Monday, April 29, 2019

The Limitless Aleph


"All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Mind As Passage


"The utmost mission of Mind
is to train our obscure consciousness
which has emerged out of the
dark prison of Matter,
to enlighten its blind instincts,
random intuitions,
vague perceptions till it shall
become capable of this greater light
and this higher ascension.
Mind is a passage,
not a culmination."

- Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950)

Sunday, April 07, 2019

Organic Unfoldment


"Photography! 
Summation of the life experience
Exquisite focal point of all being
Aromatic distillation
Inmost
And ultimate
Light.

From out of darkness
Ascending, once again
God alone.

Photography?
Realization,
Identity,
My religion of
Organic Infoldment.

Spatiously
In the lap of
Mother alone
Full blown as a rose,
Organic Unfoldment."

- Edmund Teske (1911 - 1996)

Saturday, April 06, 2019

Revere What is Unknowable


"Science of nature has one goal:
To find both manyness and whole.
Nothing 'inside' or 'Out There,'
The 'outer' world is all 'In Here.'
This mystery grasp without delay,
This secret always on display.
The true illusion celebrate,
Be joyful in the serious game!
No living thing lives separate:
One and Many are the same."
...
We can never directly see
what is true, that is, identical with
what is divine: we look at it
only in reflection, in example,
in the symbol, in individual
and related phenomena.
We perceive it as a life
beyond our grasp,
yet we cannot deny
our need to grasp it.
...
The highest achievement
of the human being
as a thinking being is to
have probed what is
knowable and quietly to
revere what is unknowable."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)