallow and withered,

your own self–that has passed like a last summer’s flower–

then go away–

I do not want a woman whom age cannot wither.

She is a made-up lie, a dyed immortelle

of infinite staleness.

—D. H. Lawrence
Know Deeply, Know Thyself More Deeply
to his wife

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