A Presence

"And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth;
of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear."

- William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Actualization

"To study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly."

- Dogen (1200 - 1253)

Ineffable Flow

"Water flows, clouds move,
never stopping or settling down.
When the wind blows, the leaves fall.
Like the fish swimming
or the birds flying,
I walk and walk,
going on and on."

- Santōka Taneda (1882 - 1940)

What is This Mind?

"You must only become the question ‘What is this Mind?’ or ‘What is it that hears these sounds?’ When you realize this Mind you will know that it is the very source of all Buddhas and sentient beings... While you are doing Zazen neither despise nor cherish the thoughts that arise; only search your own mind, the very source of these thoughts. You must understand that anything appearing in your consciousness or seen by your eyes is an illusion, of no enduring reality. Hence you should neither fear nor be fascinated by such phenomena... At last every vestige of self-awareness will disappear and you will feel like a cloudless sky."

- Bassui Tokushō (1327 - 1387)

The Spiritual-Abstract Nexus

"Visual artists, from the generation born in the 1860s to contemporary times, have turned to a variety of antimaterialist philosophies, with concepts of mysticism or occultism at their core. Terms such as occultism or mysticism should be defined carefully because of the association with the ineffable that surrounds these words and because they are context-specific: art historians and artists use these terms differently than do theologians or sociologists. In the present context mysticism refers to the search for the state of oneness with ultimate reality. Occultism depends upon secret, concealed phenomena that are accessible only to those who have been properly initiated. The occult is mysterious and not readily available to ordinary understanding or scientific reason. 

Several ideas are common to most mystical and occult world views: the universe is a single, living substance; mind and matter also are one; all things evolve in dialectical opposition, thus the universe comprises paired opposites (male-female, light-dark, vertical-horizontal, positive-negative); everything corresponds in a universal analogy, with things above as they are below; imagination is real; and self-realization can come by illumination, accident, or an induced state: the epiphany is suggested by heat, fire or light. The ideas that underlie mystical-occult beliefs were transmitted through books, pamphlets, and diagrams, often augmented by illustrations that, because of the ineffable nature of the ideas discussed, were abstract or emphasized the use of symbols.

...

The five underlying impulses within the spiritual-abstract nexus—cosmic imagery, vibration, synesthesia, duality, sacred geometry—are in fact five structures that refer to underlying forms of thought."

- Maurice Tuchman (1936 - )
“Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art"
in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985

The Cosmic Being

"A thousand heads hath Purusha, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet;
On every side pervading, he fills a space ten fingers wide.
This Purusha is all that yet hath been and all that is to be;
The Lord of Immortality which waxes greater still by food.

So mighty is His greatness; yea, greater than this is Purusha.

All creatures are one-fourth of Him, three-fourths eternal life in heaven.

With three-quarters Purusha went up: one-quarter of Him again was here.
...

When they divided Puruṣa how many portions did they make?

What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet?

 The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rājanya made.

His thighs became the Vaiśya, from his feet the Śūdra was produced.

The Moon was gendered from his mind, and from his eye the Sun had birth;

Indra and Agni from his mouth were born, and Vāyu from his breath.
 Forth from his navel came mid-air the sky was fashioned from his head

Earth from his feet, and from his car the regions. Thus they formed the worlds,"

- Rg Veda 10.90 - Purusha Sukta (~ 1500 - 1000 BCE)

I Seem to be a Verb

"I live on Earth at present,

and I don't know what I am.

I am not a thing - a noun.

I seem to be a verb,
an evolutionary process -

an integral function

of the universe."

- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
I Seem to Be A Verb

Silence and Stillness

"When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life - how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook.

...

Silence is the communion of a conscious soul with itself. If the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity, then and there is silence. She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places, and if we will we may always hearken to her admonitions.

...

The gods delight in stillness, they say ’st-’st. My truest - serenest moments are too still for emotion -they have woolen feet. In all our lives we live under the hill, and if we are not gone we live there still."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

There is No Path to Truth

"The whole point of meditation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and, however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practicing of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and, like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self-isolation which is the common movement of one’s everyday life."

- Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

Stellar Energy

"As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves - the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon - perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense ... Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do ... They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements."

 - Donald C. Peattie (1898 - 1964)