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)

Shared Essence

"The spiritual source shines clear in the light;

the branching streams flow on in the dark.

Grasping at things is surely delusion;

according with sameness is still not enlightenment.

All the objects of the senses

interact and yet do not.

Interacting brings involvement.

Otherwise, each keeps its place.

Sights vary in quality and form,

sounds differ as pleasing or harsh.

Refined and common speech come together in the dark,

clear and murky phrases are distinguished in the light.

The four elements return to their natures

just as a child turns to its mother.

Fire heats, wind moves,

water wets, earth is solid.

Thus with each and every thing,

depending on these roots, the leaves spread forth.

Trunk and branches share the essence;

revered and common, each has its speech.

...

In the light there is darkness,

but don’t take it as darkness;

in the dark there is light,

but don’t see it as light.

Light and dark oppose one another

like front and back foot in walking.

Each of the myriad things has its merit,

expressed according to function and place.

Phenomena exist, like box and lid joining;

principle accords, like arrow points meeting."

- Shitou Xiqian (700–790)

Inward Form

"The whole outward visible World with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward Spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, likewise it has its Character externally; like as Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.

...

The Being of Beings is a wrestling Power; for the Kingdom of God consists in Power, and also the outward World, and it stands especially in seven Properties or Forms, where the one causes and makes the other, and none of them is the first or last, but it is the eternal Band.

...

This Formed world has manifested itself with the motion of all forms with this visible world, as with a visible likeness, so that the Spiritual being might be manifest in a corporeal comprehensive essence; as the desire of the inward forms has made itself external, and the internal being is in the external; the internal holds the external before it as a glass, wherein it beholds itself in the property of the generation of all forms; the external is its signature."

- Jakob Böhme (1575–1624)
The Signature of All Things

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

Cosmic Reverence

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Postscript. This image was captured in Galicia, Spain last week during the slightly-over-one-minute in duration total solar eclipse. While my family and I witnessed a much longer (>3.5 min) eclipse in Baxter State Park (in Maine) in 2024, this one was special since it took place during a pilgrimage of sorts to where my wife's father's side of the family has been living for centuries. For those of you not lucky enough to experience a total eclipse in person, the image above hardly does justice to feeling the magic of the sun suddenly disappearing to nothingness while still suspended in the sky. The physicist in me was as slack-jawed at the spectacle as my spiritual side was awed by the living cosmos.

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

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)

Meditative Quiescence

"Knowledge is not an object that you acquire. It’s not a mechanism that somehow you provide to the human mind. It’s actually an epiphanal moment. And I think this is true of the arts, poetry, painting, music, and I would say also to spiritual understanding. [...] Is it possible to be alive, active in the world, and yet have such calm, such kind of inner openness and presence that one can lead a life, at least in part, that is an expression of that quality of meditative quiescence that's on the one hand quite alert and on the other hand, completely at ease, completely at rest. So it’s a little bit like bringing the sleeping life into the day life."

- Arthur Zajonc (1949 - )

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)

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

Gojū-no-tō

"By knowing things that exist,
you can know that which does not exist.
That is the void.

...

Do not think dishonestly. The Way is in training. Become acquainted with every art. Know the Ways of all professions. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters. Develop an intuitive judgement and understanding for everything. Perceive those things which cannot be seen. Pay attention even to trifles. Do nothing which is of no use. [...] Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things. As if it were a straight road mapped out on the ground. [...] These things cannot be explained in detail. From one thing, know ten thousand things. When you attain the Way of Strategy there will not be one thing you cannot see. 

...

In the void is virtue, and no evil.
Wisdom has existence, principle has existence,
the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness."

- Miyamoto Musashi (1583 – 1645)
The Book of Five Rings

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

Spiritual Facts

"Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. [...] Nature is the symbol of spirit. [...] Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. [...] By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Nature

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)

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

Terrestrial Gaze

"Seeing. One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing - if not ultimately, at least essentially. To be more is to be more united - and this sums up and is the very conclusion of the work to follow. But unity grows, and we will affirm this again, only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more. Are not the perfection of an animal and the supremacy of the thinking being measured by the penetration and power of synthesis of their glance? To try to see more and to see better is not, therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence. And thus, to a higher degree, this is the human condition."

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

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

Journey of a Thousand Miles

"The giant pine tree
grows from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet"

- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

One Seen as Many

"Being the one, the universal Soul is present in all beings. Though one, It is seen as many, like the moon in the water ... Just as it is the jar which being removed (from one place to another) changes places and not the Akasha ['fifth element' or ether] enclosed in the jar – so is the Jiva [individual, embodied soul] which resembles the Akasha ...When various forms like the jar are broken again and again the Akasha does not know them to be broken, but He knows perfectly. Being covered by Maya [cosmic illusion that veils the true nature of reality], which is a mere sound, It does not, through darkness, know the Akasha (the Blissful one). When ignorance is rent asunder, It being then Itself only sees the unity."

- Amritabindu Upanishad (100 BCE to 300 CE)