matters of being

 

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The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. 

Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the “Other.” 

The intra-actively emergent “parts” of phenomena are co­constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future.

Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. Even atoms, whose very name, ατομοσ (atomos), means “indivisible” or “uncuttable,” can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. 

Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant.


—Karen Barad

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, excerpts noosphe.re

  

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Blessed be you,
mighty matter,
irresistible march of evolution,
reality ever newborn;
you who, by constantly
shattering our mental categories,
force us to go ever further
and further in our
pursuit of the truth.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955)
Hymn of the Universe

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The whole of life lies in the verb seeing. —Teilhard de Chardin

  

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Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.

[...] The Nothing is never at rest, neither manifestation repeats any other and everything that IS throbs and vibrates to create the mental world of "existence". 

Whatever we do "here and now" influences the surrounding environment of the planet of the Solar system, of the Galaxy, of the Universe, of the full combination of the universes.

When a blade of grass is cut the whole universe quivers ...

—The Upanishads

                    

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In the end words go; finally the perceptibles and observables go into the non-perceptible and non-observable state. Find that out. 

You will understand this slowly and get peace and rest. 

You do not do anything. It happens.


—Nisagardatta Maharaj

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find the others

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little systems of care

snowflakes under microscope

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My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

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Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, 
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.


—Ted Kooser
Flying at Night

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The Universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. —Teilhard de Chardin

 

eye of a female humpback whale, rachel moore

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I could be both an I 

and the world. The great eye 

of the world is both gaze 

             and gloss. To be swallowed 

by being seen. A dream. 

To be made whole 

               by being not a witness, 

but witnessed.

—Ada Limón

  

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a plurality of worlds

  

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It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation. The beloved appears as a sign, a "soul"; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. 

What is involved, here, is a plurality of worlds; the pluralism of love does not concern only the multiplicity of loved beings, but the multiplicity of souls or worlds in each of them. To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved.


—Deleuze
Proust and Signs

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My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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shapes that renew

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I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same 
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours 
And the songs of every poet past and forever. 


—Rabindranath Tagore
unending love

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The Hermetic marriage is an alchemical symbol found in the nature of all things, for the law of polarity is universal. In the human world it appears as gender - positive and negative, masculine and feminine. 

As all electricians know, positive and negative are opposite poles of one circuit. Spirit itself knows no polarity, but manifests through polarity to the accomplishment of the Great Work.


—Manly P. Hall
The Hermetic Marriage

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To be fully ourselves we must advance in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest—towards the ‘other.’

The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. 

There is no mind without synthesis.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

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Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Wissam Nassar

thingstoread

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everything that rises must converge

 

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The Universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. 

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. 

The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.  

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

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To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the ‘other.’ The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. 

There is no mind without synthesis. 

The same holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism.’ Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

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My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him. 

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. 

Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! 

At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.


—Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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The whole of life lies in the verb seeing. —Teilhard de Chardin

Sweden, 1925

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Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, 

and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. 

—Leonardo da Vinci

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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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There is only Seeing. 

Both the seer and the seen are contained in it.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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you are the clear book

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These roses under my window make no
reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are;
they exist with God to-day.

There is no time to them.
There is simply the rose; it is perfect in
every moment of its existence. 

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts;
in the full-blown flower, there is no more;
in the leafless root, there is no less.

Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,
in all moments alike.
There is no time to it.

But man postpones or remembers;
he does not live in the present, but with
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of
the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe
to foresee the future. 

He cannot be happy and strong until he too
lives with nature in the present, above time.


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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Your cure is in you, but you are unaware,

And your illness is from you, but you do not see.

And you consider yourself to be a small mass

While within you lies the greatest world.

And you are the clear book

Whose letters make manifest the hidden.

—Amīr al-Mu’mineen, Imam Ali (ع)

 

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Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. 

For everything that rises must converge.


—Pierre Teilhard De Chardin 

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how to live on earth

   

The Kummakivi (Strange Rock)

Ruokolahti, Finland

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We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense America is dying, from within, because they forgot the instructions of how to live on earth.

It is the Hopi belief, it is our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth, and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, it is likely that you will not make it.

Everything is spiritual, everything has a spirit, everything was brought here by the creator, the one creator. Some people call him God, some people call him Buddha, some people call him Allah, some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila. Grandfather.

We are here on earth only a few winters, then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real then most of us believe. The spirit world is everything. Over 95% of our body is water. In order to stay healthy you've got to drink good water. Water is sacred, air is sacred. 

Our DNA is made out of the same DNA as the tree, the tree breaths what we exhale, we need what the tree exhales. So we have a common destiny with the tree. We are all from the earth, and when earth, the water, the atmosphere is corrupted then it will create its own reaction. The mother is reacting. 

In the Hopi prophecy they say the storms and floods will become greater. To me its not a negative thing to know that there will be great changes. Its not negative, its evolution. When you look at it as evolution, it's time, nothing stays the same.

You should learn how to plant something. That is the first connection. You should treat all things as spirit, realize that we are one family. It is never something like the end. It is like life, there is no end to life.


—Floyd Red Crow Westerman

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Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a universe that is person - and through all of this there blows, animating it and spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of union - and of the Feminine.

The diaphany of the Divine at the heart of a glowing universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the earth - the divine radiating from depths of blazing matter. 

—Teilhard de Chardin

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All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man. 

The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

—Chief Seattle

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closer than breathing

    

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... the most fundamental scientific ‘fact’ is not the existence of a universe of things in space and time but awareness of such a universe.

Awareness is not a ‘thing’ that can evolve from or arise out of an unaware or insentient universe of things. On the contrary, all things in the universe emerge and take shape out of a universal awareness. 


—Peter Wilberg
The Awareness Principle

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Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and knows,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.


—Rumi

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Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight,  

there are watchers in the skies.

—Euripides

The Bacchae c. 406 BC,

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Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places. —Flann O'Brien

  

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How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?

—St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 213-268)

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Your thinking that you have to make an effort to get rid of this dream of the waking state, and your making efforts to attain jnana (realization of Self) or real awakening, are all parts of the dream.


—Ramana Maharshi

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Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a universe that is person - and through all of this there blows, animating it and spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of union - and of the Feminine.

The diaphany of the Divine is at the heart of a glowing universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the earth - the divine radiating from depths of blazing matter.

The world will open the arms of God to us. It is for us to throw ourselves into these arms so that the divine milieu should close around our lives like a circle.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Divine Milieu, excerpts

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Both anatomy and astronomy describe you. —Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  

underwater photo of a breaking wave that shows complex vibration and vortex dynamics 

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The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf. The vapor climbs the sunbeam, and comes back in blessings upon the exhausted herb. The exhalation of the plant is wafted to the ocean.

And so goes on the beautiful commerce of nature. And all because of dissimilarity — because no one thing is sufficient in itself, but calls for the assistance of something else, and repays by a contribution in turn.


—E.H. Chapin
Sunbeams, May 2021
allchannels

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My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

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I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. 

Every cell has life. 

Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified.

—Albert Einstein

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note to self

  

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If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
Half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now? 

And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. 

On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their televisions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance. 

I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.


—David Wagoner

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What we observe is not nature itself, 

but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

—Werner Heisenberg

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steep

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We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. 

Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.


—Charles Darwin, 1868

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Sons and daughters of the earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness.

You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? 

Well, you were like to have perished of hunger.

You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for your intellect: do you not see that the very law of your own nature makes these a necessity for you?


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968

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the branch might seem like the fruit’s origin: in fact, the branch exists because of the fruit —Rumi

  

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Prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27), much more than anything you privately do. It is an allowing of the Big Self more than an assertion of the small self. Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, “Prayer happened, and I was there” more than “I prayed today.” All you know is that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through—and you are no longer in the driver’s seat.

God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world, and becomes at some level your own “I am.” You start knowing through, with, and in Somebody Else. 

Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.” 

Please trust me on this. It might be the most important thing I could tell you.


—Fr. Richard Rohr
The Naked Now

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To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the ‘other.’ 

The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same holds good from top to bottom. 

The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism.’ Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

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Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

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The many stuffs—matter, energy, waves, phenomena—that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all; but from other worlds. 

Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.


—Nelson Goodman
Ways of Worldmaking

 

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A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.


—Swami Sivananda

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I have been many things,

Before becoming as I am.

I have been a narrow multi-colored sword.

I have been a tear in the air.

I have lived as the faintest of stars.

I have been a word among letters,

A book among words.


—Taliesin, 500 ACE

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