All Nature is But Art

"What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,

Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head?

What if the head, the eye, or ear repined

To serve mere engines to the ruling mind?

Just as absurd for any part to claim

To be another, in this general frame:

Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains,

The great directing Mind of All ordains.

   All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
...

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood."

- Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)
An Essay on Man

Thought Forms

"To paint in earth’s dull colors the forms
clothed in the living light of other worlds
is a hard and thankless task [...]
They needed colored fire, and
had only ground earths.

...

Every thought gives rise to a set
of correlated vibrations in the matter of this body,
accompanied with a marvelous play of color,
like that in the spray of a waterfall as
the sunlight strikes it, raised to the
nth degree of color
and vivid delicacy.

...

Each definite thought produces a double effect,
a radiating vibration and a floating form.

...

There may be infinite variety in the color
and shape of such elementals or thought-forms,
for each thought draws round it the matter
which is appropriate for its expression,
and sets that matter into vibration
in harmony with its own; so that
the character of the thought
decides its color."

- Annie Besant (1847 - 1933) and C. W. Leadbeater (1854 - 1934)
Thought-Forms

When is it Not a Dream?

"...from behind the Buddha Hall there appeared a most miserable-looking skeleton, which uttered the following words:

The autumn wind

Has begun to blow in this world;

Should the pampas grass invite me,

I will go to the moor,

I will go to the mountain.

What to do

With the mind of a man

Who should purify himself

Within the black garment,

But simply passes life by.

...

Towards dawn, I dozed off, and in my dream I went to the back of the temple, where many skeletons were assembled, each moving in his own special way just as they did in life. While I marveled at the sight, one of the skeletons approached me and said:

Memories

There are none:

When they depart,

All is a dream;

My life—how sad!

If Buddhism

Is divided into Gods

And Buddhas;

How can one enter

The Way of Truth?

For as long as you breathe

A mere breath of air,

A dead body

At the side of the road

Seems something apart from you.

...

Well, we enjoyed ourselves together, the skeleton and I, and that illusive mind which generally separates us from others gradually left me. The skeleton that had accompanied me all this while possessed the mind that renounces the world and seeks for truth.

...

But when is it not a dream?
Who is not a skeleton?"

- Ikkyū Sōjun (1394 - 1481)
Gaikotsu (骸骨, “Skeletons”)
Translated by R. H. Blyth & N. A. Waddell

Beyond the Ordinary World

"The villagers pointed out to me a stream in the distance, and, following the sound of its waters, I entered the mountain valley. After I had gone about a league, the stream came to an end and the woodcutters’ path disappeared. There I encountered an old man. He pointed toward the clouds and mist, where I could make out a tiny patch of yellow-white, appearing and disappearing as the mountain vapors shifted. [...] The scene was of such extraordinary purity and remoteness that I felt myself to be completely beyond the ordinary world. My heart and spirit trembled with awe, and my skin quivered."

- Hakuin Ekaku (1686 - 1769)

Photographer's note. This morning, my wife excitedly woke me up at the crack of dawn and pointed at our bedroom window. Groggy and sans glasses, I was confused and initially saw "nothing" but immediately understood: fog! I rushed to the car with my camera, a tripod, and a hastily brewed cup of coffee. Years of bemoaning "fog opportunities" lost - because of lethargy, sluggishness, day-job responsibilities, or, more rarely, lack of motivation - have provided me with a ready mental list of local parks I can go to when the occasion presents itself. I arrived just as the fog was starting to lift and had no more than 30 or so minutes to "meditate frantically" on the stillness - all photographers are familiar with this seeming paradox 😊 -  but, my-oh-my how blissfully otherworldly these 30 minutes were! Here are a few other snapshots in time of a timeless experience...

Something Celestial Among the Earthly

"In like manner our universe appears to us human beings as the phenomenal world or presentation. It might appear to other creatures of a different mental constitution as something else. We cannot ascertain how it might seem to Devas, to Asuras, to angels, and to the Almighty, if there be such beings. However different it might seem to these beings, it does not imply that the phenomenal world is unreal, nor that the realm of reality is unknowable.

‘Water,’ the Indian tradition has it, ‘seems to man as a drink, as emerald to Devas, as bloody pus to Pretas, as houses to fishes.’ Water is not a whit less real because of its seeming as houses to fishes, and fishes’ houses are not less real because of its seeming as emerald to Devas. There is nothing that proves the unreality of it. It is a gross illusion to conceive reality as transcendental to appearances. Reality exists as appearances, and appearances are reality known to human beings. You cannot separate appearances from reality, and hold out the latter as the object of aspiration at the cost of the former. You must acknowledge that the so-called realm of reality which you aspire after, and which you seek for outside or behind the phenomenal universe, exists here on earth. Let Zen teachers tell you that "the world of birth and death is the realm of Nirvana"; 'the earth is the pure land of Buddha.'

…

Suffice it to say for the present it is the law of Universal Life that manifoldness is in unity, and unity is in manifoldness; difference is in agreement, and agreement in difference; confliction is in harmony, and harmony in confliction; parts are in the whole, and the whole is in parts; constancy is in change, and change in constancy; good is in bad, and bad in good; integration is in disintegration, and disintegration is in integration; peace is in disturbance, and disturbance in peace. We can find something celestial among the earthly. "

- Kaiten Nukariya (1867 - 1934)
The Religion of the Samurai:
A Study of Zen Philosophy and Discipline in China and Japan

Merging With Suchness

"When Dongshan was ready to leave his teacher Yunyan, Dongshan asked, 'Later on, if someone asks me if I can depict your reality, or your teaching, how shall I reply?' Yunyan paused, and then said, 'Just this is it.' When he heard that, Dongshan sank into thought. And Yunyan said, 'You are in charge of this great matter. You must be most thoroughgoing.'

Dongshan left Yunyan and was still perplexed; he didn’t quite get it. As he proceeded he was wading across a stream, and seeing his reflection in the water, he had some understanding. He looked down in the stream and saw something, and then he wrote this poem:

‘Just don’t seek from others or
you’ll be far estranged from yourself.
Now I go on alone, but everywhere I meet it.
It now is me; I now am not it.
One must understand in this way
to merge with suchness.’"

- Dongshan Liangjie (807–869)

A World of Phantasms

"When, therefore, Philosophy proves that our knowledge of the external world can be but phenomenal—when it concludes that the things of which we are conscious are appearances; it inevitably arouses in us the notion of an illusiveness like that to which our visual perceptions are so liable in comparison with our tactual perceptions. Good pictures show us that the aspects of things may be very nearly simulated by colors on canvass. The looking-glass still more distinctly proves how deceptive is sight when unverified by touch. And the frequent cases in which we misinterpret the impressions made on our eyes, and think we see something which we do not see, further shake our faith in vision. So that the implication of uncertainty has infected the very word appearance. Hence, Philosophy, by giving it an extended meaning, leads us to think of all our senses as deceiving us in the same way that the eyes do; and so makes us feel ourselves floating in a world of phantasms."

- Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)
First Principles/Part I, “The Unknowable”

Rhythmic Harmony

"An artist, when he paints a tonal picture, has in mind the relative dark and light of colors, and their relative coolness and warmth. Let me explain. First the relative coolness or warmth of colors. The artist regards blue as the coolest hue. As a matter of fact violet reflects even less light than blue; still, for his practical purposes, an artist says that the cool hue is blue, and he associates with it violet and green. On the other hand, yellow, he treats as warm, and associates with it red and orange.

And, if you consider for a moment, the distinction of warm and cool hues, which is practiced by artists and founded on the nature of light, appeals to our own experience. You will have no hesitation in feeling that a bunch of violets, surrounded by green leaves, gives you a feeling of coolness, as compared with another bunch composed of red and yellow poppies.

Accordingly, if an artist has made up his mind that his tonal harmony shall be a cool one, he either composes it entirely of cool hues, or sees to it that some one or all of them shall ‘prevail.’ The warmer hues may be introduced for the sake of contrast, but very sparingly. And, of course, he will reverse his use of the hues, if he wishes the tone to be a warm one.

...

When all is said and done, tone is the result of color relations,
so arranged that they produce a rhythmic harmony."

- Charles H. Caffin (1854 - 1918)
A Child's Guide to Pictures

Little Flame of Consciousness

"The development of consciousness is the burden,
the suffering, and the blessing of mankind.
...
If there were no consciousness, there would be no world;
the whole world … depends upon that
little flame of consciousness.
...
Consciousness, no matter how extensive it may be,
must always remain the smaller circle within
the greater circle of the unconscious,
an island surrounded by the sea; and, like the sea itself,
the unconscious yields an endless and self- replenishing
abundance of living creatures,
a wealth beyond our fathoming.
...
 Our consciousness can conceive of things
only in temporal succession, our time is,
therefore, essentially linked to the
chronological sequence.
...
The longing for light is the
longing for consciousness."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Continua of Time, Space, and the Self

"'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and the self envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow together without interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
A Pluralistic Universe