behind the bodily world

   

.

The Maitri Upanishad mentions two aspects of Brahman, the higher and the lower. The higher Brahman being the unmanifest Supreme Reality which is soundless and totally quiescent and restful, the lower being the Shabda-Brahman which manifests itself into the everchanging restless cosmos through the medium of sound vibrations. 

The Upanishad says that “Two Brahmans there are to be known: One as sound and the other as Brahman Supreme.” 

The process of manifestation is from soundless to sound, from noumenality to phenomenality, from perfect quiescence of "being” to the restlessness of “becoming”.

—Sudhakar S.D, 1988, p83

.

 

It is I who must begin.

Once I begin, once I try --
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
-- to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
-- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.


—Vaclav Havel

.

All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His Being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my
heart.

—Meister Eckhart

.

Everything is nothing, with a twist. —Kurt Vonnegut

 

.

 

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird.

—Richard Feynman

.

 

You must know that no man ever left himself so much in this life, but he could find more to leave. There are few who are truly aware of this and who are steadfast in it. It is really an equal exchange and barter:

Just as much as you go out of all things, just so much, neither more nor less, does God enter in with all that is His - if indeed you go right out of all that is yours.

Start with that, and let it cost you all you can afford. And in that you will find true peace, and nowhere else.

—Meister Eckhart

.

You grieve for those that should not be grieved for.
The wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead. 

Never at any time was I not, nor thou, nor these princes of men. 
Nor shall we ever cease to be hereafter. 

The unreal has no being. 
The real never ceases to be.


—Bhagavad Gita, version

Chapter 2, verse 11

 

 

.

 

 

I am large. I contain multitudes. —Walt Whitman

  

.

The secret teachings lead the pupil further. They teach him to look, with the same serene indifference, at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity displayed by the body. He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing of all that is from him, is him. He, physically and mentally, is a multitude of others.

This "multitude of others" includes the material elements—the ground, one might say—which he owes to his heredity, his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become, with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his "I", form there a swarming throng.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

.

Celebration … is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder – the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this.


—Martin Heidegger

.

I need to be silent for a while. 

Worlds are forming in my heart.

—Meister Eckhart

Expands His Being

Daniel Ladinsky version

.

all beings are words

  

.

All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His Being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my
heart.


—Meister Eckhart

.

look

  

.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye 

with which God sees me.

—Meister Eckhart 

.

In this house of mirrors you see a lot of things.

Rub your eyes. 

Only you exist.


—Rumi

.

sublime emptiness

 

.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.


—Henry David Thoreau
from Economy, 1854

.

I need to be silent for a while. 

Worlds are forming in my heart.

—Meister Eckhart

Daniel Ladinsky version

from Expands His Being

.

there is a be(ing

.

The Tao is forever changing —

Alteration, movement without rest,

Flowing through the six empty places,

Rising and sinking without fixed law,

Firm and yielding transform each other.

They cannot be confined within a rule,

It is only change that is at work here.


—The I Ching, Book of Changes

.

There is a being wonderful, perfect; It existed before heaven and earth. How quiet it is! How spiritual it is!

It stands alone and it does not change; It moves, but does not on that account suffer. All life comes from it, yet it does not demand to be Lord.

I do not know its name, so I call it Tao, the Way,

And I rejoice in its power.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching, 25th Chapter

.

God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.


—Meister Eckhart

.

this is the tale the world tells

 

.

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.  

There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.


—Meister Eckhart

.

Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. 

You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you'd been reading.


—Chuck Palahniuk

.

The world is a magic book, and we its sentences. 
We read it and read ourselves. 
And never come back, 
Returned to what we once were before we became 
what we are. 

This is the tale the world tells, this is the way it ends.
All my life I've listened for the dark speech of silence, 
And now, every night, 
I hear a slight murmur, a slow rush,
My blood setting out on its long journey beyond the skin. 


—Charles Wright

.