all my relations

 

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You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. 

We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. 

And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.

—Christian Wiman

Poetry, October 2012

 

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I’ve been asked many times whether this is the aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is armageddon and this is the end, and I have to admit I don’t know. 

Whichever way it goes, my work is the same. My work is to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it.

—Ram Dass

 

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Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. 

It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.

—Rabindranath Tagore

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earthspeak

  

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Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

—Rabindranath Tagore

.

Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of grey
the same,
its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.


—Jane Hirshfield

.

I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than

mountains and rivers and the great wide earth,

the sun and the moon and the stars. 

—Dogen

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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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the principal element of creation

  

.

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.  


—Rabindranath Tagore

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Silence will carry your voice like the nest that holds the sleeping birds. —Rabindranath Tagore

   

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The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and inter-dependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind.

Words create words, reality is silent.


—Nisargadatta 

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You are the only faithful student you have.
All the others leave eventually.

Have you been making yourself shallow
with making others eminent?

Just remember, when you're in union,
you don't have to fear 
that you'll be drained.

The command comes to speak,
and you feel the ocean 
moving through you. 

Then comes, Be silent,
as when the rain stops,
and the trees in the orchard
begin to draw moisture
up into themselves.


—Rumi
Mathnawi, V, 3195-3219) 
Coleman Barks version

 

.

 

silence

.is

a

looking

bird:the

turn

ing;edge,of

life 

(inquiry before snow

—e. e. cummings

 

.

 

Be still, my heart, these great trees are prayers. —Rabindranath Tagore

    

.

Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely: 

Imitate the magnificent trees 

That speak no word of their rapture, but only 

Breathe largely the luminous breeze. 


—D. H. Lawrence
Corot, Love Poems and Others

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close your eyes. fall in love. stay there. —Rumi

   

 

Mahmoud Al-Kurd

.

Once we dreamt that we were strangers.

We wake up to find that we were dear to each other.


—Rabindranath Tagore

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true lovers in each happening of their hearts
live longer than all which and every who;
despite what fear denies,what hope asserts,
what falsest both disprove by proving true

(all doubts,all certainties,as villains strive
and heroes through the mere mind’s poor pretend
—grim comics of duration:only love
immortally occurs beyond the mind)

such a forever is love’s any now
and her each here is such an everywhere,
even more true would truest lovers grow
if out of midnight dropped more suns than are

(yes;and if time should ask into his was
all shall,their eyes would never miss a yes)


–E. E. Cummings

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