relation(ships

Earthrise photographed by Apollo VIII, 1968

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In this spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense. 

The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.


—D.T. Suzuki, 1870 - 1966
On Indian Mahayana Buddhism

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Just as we here view a large and luminous moon, so I deduce that from the moon one would view a great and very bright earth, also illuminated by sunlight, just as the moon has been illuminated.


—Galileo Galilei 1564 - 1642

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This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence, a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature is all related.


—Plato, born Aristocles, c. 427 - 348 BC

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not no(thing

  

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It is impossible for us to know the reactions of beings constituted in a different way. It is, however, reasonable to think that in the same world ... different worlds are perceived by different beings according to the nature of their respective organs of perception.

Does that mean that in absolute truth our senses have made contact with a real horse, a real apricot, etc.? There is no proof of this, for the only existing proof depends on the evidence of the senses ...

We cannot presume any thing more than the existence of a stimulus which has caused the sensation that we have felt, a sensation which we have interpreted in our own way, adding to it images of our own invention.

Should we then believe that we have been taken in by a pure mirage? Not entirely. Probably the stimulus corresponds to something, but this something, that is to say the object of some kind with which one of our senses has made contact, remains unknown to us.


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

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Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. 

And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he has a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.


—Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
Republic, The Allegory of the Cave

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we are that

        

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We are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon.  

We are not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it.

We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. 

And the earth, together with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space.

So that we are the mind, ultimately, of space …


—Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By

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Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart 

whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. 

At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

—Plato

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As long as nothing can be known for sure

(no signals have been picked up yet),

as long as Earth is still unlike

the nearer and more distant planets,

as long as there’s neither hide nor hair

of other grasses graced by other winds,

of other treetops bearing other crowns,

other animals as well-grounded as our own,

as long as only the local echo

has been known to speak in syllables,

as long as we still haven’t heard the word

of better or worse mozarts,

platos, edisons, elsewhere,

as long as our inhuman crimes

are still committed only between humans,

as long as our kindness

is still incomparable,

peerless even in its imperfection,

as long as our heads packed with illusions

still pass for the only heads so packed,

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone

still raise voices to high heavens  

– let’s act like very special guests of honour

at the district firemen’s ball,

dance to the beat of the local oompah band

and pretend that it’s the ball

to end all balls.

I can’t speak for other –
for me this is misery and happiness enough:

just this sleepy backwater
where even the stars have time to burn
while winking at us
unintentionally.


—Wislawa Szymborska
the ball

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trans(formation

Brahmin moth, transformed

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The one Reality appears to our ignorance as a manifold universe of names and forms and changes. Like the gold of which many ornaments are made, it remains in itself unchanged. 

Such is Brahman, and That art Thou.


—Adi Shankara

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Just as one might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can bear to contemplate reality and that supreme splendour which we have called the Good.


—Plato

 

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The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus

On Nature, Fragments 

G. T. W. Patrick version

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