a letter to the king of the universe

  

Hinke Schreuders

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Cosmos is a Greek word for the orderly harmonious systematic nature of the universe, implying an emanating beauty. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos.

It reflects the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together and functions.


—Carl Sagan

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Open the letter of the body’s life inside the words. 
This body, your life, is a letter to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if the words are right. If they are not start another!

And do not think it easy to open the body and read the secret message. This is the most courageous work, not something for children playing with knucklebones in the dirt.

Open to the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you have said it says? If you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! 

Bring only what should be given.


—Rumi
The Soul of Rumi
Coleman Barks version

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And do not look for me in a human shape.

I am inside your looking. 

No room for form with love this strong.

—Rumi

 

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Your head is a loving forest full of song birds. —E.E. Cummings

 

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In truth, everything and everyone 
is a shadow of the Beloved. 

And our seeking is His seeking, 
and our words are His words. 

We search for Him here and there. 

While looking right at Him, 
sitting by His side, we ask: 
'O Beloved, where is the Beloved?' 

Enough with such questions! 

Let silence take you to the core of life. 

All your talk is worthless when compared 
with one whisper of the Beloved.


—Rumi

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Are you looking for me?

I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours. 

You will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables. 

When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time. 

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.

—Kabir

 

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close your eyes. fall in love. stay there. 

—Rumi

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You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love. —Rumi

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We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit. It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security...

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

—Sogyal Rinpoche

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Are you looking for me?

I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours. 

You will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables. 

When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time. 

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.

—Kabir

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All of you is holy. 

You are already more and less than whatever you can know. 

Breathe out, look in, let go. 

—John Welwood

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kind(red

 

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What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. 

The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. 

We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.

—Valarie Kaur
Sikh activist and human rights lawyer

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Your body is made of the same elements that lionesses are built from. Three quarters of you is the same kind of water that beats rocks to rubble, wears stones away. Your DNA translates into the same twenty amino acids that wolf genes code for. 

When you look in the mirror and feel weak, remember, the air you breathe in fuels forest fires capable of destroying everything they touch. On the days you feel ugly, remember: diamonds are only carbon. You are so much more.


—Curtis Ballard

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You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it

It’s too bad that you want to be someone else

You don’t see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.


—Rumi

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this short life is long and beautiful

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Beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community.
Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things.

It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.

And there it is ahead of all as the Beloved, toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which brings them into being.


—Pseudo-Dionysius, late 5th to early 6th century mystical theologist, Neoplatonic philosopher, from The Divine Names

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Open the letter of the body’s life inside the words. 

This body, your life, is a letter to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if the words are right. If they are not start another!

And do not think it easy to open the body and read the secret message. This is the most courageous work, not something for children playing with knucklebones in the dirt.

Open to the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you have said it says? If you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! 

Bring only what should be given.

—Rumi

The Soul of Rumi

Coleman Barks version

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Life is an island. People come out of the sea, 

cross the island, and return to the sea. 

But this short life is long and beautiful. 
 

—Martiros Saryan

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all the flowers are forms of water —W.S. Merwin

   

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The act of trying to find the way home is what convinces us we are lost. 

We are not lost, we are not alone, and we have never left home.

—Rumi

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Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within. 

Underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god.

 

—Huston Smith

 

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As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; 

it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. 

There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This.

—The Upanishads 

 

 

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Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible. —Rumi

    

 

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If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it 

and you will see the world


—Robert Kaplan

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From the earliest times, it was understood that the visible world implied the existence of an invisible world, where everything was infused with the supernatural and the felt sense of the sacred. 

Thomas Yellowtail expressed: ‘A man’s attitude toward the nature around him, and the animals in nature, is of special importance, because as we respect our created world, so also do we show respect for the real world that we cannot see.’ 

Through the traditional wisdom of American Indians we learn that there are ways of knowing that are obtained through the earth that allow human beings to listen and learn directly from the Great Spirit.


—Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
Parabola Magazine
Fall 2017 Issue: “The Sacred” 

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Names belong to things, but zero belongs to nothing. It counts the totality of what isn’t there. By this reasoning it must be everywhere with regard to this and that: with regard, for instance, to the number of humming-birds in that bowl with seven — or now six — apples. Then what does zero name?


—Robert Kaplan

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Could I live like this? I ask myself

and I know, somehow, I must.

More and more my life is peeling paint,

straight horizons.

More and more my name dissolves in the air,

salt, something invisible I taste,

and forget.


—Naomi Shihab Nye
At Otto’s Place, excerpt 

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For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. —Carl Sagan

  

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Be helpless, dumbfounded 
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying. 
If we say No, we don’t see it, that No will behead us 
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything, 
Beside ourselves, and only that, so 
Miraculous beings come running to help. 
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute, 
We shall be saying finally, 
With tremendous eloquence, 
Lead us.

When we have totally surrendered to that beauty, 
We shall be a mighty kindness.


—Rumi

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observ(ation

  

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There is the body. 

Inside the body appears to be an observer, and outside a world under observation. 

The observer and his observation as well as the world observed appear and disappear together. 

Beyond it all, there is void. 

This void is one for all.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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In the waters of purity, I melted like salt.

Neither blasphemy, nor faith, nor conviction, nor doubt remained.

In the center of my heart a star has appeared

And all the seven heavens have become lost in it.

—Rumi

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Return the divine gaze, become its reflection. 

—2 Corinthians 3:18 

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language without words

  

Lara Carlson

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Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island. 

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions. 

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,
language without words. 


—Tomas Tranströmer
March 1979, excerpt
Robin Robertson translation 

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Words, even if they come from
the soul, hide the soul, as fog

rising off the sea covers the sea,
the coast, the fish, the pearls.

It's noble work to build coherent
philosophical discourses, but

they block out the sun of truth.
See God's qualities as an ocean,

this world as foam on the purity
of that. Brush away and look

through the alphabet to essence,
as you do the hair covering your

beloved's eyes. Here's the mystery:
this intricate, astonishing world

is proof of God's presence even as
it covers the beauty. One flake

from the wall of a gold mine does
not give much idea what it's like

when the sun shines in and turns
the air and the workers golden.


—Rumi

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I am where I was:

I walk behind the murmur,

footsteps within me, heard with my eyes,

the murmur is in the mind, I am my footsteps,

I hear the voices that I think,

the voices that think me as as I think them.

I am the shadow my words cast.


—Octavio Paz
closing lines to A Draft of Shadows
Eliot Weinberger translation 

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the mandate of virtualization

 

 

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The summer night glowed; 
in the field, fireflies were glinting. 

And for those who understood such things, 
the stars were sending messages.


—Louise Glück
midsummer
poems 1962-2012

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We share our reality with a massive dichotomy of other life forms who through their own unique sensory processes have a completely different interpretation of reality than humans. 

What is important is that all life uses sensory inputs and information processing to survive. It is this mechanic of life that paints the experience of reality and each life form virtualizes reality in the form of an interface to survive. In an information driven experiential reality system the mandate of virtualization cannot be ignored as it is why we succeed in our ability to survive and exist.


—Rumi

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These forms we seem to be are cups floating in an ocean of living consciousness. They fill and sink without leaving an arc of bubbles or any good-bye spray. 

What we are is that ocean, too near to see, though we swim in it and drink it in. 

Don't be a cup with a dry rim, or someone who rides all night and never knows the horse beneath his thighs, the surging that carries him along.


—Rumi
cup and ocean
Mathnawi 1, 1109-16
Coleman Barks version

  

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tell me why

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Our weaknesses are the way to God
Tell me why it is through the body
through torment of the body you speak to the spirit
why through leprosy fever deafness

You are a healer and not a priest
you take in your hands the head of the dying
from one lump you bring forth new life 
like bread you multiply the body

You come through bodies not through sunsets
and the hard strong hand of blood and flesh
holds in the palm like a sparrow
the muscle of the human heart


—Anna Kamienska
Astonishments

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Do not turn your head. 

Keep looking at the bandaged place.

That is where the light enters. 

And do not believe for a moment 

that you are healing yourself.

—Rumi

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ways of seeing

        

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A common misconception is the belief that thinking is the creation of thought. Rather, it is the reception of thought from a source which has no name and from a place that cannot be found. Since one can’t decide to think nor can one decide thoughts’ contents, why does one claim their ownership? 

Is every sound Wu Hsin’s because he can hear them?

—Wu Hsin

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I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I am in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever i want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.

—Dziga Verotv, revolutionary Soviet film director, 1923

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

 

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A step toward your own heart
is a step toward the Beloved.

In this house of mirrors
you see a lot of things –

Rub your eyes.
Only you exist.


–Rumi 
Star/Shiva version

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sitting together

  

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We sit in this courtyard,
two forms, shadow outlines with one soul.

Birdsound, leaf moving, early evening star,
fragrant damp, and a sweet sickle curve of moon.

You and I in a round, unselved idling
in the garden-beauty detail.

The raucous parrots laugh,
and we laugh inside their laughter, 
the two of us on a bench in Konya, 
yet amazingly in Khorasan and Iraq as well.

Friends abiding this form,
yet also in another, outside of time, you and I.


—Rumi 

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Isn’t it obvious that we “inter-are”?

    

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One of the surprising things in the event of quantum collapse is that when you look, not only does an object appear in consciousness but also a subject appears looking at the object. Quantum collapse produces the awareness of a subject-object split –the experience of a subject looking at an object.

... In the event of a quantum measurement, the collapsing subject and collapsed objects, including the brain, arise simultaneously, codependently. The experiencing subject and the experienced objects co-create one another.


—Amit Goswami
Quantum Doctor

 

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You are me, and I am you.

Isn’t it obvious that we “inter-are”?

You cultivate the flower in yourself,

so that I will be beautiful.

I transform the garbage in myself,

so that you will not have to suffer. 


I support you;

you support me.

I am in this world to offer you peace;

you are in this world to bring me joy.


—Thich Nhat Hanh

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In fact, my soul and yours are the same. 

You appear in me, I appear in you. 

We hide in each other.


—Rumi 

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friend

 

 

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Friend, we’re traveling together.
Throw off your tiredness. 

Let me show you one tiny spot of the beauty that cannot be spoken. 


—Rumi

 

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there is not a fragment in all of nature —John Muir, 1867

    

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We are connected by the fundamental oneness of our consciousness; we are all individuated lumps within, as well as parts of, the same sheet. 

We are connected by the ability of one individual to vitally affect, and be affected by, another through the purposeful control of thought energy or the energy of consciousness. 

We are connected by the theoretical ability of one being to exchange energy or information with any other being simply by focusing intent. 


—Thomas Campbell, nuclear physicist
My Big Toe

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This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.

Listen, if you can stand to.
Union with the friend
means not being who you have been,
being instead silence, a place,
a view where language is inside seeing.

From the wet source
someone cuts a reed to make a flute
The reed sips breath like wine,
sips more, practicing. Now drunk,
it starts the high clear notes.

There is a path from me to you
that I am constantly looking for,
so I try to keep clear and still
as water does with the moon.

We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.
We can be led by the guide.
Wishes may or may not come true
in this house of disappointment.
Let's push the door open together and leave.

My essence is like the essence of a red wine.
My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.
Glass after glass of wine go into my head.
Finally, my head goes into the wine.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version
The Big Red Book

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You are all things, and all things are your soul. —Conrad Aiken

    

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Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skyward.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skyward. And it waxed larger as it flew.
Yet it left not my heart.


—Kahlil Gibran

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I am not this hair,

I am not this skin,

I am the soul that lives within.


—Rumi

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I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe. 

We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul.


—Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist

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