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)

Spirit World

"...As with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions,' the whole so-called 'spirit-world,' death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God."

- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Letters to a Young Poet (Letter 8)

Fleeting Vortices

"[Physicists and naturalists cannot] look down from a great height upon a world which their consciousness could penetrate without being submitted to it or changing it. [...] a more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us ... to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

...

Hence we find our minds instinctively tending to represent energy as a kind of homogeneous, primordial flux in which all that has shape in the world is but a series of fleeting 'vortices'. [...] each new being has and must have a cosmic embryogenesis ...

...

Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge ...
but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end,
to assail the real from different angles
and on different planes."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
The Phenomenon of Man

Plural Monism

"Monism allows for no such things as 'other occasions' in reality—in real or absolute reality, that is. The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more than the difference between what I formerly called the each−form and the all−form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each−form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all−form or collective−unit form is the only form that is rational. The all−form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co−implicated. In the each−form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. It is thus at all times in many possible connexions which are not necessarily actualized at the moment.

...

Here, then, you have the plain alternative, and the full mystery of the difference between pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can set it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a nutshell:—Is the manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you must postulate that one−enormous−whole indivisibly as the prius of there being any many at all—in other words, start with the rationalistic block−universe, entire, unmitigated, and complete?—or can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in oneness, and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued into one another by intermediary terms—each one of these terms being one with its next neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never getting absolutely complete?

...

Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully co−ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world may, in the last resort, be a block−universe; but on the other hand it may be a universe only strung−along, not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
A Pluralistic Universe

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 

Luminous Eddy

"The birth and death of the leaves are the
rapid whirls of the eddy whose
wider circles move slowly
among stars."

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Another Vision

"We must close our eyes and
invoke a new manner of seeing, a
wakefulness that is the birthright of us all,
though few put it to use.

...

What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birthright of all, which few turn to use.

...

Never did eye see the sun unless
it had first become sun-like,
and never can the soul have vision of
the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)

Cosmic Soul

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

...

It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. [...] It is even conceivable that every creative advance that any mind has ever made involves unwitting co-operation with the cosmic mind which, perhaps, will awake at some date before the End.

...

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Last and First Men and Star Maker

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

Mycomagicians

"Mushrooms hold the secrets to the universe,

to life on our planet, and
 the core of our being.

...

There are more species of fungi, bacteria, and protozoa in a single scoop of soil than there are species of plants and vertebrate animals in all of North America. And of these, fungi are the grand recyclers of our planet, the mycomagicians disassembling large organic molecules into simpler forms, which in turn nourish other members of the ecological community. Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death. [...] Biological systems are influenced by the laws of physics, and it may be that mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter, just like salmon take advantage of the tides.

...

Mushrooms are the key to unlocking the
mysteries of the natural world."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Below Above

"Healer and psychopomp, the shaman is these because he commands the techniques of ecstasy - that is, because his soul can safely abandon his body and roam at vast distances, can penetrate the underworld and rise to the sky. Through his own ecstatic experience he knows the roads of the extraterrestrial regions. He can go below and above because he has already been there."

- Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

A State of Information

"There are objects: cinnamon, microwaves, interstellar particles and scarecrows. There is nothing underneath objects. Or, better, there is not even nothing underneath them. There is no such thing as space independent of objects (happily contemporary physics agrees). What is called Universe is a large object that contains objects such as black holes and racing pigeons. Likewise there is no such thing as an environment: wherever we look for it, we find all kinds of objects—biomes, ecosystems, hedges, gutters and human flesh. In a similar sense, there is no such thing as Nature. I’ve seen penguins, plutonium, pollution and pollen. But I’ve never seen Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality).

...

Likewise, there is no such thing as matter. I’ve seen plenty of entities (this book shall call them objects): photographs of diffusion cloud chamber scatterings, drawings of wave packets, iron filings spreading out around a magnet. But I’ve never seen matter. So when Mr. Spock claims to have found 'Matter without form,' he is sadly mistaken... You can now buy a backpack that is made of recycled plastic bottles. But an object doesn’t consist of some gooey substrate of becoming that shifts like Proteus from plastic bottle to backpack. First there is the plastic bottle, then the production of the bag ends the bottle, its being is now only an appearance, a memory of the backpack, a thought: “This bag is made of plastic bottles... Nature [...] is 'discovered in the use of useful things.'

...

Matter, in current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself... Instead of using matter as my basic substrate, I shall paint a picture of the Universe that is realist but not materialist. In my view, real objects exist inside other real objects. 'Space' and 'environment' are ways in which objects sensually relate to the other objects in their vicinity, including the larger objects in which they find themselves... There is no space or environment as such, only objects... The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained 'in' other objects... What are these objects, then, that claustrophobically fill every nook and cranny of reality, that are reality, like the leering faces in an Expressionist painting, crammed into the picture plane? On what basis can we decide that there is no top, middle, or bottom object, that objects are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, that they generate time and space, and so on?"

Timothy Morton (1968 - )
Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Sacred Contract

"Our individual souls hum actively within a kind of global soul comprising all life on the planet. Our words, thoughts, deeds, and visions influence our individual health just as they affect the health of everyone around us. As a vital part of a larger, universal spirit, we each have been put here on earth to fulfill a Sacred Contract that enhances our personal spiritual growth while contributing to the evolution of the entire global soul."

- Caroline Myss (1952 - )
Sacred Contracts

An Invisible Influence

"The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colors or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behavior, but this does not prove that form and behavior are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere."

- Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - )

The Invisible Spirit

"Spirit selects its own photographer. 

All we can do is to be
open to Spirit.

...

For some reason I have a sense of 'mysticism.' ... The 'perilous world of the dream' is my most comfortable backyard. Since I turn everything to photography, I have tried to treat photographs in this same manner. Contrary to expectations I do not go for fuzzygraphs, I try to reach the dream, or the state of mind that is 'Visionary' ... From time to time various images in front of my eyes lift themselves up and beckon to me - I approach at their command - and make the expo sure, sometimes reluctantly, but always with such a complete projection of my mental state onto the object that it seems as if the object commanded and not myself. At this intensity I photograph. The result is a record of an experience between myself and the object. ... 'Mysticism' in photographs is a delightful idea, full of danger of overreading the visible elements, but perhaps intensely rewarding. I know its danger, and pursue it anyway.

...

...the invisible is made visible to the intuition,
the invisible organic, the invisible spirit."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

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)