the soul of the whole

    

whales sleeping

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We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One. 

And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are One.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

[...] All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.


—Albert Einstein

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the universe is fluid and volatile

   

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There are no fixtures in nature.

The universe is fluid and volatile.

Permanence is but a word of degrees. 


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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We perceive an eddy and imagine that it is in some way separate from the river and that it is in some way permanent. We experience ourselves, and likewise assume that there is an unchanging core, even if there is much evidence to undermine that conclusion.


—Bodhipaksa
Living as a River

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We are what we think. 

All that we are arises with our thoughts. 

With our thoughts we make the world. 

Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow 

As your shadow, unshakeable.


—The Dhammapada

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life in two days

 

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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.

I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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all things swim and glitter

 

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Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. 

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. 

Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius!


—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series

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I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.


—William Stafford
when i met my muse

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real(ization

   

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Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. 

Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. 

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. 

The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one. 

So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. 

He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.


—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
ESSAY IX The Over-Soul, excerpts 

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The Self in man and in the sun are one.
Those who understand this see through the world
And go beyond various sheaths
Of being to realize the unity of life.

Those who realize that all life is one
Are at home everywhere and see themselves
In all beings. They sing in wonder:

“I am the food of life, I am, I am,
I eat the food of life, I eat, I eat,
I link food and water, I link, I link,
I am the first-born in the universe;
Older than the gods, I am immortal.

Who shares food with the hungry protects me;
Who shares not with them is consumed by me.
I am this world and I consume this world.
They who understand this understand life.”

This is the Upanishad, the secret teaching.

OM shanti shanti shanti

—The Taittiriya Upanishad, excerpt
Eknath Easwaren version

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space is not empty

   

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We see the the universe as a solid fact,

God sees it as liquid law. 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Space is not empty — nor is it an ‘ether’. The space which surrounds every particle of matter in every wave field is the negative half of the wave field. The solid nucleus is the positive half. Both halves are equal in potential but vastly unequal in volume. 

Science thinks of space either as a void or as an ether through which solids of matter travel. The fact is that space travels with its solids, for each solid is surrounded by a minus zero equal-and-opposite vacuity of the plus zero which we call matter. Matter floats in these insulating spatial counterparts.

Positive electricity is accountable for the solids and negative electricity is accountable for the space. All matter comes out of space by the action of positive electricity and is returned to space by the action of negative electricity. White-hot suns come from the blackness of cold space and cold space radiates from hot suns.

The matter of space consists of holes surrounded by corpuscular solids, while the matter of solids consists of small dense cores surrounded by vast tenuous holes of space. All unfolding and refolding patterns are gyroscopically manipulated, electrically motivated and magnetically measured and controlled.

In the chemical elements, the sharps and flats are isotopes. These can be produced by man in greater numbers than Nature has produced them, for Nature does not begin to split her tones until she has passed two octaves beyond carbon, malleability and conductivity await division in vast quantities from carbon and silicon. These will be found when science discards its concept of matter as being substance, and becomes aware of the gyroscopic control of motion which will split the carbon tone into isotopes as a musical tone is split into sharps and flats.

The elements of matter are not different substances, or different things. They are pressure conditions of light waves. The light units of the elements are all alike but are differently conditioned by the electric pressures exerted upon them during the inward or outward spiral journey from zero to zero.

The unanswered mystery of how the elements become mathematically precise octave tones, just as musical tones or color tones of the spectrum are mathematically precise in vibration orderliness, lies in the wave field gyroscopic principle.
 

—Walter Russell

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Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence ... are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things eternally separated?
 

—Friedrich Nietzsche

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the universe is fluid and volatile

  

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There are no fixtures in nature.

The universe is fluid and volatile.

Permanence is but a word of degrees. 


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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We perceive an eddy…and imagine that it is in some way separate from the river and that it is in some way permanent. We experience ourselves, and likewise assume that there is an unchanging core, even if there is much evidence to undermine that conclusion.


—Bodhipaksa
Living as a River

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We are what we think. 

All that we are arises with our thoughts. 

With our thoughts we make the world. 

Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you 

As your shadow, unshakeable.


—The Dhammapada

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the dreamer is one

 

Aleksandar Bonačić

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There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. 

We wake from one dream into another dream.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The dreams are not equal, but the dreamer is one. I am the insect, I am the poet - in dream. But in reality I am neither. 

I am beyond all dreams. I am the light in which all dreams appear and disappear. I am both inside and outside the dream. 

Just as a man having a headache knows the ache and also knows that he is not the ache, so do I know the dream, myself dreaming and myself not dreaming - all at the same time. I am what I am before, during and after the dream. 

But what I see in dream, I am not.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Make everything in you an ear, each atom of your being, and you will hear at every moment what the Source is whispering to you. 

We are all the beloved of the beloved, and in every moment, in every event of your life, the Beloved is whispering to you exactly what you need to hear and know. 

Who can ever explain this miracle? It simply is.


—Rumi

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in(visible

 

butterfly eggs

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Every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. 

He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is creating an atmosphere.


—Hazrat Inayat Khan
The Mysticism of Sound and Music

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Standing on the bare ground, a mean egoism vanishes. 

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson 

 

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part(icle

   

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It is better not to view a particle as a permanent entity, but rather as an instantaneous event. Sometimes these events link together to create the illusion of permanent entities. 

[...] What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.  

Particles are just appearances. 

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.


—Erwin Schrodinger
Quantum Theory

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"The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. 

He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. 

"As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come." 

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. 

We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism." 

"It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. 

Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. 

Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are." 


—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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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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kindred

Arnhem Land Rock Art, Australia

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Karl Jaspers calls the primal connection that the first people had with the universe Pre-Axial Consciousness. David Suzuki finds this Pre-Axial Consciousness among aboriginal people today as well. 

"Aboriginal people do not believe they end at their skin or fingertips. The earth as mother is real to them, and their history, culture and purpose are embodied in the land. The aboriginal sense of the interconnection of everything in the world is also readily demonstrable and irrefutable scientifically." 

Indeed, the new quantum physics reveals, as Ilia Delio says, that "matter is not composed of basic building blocks but complicated webs of relations. Interconnectedness lies at the core of all that exists." 

—Fr. Richard Rohr

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The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. 

Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. 

Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. 

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compensation, Essays: First Series (1841)

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The cosmos is a vast living 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 nerve center 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.

—D.H. Lawrence

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mean(ings

  

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Everything has a hidden face. Hidden, not in the sense that it is intentionally concealed, but in that it can only be seen with different eyes than the physical. A different mode of perception must be used. 

The hidden face of Nature can only be seen with the heart. 

Everything we encounter in the wildness of the world gives off its own electromagnetic pulse of communication. These waveforms are filled with meanings, living communications that touch us and that we experience as feelings.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
The Secret Teachings of Plants

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In front of the breast lies the great world of activity; behind it, in the spinal cord, is the vast, illimitable, unfathomable ocean of consciousness, motionless and peaceful. 

The waves of the world are hurling themselves upon the breast, breaking there and sinking down into the deep peace of the ocean within. 

—Sri Anirvan

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Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, mean egotism vanishes. 

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

―Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature and Selected Essays

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notes to self

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Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. 

You are not obligated to complete the work,
But neither are you free to abandon it.


—Pir Aga Mir
We Are Contextual Beings

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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.

Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.

We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.


—Alan Watts

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Time and space are but physiological colours which the eye makes, 

but the soul is light.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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chang1ng r00ms

  

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There is geometry in the humming of the strings,  

there is music in the spacing of the spheres. 

—Pythagoras

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The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; 
and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. 

It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. 

St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was
everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. 

One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or
compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of being outdone. 

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. 


—Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Essays: First Series (1841)

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Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.


—Hafiz

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Strange, that.

Andy Ilachinski

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What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it. That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

―Richard Feynman (treasure)
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

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When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? 

Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. 

Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. 

And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. 

But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. 

We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world.
 

—Christophe Galfard

The Universe in Your Hand

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Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882
tao of photography

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