real(ization

  

orchid mantis (flower child)

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The world is labyrinthine beyond possibility of imagining, inhabited on many levels by alien intelligence, infinite in extent, staggering in its beauty, terrifying in its weirdness, endlessly satisfying and peculiar.


—Terence McKenna

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All that a Guru can tell you is: “My dear Sir, you are quite mistaken about yourself. You are not the person you think yourself to be.” 

Trust nobody, not even yourself. Search, find out, remove and reject every assumption till you reach the living waters and the rock of truth.

Until you are free of the drug, all your religions and sciences, prayers and Yogas are of no use to you, for based on a mistake, they strengthen it. 

But if you stay with the idea that you are not the body nor the mind, nor even their witness, but altogether beyond, your mind will grow in clarity, your desires in purity, your actions in charity and that inner distillation will take you to another world, a world of truth and fearless love. Confide in your inner self. 

Truly, your inner self is the supreme teacher. It alone can take you to your goal and it alone meets you at the end of the road. Confide in your inner self and you need no outer Guru.

You must have the strong desire to find truth and do nothing that will create obstacles and delays.

And do not waste energy and time on regrets.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj


  

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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer. —Terence McKenna

  

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There'll never be a door. 

You're inside and the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse nor reverse nor circling nor secret center.


—Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
In Praise of Darkness

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Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.
 

—Jorge Luis Borges

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all my relations

 

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In their relationship, plants and mycorrhizal fungi enact a polarity: plant shoots engage with the light and air, while the fungi and plant roots engage with the solid ground. Plants pack up light and carbon dioxide into sugars and lipids. Mycorrhizal fungi unpack nutrients bound up in rock and decomposing material. 

These are fungi with a dual niche: part of their life happens within the plant, part in the soil. They are stationed at the entry point of carbon into terrestrial life cycles and stitch the atmosphere into relation with the ground. To this day, mycorrhizal fungi help plants cope with drought, heat and the many other stresses life on land has presented from the very beginning, as do the symbiotic fungi that crowd into plant leaves and stems. 

What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.

—Merlin Sheldrake,

Entangled Life

 

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Spribille describes lichens as the most ‘extroverted of all symbioses’. Yet it is no longer possible to conceive of an organism - humans included - as distinct from the microbial communities they share a body with. The biological identity of most organisms can’t be prised apart from the life of their microbial symbionts. The word 'ecology’ has its roots in the Greek word oikos, meaning 'house’, 'household’, or 'dwelling place’. Our bodies, like those of all other organisms, are dwelling places. 

Life is nested biomes all the way down.

We can’t be defined on anatomical grounds because our bodies are shared with microbes, and consist of more microbial cells than our own - cows can’t eat grass, for example, but their microbial populations can, and cows’ bodies have evolved to house the microbes that sustain them. 

Neither can we be defined developmentally, as the organism that proceeds from the fertilisation of an animal egg, because we depend, like all mammals, on our symbiotic partners to direct parts of our development programmes. 

Nor is it possible to define us genetically, as bodies made up of cells that share an identical genome —many symbiotic microbial partners are inherited from our mothers alongside our own DNA, and at points in our evolution art history, microbial associates have permanently insinuated themselves into the cells of their hosts: our mitochondria have their own genome, as do plants’ chloroplasts, and at least 8 per cent of the human genome originated in viruses (we can even swap cells with other humans when we grow into 'chimeras’, formed when mothers and foetuses exchange cells or genetic material in utero). 

Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, although our immune cells are often thought of as answering this question for us by distinguishing self from 'non-self’. 

Immune systems are as concerned with managing our relationships with our resident microbes as fighting off external attackers, and appear to have evolved to enable colonisation by microbes rather than prevent it. 


—Merlin Sheldrake
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures

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The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called “true enough.” 

I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

―Rupert Sheldrake

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you are a divine being

 

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You are a divine being. You matter, you count. 

You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, 
and you will return to those realms.


—Terence McKenna

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There is no less holiness at this time - as you are reading this - than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. 

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.


—Annie Dillard
For the Time Being

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the realm of the densely packed

  

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Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others. For the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.

Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.


—Albert Einstein

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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.


—Terence McKenna

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We trust that time is linear.
That it proceeds eternally, uniformly,
Into Infinity.

But the distinction between
past, present and future is
nothing but an illusion.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow
are not consecutive, they are connected
in a never-ending circle.


—Albert Einstein

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