We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. —Plotinus

 

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The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.

Everything in the world is full of signs. 

All events are coordinated.

All things depend on each other; as has been said: Everything breathes together.

—Plotinus
ca CE 204/5–270

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The way to arrive and remain within “the force field of the Holy Spirit”, which is one way of describing consciousness – is both very simple and very hard: you’ve got to remain in love, with a foundational yes to every moment. 

You can’t risk walking around with a negative, resentful, gossipy, critical mind, because then you won’t be in the force field. You will not be a usable instrument. 

That’s why Jesus asked us to love. 
It’s that urgent. 
It’s that crucial.


—Richard Rohr

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all things depend on each other

   

 

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Observe your own body. It breathes. 

You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? 

The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. 

You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, 'my life' is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. 

You don't possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.

—Ilchi Lee

 

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The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.

Everything in the world is full of signs. 

All events are coordinated.

All things depend on each other; as has been said: Everything breathes together.

—Plotinus
ca CE 204/5–270

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here

 

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Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. 

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

—Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

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Let your mind and heart release all that disturbs you.

Let your body be still, and all the frettings of your body, and all that surrounds it.

Let the earth and sea and air be still, and heaven itself;
and then think of spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining into you, through you, and out from you in all directions while you sit quiet.

—Plotinus, 204/5 - 270 CE

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later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

—Warsan Shire
What They Did Yesterday Afternoon

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Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world. —Jack Kerouac

 

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God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things,

though they are ignorant that this is so.

—Plotinus

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You need not go to heaven to see God; nor need you speak loud, as if God were far away; nor need you cry for wings like a dove to fly to Him. Only be in silence, and you will come upon God within yourself.


—Saint Teresa of Avila

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delicious trouble

 

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Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless

Each of us with his or her
right upon the earth,

Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,

Each of us here
as divinely as any is here.

[...]


The sun and stars that float in the open air... the appleshaped earth and we upon it... surely the drift of them is something grand;

I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,

And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot or reconnoissance,

And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,

And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

[...]



To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same; 

Every spear of grass - the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women,
and all that concerns them,

All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. 


—Walt Whitman

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This the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.

For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this is the Soul's feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.

These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.


—Plotinus

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adaequatio

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Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

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The wild mind of the planet blows through us all, ensconced as we are in the depths of this elusive medium. However, although it is our common element, every one of us experiences it differently. No two bodies or beings ever inhabit this big awareness from precisely the same angle, or with the same sensory organization and style.

Since the body is precisely our interface and exchange with the field of awareness, a praying mantis’s experience of mind is as weirdly different from mine as its spindly body is different from mine; and the dreaming of an aspen grove is as different from mine and the mantis’s as its own fleshly interchange with the medium is different from ours.

It is our bodies that participate in awareness.


—David Abram
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Never did the eye see the sun unless it has first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.


—Plotinus

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This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adequatio et rei et intellectus—the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

[] “As above, so below’ the ancients used to say: to the world outside us there corresponds, in some fashion, a world inside us.


—E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed

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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. —Plotinus

 

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God turns you from one feeling to another

and teaches by means of opposites,

so that you will have two wings to fly,

not one.

—Rumi

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