Showing posts with label Spirit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spirit. Show all posts

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Terra Mobilis


"Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance.

Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body."

Robert Macfarlane (1976 - )

Monday, December 11, 2023

Illimitable Spirit


"My religion consists of a humble
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

"Blessed be you, mighty matter,
irresistible march of evolution,
reality ever newborn; you who,
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."

Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."

Richard Bach (1936 - )

Friday, September 22, 2023

A Moment


"'Is this a moment?'
He asks in a very loud voice.
'No, not anymore.'
And this one? Not anymore either.
All you have is the moment to come.
The present is already past.'"

- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

The Essential Doesn't Change


"We should turn resolutely towards Nature.
...
By all means, nothing simpler.
It’s the natural order.
...
Let us do something, while we have the chance!
It is not every day that we are needed...
To all mankind they were addressed,
those cries for help still ringing in our ears!
But at this place, at this moment of time,
all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.
Let us make the most of it,
before it is too late!
...
We always find something, eh,
to give us the impression we exist.
...
There’s no lack of void.
...
The essential doesn't change."

- Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989)
Waiting for Godot

Sunday, June 11, 2023

A Personal Universe


"Poetry remakes and prolongs language;
every poetic language begins
by being a secret language, that is,
the creation of a personal universe,
 of a completely closed world.
The purest poetic act seems to
re-create language from an
inner experience that …
reveals the essence of things."

- Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Saturday, June 03, 2023

Coastal Forms


"Then in my thoughts these shores, so different in their nature and in the inhabitants they support, are made one by the unifying touch of the sea. For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality — earth becoming fluid as the sea itself."

Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964)

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Quiet Light II


"There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. "

- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
 To Bless the Space Between Us

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Serene Illumination


"Serene illumination, or just sitting, is not a technique, or a means to some resulting higher state of consciousness, or any particular state of being. Just sitting, one simply meets the immediate present. Desiring some flashy experience, or anything more or other than 'this' is mere worldly vanity and craving... Just sitting does not involve reaching some understanding. It is the subtle activity of allowing all things to be completely at rest just as they are, not poking one's head into the workings of the world."

John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
 The Art of Just Sitting

Sunday, March 05, 2023

The Mind of Some Eternal Spirit


"When scientists study the world of phenomena, the shadows which nature throws onto the wall of our cave, they do not find these shadows totally unintelligible, and neither do they seem to represent unknown or unfamiliar objects. Rather, it seems to me, we can recognize chess players outside in the sunshine who appear to be very well acquainted with the rules of the game as we have formulated them in our cave. To drop our metaphor, nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics as our mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.
...
And now it emerges that the shadow-play which we describe as the fall of an apple to the ground, the ebb and flow of the tides, the motion of electrons in the atom, are produced by actors who seem very conversant with these purely mathematical concepts-with our rules of our game of chess, which we formulated long before we discovered that the shadows on the wall were also playing chess.
...
When we try to discover the nature of the reality behind the shadows, we are confronted with the fact that all discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them. For this reason, to borrow Locke's phrase, "the real essence of substances" is forever unknowable. We can only progress by discussing the laws which govern the changes of substances, and so produce the phenomena of the external world. These we can compare with the abstract creations of our own minds.
...
It does not matter whether objects 'exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit' or not; their objectivity arises from their subsisting 'in the mind of some Eternal Spirit.'"

- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe

Saturday, March 04, 2023

The Celestial Way


"So it is said, the life of the sage follows the celestial way, and in death he dissolves and merges with all things. In stillness he is at one with the virtue of yin; in movement he flows with yang. He does not bring fortune and does not cause misfortune. He only responds when external circumstances call for it. He only acts when pushed. He only rises up when there is no other alternative. He throws away the whys and wherefores, and follows the celestial way. Therefore, he does not meet with disaster. Nor is he burdened by material things. He is not slandered by people nor punished by the spirits. He floats with life and rests with death. He does not worry and does not scheme. He is like light that does not dazzle. Completely trustworthy, he does not need to make promises. His sleep is dreamless and his waking hours are free from worry. His spirit is pure and his soul is not tired. In emptiness, nothingness, and simplicity, he is in harmony with the celestial way."

Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Translation in Teachings of the Tao by Eva Wong

Friday, March 03, 2023

I Am


"Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.""

- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Translation by Stephen Mitchell (The Enlightened Heart)

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

Into Another Intensity


"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

- T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Eternal Energy


"You, yourself, are the
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.
...
We are the eyes of the cosmos.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
 and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Friday, February 24, 2023

Gentle Traces and Imprints


"The past I know is gone;
the present never lasts.
Time glides by without a trace.
Who can be wise in this constant flux?
I take each day as its own
sustaining myself until I’m released.
After so much wandering,
I have arrived here—
twenty years seen through a cloud."

- Taigu Ryokan (1758 - 1831)
The Kanshi Poem of Taigu Ryokan

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Another World


[There is a...] "...long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world."

- Hal Zina Bennett (1936 - )
Spirit Circle: A Story of Adventure & Shamanic Revelation

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Infinitely Visible World

 
"Close your eyes, prick your ears, and from the softest sound to the wildest noise, from the simplest tone to the highest harmony, from the most violent, passionate scream to the gentlest words of sweet reason, it is by Nature who speaks, revealing her being, her power, her life, and her relatedness so that a blind person, to whom the infinitely visible world is denied, can grasp an infinite vitality in what can be heard."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Postscript. The picture above is of our youngest, Josh (the photographer), with whom my wife and I just had a brief weekend visit at his college in California. It was our first trip to his neck of the woods since dropping him off last August (although we did enjoy a few weeks together in our home in Virginia over the winter break). Since the book I was reading on the plane (well, re-reading for the second time) was Andrea Wulf's magisterial biography of Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe's quote that Wulf uses to set the stage for her book seems apropos. While Josh spent a fair amount of time happily composing away on a beach in Malibu, I managed to capture him contemplating the siren call of the "infinitely visible world" unfolding before his gaze, and enfolding him in its mystery. Not to be outdone, my wife captured me "capturing Josh contemplating the 'infinitely visible world'" 😊

Tuesday, February 07, 2023

One Model of Reality


"The world in which you were
born is just one model of reality.
Other cultures are not failed
attempts at being you; they
are unique manifestations
of the human spirit."

- Wade Davis (1953 - )

Saturday, February 04, 2023

Worlds Within Worlds


"It was from them [spiders] that I first learned of the intelligence that lurks in nonhuman nature, the ability that an alien form of sentience has to echo one’s own, to instill a reverberation in oneself that temporarily shatters habitual ways of seeing and feeling, leaving one open to a world all alive, awake, and aware. It was from such small beings that my senses first learned of the countless worlds within worlds that spin in the depths of this world that we commonly inhabit."

- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous

Postscript. The quote is from a remarkable book that has nourished my soul since I first read it in the mid 1990s (whose author, by coincidence, attended the same university as I did - Stony Brook, NY; I suspect we walked past each other a few times during our overlapping time there, though we graduated with very different degrees). It is part of a longer section in which Abrams describes an awe-inspiring encounter with a spider. Though spiders have no direct connection to the triptych above (which, for those of you wondering, is "just" a sequence of crepes that my wife prepared for our breakfast this morning), I had only last night started my 10th or 11th re-reading of Abrams' book, and had - by coincidence? - earmarked the page on which that wonderful combination of words "...worlds within worlds..." appears (page 19). Of course, while I almost certainly would have captured the same images whether or not I had been rereading Abrams' book the night before (since my eye is naturally tuned to seeing "ordinary-yet-not-ordinary" abstract patterns, I was instantly drawn to the crepes' tapestry of web-like forms), the serendipitous indirect enfolding of crepes and spiders brought an added joy to this morning's breakfast 🙂

Thursday, December 29, 2022

Liminal State of Awareness


"There is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters… It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond."

- Nick Cave (1957 - )
Faith, Hope and Carnage

Thursday, December 08, 2022

Plenum Model of the Ground


"The proposal I am making here - that the I which lies behind or inside all matter is an underlying substance, or 'original substance' underlying all matter - partially reunites us, part of the way, not all the way, towards a world of spirit. It does not make a separation between spirit and matter. Rather it asserts and insists that matter is not a purely mechanical material, but rather a spirit-like, Self-like substance, a material grounded in I, hence a different kind of substance from the space-time of Descartes and Einstein which were both postulated in the mechanistic tradition.
...
The plenum model of the Ground - the idea that the I is actually real in the universe, not only in the mind - is harder to accept... In this view we see the same ground - but we now think of it as a great thing in the universe, far beyond ourselves, haunting, otherworldly, ultimate in its beauty and light. It is reached only when a great work breaks through it."

Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
The Nature of Order: Luminous Ground