Matter is Spirit

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(1881 - 1955)

Doing Things from Your Soul

"When you do things from your soul,

you feel a river moving in you, a joy."

- Rumi

(1207 - 1273)

Trees are Poems

"Trees are poems

that the earth writes

upon the sky."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Sand and Foam

Postscript: watch one humble human planting his poems here.

Direct Experience

"Seeing is perception 

with the original, 

unconditioned eye. 

It is a state of consciousness 

in which separation of 

photographer/subject, 

audience/image dissolves; 

in which a reality beyond words 

and concepts opens up, 

whose "point" or "meaning" is 

the direct experience itself."

- John Daido Loori

(1931 - 2009)

Parts of the Universe

"A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!"

- Richard Feynman

(1918 - 1988)

Wandering through Outer Worlds

"The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long. 

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet. 

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune. 

The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end. 

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said `Here art thou!'

The question and the cry `Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance `I am!'"

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Gitanjali: Song Offerings

A Parable, whose Subject is Time

"'In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only word that must not be used?' I thought for a moment. 'The word chess,' I replied. 'Exactly,' Albert said. 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts'ui Pen the merest mention of its name. To always omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word. It is. at any rate, the tortuous path chosen by the solutions—all devious Ts'ui Pen at each and every one of the turnings of his inexhaustible novel. I have compared hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the errors introduced through the negligence of copyists, I have reached a hypothesis for the plan of that chaos, I have reestablished, or believe I've reestablished, its fundamental order—I have translated the entire work; and I know that not once does the word 'time' appear. The explanation is obvious: 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones