Your head is a loving forest full of song birds. —E.E. Cummings

 

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In truth, everything and everyone 
is a shadow of the Beloved. 

And our seeking is His seeking, 
and our words are His words. 

We search for Him here and there. 

While looking right at Him, 
sitting by His side, we ask: 
'O Beloved, where is the Beloved?' 

Enough with such questions! 

Let silence take you to the core of life. 

All your talk is worthless when compared 
with one whisper of the Beloved.


—Rumi

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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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close your eyes. fall in love. stay there. 

—Rumi

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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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The flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is Love. —Kabir

 

Édouard Boubat

 

 

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No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,

But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
 

—May Sarton
The Work of Happiness

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Just be Quiet and you will receive a precious gift

from the Light hiding inside you.

—Papaji

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within this vessel

  

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A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest. 

—Martin Heidegger

Love Expands

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Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves, and within it is the Creator:

Within this vessel are the seven oceans and the unnumbered stars.

The touchstone and the jewel-appraiser are within;

And within this vessel the Eternal soundeth, and the spring wells up.

Kabir says: “Listen to me, my Friend! 

My Beloved Lord is within.

 

—Kabir

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Love says, 'I am everything.'

Wisdom says, 'I am nothing.'

Between these two my life flows.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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friends

 

 

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Wherever and whenever

You hear this

You hear

What was meant for you
Since before
Time began.

This is the moment
Of our meeting
Mind, heart, body

That was written
In your stars
When your soul began

Its long journey back
To your own house.

So, friends,
Open the door
And see Kabir

Waiting for you
Sitting on
Your favorite chair.

Let's talk
Or better
Let's not.


—Kabir

  

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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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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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What I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. —Rumi

 

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Go deeper
Past thoughts into silence.

Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.

Let love consume all that is left of you.


—Kabir

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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. —Plotinus

  

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God turns you from one feeling to another

and teaches by means of opposites,

so that you will have two wings to fly,

not one.

—Rumi

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You are sitting in a wagon being
drawn by a horse whose
reins you 
hold.

There are two inside of you
who can steer.

Most never hand the reins to Me
so they go from place to place the
best they can, though
rarely happy.

And rarely does their whole body laugh
feeling God's poke 
in the 
ribs.

If you feel tired, dear,
my shoulder is soft,
I'd be glad to
steer a
while.


—Kabir

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listen

  

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If you want what visible reality
can give, you're an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,
but you'll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love's confusing joy.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

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listen

hiding in this cage
of visible matter

is the invisible
lifebird

pay attention
to her

she is singing
your song


—Kabir
Sushil Rao version

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wherever you are on the way

Stephane Granzotto

. 

They set out with him inside the dream,
while he is actually sleeping beside a river of pure water.

Sleep deeply wherever you are on the way.
Maybe some traveler will wake you.

Give up subtle thinking, the twofold, threefold
multiplication of mistakes.

Listen to the sound of waves within you.


—Rumi

. 

You are sitting in a wagon being
drawn by a horse whose
reins you 
hold.

There are two inside of you
who can steer.

Most never hand the reins to Me
so they go from place to place the
best they can, though
rarely happy.

And rarely does their whole body laugh
feeling God's poke 
in the 
ribs.

If you feel tired, dear,
my shoulder is soft,
I'd be glad to
steer a
while.


—Kabir

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When whales need a nap, they take a deep breath, dive around 15 meters, and position themselves in a perfectly vertical pattern. They sleep peacefully for between 10 and 15 minutes, in groups of 5 or 6 whales, possibly for protection.

Nobody knew that whales slept vertically until a 2020 study documented the behavior. And nobody captured such stunning photos in the wild until 2023. French photographer Stephane Granzotto was documenting whales in the Mediterranean for his book on the creatures when he stumbled upon these sleeping whales.
ian sanders

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questions

  

David Sanger

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I have been thinking of the difference between
water and the waves on it.

Rising, water's still water, falling back, it is water.
Will you give me a hint how to tell them apart? 

Because someone has made up the word "wave,"
do I have to distinguish it from water? 
There is a Secret One inside us; the planets in all the galaxies pass through his hands like beads. 

That is a string of beads one should look at 
with luminous eyes.


—Kabir

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The heart brings us authentic tidings of invisible things. —James Hillman

 

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The heart is an intricate pump. It creates electromagnetic fields that others can feel or through which we can communicate. We exist immersed in living fields of communication, all of which are imbued with meaning, generated by intelligent life forms which flow from and to us from the moment the cells of our bodies self-organize into the unique identities that we know as ourselves.

 We feel the touch of the world upon us, and those millions of unique touches hold within them specific meanings, sent to us from the heart of the world and from the heart of the living beings with which we inhabit this world. We are never alone. 

The greeks had a word for the heart’s ability to perceive meaning from the world: aisthesis.

In Aristotalian psychology the organ of aesthesis is the heart; passages from all the sense organs run to it; there the soul is set on fire. 

Its thought is innately aesthetic and sensately linked with the world.

 

—James Hillman

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Aisthesis denotes the moment in which a flow of life force, imbued with communications, moves from one living organism to another. The word literally means ‘to breathe in’. it is a taking in of the world, a taking in of soulful communications. 

The world takes us in too—we are breathed. 

The use of the heart as an organ of perception and communication weaves us inextricably into the life web of the Earth, gathering knowledge from the heart of the world.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
The Secret Teachings of Plants, excerpts 
(treasure)

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The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.
Some think it is East of us, others West of us.
Some say ‘among primitive earth rocks’,
Others, 'in the deep waters.’

Kabir’s instinct told him it was inside,
And what it was worth –
And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.


—Kabir

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wherever you are

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Just turn away from all that occupies the mind,

do whatever work you have to complete, 

avoid new obligations,

keep empty, keep available, 

but resist not what comes uninvited.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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wherever you are is the entry point

—Kabir

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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

‘

We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. —Norbert Weiner

 

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... if a mirror ever makes
you sad
you should know
that it does
not know
you.


—Kabir

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birth(right

 

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Your love should never be offered to the 
mouth of a stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife 
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.


—Hafiz

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To kiss a forehead is to erase worry.
I kiss your forehead.

To kiss the eyes is to lift sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

To kiss the lips is to drink water.
I kiss your lips.

To kiss a forehead is to erase memory.
I kiss your forehead.


—Marina Tsvetaeva
trans. Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine

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