if you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places

   

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To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. 

At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
 

―N. Scott Momaday

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Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …’

—W.B. Yeats

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I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe. That kind of magic. 

I believe in that kind of religion. A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.
 

—George Morrison, Grand Portage Ojibwe

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nearly true

  

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In India it is considered a great sin to awaken anyone who is asleep. If a man is asleep, do not wake him; let him sleep; it is the time for him to sleep; it will not do to wake him before his time. Thus a mystic understands also that a person who is taking his time to wake up must not be awakened to give him the mystic’s idea. 

He is not prepared to understand it, and his beliefs would be shaken. Let him go on thinking God is in Benares; let him think He is in the temple of Buddha; let him think He is in heaven; let him think He is in the seventh heaven above the sky. 

It is the beginning; he will evolve in time and arrive at the same stage. The rest he is having just now is good for him. The awakening comes, all in its good time.

—Hazrat Inayat Khan

 

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One should say before sleeping, “I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. 

Many a beloved had sat upon my knees and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. 

Everything that has been shall be again.”


—W.B. Yeats

 

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Total awareness opens the way to understanding, and when any given situation is understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest, and the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true, or at least as nearly true as it is possible for a verbal expression of the ineffable to be. 

One in all and all in One; samsara and nirvana are the same; multiplicity is unity, and unity is not so much one as not-two; all things are void, and yet all things are the Dharma — Body of the Buddha — and so on. So far as conceptual knowledge is concerned, such phrases are completely meaningless. 

It is only when there is understanding that they make sense. For when there is understanding, there is an experienced fusion of the End with the Means, of the Wisdom, which is the timeless realization of Suchness, with the Compassion which is Wisdom in action.

Love is the last word

—Aldous Huxley 

 

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january

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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once …

and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

―Susan Sontag

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