Thoughtful Imbibing

"Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

...

Aside I turn to the holy,
unspeakable, mysterious Night.

...

In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents."

- Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night 

Scenery of Spring

 "In the scenery of spring,
nothing is better, nothing worse;
The flowering branches are

of themselves, some short,
some long."

- Ryōkan (1758 - 1831)

Movements of Mind

"The life of forms is not the result of chance. Nor is it a great cyclorama neatly fitted into the theater of history and called into being by historical necessities. No. Forms obey their own rules - rules that are inherent in the forms themselves, or better, in the regions of the mind where they are located and centered - and there is no reason why we should not undertake an investigation of how these great ensembles, united by close reasoning and by coherent experiment, behave throughout the phases that we call their life. The successive states through which they pass are more or less lengthy, more or less intense, according to the style itself. [...] We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above man. They mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind. [...] We must, in the truest sense of the word, follow closely at its heels; we must take careful note of how it lives its life."

- Henri Focillon (1881 - 1943)
The Life of Forms in Art

Unknown Worlds

"Without a living subject,
there can be neither space nor time.

...

[This is] "...what one might call the description of a walk into unknown worlds. These worlds are not only unknown; they are also invisible. Furthermore, the justification for their existence is denied by many zoologists and physiologists. [...] While this assertion will sound odd to anyone familiar with those worlds, it can be explained by the fact that not everyone has access to those worlds. Certain convictions are able to bar the entrance to those worlds so securely that not even one ray of all the splendor that spreads over them can penetrate it. Whoever wants to hold on to the conviction that all living things are only machines should abandon all hope of glimpsing their environments. [...] Every subject spins out, like the spider's threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence.

...

Each subject lives in a world where there is
only of subjective realities and where the
same environments represent
only subjective realities."

- Jakob von Uexküll (1864 - 1944)
 A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans:
With a Theory of Meaning

Consciousness and Memory

"We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself. [...] The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory. [...] But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity."

- Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)

Repetition of Sensations

"Everything which we observe in nature imprints itself uncomprehended and unanalyzed in our percepts and ideas which then, in their turn, mimic the processes of nature in their most general and most striking features.

...

It is a well-known fact that some objects please us, while others do not. Generally speaking, anything that is constructed according to fixed and logically followed rules, is a product of tolerable beauty. We see thus nature herself, who always acts according to fixed rules, constantly producing such pretty things.

...

A rule always presupposes a repetition. Repetitions, therefore, will probably be found to play some important part in the production of agreeable effects. Of course, the nature of agreeable effects is not exhausted by this. Furthermore, the repetition of a physical event becomes the source of agreeable effects only when it is connected with a repetition of sensations."

- Ernst Mach (1838 - 1916)
Popular Scientific Lectures

Maya's Veil

"Space-time-causation, or name-and-form, is what is called Maya. [...] Maya is neither existence nor non-existence. Both the Niagara Falls and the rainbow are eternally changeable. [...] Nature is Maya. Maya means name and form, into which everything is cast. Maya is not real. We could not destroy it or change it if it were real. The substance is the noumenon, Maya is phenomena. There is the real “me” which nothing can destroy, and there is the phenomenal “me” which is continually changing and disappearing.

...

Maya is not illusion as it is popularly interpreted. Maya is real, yet it is not real. It is real in that the Real is behind it and gives it its appearance of reality. That which is real in Maya is the Reality in and through Maya. Yet the Reality is never seen; and hence that which is seen is unreal, and it has no real independent existence of itself, but is dependent upon the Real for its existence. Maya then is a paradox - real, yet not real, an illusion, yet not an illusion. He who knows the Real sees in Maya not illusion, but reality. He who knows not the Real sees in Maya illusion and thinks it real."

- Swami Vivekananda (1863 - 1902)

Gentle Pulsing

"Over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in a spring morning."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Walden

There is a Cause

"To return to the difficulty which has been stated with respect both to definitions and to numbers, what is the cause of their unity? In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause."

 - Aristotle (384–322 BC)

Inward Gathering

"Nature looks dead in winter because
her life is gathered into her heart.
She withers the plant down to the root that
she may grow it up again fairer and stronger.
She calls her family together within her
inmost home to prepare them for being
scattered abroad upon the
face of the earth."

- Hugh Macmillan (1833 - 1903)
The Ministry of Nature

Nature's Calligraphy

"Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's
creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed,
so can all other activities become art.
In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself
as an artistic statement—the art of living."

- H.E. Davey (1961 - )
Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

Leaving a Trace

"The enlightened mind is like a bird in flight that leaves no trace of its path. People will say, 'A bird just flew by.' In their mind, there is a trace of the bird’s path. This is attachment. For the enlightened practitioner, that moment is already gone—the bird has left no trace of its flight. Like the bird, from moment to moment the enlightened practitioner’s actions do not leave any trace."

- Sheng Yen (1931 - 2009)
The Method of No-Method

Mimir’s Well

"Odin’s eye remains in Mimir’s well,
preserved by the waters that feed the world ash,
seeing nothing, seeing everything. Time."

- Neil Gaiman (1960 - )
Norse Mythology

The Nature of Things Illuminated

"For even the light of the sun which it has in itself would perhaps escape our sense of sight if a more solid mass did not lie under it. But if someone said that the sun was all light, one might take this as contributing to the explanation of what we are trying to say; for the sun will then be light which is in no form belonging to other visible things … This, then, is what the seeing of Intellect is like; this also sees by another light the things illuminated by that first nature, and sees the light in them; when it turns its attention to the nature of the things illuminated, it sees the light less; but if it abandons the things its sees and looks at the medium by which it sees them, it looks at light and the source of light.

...

What is above life is cause of life; for the activity of life, which is all things, is not first, but itself flows out, so to speak, as if from a spring. For think of a spring that has no other origin, but gives the whole of itself to rivers, and is not used up by the rivers but remains itself at rest, ... or of the life of a huge plant, which goes through the whole of it while its origin remains and is not dispersed over the whole, since it is, as it were, firmly settled in the root.

...

The One is all things and not a single one of them: it is the principle of all things, not all things, but all things have that other kind of transcendent existence; for in a way they do occur in the One; or rather they are not there yet, but they will be. How then do all things come from the One, which is simple and has in it no diverse variety, or any sort of doubleness? It is because there is nothing in it that all things come from it. ... For something like what is in Intellect, in many ways greater, is in that One, it is like a light dispersed far and wide from some one thing translucent in itself; what is dispersed is image, but that from which it comes is truth; though certainly the dispersed image, Intellect is not of alien form."

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)

One Eye

"The eye through which I see God is the
same eye through which God sees me;
my eye and God's eye are one eye,
one seeing, one knowing, one love.
...
Nothing in all creation is
so like God as stillness.
...
When the Soul wants to experience something
she throws out an image in front of her
and then steps into it."

- Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328)

What Are Things?

"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring;

like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying, What I do is me: for that I came."

- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)
Quoted in Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality,
by Timothy Morton (1968 - )

Original Realization

"Because earth, grass, trees, walls, tiles, and pebbles in the world of phenomena in the ten directions all engage in buddha activity, those who receive the benefits of the wind and water are inconceivably helped by the buddha's transformation, splendid and unthinkable, and intimately manifest enlightenment. Those who receive these benefits of water and fire widely engage in circulating the buddha's transformation based on original realization."

- Dogen (1200 - 1253)
 Treasury of the True Dharma Eye

Returning to the Source

"Empty yourself of everything.

Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted, you will act royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away."

 - Tao Te Ching, Chapter 16

Poetry and Grace

"Things are either devolving toward,
or evolving from, nothingness.

...

Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.

...

The closer things get to nonexistence,
the more exquisite and evocative they become.
Consequently to experience wabi-wabi means
you have to slow way down,
be patient, and look
very closely."

- Leonard Koren (1948 - )
Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Nature Gazing Upon Itself

"Thus, when we look out at the world,
we are nature gazing upon itself."

- Philip Toshio Sudo (1959 - 2002)
Zen 24/7: All Zen, All the Time