what is the nature of the world?

 

.

You want somehow or other to maintain that the world is real. What is the standard of reality? That alone is real which exists by itself, which reveals itself by itself and which is eternal and unchanging. Does the world exist by itself? Was it ever seen without the aid of the mind? 

In deep sleep there is neither mind nor world. When awake, there is the mind and there is the world. What does invariable concomitance mean? You are familiar with the principles of inductive logic which are considered the very basis of scientific investigation. Why do you not decide this question of the reality of the world in the light of those accepted principles of logic?

Of yourself, you can say “I exist”. That is, your existence is not mere existence; it is existence of which you are conscious. Really, it is existence identical with consciousness.

[...] Consciousness is always Self-consciousness. If you are conscious of anything you are essentially conscious of yourself. 

Unselfconscious existence is a contradiction in terms. It is no existence at all. It is merely attributed existence, whereas true existence, the SAT, is not an attribute, it is the substance itself. It is the Vastu (Reality). 

Reality is therefore known as SAT-CHIT, being consciousness, and never merely the one to the exclusion of the other. The world neither exists by itself, nor is it conscious of its existence. How can you say that such a world is real?

And what is the nature of the world? It is perpetual change, a continuous, interminable flux. A dependent, unselfconscious, ever-changing world cannot be real.

—Ramana Maharshi

.

You and I are just swinging doors.

This kind of understanding is necessary.


—Shunryu Suzuki

.

sit, be still, and listen

   

.

There is in Celtic mythology the notion of ‘thin places’ in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good — and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal. 

Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.


—Peter Gomes

.

In one sense the Reality is creatures; in another sense, It is not. ... Whether you assert that It is undivided or divided, the Self is alone. The manifold [universe] exists and yet it does not exist. 


—Ibn ‘Arabi 

.

Listen.

Sit, be still, and listen,

because you’re drunk and
we’re at the edge of the roof.


—Rumi

.

zeroes on the loose

 

.

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

.

I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.

I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.

I prefer to knock on wood.

I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.

I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.


—Wislawa Szymborska

.

The sun turns like a pinwheel. 

It counts 

its radiant, radioactive petals, ending always 

in ‘love,’ an odd number—


—Oni Buchanan

.

David Lynch: Consciousness and Creativity

.

How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?

 

—St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 213-268)

wait - what ?

largerloves

.

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe?

This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it.

This is not yet a scientific age.


—Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law (1962)

 

.

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.

There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison. Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.

Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering…

I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.


—Richard Feynman
an untitled ode to the wonder of life from a 1955 speech, spoken by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman

 

 

.

 

self(consciousness

   

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

weird(ness

    

  

.

People say, “I’m going to sleep now,” as if it were nothing. But it’s really a bizarre activity. “For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.” 

If you didn’t know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you’d seen. “They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be okay? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the ‘mind adventures’ got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren’t unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.” 

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a science fiction movie. And whisper, ‘The creature is regenerating itself'.

—George Carlin

.

questions

 

.

You are a man because you identify with the body. If you do not identify with the body, what gender are you? After leaving the body, the vital breath and the ‘I am’ merge into the substratum. Then where is man or woman?

First you have what is called ‘atma-bhava’ – that is the ‘I am’ sense. Later, this sense identifies with the form of a body, when it is called ‘aham-akar’, the ‘I am’ form, this is ego. Ego is never a title or name, but just a sense of ‘I am’ prior to words. 

The waking state, the sleep state and the knowingness ‘I am’ constitute an ego. In the absence of these three states what do you think you are? What would be the evidence of your existence?

Give up all questions except the one ‘who am I?’.  

After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you ‘are’. 

The ‘I am’ is certain, the ‘I am this’ is not. 

Struggle to find out what you are in reality.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

all things

    

.

The earth is not a dead body, but is inhabited by a spirit that is its life and soul.

All created things, minerals included, draw their strength from the earth spirit.

This spirit is life, it is nourished by the stars, and it gives nourishment to all the living things it shelters in its womb.


—Basilius Valentinus
15th Century Benedictine
monk and alchemist

.

All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. 

In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.


—Kahlil Gibran

.

this is what you shall do

    

.

There is something in personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world. 

—Walt Whitman

 

.

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors to others,

Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
Or to any man or number of men,

Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young and with the mothers of families,

Read these leaves in the open air,
Every season of every year of your life,

Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,

And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,

And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.


—Walt Whitman,
born 1819
Leaves of Grass

.

questions

  

.

A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different timescales

[...] A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.

—John Berger
Into the Woods

.

 

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?


—Richard Dawkins

.

I've no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother's hopes, older than I am by coming before me, and my child's wishes, older than I am by outliving me.  

And what's it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.


—Li-Young Lee
The Hammock, excerpt
Book of My Nights

.

not till then

    

.

...  a man can know nothing by himself, save after a natural manner, which is only that which he attains by means of the senses. For this cause he must have the phantasms and the forms of objects present in themselves and in their likenesses; otherwise it cannot be, for, as philosophers say: Ab objecto et potentia paritur notitia. 

That is: From the object that is present and from the faculty, knowledge is born in the soul. 

Wherefore, if one should speak to a man of things which he has never been able to understand, and whose likeness he has never seen, he would have no more illumination from them whatever than if naught had been said of them to him.

—John of the Cross
(1542 - 1591)

 

.

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. 

One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.  

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. 

But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. 

One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

.

We make too much history.
With or without us
there will be the silence
and the rocks and the far shining.

But what we need to be
is, oh, the small talk of swallows
in evening over
dull water under the willows.

To be we need to know the river
holds the salmon and the ocean
holds the whales as lightly
as the body holds the soul
in the present tense, in the present tense


—Ursula Le Guin

.

extraordinary worlds

   

.

The sadness I have caused any face

by letting a stray word

strike it,

any pain 

I have caused you,

what can I do to make us even?

Demand a hundred fold of me - I'll pay it.

During the day I hold my feet accountable

to watch out for wondrous insects and their friends.

Why would I want to bring horror

into their extraordinary

world?

Magnetic fields draw us to Light; 
they move our limbs and thoughts.

But it is still dark; 
if our hearts do not hold a lantern,

we will stumble over each other,

huddled beneath the sky
as we are.

—Rumi

I hold my feet accountable

.

 

how to love the world

  

.

The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions
is this single kernel of bright yellow
dropped on our path by the sun, sensing
that we might need some marker to help us
find our way through life, to find a path
over the snow-flattened grass that was
blade by blade unbending into green,
on a morning early in April, this happening
just at the moment I thought we were lost
and I’d stopped to look around, hoping
to see something I recognized. And there
it was, a commonplace dandelion, right
at my feet, the first to bloom, especially
yellow, as if pleased to have been the one,
chosen from all the others, to show us the way.


—Ted Kooser
Dandelion
How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope

.

Two days of an icy prairie fog
and every blade of grass, and twig,
and branch, and every stretch of wire, barb, post and staple,
is a knot or a thread in a lace
of the purest white. To walk
is like finding your way
through a wedding dress, the sky
inside it cold and satiny;
no past, no future, just the now
all breathless. Then a red bird,
like a pinprick, changes everything.


—Ted Kooser
Hoar Frost

.

Today I celebrate with all of you, 

The miracle of sunlight, 

The humble joy of being and breath 

And the mystery and grace of each new day.

—Vincent van Gogh

The Field Next to the Other Road

.

1 x 1

.

LII


life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose:higher than have
—but beauty is more each than living’s all

multiplied with infinity sans if
the mightiest meditations of mankind
cancelled are by one merely opening leaf
(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)

or does some littler bird than eyes can learn
look up to silence and completely sing?
futures are obsolete;pasts are unborn
(here less than nothing’s more than everything)

death,as men call him,ends what they call men
—but beauty is more now than dying’s when

—E. E. Cummings
from 1 x 1 [One Times One] (1944)

.

rebirth, excerpt

   

Riitta Ikonen

 

.

We are like the spider. 

We weave our life and then move along in it. 

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.  

This is true for the entire universe.

—The Upanishads

.

In our souls everything

moves guided by a mysterious hand.

We know nothing of our own souls
that are ununderstandable and say nothing.

The deepest words
of the wise man teach us 
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.


—Antonio Machado

  

.

Start seeing everything as God,

But keep it a secret.

—Hafiz

.

this is how all animals see

  

.

Dogs and other animals detect smells using proteins called odorant receptors, chemical sensors. They sit on the surface of cells, grabbing specific molecules that float past. 

The process is temporary: after the [receptors] are done, they either release or destroy the molecules that they’ve grabbed. But one group of them bucks this trend: opsins. 

They are special because they keep hold of their target molecules, and because those molecules absorb light. This is the entire basis of vision. This is how all animals see—using light-sensitive proteins that are actually modified chemical sensors. 

In a way, we see by smelling light. 

—Ed Yong

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, excerpts

.

Light is breath’s shadow.


—Ahmed Salman
NOOSPHE.RE

.

'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle! ―Alice

    

.

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. 

You see, my physics students don’t understand it 

That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘but how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.

Nobody knows how it can be like that.


―Richard Feynman (treasure

The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, excerpts

.

But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here.
I’m mad. You’re mad."

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”


―Lewis Carrol
Alice in Wonderland

.

all shapes speak

 

Nils Udo

.

The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a consulate artist, is the precondition of all visual art, and indeed, as we shall see, of an important amount of poetry. We take pleasure in the immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. But even when this dream reality is presented to us with the greatest intensity, we know it is just an illusion. 

Men of philosophy even have a sense that beneath the reality in which we live there is hidden a second, quite different world, and that our own world therefore is an illusion; and Schopenhauer actually says that the gift of being at times able to see men and objects as mere phantoms or dream images is the mark of the philosophical capacity. 

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

—Nietzche
The Birth of Tragedy

.

Give up all.

The correct understanding will be when you realize that whatever you have understood so far, is invalid.

Give up all and you gain all. Then life becomes what it was meant to be: pure radiation from an inexhaustible source.

In that light the world appears dimly, like a dream.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

As stars, a lamp, a fault of vision,

As dewdrops or a bubble,

A dream, a lightning flash, a cloud,

So one should see conditioned things.

—Diamond Sutra

.