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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self(consciousness

   

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Once you have recognized that there are other realities, other than the one you have been familiar with, your life starts to change. 

I don't care whether you got it from a joint; whether you got it from trauma; whether you got it from surfing; whether you got it from temple or church. 

Whatever thing you did that took you beyond yourself. Whatever it was, if you acknowledged it as real, as what you have started from, you are on the way. That is what is known as awakening.

—Ram Dass

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I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. 

But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.

—Niels Bohr

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Be conscious of yourself, watch your mind, give it your full attention. Don’t look for quick results; there may be none within your noticing. 

Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change; there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behavior. 

You need not aim at these - you will witness the change all the same. For, what you are now is the result of inattention and what you become will be the fruit of attention.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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There are many great voices but not all are human. —Native American proverb

 

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When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. 

You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. 

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

—Ram Dass

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