Indra’s Pool

"In one single mote of dust
Are completely seen all worlds.
If living beings should hear about them,
Their minds would be confused and go insane.

As within a single mote of dust,

So, too, it is in every mote of dust.

All world-systems enter within them.

It is in that way inconceivable.

In every particle of dust

Are Dharmas of the ten directions and three times.

The destinies and kshetras are all limitless,

Yet can be known with all their differences.

In every particle of dust

Are limitless kinds of Buddha kshetras.

Of their various kinds, all limitless,

Not a single one remains unknown.

Everything within the Dharma realm,

With all the varying characteristics

And types of destinies, each having differences,
Can all be discerned and known."

- Indra's Net / Avatamsaka Sutra
(late third or the fourth century CE)

Living Pattern

"Thou art confused, my beloved, at seeing the thousandfold union

Shown in this flowery troop over the garden dispersed;

Many a name dost thou hear assigned; one after another

Falls on thy listening ear, with a barbarian sound.

None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness;

Therefore a mystical law is by the chorus proclaimed;

Yes, a sacred enigma! Oh, dearest friend, could I only

Happily teach thee the word, which may the mystery solve!

Closely observe how the plant, by little and little progressing,

Step by step guided on, changeth to blossom and fruit!

...

Here doth Nature close the ring of her forces eternal;

Yet doth a new one, at once, cling to the one gone before,

So that the chain be prolonged for ever through all generations,

And that the whole may have life, e’en as enjoyed by each part.

Now, my beloved one, turn thy gaze on the many-hued thousands

Which, confusing no more, gladden the mind as they wave.

Every plant unto thee proclaimeth the laws everlasting.

Every floweret speaks louder and louder to thee;

But if thou here canst decipher the mystic words of the goddess,

Everywhere will they be seen, e’en though the features are changed."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
 The Metamorphosis of Plants

Boundless Within

"The person in the hut lives here calmly,
not stuck to inside, outside, or in between.
Places worldly people live, he does not live.
Realms worldly people love, he does not love.
Though the hut is small, it
includes the entire world."

- Shitou Xiqian (700–790)

Sacred Threshold

"Here, we are no longer in the well-known valleys of human and psychic life. We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure: that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold. And even when the threshold is crossed, where shall certainty be found? Where shall we discover those marvelous laws that we are perhaps constantly disobeying: laws of whose existence our conscience is ignorant, though our soul has been warned? Whence comes the shadow of a mysterious transgression that at times creeps over our life and makes it so hard to bear? What are the great spiritual sins of which we can be guilty? Will it be our shame to have striven against our soul, or is there an invisible struggle between our soul and God? And is this struggle so strangely silent that not even a whisper floats on the air? [...] Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves of night and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded."

- Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 - 1949)
The Treasure of the Humble

Amber Apparition

"White in prismatic order is the union or compound light, while the [...] mixture of our material colors becomes the opposite; that is, the destruction of all, or in other words - darkness. Light is therefore color and shadow the privation of it by the removal of those rays of color, or subductions of power; and there are to be found throughout nature [...] the ruling principles of diurnal variations, the grey dawn, the yellow morning sun rise and red departing ray, in ever changing combination; these are the pure combinations of Aerial colors.

...

The ark stood firm on Ararat: th’ returning sun
Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles, and, emulous of light,
Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise,
Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly,
Which rises, flits, expands, and dies."

- J.M.W. Turner (1775 - 1851)

Universal Consciousness

"A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the keynote, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense material Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of Matter hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the works of a vast occult Intelligence.
...
They are the seven colours of the light of the divine consciousness, the seven rays of the Infinite, and by them the Spirit has filled in on the canvas of his self-existence conceptually extended, woven of the objective warp of Space and the subjective woof of Time, the myriad wonders of his selfcreation great, simple, symmetrical in its primal laws and vast framings, infinitely curious and intricate in its variety of forms and actions and the complexities of relation and mutual effect of all upon each and each upon all. These are the seven Words of the ancient sages; by them have been created and in the light of their meaning are worked out and have to be interpreted the developed and developing harmonies of the world we know and the worlds behind of which we have only an indirect knowledge. The Light, the Sound is one; their action is sevenfold."

- Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950)
The Life Divine

Mystery of the Infinite

"When the King conceived ordaining

He engraved engravings in the luster on high.
A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed
within the Concealed of the Concealed
from the mystery of the Infinite,
a cluster of vapor in formlessness
set in a ring, not white,
not black, not red, not green, no color at all.
As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors.
Deep within the spark gushed a flow
imbuing colors below,
concealed within the concealed of the mystery of the Infinite.
The flow broke through and did not break through its aura.
It was not known at all until,
under the impact of breaking through,
one high and hidden point shone.
Beyond that point, nothing is known."

- "Creation of Elohim," Zohar

Cosmogenic Vision

"If you analyze cave art ... there are so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness, of visions. And plants like the amanita muscaria mushroom and psilocybin mushrooms appear to have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change. So to investigate this possibility when I got interested in this mystery, I went down to the Amazon where there are still surviving shamanistic cultures today, and where they drink the powerful visionary brew: ayahuasca, of which the active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine (DMT) which is actually closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin. [...] And one of those effects has to do with creativity, and we can see the creative cosmogenic impulse of ayahuasca in the paintings of Ayahuasca Shamans from Peru, like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo ... those richly saturated colors, they’re amazing visions that they reproduce. [...] And as these paintings show, another universal experience of ayahuasca is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically."

- Graham Hancock (1950 - )
The War on Consciousness

Supernatural Visions

"In the last few decades, a new kind of art has been striking natives and tourists of Peruvian Amazonia with great wonder and enchantment: ayahuasca‑inspired visionary art. This very original iconography emerges directly from the artists’ visionary experience under the effect of the ayahuasca brew. [...] With the use of figurative techniques, sometimes learned in art schools or developed autonomously, mestizo visionary artists manage to translate and share their colorful supernatural visions with a much wider public than that directly involved with ayahuasca shamanism. One of the most important effects of this translation, in my view, is to render visible the invisible dynamics of shamanic worlds, even to untrained eyes. [...] This art functions as a shining window to the spiritual worlds of ayahuasca shamanism, translating the multidimensional and extraordinary visions to our more familiar realm of everyday iconic images."

- Vinícius Dino, Visionary Art in Peruvian Amazonia:
The Power of Images and Translation Effects

Other Minds

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. [...] We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question - for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Spirit-Matter

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

...

In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit. All that exists is matter becoming spirit. There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. [...] Life represents the goal of a transformation of great breadth, in the course of which what we call ‘matter’ turns about, furls in on itself, interiorizes the operation covering, so far as we are concerned, the whole history of the earth. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self‑conscious. It is a cosmic change of state."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

In the Heart of the Spirit

 "In our hearts there burns a fire...
That burns all veils to their root and foundation
When those veils have been burned away
Then the heart will understand completely.
Ancient love will unfold ever-fresh forms
In the heart of the Spirit,
In the core of the heart."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Illusory Categories

"The further we penetrate into the submicroscopic world, the more we shall realize how the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting and ever‑moving components with man being an integral part of this system.

...

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks,’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way.

...

Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. [...] all things and events perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected, and are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality."

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
The Tao of Physics

Temples of the Sun

"The loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they built pyramidal Temples of the Sun. [...]

...

The Great Pyramid! Both, built in Atlantean times, stand as distinctive marks of the mysterious continent, and remain as mute legacies from a race of people who have departed as mysteriously as their own land. Both remind the successors of the Atlanteans of the glories of that lost civilization.

...

Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kinds of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp."

- Paul Brunton (1898 - 1981)
A Search in Secret Egypt

Simple Light

"Know that before the emanations were emanated and the created was created, a supreme simple light filled all reality, so that there was no free place at all in the sense of an empty, hollow space, but everything was filled with that simple light of the En Sof. [...] And when it ascended in its simple will to create the worlds and emanate the emanations, thereby making the perfection of its works, its names and its attributes knowable, which was the reason for the creation of the worlds [...], the En Sof contracted at the middle point, truly in the middle of its light. It contracted the light and moved away on all sides around the center point. This left a free space around the center point, an empty, hollow space..."

- Isaac Luria (1534 - 1572)
Etz Chaim (Tree of Life)

Perfect Penetration

"I entered into the stream of the self-nature of the sense of hearing, thereby eliminating the sound of what was heard. Now proceeding from this stillness, both sound and silence ceased to arise. Advancing in this way, both hearing and what was heard melted away and vanished. When hearing and what is heard are both forgotten, then the sense of hearing leaves no impression in the mind. When sense and the objects of sense both become empty, then emptiness and sense merge and reach a state of absolute perfection. When emptiness and what is being emptied are both extinguished, then arising and extinction are naturally extinguished. At this point the absolute emptiness of nirvana became manifest, and suddenly I transcended the mundane and supra-mundane worlds."

- Guanyin Bodhisattva
Shurangama Sutra

Pure Mind

"Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.
If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts
suffering follows him like the wheel
that follows the foot of the ox.

...

Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.
If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts
happiness follows him like his
 never-departing shadow."

- The Dhammapada

Aboriginal Dreaming

"Although The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen. We should be very wrong to try to read into it the idea of a Golden Age, or a Garden of Eden, though it was an Age of Heroes, when the ancestors did marvelous things that men can no longer do [...] Clearly, The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man. [...] These tales are neither simply illustrative nor simply explanatory, they are fanciful and poetic in content because they are based on visionary and intuitive insights into mysteries; and, if we are ever to understand them, we must always take them in their complex content."

- W.E.H. Stanner (1905 - 1981)

Fiery Light

"A fiery light, of the greatest flashing brightness, coming out of a cloudless sky, flooded my entire mind and so inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast like a flame — yet it was not blazing but glowing hot, as the sun makes anything on which its rays fall hot. 

...

And I saw as if in the middle of the southern sky an image, beautiful and wonderful in the mystery of God, like a human in form. Her face was of such beauty and radiance that I could more easily look at the sun than at her; and a great circlet of golden color surrounded her head. [...] And this image spoke: ‘I am the supreme and fiery force, who sets all living sparks alight and breathes forth no mortal things, but judges them as they are. Flying around the circling circlet with my upper wings - with my wisdom - I have ordered all things rightly. But I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields, and I shine in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. With the airy wind I quicken all things with some invisible life that sustains them all. For the air lives in viridity [i.e., greenness] and in the flowers, the waters flow as if alive, and the sun lives within its own light.

...

The light that I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud that carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it the 'reflection of the living Light.'"

- Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179)

Rhythmic Measures

"The same stream of life that runs
through my veins night and day runs through
the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle
of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world
of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages
dancing in my blood this moment."

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)