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”

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

Spiritual Being

"Art should be there to remind man that he is a spiritual being, that he is part of an infinitely larger spirit to which he will return in the end. If he’s interested in these questions, if he simply asks himself these questions, he’s already saved spiritually. It’s not the answer that’s important. I know that from the moment man begins asking the questions, he will be unable to live as he has before."

- Andrei Tarkovsky (1932 - 1986)

I Am an Atom in the Universe

"At this moment I have knowledge of,
in the living reality, that I am an atom in the universe
that has access to infinite possibilities of development.
These possibilities I want, gradually, to reveal.
...
Those granted the gift of seeing more deeply
can see beyond form, and concentrate on the
wondrous aspect hiding behind every form,
which is called life.
...
The more we discover the wonders of nature,
the more we become aware of ourselves."

- Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944)

Passing Forms

"How sensible I am to the restless change which rules the world. To appear, and to vanish—there is the biography of all individuals, whatever may be the length of the cycle of existence which they describe, and the drama of the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph traced for an instant in the sand, and effaced a moment afterward by a breath of wind, an air-bubble expanding and vanishing on the surface of the great river of being—an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this nothing is, however, the symbol of the universal being, and this passing bubble is the epitome of the history of the world."

- Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821 - 1881)

Spiritual Correspondences

"The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world...
…
...all things that have existence in nature … are correspondences...
…
...nothing can subsist from itself."

- Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772)
Heaven and Hell

Passing Forms

"I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones,
‘To Him we shall return.’"

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Innumerable Worlds

"I hold the universe to be infinite as result of the infinite divine power; for I think it unworthy of divine goodness and power to have produced merely one finite world when it was able to bring into being an infinity of worlds. Wherefore I have expounded that there is an endless number of individual worlds like our earth. I regard it, with Pythagoras, as a star, and the moon, the planets and the stars are similar to it, the latter being of endless number. All these bodies make an infinity of worlds; they constitute the infinite whole in infinite space, an infinite universe, that is to say, containing innumerable worlds. So that there is an infinite measure in the universe and an infinite multitude of worlds.

Within this universe I place a universal Providence, whereby everything lives, grows, acts and abides in its perfection. And I understand this in a two-fold way: one, after the fashion of the spirit which is completely present in the whole body and in every part thereof. This I call Nature, the shadow and record of the Divine. The other manner is the inconceivable way in which God, an essence, presence and power, is in all and above all, not as part, not as spirit, but unspeakably."

- Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600)
Testimony before the Venetian Inquisition in1592, Translated and quoted in
Giordano Bruno: His Life, Thought, and Martyrdom (William Boulting, 1914)

Visible Invisible

"The great aspiration of the Human Race is to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the Noumenon behind the phenomenon; but the fact that from infancy we have been accustomed to confine our attention wholly to the objective, believing that to be the reality, has surrounded us with a concrete boundary wall through which we can only at times, with difficulty, get transient glimpses of that which is beyond. It is only in recent years that we have been able to realize that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow or its manifestation in the Physical Universe, and that Time and Space have no existence apart from our physical senses, in short, that they are only the modes or limits under which those senses act or receive their impressions and by which they are necessarily rendered finite.

The difficulty is that our physical senses only perceive the surface of our surroundings, and that we have hitherto been looking at the Woof of Nature as though it were the glass of a window covered with patterns, smudges, flies, &c., comprising all that we call physical phenomena and which, when analyzed in terms of Time and Space, produce the appearance of succession and motion. It requires a keener perception, unbounded by these limitations, to look through the glass at the Reality which is beyond.

...

Although we have no words to express, nor indeed minds to grasp, the wonders and glories of that which is behind the Veil, it is possible for some of us to get a glimpse of it through our Window. [...] We have seen that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow; that the Invisible, as distinguished from the Visible, is not in a place apart from the Physical, but is the Reality of which the visible constitutes the boundary lines or planes in our consciousness."

- Sydney Turner Klein (1853 - 1934)
Science and the Infinite

Heart Divine

"The willing into being the primordial particle, has completed the act, or more properly the conception, of Creation. We now proceed to the ultimate purpose for which we are to suppose the Particle created - that is to say, the ultimate purpose so far as our considerations yet enable us to see it - the constitution of the Universe from it, the Particle.

This constitution has been effected by forcing the originally and therefore normally One into the abnormal condition of Many. An action of this character implies reaction. A diffusion from Unity, under the conditions, involves[31] a tendency to return into Unity - a tendency ineradicable until satisfied. But on these points I will speak more fully hereafter.

...

But are we here to pause? Not so. On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue - another creation and irradiation, returning into itself - another action and reaction of the Divine Will.

Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief - let us say, rather, in indulging a hope - that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?

And now - this Heart Divine -
what is it? It is our own."

- Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849)

Eureka: A Prose Poem

Oneiric Spirits

"We [Hidatsas] believed, indeed, that this world and everything in it was alive and had spirits; and our faith in these spirits and our worship of them made our religion.

My father explained this to me. ‘All things in this world,’ he said, ‘have souls, or spirits. The sky has a spirit; the clouds have spirits; the sun and moon have spirits; so have animals, trees, grass, water, stones, everything. These spirits are our gods; and we pray to them and give them offerings, that they may help us in our need.’

...

Any one could pray to the spirits, receiving answer usually in a dream. Indeed, all dreams were thought to be from the spirits; and for this reason they were always heeded, especially those that came by fasting and suffering. Sometimes a man fasted and tortured himself until he fell into a kind of dream while yet awake; we called this a vision.

A man whom the gods helped and visited in dreams, was said to have mystery power; and one who had much mystery power, we called a mystery man, or medicine man. Almost every one received dreams from the spirits at some time; but a medicine man received them more often than others.

...

Believing as he did that the world was full of spirits, every Indian hoped that one of them would come to him and be his protector, especially in war. When a lad became about seventeen years of age, his parents would say, ‘You are now old enough to go to war; but you should first go out and find your god!’ They meant by this, that he should not risk his life in battle until he had a protecting spirit.

Finding one’s god was not an easy task. The lad painted his body with white clay, as if in mourning, and went out among the hills, upon some bluff, where he could be seen of the gods; and for days, with neither food nor drink, and often torturing himself, he cried to the gods to pity him and come to him. His sufferings at last brought on delirium, so that he dreamed, or saw a vision. Whatever he saw in this vision was his god, come to pledge him protection. Usually this god was a bird or beast; or it might be the spirit of some one dead; the bird or beast was not a flesh-and-blood animal, but a spirit."

- Edward Goodbird (1869 -1938)
Goodbird the Indian: His Story

Starry Space

"Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as ‘the infinitely little;’ no blade of grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere.

But the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged center of a very limited universe, was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of starry space, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, which the telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes.

For if Bruno must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of the earth - the infinitely little; he looked back, gratefully, to another daring mind, which had already put the earth into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable.

...

And his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that larger survey, making the utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in that endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new conditions. The immovable earth beneath one’s feet! one almost felt the movement, the respiration of God in it. And yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, the prospect, the music, the music of the spheres! - he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even."

- Walter Pater (1839 - 1894)
Giordano Bruno

Recursive Centers

"Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament.

But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things.

It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.

...

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed."

- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

Shadow Physics

"The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse illusion.

But if so, that is of little concern to the scientist, who has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination of its exact status in regard to reality. In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it.

Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow."

- Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)
The Nature of the Physical World

Unrevealable Sea

"More than bare mountains ’neath a naked sky,
Or star-enchanted hollows of the night

When clouds are riven, or the most sacred light

Of summer dawns, art thou a mystery

And awe and terror and delight, O sea!

Our Earth is simple-hearted, sad to-day

Beneath the hush of snow, next morning gay

Because west-winds have promised to the lea

Violets and cuckoo-buds; and sweetly these

Live innocent lives, each flower in its green field,

Joying as children in sun, air, and sleep.

But thou art terrible, with the unrevealed

Burden of dim lamentful prophecies,
And thy lone life is passionate and deep.
...

Light ebbs from off the Earth; the fields are strange,

Dusk, trackless, tenantless; now the mute sky

Resigns itself to Night and Memory…"

- Edward Dowden (1843 - 1913)
"Ocean," in Poems

Unknown Shore

"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things - yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet - I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.

...

I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned."

- Arthur Machen (1863 - 1947)
The Great God Pan

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