Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

 

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Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

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The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

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Morning and afternoon are clasped together 

And North and South are an intrinsic couple 

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers 

That walk away as one in the greenest body.


—Wallace Stevens
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

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no(thingness

 

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Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. 

It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. 

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. 

Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

—Albert Einstein

 

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God made everything out of nothing.

But the nothingness shows through.

—Paul Valéry

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"To every Form of being is assigned,"
Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage,
"An 'active' Principle:--howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.

Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.

This is the freedom of the universe;
Unfolded still the more, more visible,
The more we know; and yet is reverenced least,
And least respected in the human Mind,
Its most apparent home."


—William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850
The Excursion, Book 9, excerpt

 

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Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

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You must always keep in mind that a path is only a path.
Each path is only one of a million paths.
If you feel that you must now follow it,
you need not stay with it under any circumstances.
Any path is only a path. 

There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping a path
if that is what your heart tells you to do. 

But your decision to keep on a path or to leave it 

must be free of fear and ambition. 

I caution you: look at every path closely and deliberately. 

Try it as many times as you think necessary.
Then ask yourself and yourself alone this one question.
Does this path have a heart? 

All paths are the same. They lead nowhere.
They are paths going through the brush or into the brush
or under the brush of the Universe. 

The only question is: Does this path have a heart? 

If it does, then it is a good path.
If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.


—Carlos Castaneda

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The body is not you, the name is not you.

The body is the food you have consumed;
the taste of the food is the knowledge ‘I am’.

That is Self, the feeling ‘I am’,
that is the love to be. 

How amazing, how incredible, it has no name, but you give many names to it. 

It is the Self, the love to be. 
That love to be is all pervading. 

Before you conceptualize anything, you are. 

Even before the knowingness, you are.


—Nisargadatta

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