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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form is emptiness, emptiness is form

     

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The cosmos that you and I are experiencing right now, 

with trees, plants, peoples, houses, cars, stars and galaxies, 

is just consciousness expressing itself at one particular frequency.


—Deepak Chopra

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We can appreciate that the colors we experience are just appearing in the mind—the light itself is not colored, it is simply energy of varying frequencies, the color we experience coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind—but it is more difficult to appreciate the same is true of the solidity we experience around us. It not only looks solid, we can touch it and feel its solidity, and experience how it impedes our movement. 

We seem to be experiencing the world directly—overlooking the fact that all we are experiencing, including this solidity, is a representation of the world “out there” that appears in our field of knowing.

Even more challenging is the fact that the space in which these forms exist, from right in front of my nose to the distant skyline, is also an appearance in the mind. Our knowing has taken on the appearance of space, and within this space are placed the images we have made of the world around—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations that have been constructed. 

The space we see around us is in fact the space of awareness in which all experiences appear. But now it has various substantial forms distributed throughout, confirming the assumption that we are directly experiencing an independent reality “out there.”

What we thought of as solid matter turns out to be largely empty space, and even so-called elementary particles turn out to have no real substance. As the German physicist Hans-Peter Durr put it, “Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter.” Matter as we conceive of it, exists only in the mind. Matter-stuff is just another concept, another form of mind-stuff. Another modulation of the field of knowing.

Moreover, anything we may say about the world “out there” is another form appearing in the mind. All our ideas about the world—our scientific theories and mathematical equations, our concepts of matter, energy, quarks, strings, particles, waves—they are all appearing in our field of knowing. They are no more substantial than our thoughts.

In the final analysis, it is all mind-stuff appearing as matter-stuff. 

Everything I know is an appearance that “I” have taken on. “I” am, appearing as this thought, these feelings, the sounds I hear, the world I see before me. It is all arising from and within my own being.

This is very different from the claim that I am one with everything, which assumes an external reality with which I am identifying, or feel a oneness with. It is not so much that I am one with the world—the physical world I imagine around me—but that the world of my experience is one with me. This is all me!


—Peter Russel, excerpts
theoretical physicist and so much more

 

 

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knowing with an(other

  

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One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. 

People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. 

And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.

—Joseph Campbell

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According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. 

The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous. 

―Deepak Chopra

Synchro Destiny

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I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

—Walt Whitman

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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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the stuff of reality

  

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Particle physics has taught us that every atom in the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles.

At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms.

Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. [It] presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be sceptical. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn’t seem that what we’re seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of immensely complicated chemical reaction. 

At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe.

There’s an older thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, had an impressive ship in which he had fought numerous battles. To honor him, the citizens of Athens preserved his ship in their port. Occasionally a plank or part of the mast would decay beyond repair and have to be replaced. We have a question of identity: is it the same ship after we’ve replaced one of the planks? If you think it is what about after we’ve replaced all of the planks, one by one? And (as Thomas Hobbes went on to ask) what if we then took all the old planks and built a ship out of them? Would that one then suddenly become the Ship of Theseus?

Narrowly speaking, these are all questions about identity. When is one thing “the same thing” as some other thing? But more broadly, they are questions about ontology, our basic view of what exists in the world. 

What kinds of things are there at all?

—Sean Carroll
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and The Universe Itself

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At the quantum level, no part of the body lives apart from the rest. There are no wires holding together the molecules of your arteries, just as there are no visible connections binding together the stars in a galaxy. 

Yet arteries and galaxies are both securely held together, in a seamless, perfect design. The invisible bonds that you cannot examine under a microscope are quantum in nature; without this “hidden physiology,” your visible physiology could not exist. It would never have been more than a random collection of molecules.


―Deepak Chopra

Perfect Heath

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When you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything. 

—Lao Tzu

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I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter as derivative from consciousness. —Max Planck

    

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The brief span of an individual life is misleading. 

Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. 

The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. 


—J.G Ballard
The Drowned World

 

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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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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

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When the blood of your veins returns to the sea and the dust of your bones returns to the ground, maybe then will you remember that this earth does not belong to you, you belong to this earth.

—Sweetgrass

Native American Prophet

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Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains. —Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

 

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The human skin is an artificial boundary: the world wanders into it, 

and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and constant. 

—Bernard Wolfe 

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We all tend to see our bodies as ‘frozen sculptures’ – solid, fixed, material objects, when in truth they are more like rivers, constantly changing, flowing patterns of intelligence. 

Your adipose tissue (fat cells) fill up with fat and empty out constantly, so that all of it is exchanged every three weeks. 

You acquire a new stomach lining every five days. Your skin is new every five weeks. Your skeleton, seeming so solid and rigid, is entirely new every three months. 

You appear to be the same outwardly, yet you are like a building whose bricks are constantly being replaced by new ones. Every year, fully 98 percent of the atoms and molecules in your body are replaced.

To change the printout of the body, we must learn to rewrite the software of the mind.


—Deepak Chopra

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Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. 

Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

—Roger Sperry

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The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses—not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef—just impulses.


—Diane Ackerman
A Natural History of the Senses 

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your mind is the knife

 

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With only simple tools at their disposal, Ladakhis spend a long time accomplishing each task. Producing wool for clothes involves the time-consuming work of looking after the sheep while they graze, shearing them with hand tools, and working the wool from beginning to end—cleaning, spinning, and finally weaving it. Yet I found that the Ladakhis had an abundance of time. They worked at a gentle pace and had a surprising amount of leisure.

Time is measured loosely; there is never a need to count minutes. "I'll come to see you toward midday, toward evening," they will say, giving themselves several hours' leeway. Ladakhi has many lovely words to depict time, all broad and generous. Gongrot means "from after dark till bedtime"; nyitse means literally "sun on the mountain peaks"; and chips-chirrit, "bird song," describes that time of the morning before the sun has risen, when the birds sing.

Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between word and play is not rigidly defined.

—Helena Elena Norberg Hodge

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

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 Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of 

space and time into neat slices of linear experience.  

 

—Deepak Chopra

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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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