Morphic Fields

"Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it.

...

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

...

What is emerging ... is an evolutionary vision of reality at every level: subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, social, ecological, cultural, mental, economic, astronomical and cosmic."

- Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - )

Fossilization of Time

"To me photography functions as a fossilization of time.

...

My method is different from the one most photographers use. I do not go around and shoot. I usually have a specific vision, just by myself. One night I thought of taking a photographic exposure of a film at a movie theater while the film was being projected. I imagined how it could be possible to shoot an entire movie with my camera. Then I had the clear vision that the movie screen would show up on the picture as a white rectangle. I thought it could look like a very brilliant white rectangle coming out from the screen, shining throughout the whole theater. It might seem very interesting and mysterious, even in some way religious.

...

I’m inviting the spirits into my photography.
It’s an act of God."

- Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - )

Hypertelescopic Imagination

"But in truth the eternal spirit was ineffable. Nothing whatever could be truly said about it. Even to name it "spirit" was perhaps to say more than was justified. Yet to deny it that name would be no less mistaken; for whatever it was, it was more, not less, than spirit, more, not less, than any possible human meaning of that word. And from the human level, even from the level of a cosmical mind, this "more," obscurely and agonizingly glimpsed, was a dread mystery, compelling adoration.

...

Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet’s dark side a hill, and on that hill myself.

...

For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself. I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite.

...

For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Star Maker

Sea of the Unreal

"Reality is, you know,
the tip of an iceberg of
irrationality that we've managed
to drag ourselves up onto for
a few panting moments before
we slip back into the sea
of the unreal."

- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

Imagination Itself

"The tree which moves some
to tears of joy is in the eyes
of others only a green thing
that stands in the way. Some see
nature all ridicule and deformity...
and some scarce see nature at all. But
to the eyes of the man of imagination,
nature is imagination itself."

- William Blake (1757 - 1827)

Terra Mobilis

"Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance.

Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body."

- Robert Macfarlane (1976 - )

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

Illimitable Spirit

"My religion consists of a humble
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

"Blessed be you, mighty matter,

irresistible march of evolution,

reality ever newborn; you who,
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."

- Richard Bach (1936 - )

A Moment

"'Is this a moment?'
He asks in a very loud voice.

'No, not anymore.'
And this one? Not anymore either.
All you have is the moment to come.
The present is already past.'"

- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)

The Essential Doesn't Change

"We should turn resolutely towards Nature.
...
By all means, nothing simpler.
It’s the natural order.
...
Let us do something, while we have the chance!
It is not every day that we are needed...
To all mankind they were addressed,
those cries for help still ringing in our ears!
But at this place, at this moment of time,
all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.
Let us make the most of it,
before it is too late!
...
We always find something, eh,
to give us the impression we exist.
...
There’s no lack of void.
...
The essential doesn't change."

- Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989)
Waiting for Godot

A Personal Universe

"Poetry remakes and prolongs language;
every poetic language begins
by being a secret language, that is,
the creation of a personal universe,
 of a completely closed world.
The purest poetic act seems to
re-create language from an
inner experience that …
reveals the essence of things."

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

Coastal Forms

"Then in my thoughts these shores, so different in their nature and in the inhabitants they support, are made one by the unifying touch of the sea. For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality — earth becoming fluid as the sea itself."

- Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964)

The Edge of the Sea

Quiet Light II

"There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. "

- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
 To Bless the Space Between Us

Serene Illumination

"Serene illumination, or just sitting, is not a technique, or a means to some resulting higher state of consciousness, or any particular state of being. Just sitting, one simply meets the immediate present. Desiring some flashy experience, or anything more or other than 'this' is mere worldly vanity and craving... Just sitting does not involve reaching some understanding. It is the subtle activity of allowing all things to be completely at rest just as they are, not poking one's head into the workings of the world."

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
 The Art of Just Sitting

The Mind of Some Eternal Spirit

"When scientists study the world of phenomena, the shadows which nature throws onto the wall of our cave, they do not find these shadows totally unintelligible, and neither do they seem to represent unknown or unfamiliar objects. Rather, it seems to me, we can recognize chess players outside in the sunshine who appear to be very well acquainted with the rules of the game as we have formulated them in our cave. To drop our metaphor, nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics as our mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.

...

And now it emerges that the shadow-play which we describe as the fall of an apple to the ground, the ebb and flow of the tides, the motion of electrons in the atom, are produced by actors who seem very conversant with these purely mathematical concepts-with our rules of our game of chess, which we formulated long before we discovered that the shadows on the wall were also playing chess.

...

When we try to discover the nature of the reality behind the shadows, we are confronted with the fact that all discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them. For this reason, to borrow Locke's phrase, "the real essence of substances" is forever unknowable. We can only progress by discussing the laws which govern the changes of substances, and so produce the phenomena of the external world. These we can compare with the abstract creations of our own minds.

...

It does not matter whether objects 'exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit' or not; their objectivity arises from their subsisting 'in the mind of some Eternal Spirit.'"

- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe

The Celestial Way

"So it is said, the life of the sage follows the celestial way, and in death he dissolves and merges with all things. In stillness he is at one with the virtue of yin; in movement he flows with yang. He does not bring fortune and does not cause misfortune. He only responds when external circumstances call for it. He only acts when pushed. He only rises up when there is no other alternative. He throws away the whys and wherefores, and follows the celestial way. Therefore, he does not meet with disaster. Nor is he burdened by material things. He is not slandered by people nor punished by the spirits. He floats with life and rests with death. He does not worry and does not scheme. He is like light that does not dazzle. Completely trustworthy, he does not need to make promises. His sleep is dreamless and his waking hours are free from worry. His spirit is pure and his soul is not tired. In emptiness, nothingness, and simplicity, he is in harmony with the celestial way."

- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Translation in Teachings of the Tao by Eva Wong

I Am

"Silent friend of many distances, feel

how your breath enlarges all of space.

Let your presence ring out like a bell

into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.

Move through transformation, out and in.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?

If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power

that rounds your senses in their magic ring,

the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.

To the flashing water say: I am.""

- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Translation by Stephen Mitchell (The Enlightened Heart)

Into Another Intensity

"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

- T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Eternal Energy

"You, yourself, are the
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.

...

We are the eyes of the cosmos.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
 and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Gentle Traces and Imprints

"The past I know is gone;
the present never lasts.
Time glides by without a trace.
Who can be wise in this constant flux?
I take each day as its own
sustaining myself until I’m released.
After so much wandering,
I have arrived here—
twenty years seen through a cloud."

- Taigu Ryokan (1758 - 1831)
The Kanshi Poem of Taigu Ryokan

Another World

[There is a...] "...long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world."

- Hal Zina Bennett (1936 - )
Spirit Circle: A Story of Adventure & Shamanic Revelation